June 20, 2019 • 21 mins
Do exercise-tracking apps and gadgets like the Fitbit actually make us healthier? Or do they just create a high-tech, data-centric illusion of control over our weight, sleep and general well-being? Bloomberg's Naomi Kresge loaded up some popular apps to find the answer –- and to see if she could get a better night’s sleep than her husband.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's almost seven thirty and I just got in from
my morning walk. Thanks to my fitbit and my phone,
I know that I'm already more than halfway to hitting
my ten thousand step target for the day. I have
my fitbit who says that I have walked seven thousand
and thirty one steps. And you know what I have
(00:24):
on my phone as well, another health app, and that
one says I've done seven thousand, four hundred and eleven steps.
Now that it's warmer out, I'm on tract to beat
last week's numbers two. But I'll admit sometimes I wonder
if my fitbit really makes me any more fit. Welcome
(00:53):
to Prognosis, Bloomberg's podcast about the interception of health and
technology and the unexpected places taking us. I'm your host,
Michelle fe Cortes. Even if you never use it, you
most likely have a health app installed on your phone.
Apple Health, which comes with every iPhone, can clock everything
from steps to sleep. Some three thousand digital health apps
(01:16):
are competing for a share of the market to help
you track your calories, watch your blood sugar, guide your workouts,
or help you meditate. In the last episode, we told
you what these apps are doing with your data. This time,
my colleague Naomi Krasky looks into what the health apps
can do for their users. For us, My app addiction
(01:44):
started last year when a friend of a friend told
me he was using an app as a smart alarm
clock set to ring when he was sleeping most lightly
in the morning. I was super intrigued. I downloaded the
app and pretty soon realized it would also grade in
my sleep on a hundred point scale. I love being
told whether I'm doing things right, so soon it became
(02:05):
the first thing I looked at every morning. But that
wasn't enough. I wanted to know why I was sleeping
well or poorly, so I caved and bought the premium version.
That was my first real sign of app addiction. Another
friend gave me a bunch of recommendations for other apps
to try. I started using a period tracker and telling
(02:28):
that app about way more than just my menstrual cycle.
I recorded gastro intestinal side effects, my moods, my sex life.
That app knew more about me than most real humans did.
And at the same time I was researching apps for
diabetes patients for a magazine article, and then eventually also
started using a life tracking app linked to my sleep app.
(02:50):
That one shows you where you are during the day,
work or shopping or home, et cetera. So I could
watch how long I spend bicycling to work, walking, or
at the gym. It felt like being able to watch
all these elements of my life so closely was giving
me more control over them somehow. But the big question
(03:12):
was whether it was actually improving my health. For example,
the sleep app showed me almost immediately what helps me
sleep well, things like meditating before bed and working out,
and what kills my sleep basically booze parties and early
morning light. But my sleep only really improved after my
(03:34):
life slowed down. I had just come off a jam
packed spring and summer in which I had moved, finished
a big project at work, and gotten married. So I
figured my next step should be collecting more data, which
meant downloading more apps. I'm part of a team of
reporters who write about European health and consumer goods companies,
(03:56):
so I asked my colleagues for recommendations. The top pick
was the hugely popular my Fitness Pal app. Sportswear company
under Armour bought this app in for four hundred and
seventy five million dollars. Here's Michael Lagardia, under Armour's senior
vice president of Digital Products, explaining why we look at
(04:18):
fitness as a holistic activity. That it's about the fuel
that you put into It's about the activity that you do,
and my Fitness Pal is there to help you keep
track of that. The central function of my Fitness Pal,
like so many other fitness apps, is counting calories in
calories out Now. I am almost forty years old and had,
(04:42):
if you believe it, actually never tried to do this
in a systematic way before. It's not that I didn't
read food labels or think about calories. It's just that
I had always been too lazy to write them down
and had relied on a combination of exercise and metabolism
to burn them off. But my colleagues assured me that
(05:03):
I would be able to find the calorie and nutrition
facts for almost anything in my Fitness Pal. So in
February one, I logged my first day's worth of meals.
The app told me I had eaten about calories, about
a third of which came from snacks, cookies, and peanuts.
