Product Hunt

@anthony_weil · CEO / Founder @ One X

@airjoshb Hi Joshua. Thanks for your comment. Let's break it in two parts: 1) Skin carotenoids as a surrogate marker of oxidative stress, Our website in "SEE THE RESEARCH" section links dozens of reports. But we have prepared a special blog post that reviews the existing literature: https://goo.gl/QKJ01H. You can dive even further in this exhaustive review we worte regarding non-invasive assessment of skin carotenoids: https://goo.gl/fKI0Oh. Although One X is not making any medical claim, hundreds of peer review studies have shown the prevention role of carotenoids on cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative diseases, obesity, and even association with longevity markers, skin health and eye vision. 2) Skin carotenoids and healthy nutrition. As mentioned, carotenoids are the best biomarkers of fruit and vegetable intake which is a very interesting biomarker to track to assess the quality of your diet and above all to understand the interaction between your diet with other lifestyle habits. Skin carotenoids measurement are also way superior (vs. blood) because they ultimately reflect what your body is able to absorb (skin is a tissue). Conversely, junk food can lower the skin antioxidant level through oxidation but also because your nutritional / antioxidant intakes are too low to be transported to the skin that constantly regenerates. If you go through our blog post relating our 40 days experiment tracking skin carotenoids every 3 hours, you'll see that skin carotenoids reflect very significantly specific antioxidant and vitamin intakes such as Vit. A, E, C carotenoids but also some type of fatty acids that are necessary for proper nutrient metabolism. https://goo.gl/rG1MIz We've measured so many persons who though they were eating well but with low to average score. (People sometimes think that their lunch salad is providing them with enough nutrients but truth is that they usually need a much higher variety of veggies / fruits to increase their level, and with enough fat to ensure proper absorption) Let me know your thoughts

@anthony_weil · CEO / Founder @ One X

@hexsprite @airjoshb Joshua refers to Reflectance Spectroscopy (RS) which is an optical technique to measure skin molecules concentration such as carotenoids.

2 share tweet・8 months ago

@airjoshb · Celebrating people, making life better.

@hexsprite Reflective or Raman Spectroscopy. Basically the method they are using to analyze the skin

@anthony_weil · CEO / Founder @ One X

@airjoshb @hexsprite Actually Raman Spectroscopy use expensive laser beams while Reflectance Spectroscopy uses LEDs. The technology behind One X is called Spatially Resolved Reflectance Spectroscopy: a combination of optics and algorithms. We reach 90% correlation with Gold Standard Raman Spectroscopy, for 2% of its cost.

1 share tweet・8 months ago

@airjoshb · Celebrating people, making life better.

@anthony_weil first let me say that this is some cool tech applied to what appears to be some intelligent software that could be useful for prompting people to eat more/wider variety of vegetables similar to how Pavlok can be useful in helping people create better habits. On the other hand you are walking a fine line in trying to correlate the data to real measurements of cellular oxidative stress. While the skin measurements are accurate at measuring skin level oxidative stress (sunlight, smoking, etc) and quite useful at assessing fruit and vegetable intake. However, your references cherry pick slices of conclusions to things that show promise, though have little data at this point. Also there is little reference to how your environment and even amount of fat tissue might effect the results. I believe you are being careful about how you present the product but you seem to be walking the line awfully close and some of the other companies who have brought similar products based on RSS technology to market appear to have found themselves having to answer for how far over they went

1 share tweet・8 months ago

@airjoshb · Celebrating people, making life better.

@anthony_weil @hexsprite cool. Thanks for clarifying.

@anthony_weil · CEO / Founder @ One X

@airjoshb Thanks for your comments. If you have a look at some of the papers we linked, you can notice that skin carotenoids have already be correlated to metabolic markers of oxidative stress such as urine MDA (malondaidehyde). "When analyzed by a chemical assay based on urinary malondialdehyde excretion, an indicator of oxidative lipid damage, people with high oxidative stress had significantly lower skin carotenoid levels than people with low oxidative stress. These observations provide evidence that skin carotenoid readings might be useful as a surrogate marker for general antioxidant status" As such, I invite you to review these two papers: W. Gellermann, J. Zidichouski, C. Smidt and P. Bernstein, “Raman detection of carotenoids in human tissue,” in Carotenoids and Retinoids, Molecular Aspects and Health Issues , K. Kraemer, L. Packer, H. Sies and U. Obermüller-Jevic, Eds., AOCS Publishing, 2005. I. Ermakov, M. Sharifzadeh, M. Ermakova and W. Gellermann, “Resonance Raman detection of carotenoid antioxidants in living human tissue,” Journal of Biomedical Optics, vol. 10, no. 6, 2005. If you're interested, The Research from the University of Dusseldorf is very solid (Helmut Sies, W. Stahl). The Hebrew University is also focused on skin antioxidants to assess ongoing metabolic and environmental oxidative stress: http://www.mdpi.com/2079-9284/3/... Best !

@airjoshb · Celebrating people, making life better.

@anthony_weil Unfortunately the two studies are both quite early and related to the device manufacturer selling supplements. The latter is focused primarily on optics and while they suggest that they "might" correlate with skin (stating the need for more research), they also conclude, "it may serve as a noninvasive novel biomarker for fruit and vegetable intake" - novel being the operative word and precisely what I described as how the product will be useful to people.