The anxiety-inducing world of wellness tech

I first came across the Zoe programme when a bright yellow package arrived on my parents’ doorstep last year. My mother, like many, had been wooed by the TV personality Davina McCall into ‘living her best life’ by ordering a Zoe gut-health testing kit (at an upfront cost of £299, or £599 for the Plus plan). 

Zoe is the invention of Tim Spector, the professor-turned-health guru who ran the Covid symptom-tracker app throughout the pandemic. It’s a personalised nutrition programme that promises to make you ‘feel’ healthier and improve your gut health, energy levels and even flatulence.

It works by giving you what most know as a diabetes continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that measures your blood sugar levels after eating. Once you’ve spiked the device into the back of your arm, you eat a ‘test’ cookie, prick your finger, pop a poo sample in the post, and voilà, a full metabolic analysis is on its way to you. Zoe then scores the make-up of your meals from 0-100, helping you ‘make choices guided by personalised science’. ‘Discover how your body responds to different foods,’ Spector says. There’s nothing like a sultry, silver-haired scientist telling you your body is special.

Not long after that yellow box arrived, my mother and her friends became walking adverts for Zoe, their branded CGMs proudly stuck to their arms like pin badges for protestors. Since the company’s launch, 250,000 have signed up to join them, all, presumably, paying the £35 monthly subscription fee. The conversation around my mother’s kitchen table has changed from who’s had Ozempic or who’s divorcing who to their own digestive systems. ‘Did your report tell you to stop eating oats?’; ‘Almonds and I get on so well!’; ‘Red meat is an absolute no-go.’