I had eatn in the office and then after work
(05:24):
bread and patte with a colleague. Oh dear, at least
I'd skipped having any wine. The app lets you set
a calorie target based on whether you want to lose,
maintain or gain weight. I set my target on maintain
and kept on logging. The easiest things to record were
(05:47):
straightforward items like pieces of fruit or eggs, but logging
anything I'd cooked for myself, arguably the healthiest choice, required
a bit of guesswork to find out what the evidences
that this app, or any app can improve its users health.
I called Yucca b am Seran, a doctor and researcher
(06:08):
at Bond University in Australia. She published one of the
few overview studies of the effectiveness of digital health apps
last year. We came to this research as you know,
just any other twenty one century UM citizen with smartphones,
and we started seeing a lot of UM news and
articles on how smartphone apps are treating this thing and
(06:31):
that thing, and it's you know, being UM taught it
as the next big thing in health and tech. World.
Science is very specific about how we know medical treatments work,
but that's not the case when it comes to consumer products.
Like most health apps a Yucca started looking for rigorous studies.
(06:52):
She surveyed almost eight hundred trials of apps conducted between
two thousand eight and but once she looked more closely,
she found only a handful of the studies showed the
apps have some meaningful effect on health outcomes. Since then,
drugmakers have started looking more at apps that could be
(07:13):
used as therapies. Swiss Droukes Giant Novardes got US approval
for one to treat substance abuse last year, But across
the app world, YUCA says evidence still remains a rare commodity.
We would estimate that less than one percent of all
of these apps are actually been tested, and for apps
(07:34):
that aren't being reviewed by health regulators, just having done
any kind of test can be a marketing point, no
matter what the outcome was. The term for this is experrammercial,
a combination of experiment and commercial. And when the study
doesn't show any benefit, they don't mention it, but they
(07:54):
would mention in the app description that our app has
been scientifically tested, and that kind of gives this false
notion of legitimacy to the potential customers and consumers. My
Fitness Pal was among the few apps or Youka found
that had been tested in an independent clinical trial conducted
about five years ago in Los Angeles. The study randomly
(08:17):
assigned two hundred and twelve overweight adults to either use
the app or to pursue and I quote any activities
you would like to lose weight. After six months, neither
group lost much weight. The researchers did speculate, though, that
the app might be useful for patients who are already
trying to watch their calorie intake. I asked Michael, the
(08:40):
under Armour executive, for his thoughts on the results. That's
absolutely directly in line with our experience with this app.
You know, like I said, it's not We don't think
of it as a health to it. We don't think
of it as something that someone would say, put this
on your phone, you will get better. But we think
of it as an integral part in someone's journey when
they've made the decision I'm going to change my life,
(09:01):
I'm going to hit some fitness goals. Will be there
to help. Maybe that was the problem with my diet
app experiment. I didn't start out with a particular fitness goal.
I wasn't actually trying to change my body or my life,
and in fact another force was at work, won a
lot stronger than willpower or workouts. I was pregnant, and
(09:28):
so for the first time practically since puberty, my body
felt like it was careening out of my control. Low
carb diet hard to handle when you need to eat
toast practically as soon as you open your eyes in
the morning in order to settle your stomach, and I
knew I would have to gain weight, not maintain it,
let alone lose it. Still, I kept logging my meals
(09:51):
and my exercise. I started to read more about the
nutrients I would need for a healthy pregnancy, and I
started to get a little obsessed of about making sure
I logged them. When my fitness pal inexplicably didn't record
the calcium in my brand of yogurt, it felt like
a personal insult. I started keeping a very very close
(10:14):
eye on my protein intake, and I started worrying about
whether I was getting too much vitamin A, something that
would never have occurred to me before, from eating too
many a rugulas salads. I started to wonder whether I
was monitoring myself a little too much. Today we're being
reminded every single minute of how sub optimized we are
(10:37):
and what we should be doing in order to be
more optimized. That's Carl Staderstrom, an associate professor at Stockholm
Business School. He co wrote a book called The Wellness Syndrome,
in which he argued that the pressure to become ever
healthier is actually anything but healthy. For another project, he
also used himself as a guinea pig. So what I
(11:01):
did was that I was using an app to log
everything that I was eating. I was also using one
of these wearables of rest band that logged my sleeping
and logged the activity I was doing during the day.
