About 10 years ago, I came across a statistic I found incredibly depressing: The annual advertising budget for Pringles chips alone was more than 10 times greater than the annual marketing budget for the federal government’s entire “Five a Day” education campaign meant to encourage Americans to consume fruits and vegetables. In other words, messages promoting nutritious, health-supporting practices haven’t got a prayer of cutting through the deluge of advertising designed to lure us into craving empty-calorie junk.
Over the years, I’ve wondered what our society might look like if public health causes had comparable bankrolls as for-profit consumer goods products or the typical Silicon Valley internet startup. What if our country’s top marketing talent applied its creative genius toward projects meant to promote the common good rather than toward picking our pockets, sapping our attention and gavaging us with white flour and sugar? What if, say, the best and brightest of Silicon Valley decided to channel their energy toward inventing a killer app that would make healthy living as addictive and entertaining as, say, Candy Crush?
Well, one can imagine my delight when I learned that a cadre of such whizzes recently decided to do just that, with a free app called Hi.Q , a ” health IQ Test.” The crazily addictive app is a timed, quiz-type game on all things health and nutrition. With 10,000 questions covering 300-plus topics — and new quiz topics added daily — players can test their knowledge on everything from nutrition to fitness to alternative medicine, earning points along the way as they’re grilled on super-pragmatic, health-related trivia. Think you know how to treat saddle sores? What about how to out hidden calories on the Chipotle menu? Those with a competitive streak can see how their scores compare to players all across the country. And more importantly, we’re learning as we’re gaming: All questions have been vetted by more than 30 credentialed experts in their respective fields, from Harvard cardiologists to Stanford endocrinologists to New York City’s go-to dietitian for digestive drama (that’s me!).
According to company co-founder Munjal Shah, Hi.Q’s health IQ test has a greater purpose beyond just entertainment: He’s on a mission to improve the health of the world. Furthermore, he contends that the underlying health literacy demonstrated by higher Hi.Q scores translates into improved health outcomes. And like any seasoned Silicon Valley veteran, he’s got data to support it.
Shah and his team tested the 10,000-question test among 250,000 users, and analyzed their scores in comparison to self-reported data on hospital admissions and cost. They found that even when controlling for gender, age and disease status, there was an inverse association between Hi.Q scores and hospitalizations. In other words, the higher one’s health IQ, the lower the likelihood that he pr she had been hospitalized for any reason. More specifically, mastery of food and nutrition-related topics was most likely to be predictive of a low hospitalization risk — though knowledge of yoga and running ranked up there as well. Greater knowledge of health and nutrition also correlated closely with obesity rates: States whose users had the lowest Hi.Q scores were also typically the states with the highest obesity rates, and vice versa. (So for those who are critical of the Food and Drug Administration’s latest mandate for nutrition labeling at all chain restaurants and vending machines nationwide, take note: According to Shah’s large data set, there’s good reason to believe that better knowledge of nutrition — and calories in particular — may translate directly into better health outcomes.)
Shah became a born-again health advocate after his workaholic lifestyle led to a health scare at the young age of 37. Realizing the need to take charge of his own health, he soon discovered how much practical knowledge was required in order to do — and how unhelpfully theoretical most available health information currently was. As he set about improving his own health literacy, he also set his entrepreneurial sights on tackling the glaring lack of “vocational” health education currently available to the public. As he explained to me, “Health literacy means having knowledge that can be implemented in a way tied to our specific social environment — like how to eat well at Disneyland or Chipotle — not medical education on how our pancreas works, or theoretical information on how the metabolism works.”
The fact that Hi.Q delivers such pragmatic, evidence-based education to the smartphone-wielding public for free and in the form of a seriously habit-forming game makes this app among the first of what I hope will be many such socially responsible commercial enterprises. If these guys can figure out how to be profitable while gamifying better health for millions, the Pringles of the world will have finally met their match.
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Hi.Q: Nutrition Knowledge That Matters originally appeared on usnews.com