A Highly Intelligent Food Database Right at Your Fingertips!

A Highly Intelligent Food Database Right at Your Fingertips!
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Life these days is so busy that we forget to take care of ourselves especially when it comes to managing our health. Over time our faulty habits take a toll on our health and we end up spending all our life saving in treatments. But what if managing our health was easy? What if there was a way to protect ourselves and our loved ones before we hit rock bottom? What if we had a personal nutritionist by our side 24/7 to give us feedback on our food choices, provide us with scientifically proven food suggestions and give us the guidance to minimize disease risk and optimize our health. Sounds like fairytale, right? Well, not anymore!

I recently had the opportunity to meet Dee McCaffrey, an organic chemist turned nutritionist, weight loss expert and founder of Processed Free America who enlightened me about her new venture and a powerful tool that will revolutionize our relationship with ourselves and our health. Here is my interview with this amazing woman who is walking the walk and helping people across America live a processed free healthy life.

Please tell us about yourself?

My name is Dee McCaffrey. I am an organic chemist turned nutritionist and weight loss expert. In 1992 I lost 100 pounds and have kept the weight off for over two decades. I am an accomplished speaker and the author of the internationally acclaimed book The Science of Skinny and The Science of Skinny Cookbook. Woven throughout my books, seminars and cooking classes is a personal message of hope, empowerment, and courage for making lasting lifestyle changes.

What inspired you to become a Holistic Health Coach?

I struggled with food and weight since childhood, repeatedly failing at diets all along the way. By the time I reached age thirty, I was morbidly obese, carrying 210 pounds on my 4’10” petite frame. At that time, I was working as a chemist, analyzing water and soil samples for the presence of environmental pollutants. One evening at home I was making a cake from a box mix, and I noticed that one of the ingredients in the cake mix was a chemical—and industrial degreaser--that I used in my work at the lab. What was that chemical doing in my food? Could it, and perhaps other chemical food ingredients, be a contributing factor to my obesity and many of the health problems people experience?

I decided to overhaul my eating and my life. I reached beyond the conventional approaches to nutrition, stopped eating refined sugar and flour, processed foods and chemical food additives, released 100 pounds in one year, and never looked back.

My weight loss infused me with a passion and a sense of responsibility to help others achieve their health goals. By day I worked as a chemist in a lab, and spent nearly all of my off time teaching people about healthy food and cooking. Eventually I went back to school to become formally trained in nutrition and diet counseling, and began my professional career as a nutritionist in 2002.

Where did you get the inspiration for HITO?

The inspiration for HITO came from Ernesto Amezcua (initially a fan/reader of The Science of Skinny, and now my business partner and the CEO of HITO). Before I tell you about the idea for HITO, I need to give you a bit of background information.

In 2013 Ernesto reached out to me through email for help with his wife’s arthritis. He, his wife and their two daughters (ages 11 and 13 at the time) live in Mexico City, and often travel to the U.S. for business and leisure. He inquired about scheduling an appointment for his wife to come and see me in Phoenix. I responded with detailed nutrition suggestions to help ease her symptoms, so the in-person appointment was not necessary. She improved, and one year later I received another email from Ernesto, this time with a business proposition.

The idea for HITO was a combination of Ernesto’s experience working on Business Intelligence Solutions for the federal sector in Mexico, and the stark fact that Mexico has one of the worst rates of overweight and obese people in the world—72.5 percent in 2016—surpassing the United States. The problems caused by obesity are causing a public health crisis in Mexico, with children growing fatter and adults increasingly dying from heart disease and diabetes.

Mexico is one of the world's biggest consumers of sugary beverages, so in an effort to reduce consumption, the government imposed a tax on such products in 2014. Ernesto told me that the Mexican authorities have also launched several programs to encourage Mexicans to drink more water, exercise and avoid junk food, however it is going to take major efforts to turn around the current trend.

With this problem in mind, Ernesto came up with the idea for HITO—a quality high performance online learning environment, in both English and Spanish, that will deliver nutrition and health information in an amiable and powerful way. Through interactive food tracking, animated educational videos, on-screen pop-ups, meal plans, recipes, individualized nutrition suggestions and more, HITO’s main goal is to heighten awareness of the impact food has on one’s health, and to navigate users into healthier lives.

Ernesto asked me to join him as a business partner to develop and create the nutritional aspects of the learning platform. We saw the value of it not just for Mexico, but also in the U.S. and many other countries.

HITO-World’s most powerful nutritional tool.

I really love the name of HITO, how did you decide on this title?

The name HITO (pronounced HEE-TOE) is an acronym for Healthy Inside, Thin Outside. The idea for this name comes from a medical term that doctors use called TOFI, which means Thin-Outside-Fat-Inside. It’s a new term used to describe people who appear healthy because they’re thin, yet have a lot of internal fat packed around their vital organs, streaked through their under-used muscles, and wrapped around the heart. This type of fat is more dangerous than subcutaneous fat (the kind that lies just under the skin), because it sends out chemical signals within the body which eventually lead to insulin resistance, diabetes and heart conditions. People who are TOFI are at much higher risk for chronic metabolic diseases.