And then I was spending all my days in the gym,
(11:21):
and I was over the course of that month gaining
something like eight kilos. And the month ended with me
participating in a weightlifting competition which I incidentally ended up
coming last in. Carl writes about our society's obsession with
wellness as being part of an individualistic culture where you
(11:42):
need to demonstrate that you're performing at your peak, where
there's a moral value linked with how your body looks,
and also where workers who spend their days emailing and
organizing seek satisfaction or at least a sense of having
something to show for their efforts from improving their bodies.
(12:02):
He says health apps are a lot like an idea
from Freud, where your conscience prodes you to do what
you know you should do but don't want to. So
it is using an app as this little angry man
sitting on your shoulder constantly telling you that what you
(12:22):
do is wrong and what you should be doing is
this or that. And I think it's says something about
how difficult it is for for all your humans have
probably always been to live the way that we are
supposed to be living. And I think to some extent,
(12:42):
the whole idea of being human is that we are imperfect.
There's no way of always being able to do everything
that we're supposed to be doing. But I think what's
different today than in the past, and the health apps
are a big part of this, is that we are
being reminded seven as we're not living up to that
(13:02):
idealized version of ourselves. Carl argues that this focus on
self optimization is part of a larger political development in
which health is viewed more as an individual concern and
less as a broader social good, and the more society
moves in that direction, the easier it becomes to demonize
(13:24):
and ridicule people who do not have the resources to
look after their own health. Talking to Carl made me
think about my own app experiments in a different way.
There I was obsessing about vitamin A and analyzing the
nutrition content of the free protein bars in the Bloomberg pantry.
The whole thing seemed so narcissistic. There was one time, though,
(13:53):
that an app did help me do something that's actually
objectively healthy. I quit smoking a couple of years ago.
As any former smoker would know, the way cigarettes fit
into your daily ritual is one of the things that
make it super hard to quit. I used to love
smoking in the late afternoon. It's a little moment to
(14:13):
rest my brain before the last few hours of my
work day. So once I quit, I started using a
meditation app called Headspace as a replacement. I didn't think
of Headspace at the time as a health app per se.
It has more than one million paying subscribers and offers
everything from a cat's and boats soundscape for falling asleep
(14:34):
to meditation prep for students who are taking exams. But
when I talked to the apps chief science officer Megan
Jones bell I found out that they actually do see
themselves that way. The company says there are sixty seven
randomized clinical trials being done on its app, including studies
on everything from quitting smoking to managing stress and pain.
(14:58):
There are a number of ways that people can use
meditation to improve their health and happiness, and that can
range from using it as we think about it as
kind of a vitamin, which means that you are um
using it more on a preventative health capacity, such as
trying to boost your resilience to stress, which is something
(15:19):
that we have researched in a number of our trials
and have a number of very rigorous studies underway looking
at how that actually has proven out in brain changes.
The company is also working on a separate version of
its app that doctors could prescribe to their patients like
a medicine. This is more complicated because Headspace needs to
figure out with the Food and Drug Administration how best
(15:43):
to test the new app and regulate it to make
sure it works. Headspace hasn't started these trials yet and
it could be a couple of years before the new
product is approved. I asked Megan why Headspace would spend
money in the meantime testing its consumer app too, when
there's no regulator demanding data. I think, because we're really
(16:04):
playing the long game here, our science strategy is not
unlike the way that we've approached redefining the brand of meditation.
You can think about headspaces origins and really changing the
cultural perception of meditation and mindfulness, and you know, we've
certainly lifted all ships in the process of doing that
(16:25):
and really helping create this market and moving it out
of this kind of more woo woo experience into something
that is very approachable for a diverse range of of consumers.
A few studies are also being done on headspaces big
competitor the app Calm, So when these trials read out,
(16:45):
assuming the results are published, we should get a better
idea if at least this particular corner of the app
market works. Some in the health apps industry think that
an evidence space will become more necessary across the market
as a whole, not just for apps that could be
prescribed as medicines. I talked to Carl Johann Hateroth, CEO
(17:07):
of sleep Cycle, the alarm clock app that got me
started on this project it's really really interesting for us.
I think the whole industry is heading in that direction.
I think this industry is going to be regulated in
some way the coming years. I don't know exactly how,
(17:28):
but I think it will. And I mean, we like that.
And now I have a confession to make. Like a
lot of health app users, I wound up using what
kept me entertained and dropping the rest. I'm still using
(17:48):
sleep Cycle, partly because I like to compete with my
husband to see who gets a better night's sleep, and
because I take a morbid interest in seeing how much
worse my sleep might get as I get more and
more pregnant. Well you know what I mean, bigger and bigger.
