Where this comes from
Photographing your food to understand your body is not a new idea. It is a fifty-year-old practice with a small canon of people who have done it seriously. BrainFood is mostly carrying their work forward.
Yoshiro Nakamatsu
A Japanese inventor. In 1972, at age 42, he started photographing every meal he ate to analyze the impact of food on his brain function. He is still doing it at 97. In 2005 he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition for the methodology. BrainFood is mostly his experiment, in everyone's pocket.
Itsuo Kobayashi
A Japanese artist who has drawn every meal he's eaten since the 1980s. Ink, watercolor, handwritten labels, prices, his felt response to each dish. Thirty-plus years of pages. He shows that the practice produces more than data. It produces memory.
Lydia Zepeda & David Deal
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Their 2008 study showed that photographing food before eating works as an immediate behavior intervention and outperforms written food diaries. One participant put it this way: "I was less likely to have a jumbo bag of M&Ms. It curbed my choices."
Tim Ferriss
Popularized the practice in The 4-Hour Body (2010) by citing the Zepeda study and giving the method a name in mainstream culture. He framed it as a simple rule: photograph the meal before the first bite.