We want people to be healthy inside and outside—we want them to be HITO, not TOFI.

You have been working on HITO for over three years. How was this journey?

Our main goal for HITO is to have a social impact on public health. It took a long time to nail down the exact concept of what we wanted HITO to be able to do. Our original idea was to have it be a part of K-12 school curricula or government program geared toward reducing and preventing increases in obesity rates among children and adults. We also want it to be available to the general public, and not just for helping people with reducing weight, but also helping people with other health conditions, such as Ernesto’s wife’s arthritis. We want it to be a tool for anyone who wants to optimize their health.

HITO is very unique in that it can track and monitor changes and progress in a person’s health, AND it also provides nutrition and health education, and gives feedback to the user on how they are doing and how to improve their food choices to meet their needs.

It has been a great deal of conceptualizing, collecting data, building a food database, creating the intake assessment questions, and programming to correlate all of the information so that it can be tailored to an individual’s needs.

What were the challenges you faced while designing/conceptualizing HITO? What took it 3 years?

There have been many challenges to create HITO. For one, it has been a sweat equity project from the very beginning. Each of the partners in the company has given their own time, to get it off the ground. In a word, it was slow-going because everyone involved has their own job to pay bills and put food on the table, and the tasks for HITO had to be done in our spare time. There has also been a number of turnovers in partnership over the years, which slowed things down a bit. Now we are finally at a point where it just needs a little more programming.

So after I have HITO, I won’t need a nutritionist?

Not necessarily. HITO is not designed to deal with serious health issues, like cancer, or some autoimmune diseases. Our database is designed to make recommendations for foods that have been scientifically proven to minimize disease risk and help manage existing health conditions.

Can HITO help with disease specific diet plan?

As mentioned above, HITO can do this to a certain degree. When a user signs on to use HITO, he/she will be asked to fill out a user profile that will gather information about that person’s health condition and health risks. The user can give just basic information, or they can be very specific, it is up to them how much information they want to give. The more information HITO has, the more it has to work with. If a user tells HITO that they have type 2 diabetes and want help with food choices that can help them manage their blood sugar and release weight, HITO can help them.

In my experience produce available in other parts of the World is different from one available in US. Will HITO be applicable to other food cultures/ regions as well? Do you plan to expand it later?

HITO’s food database contains foods available in the U.S. and Mexico. We plan to expand the database with foods from other countries in future updates to the program.

Are there any other programs like HITO?

As a nutrition professional, I have used many software programs to help me make meal plans and track dietary intake for my clients. I have seen what most of them do and I have to say there is really nothing else like HITO. That’s why I wanted to create it.

Other programs only do so much—they track calories and nutrient intake, provide reports for nutrient deficiencies, and allow users to select or enter meal plans and recipes. But they don’t go into the depth that HITO can because of our database and the intelligence I gave it. I have not seen any other program that will allow you to eat for your Ayurvedic dosha while also ensuring that you eat to keep your blood sugar balanced, lower your risk for Alzheimer’s, avoid gluten, track all of your nutrients, and get meal plans and recipes that meet all of these individual requirements. With HITO, it is all baked in.

What message do you have for people who want to get healthy, lose weight and live a better life?

The state of your health is all about choices. Knowledge is what gives you the power of choice. You can choose to remain the same, struggling as I once did with food, weight and health issues, or you can choose to make healthy living a true priority.

I was once a morbidly obese junk-food junkie. I know what it’s like to be standing in your shoes. If you’re not informed on the fact that blueberries can lower your blood sugar and reduce your risk for developing Alzheimer’s, then you may be missing out on the chance to improve your health. Likewise, if you don’t know that a common chemical food additive called monosodium glutamate (MSG) has been proven to induce obesity and diabetes in animals and humans, you may be unknowingly putting yourself or your loved ones at risk by continuing to eat foods that contain MSG simply because you didn’t have the knowledge.

HITO gives people an advantage I didn’t have when I was first starting out on my own health journey—the proven science, advice, recipes and practical tools I put into its programming. HITO can lay a foundation for transforming your health, and the health of your loved ones, for the long term.

What is your vision for HITO?

As mentioned before, we’d like it to be a part of K-12 school curricula or government programs geared toward reducing and preventing increases in obesity rates among children and adults. We also want it to be available to the general public, and not just for helping people with reducing weight, but also for optimizing their health.

HITO is in it’s crowd funding stage and would love the support of community to see the light of the day. A pledge of just $10 will go a long way in helping the team reach their goal of $10,000. Everyone who pledges will also be given the opportunity to be a beta-tester and share their feedback to improve the functionality of HITO.

I have had the opportunity to personally use HITO and I firmly believe it’s the need of our hour. You can be one of the elite beta testers and support the development of this wonderful tool by learning more about the campaign here.

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