Sometimes the same food keeps showing up before the same symptom. Loopa counts that for you. It counts, and that is all it does.
A pattern is not a cause. Two things happening near each other is exactly as much as this says. Only a person who knows your history can tell you what it means.
Protocols are a Loopa Premium feature.
What it looks at
For each symptom you log, Loopa looks at the food you logged in the three hours before it, and counts how often each food and each food category turns up there.
It reports as a count and a rate, in a sentence: "Heartburn logged within 3 hours of fried foods, 6 of 8 times."
What it needs before it says anything
Both of these, for the same symptom:
- Five co-occurrences of that food with that symptom.
- The food appears before at least half of the times you logged that symptom.
Below either, the screen tells you it is still learning and what it is waiting for. That is deliberate. Three coincidences look exactly like a pattern and are not one.
By food and by category
A food is counted twice: under its own name, and under the category it belongs to in the food database. So "fried foods" can show a pattern that no single item does.
A food you typed yourself has no category, so it is only ever counted as itself. If you want categories to work, log from the database rather than as free text.
What it does not do
- It does not say a food caused a symptom.
- It does not tell you to stop eating anything.
- It does not rank foods as good or bad.
What it does do is feed one other screen: a food at or above your own threshold is left out of the protein gap suggestions and named as excluded, so you are not offered something your own log keeps putting next to a rough afternoon.
Privacy
Your food log is encrypted with your own key. To count these, Loopa opens only the days that carry a symptom, plus the day before each so a three-hour window that crosses midnight still works. Days with no symptom on them are never opened for this.
Making it useful
- Log the symptom when it happens, not hours later. The three-hour window is the whole mechanism.
- Log the food too. A symptom with an empty afternoon in front of it counts toward nothing.
- Take a pattern to your appointment rather than acting on it. The Question for my prescriber field is there for exactly this.
Related
- GLP-1 side effects, and how to track them
- Closing the protein gap
- Your cycle pattern
- Patterns
- Preparing for a prescriber appointment
- Food data quality
Where this comes from
Everything here is counted from your own entries. Loopa does not give medical advice and never attributes a symptom to a food or a medicine. Sources for health information elsewhere in this knowledge base are at loopahealth.app/sources.
