Tech of the Week: Darma Smart Cushion

Darma Smart Cushion

Back pain is one of the most commons health problems our modern society faces. Darma aims to fix that. Boasting features from monitoring you posture, sittings habits, stress level, and coaching you to sit better.
How bad is sitting? Studies have shown that the hours you sit is related to various cancers, heart conditions, metabolic conditions, depression, anxiety and depression.

“Good posture is the key to good health.”

 Possible Pros:

Improved health. A technology that could be a category killer for many other apps and devices (i.e. reminder timers, heart rate apps)

Possible Cons:

Price, good chance this is the only cushion you’ll pay $100+ for. Accuracy, will it really be able to measure your stress levels and heart rate variability? It’s still not completely clear.

Regardless they definitely have plenty of backers. Their Kickstarter campaign ended at $225,574, over 5 times their goal.

Early units are planned to go out from March – June 2015 with no word, as of yet, on public access.

Tech of the Week: Tellspec

The tech of the week is TellSpec! Which “intends to revolutionize our health by empowering us with knowledge about the food we eat” and it could, in theory, do just that.

What was originally an Indiegogo project and dream of Isabel Hoffman and Dr. Stephen Watson is now a company backed with nearly $400,000 and a public release due in November of 2014 (now pushed to Q1 of 2015).
Possible Pros:

• Knowing how many calories a food has rather than guessing
• Knowing what ingredients and possible allergens are in a food
• App to quickly sync with your phone
• With the planned size that of a hand it’ll be very mobile
• Cool factor (who doesn’t want a spectrometer on their key chain?)

Possible Cons:

• Size, following the newsletter and updates they have been having difficulties getting the product to the desired size
• Battery life. If it is the planned size and it’s running a spectrometer what kind of battery life will it have?
• Price, although the Indiegogo units were as cheap as $150 there is a planned yearly subscription fee for using the service

All and all it’s too soon to tell if TellSpec will live up to its promises but it will definitely be interesting to see what happens in the first quarter of 2015.

60 Second Paleo Episode 5: Clean 15 and The Dirty Dozen

More information on the Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen can be found at:
Environmental Working Group
PBS The Dirty Dozen

Episode 4: Brief History of the Paleo Diet

Android App Now on the Google Play Store!

Released an app for all you Android users out there. Still in the beta phase but you can get it at:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wBuildingABetterHuman&hl=en

Enjoy!

Episode 3: 60 Second Paleo

Episode 3 of 60 Second Paleo! Drunk Holiday Edition!
Slowly figuring out this whole audio quality thing, work in progress.

Transcript:

This is 60 Second Paleo, I'm Roman. Today I want to talk about alcohol. Whether or not alcohol is actually paleo is debatable as there is some evidence we've had a long history with alcohol. It actually lowers your blood sugar, it's broken down by the liver into toxins and eventually into co2 and water. Now, the hangover is caused by the toxins and there are some steps you can take to mitigate the hangovers. One way is to just drink better kinds of alcohol in general. Beers generally the worst, lagers. Vokda, tequila, whiskey and gin are some of the better choices. You can take vitamin b1, alpha lipoic acid. You can take some vitamin C. Glutathione, either in the oral form or through NAC. You can also take some activated charcoal once you're done drinking. That's your 60 seconds for today, happy holidays thanks for listening.

Episode 2: 60 Second Paleo

Second episode of 60 Second Paleo!

In the process of enhancing the audio quality. Thank you for the feedback!

Transcript:

This is 60 Second Paleo, I'm Roman. Today I want to talk about multi vitamins. A lot of the multi vitamins you'll find at the everyday convenience store/grocery store, is quite possibly doing more harm than good. When looking for a multi vitamin you really want to look at the quality of the brand and you also want to know the optimal form of the vitamin or mineral you're trying to get. You'll also want to watch out for fillers. There's actually, for a reason that's beyond me, a lot of multi vitamins have gluten in them. So the three most optimal things to do would be: either well research you're multi vitamin and make sure everything's on point. Or do the same thing with you're diet which would need to be extremely on point. The third thing would be to buy the vitamins/minerals separately in the most optimal form. And that's your 60 seconds for today.