But my fitness pal was more complicated. The turning point
(18:09):
was around the time when I was moving from the
she ate too many burritos to the is that a
bump stage of pregnancy. I noticed that on the weekends
when I would skip the app, I felt so much
better about my food intake. And during the week when
I was worrying about protein and calcium and vitamins and calories,
(18:30):
I felt like I was going crazy. I would look
up online calculators to reassure myself that my weight gain
was within normal parameters, and then beat myself up for
not hitting a nutrient target even though I had exceeded
my calorie goal for the day. My husband Philip actually
started to worry about me. I mean, I wouldn't say
(18:52):
it was crazy. You used the worst crazy before. I
wouldn't say it was crazy, But definitely you were a
bit obsessed. I remember you always telling me like not
to worry so much about weight during pregnancy, and I
wonder whether some of the experience with this was just
tied together with that as well. That could definitely be
(19:17):
the case. I mean, I do remember that you asked
very often like, oh God, am I too big? Am
I gaining too much weight? And I then, I mean,
I even get angry about this question because it's not
a competition of like who gains more or who gains
less weight during pregnancy. Your body does. What your body
does in each pregnancy is difficult different. At some point
(19:39):
in time, I was afraid that you would, I don't know,
stop eating when you if you thought that you had
gained too much weight, which would maybe have been unhealthy
for you or the baby. And if an app makes
you even consider something like that, it's definitely not a
good app. After Philip told me that I quit using
the app. But not everybody is as neurotic as I am,
(20:03):
and with so little evidence about health apps and health,
I think the bottom line here is that you can
take what's good for you and just leave the rest behind,
and that sometimes the more you try to control things
to optimize yourself, as Carl would say, the more you
eventually realize that you just need to let go. And
(20:39):
that's it for this week's prognosis. Thanks for listening. Do
you have a story about health here in the US
or around the world we want to hear from you.
Find me on Twitter at bay Cortes or email m
Cortes a Bloomberg dot net. If you are a fan
of this episode, please take a minute to rate and
review us. It really helps new listeners in the show,
(21:01):
and don't forget to subscribe. This episode was produced by
Liz Smith and topor Foreheads. Our story editor was Rick
Shine Francesco Leavie as head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll be
back with our next episode on July four. See you then,
It's almost seven thirty and I just got in from
my morning walk. Thanks to my fitbit and my phone,
I know that I'm already more than halfway to hitting
my ten thousand step target for the day. I have
my fitbit who says that I have walked seven thousand
and thirty one steps. And you know what I have
(00:24):
on my phone as well, another health app, and that
one says I've done seven thousand, four hundred and eleven steps.
Now that it's warmer out, I'm on tract to beat
last week's numbers two. But I'll admit sometimes I wonder
if my fitbit really makes me any more fit. Welcome
(00:53):
to Prognosis, Bloomberg's podcast about the interception of health and
technology and the unexpected places taking us. I'm your host,
Michelle fe Cortes. Even if you never use it, you
most likely have a health app installed on your phone.
Apple Health, which comes with every iPhone, can clock everything
from steps to sleep. Some three thousand digital health apps
(01:16):
are competing for a share of the market to help
you track your calories, watch your blood sugar, guide your workouts,
or help you meditate. In the last episode, we told
you what these apps are doing with your data. This time,
my colleague Naomi Krasky looks into what the health apps
can do for their users. For us, My app addiction
(01:44):
started last year when a friend of a friend told
me he was using an app as a smart alarm
clock set to ring when he was sleeping most lightly
in the morning. I was super intrigued. I downloaded the
app and pretty soon realized it would also grade in
my sleep on a hundred point scale. I love being
told whether I'm doing things right, so soon it became
(02:05):
the first thing I looked at every morning. But that
wasn't enough. I wanted to know why I was sleeping
well or poorly, so I caved and bought the premium version.
That was my first real sign of app addiction. Another
friend gave me a bunch of recommendations for other apps
to try. I started using a period tracker and telling
(02:28):
that app about way more than just my menstrual cycle.
I recorded gastro intestinal side effects, my moods, my sex life.
That app knew more about me than most real humans did.
And at the same time I was researching apps for
diabetes patients for a magazine article, and then eventually also
started using a life tracking app linked to my sleep app.
