How A.I. Can Help You
A.I. is not as good as you probably expect. If you remember one thing, remember that! When it comes to your health, it pays to understand the limitations of A.I., and also how it can help you. And it can absolutely help transform your health!
In this blog, I will explain three limitations I have encountered, then five ways that AI can change your life for the better when it comes to your health.
Limitation 1. If you are researching something, AI is like pureed baby food would be to a gourmet chef. A bland, entry-level blend of universally palatable information, rather than the interesting morsels you are probably hoping to find. You need to ask very, very specific questions to get the good stuff!
Limitation 2. Money talks. AI will do its best to make its answers palatable to the big players, for example, the food industry. Answers may be carefully worded to downplay the harm that ultra-processed food is doing to the health of the developed world. Be aware.
Limitation 3. The lag phase that it takes for accepted health science to filter through as clinical health guidelines can be many years - some say 17-20 years. In my experience, AI will always give me the twenty-year-old clinical guidelines. I have often found it difficult to extract even very well-accepted science when the two differ - which is often/usually the case. One way to get the latest science is to ask the opinion of a named scientist. "How would Dr XXX answer this question?"
Here are six ways that AI could help you transform your health!
Always ask AI to do a "credibility check" on a person who is giving advice before acting on that advice. You will get a conservative answer. For health advice, look for medical qualifications. Not just "health" but "disease" - an understanding of metabolic disease. Notice whether they are a practising doctor, specialist or scientist. Whether they teach medical students, and how "well-cited" their work is. Conflicts of interest and financial interests.
Once you have chosen a scientist or doctor to follow, you can fast-track your learning by simply asking AI to summarise the main message of their teachings.
AI is good at calculating macronutrients in food, which can help you decide what to eat on a daily basis. Protein, fibre, digestible carbohydrates.
AI is useful when learning how to cook whole foods when reducing/removing processed foods from your diet. For example, it can tell you how to make a curry from scratch, Dukkha, a healthy breakfast, and homemade hummus and salad dressings.
It's useful for tracking progress and explaining the significance of trends from your health devices.
AI is fantastic for general educational health advice. But not personalised advice. Use it to ask better questions of your doctor, rather than replace your doctor.
How to get set up?
If you open your AI and go into Settings, you can personalise your AI experience.
Memory. Your AI can either remember things about you from your previous chats, or not - you choose. Enable "memory", and you will see what it has remembered about you, manage it, and add to it. This saves you a lot of repetition.
Style and tone. You can choose efficient or friendly, for example.
Be sure to set it to "web search" if you want to research.
Use the "voice-to-text" function on your phone to dictate your question. It's quick! And it works better than the voice function inside the AI app. You get more time to edit.
AI has definitely changed my life - in fact, it generated the Daily Foundation recipe that swung my downward spiralling health into an upspiral. I asked for a breakfast recipe to optimise heart and brain health and support my gut microbiome. What I got was far better than I had ever imagined!
I encourage you to give AI a go. Ask a question and explore the answer - and keep asking! Stay curious, use your own judgement, and check the facts that matter.
