I love what the folks at Zoe are doing. The podcast is awesome and I’m totally on board. I completed the program last year but then really struggled with the App. Zoe is very much in favour of getting away from UPF’s. But adding UPF’s to the app is really easy - just scan the barcode. If like me, you cook all your food from scratch including a bunch of homemade fermentation products, as recommended by Zoe, then the process of adding is very laborious. Sure, you can batch cook and then add the recipe, which makes it easy the second time you cook, but this goes against the very idea of eating a large verity of different fruit, veg, nuts, seeds. I eat the seasons, including as much variety as I can. I don’t want to spend more time logging food than eating it, which is what happened. So I gave up on the app and unsubscribed. Since then, two of my close family have signed up and a third is going to give it a go soon. This has reenergised me. So, now I want to resubscribe. I’ve hit the resubscribe button in the app every day for a week. Nothing. No response. No email. No message from support. Do you want my money? I don’t know how else to contact the team. There’s no contact information on the join Zoe website.

My stomach pain thwarted me to see a gastroenterologist after 6 months of pain and increasing respiratory issues. After tests and antibiotics, I read countless books on IBS and SIBO, experimented with so many diets and stuck with Low Fodmap for two years, which helped but my bloat and pain was still unpredictable. I heard about this app on a podcast by Simon Hill and it’s made my life so much easier. I cannot believe how much time and energy I wasted on general advice, years of voices that weren’t specific to my biology, which affected my mental health as well. The App: It seemed like a lot to do on my own (blood and muffin test) but Zoe was organized in their delivery and the app videos and chat supportive and informative. I’m still in phase 2 and it’s a little tedious to track everything but I’m determined to work with my body, which this app will help you to do. Anytime I have a craving at the grocery store or want to try a new snack or spread at a farmers market, I simply scan the item, and if it’s not good for my gut, then I’m immediately turned off, because the painful consequences are dotted in orange. Thank you for educating me and helping me regain control of my life. Worth every penny.

I heard about Zoe after reading the book “Spoon Fed” by Tim Specter. Intrigued by the information there, I found and registered for the Zoe app and program. My first diet at the age of 15 was an extreme calorie restricted diet. I am now 63 and have struggled with my weight my whole life, despite the many diet fads I have tried. Intuitively, I felt that I had a unique biology because diets that worked for other people did not work for me. With this program and the results of the blood sugar, blood fat, and digestive microbe tests, I finally have a system that works for my biology. The app is amazing because it has scores for hundreds of ingredients and packaged foods. I can use the scores to plan what I eat that will benefit my health. I feel really light and energetic and not hungry. But a caveat - if you are determined to eat nothing but fast food and highly processed foods, and not willing or ready to change or improve on that, this will not work for you. I also feel that the change in my eating is better for the planet!

The Zoe recommendations, research, testing, etc., are top notch. It's just too bad those are paired with such an unappealing app. First of all, it is designed strictly for use on a phone, so that puts huge constraints on its user interface - small screen, only basic displays. If they had the option to use it effectively and as one might expect on a computer, laptop, or iPad (or similar device), it would make all the difference in the world. For instance, in logging your food, it's easy enough to find the foods you want to log, and the app will tell you how well that serves your gut health, but that's all. There's absolutely nothing else: no calorie counts, no nutritional information, and so no totals for those, either. Lots of people have the need to track that stuff. For instance, I have osteoporosis, so I want to track calcium. I also want to lose weight, so it might be good to track calories, carbs, or whatever. I might want to see if I'm meeting my daily nutritional requirements in other ways as well. Anyway, I do understand that the app is supposedly tuned to my personal test results, so that is a complex algorithm, but the basics would be nice, too. I just think the app, in it's phone-size restricted interface, is inadequate. I rarely use it, because I like to see that other stuff, too. I would much prefer to log everything using Zoe.