(02:50):
That one shows you where you are during the day,
work or shopping or home, et cetera. So I could
watch how long I spend bicycling to work, walking, or
at the gym. It felt like being able to watch
all these elements of my life so closely was giving
me more control over them somehow. But the big question
(03:12):
was whether it was actually improving my health. For example,
the sleep app showed me almost immediately what helps me
sleep well, things like meditating before bed and working out,
and what kills my sleep basically booze parties and early
morning light. But my sleep only really improved after my
(03:34):
life slowed down. I had just come off a jam
packed spring and summer in which I had moved, finished
a big project at work, and gotten married. So I
figured my next step should be collecting more data, which
meant downloading more apps. I'm part of a team of
reporters who write about European health and consumer goods companies,
(03:56):
so I asked my colleagues for recommendations. The top pick
was the hugely popular my Fitness Pal app. Sportswear company
under Armour bought this app in for four hundred and
seventy five million dollars. Here's Michael Lagardia, under Armour's senior
vice president of Digital Products, explaining why we look at
(04:18):
fitness as a holistic activity. That it's about the fuel
that you put into It's about the activity that you do,
and my Fitness Pal is there to help you keep
track of that. The central function of my Fitness Pal,
like so many other fitness apps, is counting calories in
calories out Now. I am almost forty years old and had,
(04:42):
if you believe it, actually never tried to do this
in a systematic way before. It's not that I didn't
read food labels or think about calories. It's just that
I had always been too lazy to write them down
and had relied on a combination of exercise and metabolism
to burn them off. But my colleagues assured me that
(05:03):
I would be able to find the calorie and nutrition
facts for almost anything in my Fitness Pal. So in
February one, I logged my first day's worth of meals.
The app told me I had eaten about calories, about
a third of which came from snacks, cookies, and peanuts.
I had eatn in the office and then after work
(05:24):
bread and patte with a colleague. Oh dear, at least
I'd skipped having any wine. The app lets you set
a calorie target based on whether you want to lose,
maintain or gain weight. I set my target on maintain
and kept on logging. The easiest things to record were
(05:47):
straightforward items like pieces of fruit or eggs, but logging
anything I'd cooked for myself, arguably the healthiest choice, required
a bit of guesswork to find out what the evidences
that this app, or any app can improve its users health.
I called Yucca b am Seran, a doctor and researcher
(06:08):
at Bond University in Australia. She published one of the
few overview studies of the effectiveness of digital health apps
last year. We came to this research as you know,
just any other twenty one century UM citizen with smartphones,
and we started seeing a lot of UM news and
articles on how smartphone apps are treating this thing and
(06:31):
that thing, and it's you know, being UM taught it
as the next big thing in health and tech. World.
Science is very specific about how we know medical treatments work,
but that's not the case when it comes to consumer products.
Like most health apps a Yucca started looking for rigorous studies.
(06:52):
She surveyed almost eight hundred trials of apps conducted between
two thousand eight and but once she looked more closely,
she found only a handful of the studies showed the
apps have some meaningful effect on health outcomes. Since then,
drugmakers have started looking more at apps that could be
(07:13):
used as therapies. Swiss Droukes Giant Novardes got US approval
for one to treat substance abuse last year, But across
the app world, YUCA says evidence still remains a rare commodity.
We would estimate that less than one percent of all
of these apps are actually been tested, and for apps
(07:34):
that aren't being reviewed by health regulators, just having done
any kind of test can be a marketing point, no
matter what the outcome was. The term for this is experrammercial,
a combination of experiment and commercial. And when the study
doesn't show any benefit, they don't mention it, but they
(07:54):
would mention in the app description that our app has
been scientifically tested, and that kind of gives this false
notion of legitimacy to the potential customers and consumers. My
Fitness Pal was among the few apps or Youka found
that had been tested in an independent clinical trial conducted
about five years ago in Los Angeles. The study randomly
(08:17):
assigned two hundred and twelve overweight adults to either use
the app or to pursue and I quote any activities
you would like to lose weight. After six months, neither
group lost much weight. The researchers did speculate, though, that
the app might be useful for patients who are already
trying to watch their calorie intake. I asked Michael, the
(08:40):
under Armour executive, for his thoughts on the results. That's
absolutely directly in line with our experience with this app.
