Healthy App-etite

ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO GLAGO decided she needed to radically overhaul her diet and started trying to eat healthier. “As a cancer survivor I take my health really seriously,” says Glago, who has had cancer twice, including lymphoma at 17, just before she entered Dartmouth. She searched for tech help and quickly found that most of the phone apps on the market focused on calorie counting and weight loss. “I was a cognitive science major, so I’ve always been interested in psychol- ogy and how you can use technology to change behavior,” she says. “I wondered if I could build something that could mo- tivate people to eat healthy foods.”

So Glago, then a program manager for Microsoft in Seattle, asked her web developer husband if he wanted to help her build an app for that. He jumped at the idea. “We’d just gotten married, and instead of taking a honeymoon we stayed home and worked on a prototype,” she says. Together they built Wholesome, an iPhone nutrition app that earned glowing reviews and a 2014 Innov8 for Health business concept award. The free ver- sion lets users access USDA nutrition information for a wide range of whole foods. The $3 version lets users track food intake throughout the day—and provides info on what vitamins and nutrients may be lacking and where to get them. Colors aid in navigation. “It’s designed to be vi- sually inspirational: red, orange, yellow, leafy green, purple,” she says. “You can keep browsing—I had no idea that cher- ries had so many antioxidants!—and it’ll inspire you.”

Glago is now packing for a move to New York City to become a senior product director for Priceline and continue devel- oping Wholesome. “My ultimate vision is that it becomes a recommendation engine that would suggest healthy whole food recipes,” she says. “We’d have a database of recipes and it would suggest the recipes based on your individual needs and diet history and what you should be eating.” In the meantime Glago’s following some wholesome advice of her own—crunching sunflower seeds to boost her daily dose of vitamin E.

Glago gave up her honeymoon to develop her Wholesome prototype.

“I wondered if I could build something that could motivate people to eat healthy foods.”