The Nutritional Researchers Cohort
Project Infobox 
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| Self researcher(s) | Andre Boorsma |
| Related tools | 23andMe |
| Related topics | Diet and weight loss, Food tracking, Blood tests and blood pressure, Blood glucose tracking, Personal genome |
Builds on project(s) |
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| Has inspired | Projects (0) |
| Show and Tell Talk Infobox | |
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| Featured image | |
| Date | 2014/05/11 |
| Event name | 2014 QS Europe Conference |
| Slides | |
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The Nutritional Researchers Cohort is a Show & Tell talk by Andre Boorsma that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2014/05/11 and is about Diet and weight loss, Food tracking, Blood tests and blood pressure, Blood glucose tracking, and Personal genome.
DescriptionEdit
A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:
Andre Boorma works for T&L, a research organization in the Netherlands and last year they started working on a project where the researchers are the subject. She introduces and describes the Nutritional Researchers Cohort, a ground breaking study using self-tracking to examine diet and nutrition. The group consists of 70 nutrition researchers who have created a voluntary cohort of self-trackers sharing data for science. In this video, they talk about the lessons and explore whether this approach of voluntary and participatory public health research could grow and inspire similar projects.
Video and transcriptEdit
A transcript of this talk is below:
Andre Boorsma
The Nutritional Researchers Cohort
I’m going to talk about something completely different, so I’m working at a research organization in the Netherlands, it’s called T&L and last year we started to do a project where the researchers are the subject. So you can say we do some science projects where the citizens are the scientists actually. So I work in a group where we study metabolic health, so the people involved in this project are all nutritional researchers, so that’s what the plan was to start a cohort of the researchers can report using all Quantified Self devices and self-tests about yourself. So how did we do that? So we first started with building a web application, an application that can catch all this different data. So we used APIs to couple activity measurements but people could also manually gather the data etc. So the whole project is about the participant who is joining this initiative and it’s called the Nutritional researcher Cohort, and they are in control. They can decide which data to share and which not. Also in the beginning we had a plan that people could actually to build their own study and ask people to join. We started last year at the nutritional conference where we recruited people and then we also asked people to donate blood for using in bloodspots, so people really had to believe for this and get like fill more than 20 spots on blog spot. People also had to measure blood pressure, weight, glucose tolerance test etc. for reporting. The first study started but people also had to do this continuously, so that was for the intake. Then we are then analyzing the data and especially the metabolize and measure over 200 metabolize in the blood, and people can now see at the website and can get back information about these measurements. For example fatty acids and they can also check how they compare to others in the cohort and where they are with these values. Then the question is what did we learn from this project? First of all initially we wanted to do genetics, so we’re doing the 23andme assay, but we couldn’t get that to the people who were thinking about the medical ethical decisions. We actually found out that the initial things we had we made a formal consent based on the legal consent that actually didn’t really cover very good in the end to publish our results. But we came to work around that, that we wanted to publish our results and have all the participants on the scientific paper. So we also learned that we had to be very careful with the medical ethical concerns. The other thing that we learned was that a lot of people researched involved in this kind of research, that normally they are not the subject, so suddenly people had to give blood, and I remember one of the occasions that a professor demonstrate how you can do a finger prick and generate blood. But not for every person which is easy to do especially if you have low blood pressure. For her it was like, just do it like this and you now have blood. And of course for me personally it had the biggest impact, because during this whole session I could see that my cholesterol levels for example. But also I did an advanced diabetes test, and it turned out I was in bad glucose tolerant so I could be pre-diabetic. So it really affected my personal life and I started to change my food intake and my exercise. We’re now in the phase that we evaluated the whole exercise and we want to continue. So we made a European effort with a big European group, we want to do a next study where we want to recruit 250 researchers for participate this and of course that’s the future to conquer the world and we want to make like a cohort where we can really measure a lot of people. That will be great I think because then we can do really special stuff. We could like in the future measure health in a real time setting, and that would be very interesting like companies do. They do AB testing, so we could take a small portion of the people and ask them to have some sort of intervention and have another group as a control group. Then maybe in this way we could tweak our health.
That’s it.
About the presenterEdit
Andre Boorsma gave this talk.