You know, like I said, it's not We don't think
of it as a health to it. We don't think
of it as something that someone would say, put this
on your phone, you will get better. But we think
of it as an integral part in someone's journey when
they've made the decision I'm going to change my life,
(09:01):
I'm going to hit some fitness goals. Will be there
to help. Maybe that was the problem with my diet
app experiment. I didn't start out with a particular fitness goal.
I wasn't actually trying to change my body or my life,
and in fact another force was at work, won a
lot stronger than willpower or workouts. I was pregnant, and
(09:28):
so for the first time practically since puberty, my body
felt like it was careening out of my control. Low
carb diet hard to handle when you need to eat
toast practically as soon as you open your eyes in
the morning in order to settle your stomach, and I
knew I would have to gain weight, not maintain it,
let alone lose it. Still, I kept logging my meals
(09:51):
and my exercise. I started to read more about the
nutrients I would need for a healthy pregnancy, and I
started to get a little obsessed of about making sure
I logged them. When my fitness pal inexplicably didn't record
the calcium in my brand of yogurt, it felt like
a personal insult. I started keeping a very very close
(10:14):
eye on my protein intake, and I started worrying about
whether I was getting too much vitamin A, something that
would never have occurred to me before, from eating too
many a rugulas salads. I started to wonder whether I
was monitoring myself a little too much. Today we're being
reminded every single minute of how sub optimized we are
(10:37):
and what we should be doing in order to be
more optimized. That's Carl Staderstrom, an associate professor at Stockholm
Business School. He co wrote a book called The Wellness Syndrome,
in which he argued that the pressure to become ever
healthier is actually anything but healthy. For another project, he
also used himself as a guinea pig. So what I
(11:01):
did was that I was using an app to log
everything that I was eating. I was also using one
of these wearables of rest band that logged my sleeping
and logged the activity I was doing during the day.
And then I was spending all my days in the gym,
(11:21):
and I was over the course of that month gaining
something like eight kilos. And the month ended with me
participating in a weightlifting competition which I incidentally ended up
coming last in. Carl writes about our society's obsession with
wellness as being part of an individualistic culture where you
(11:42):
need to demonstrate that you're performing at your peak, where
there's a moral value linked with how your body looks,
and also where workers who spend their days emailing and
organizing seek satisfaction or at least a sense of having
something to show for their efforts from improving their bodies.
(12:02):
He says health apps are a lot like an idea
from Freud, where your conscience prodes you to do what
you know you should do but don't want to. So
it is using an app as this little angry man
sitting on your shoulder constantly telling you that what you
(12:22):
do is wrong and what you should be doing is
this or that. And I think it's says something about
how difficult it is for for all your humans have
probably always been to live the way that we are
supposed to be living. And I think to some extent,
(12:42):
the whole idea of being human is that we are imperfect.
There's no way of always being able to do everything
that we're supposed to be doing. But I think what's
different today than in the past, and the health apps
are a big part of this, is that we are
being reminded seven as we're not living up to that
(13:02):
idealized version of ourselves. Carl argues that this focus on
self optimization is part of a larger political development in
which health is viewed more as an individual concern and
less as a broader social good, and the more society
moves in that direction, the easier it becomes to demonize
(13:24):
and ridicule people who do not have the resources to
look after their own health. Talking to Carl made me
think about my own app experiments in a different way.
There I was obsessing about vitamin A and analyzing the
nutrition content of the free protein bars in the Bloomberg pantry.
The whole thing seemed so narcissistic. There was one time, though,
(13:53):
that an app did help me do something that's actually
objectively healthy. I quit smoking a couple of years ago.
As any former smoker would know, the way cigarettes fit
into your daily ritual is one of the things that
make it super hard to quit. I used to love
smoking in the late afternoon. It's a little moment to
(14:13):
rest my brain before the last few hours of my
work day. So once I quit, I started using a
meditation app called Headspace as a replacement. I didn't think
of Headspace at the time as a health app per se.
It has more than one million paying subscribers and offers
everything from a cat's and boats soundscape for falling asleep
(14:34):
to meditation prep for students who are taking exams. But
when I talked to the apps chief science officer Megan
Jones bell I found out that they actually do see
themselves that way. The company says there are sixty seven
randomized clinical trials being done on its app, including studies
on everything from quitting smoking to managing stress and pain.
(14:58):
There are a number of ways that people can use
meditation to improve their health and happiness, and that can
range from using it as we think about it as
kind of a vitamin, which means that you are um
using it more on a preventative health capacity, such as
trying to boost your resilience to stress, which is something
(15:19):
that we have researched in a number of our trials
and have a number of very rigorous studies underway looking
at how that actually has proven out in brain changes.
The company is also working on a separate version of
its app that doctors could prescribe to their patients like
a medicine. This is more complicated because Headspace needs to
figure out with the Food and Drug Administration how best
(15:43):
to test the new app and regulate it to make
sure it works. Headspace hasn't started these trials yet and
it could be a couple of years before the new
product is approved. I asked Megan why Headspace would spend
money in the meantime testing its consumer app too, when
there's no regulator demanding data. I think, because we're really
(16:04):
playing the long game here, our science strategy is not
unlike the way that we've approached redefining the brand of meditation.
You can think about headspaces origins and really changing the
cultural perception of meditation and mindfulness, and you know, we've
certainly lifted all ships in the process of doing that
(16:25):
and really helping create this market and moving it out
of this kind of more woo woo experience into something
that is very approachable for a diverse range of of consumers.
A few studies are also being done on headspaces big
competitor the app Calm, So when these trials read out,
(16:45):
assuming the results are published, we should get a better
idea if at least this particular corner of the app
market works. Some in the health apps industry think that
an evidence space will become more necessary across the market
as a whole, not just for apps that could be
prescribed as medicines. I talked to Carl Johann Hateroth, CEO
(17:07):
of sleep Cycle, the alarm clock app that got me
started on this project it's really really interesting for us.
I think the whole industry is heading in that direction.
I think this industry is going to be regulated in
some way the coming years. I don't know exactly how,
(17:28):
but I think it will. And I mean, we like that.
And now I have a confession to make. Like a
lot of health app users, I wound up using what
kept me entertained and dropping the rest. I'm still using
(17:48):
sleep Cycle, partly because I like to compete with my
husband to see who gets a better night's sleep, and
because I take a morbid interest in seeing how much
worse my sleep might get as I get more and
more pregnant. Well you know what I mean, bigger and bigger.
But my fitness pal was more complicated. The turning point
(18:09):
was around the time when I was moving from the
she ate too many burritos to the is that a
bump stage of pregnancy. I noticed that on the weekends
when I would skip the app, I felt so much
better about my food intake. And during the week when
I was worrying about protein and calcium and vitamins and calories,
(18:30):
I felt like I was going crazy. I would look
up online calculators to reassure myself that my weight gain
was within normal parameters, and then beat myself up for
not hitting a nutrient target even though I had exceeded
my calorie goal for the day. My husband Philip actually
started to worry about me. I mean, I wouldn't say
(18:52):
it was crazy. You used the worst crazy before. I
wouldn't say it was crazy, But definitely you were a
bit obsessed. I remember you always telling me like not
to worry so much about weight during pregnancy, and I
wonder whether some of the experience with this was just
tied together with that as well. That could definitely be
(19:17):
the case. I mean, I do remember that you asked
very often like, oh God, am I too big? Am
I gaining too much weight? And I then, I mean,
I even get angry about this question because it's not
a competition of like who gains more or who gains
less weight during pregnancy. Your body does. What your body
does in each pregnancy is difficult different. At some point
(19:39):
in time, I was afraid that you would, I don't know,
stop eating when you if you thought that you had
gained too much weight, which would maybe have been unhealthy
for you or the baby. And if an app makes
you even consider something like that, it's definitely not a
good app. After Philip told me that I quit using
the app. But not everybody is as neurotic as I am,
(20:03):
and with so little evidence about health apps and health,
I think the bottom line here is that you can
take what's good for you and just leave the rest behind,
and that sometimes the more you try to control things
to optimize yourself, as Carl would say, the more you
eventually realize that you just need to let go. And
(20:39):
that's it for this week's prognosis. Thanks for listening. Do
you have a story about health here in the US
or around the world we want to hear from you.
Find me on Twitter at bay Cortes or email m
Cortes a Bloomberg dot net. If you are a fan
of this episode, please take a minute to rate and
review us. It really helps new listeners in the show,
(21:01):
and don't forget to subscribe. This episode was produced by
Liz Smith and topor Foreheads. Our story editor was Rick
Shine Francesco Leavie as head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll be
back with our next episode on July four. See you then,
Host
Jason Gale
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