Small Signs I'm on the Right Track

Building a company in its early days is mostly quiet. You write code, fix bugs, read papers, and wonder whether any of it matters to anyone but you.

Lately the quiet has been interrupted by a handful of small, encouraging signals. None of them proves anything on its own. Together, they have reassured me about the mission, so I wanted to write them down.

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A Doctor Who Knows the Gaps

A doctor told me AllNutrition is already better than OpenEvidence.

What made that land was that she said it knowing exactly where we fall short. Our library holds roughly a tenth of all the relevant nutrition and health articles published over the past few decades. She knows that, and she still thinks it is better.

I take that as a sign that the approach matters as much as the size of the library: every claim traced to a specific paper, every paper scored for trust and conflicts of interest, and nothing quietly filtered out. It also tells me how much better this can get as the library keeps growing.

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Let People Read and Decide

During SF Tech Week I spoke with a doctor and business owner who has spent more than 30 years in patient care and nutrition.

That conversation reinforced something I had been hoping was true: now is the right time, and an important one, to put every nutrition and health reference out there, in a form people can actually digest, so they can read it and decide for themselves. Not suppress certain sources because of someone's personal bias, including mine.

That is the hardest part of the mission to explain, and hearing it from someone with three decades in the field meant a lot.

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Strangers Who Found It on Their Own

This is the one that fascinates me most.

I have built a few apps before that I hoped would be useful and could scale. None of them ever found users without me pushing them.

Since publishing the AllNutrition app in ChatGPT, around ten people a day find it and ask it questions. I do not know them. I have not talked to them about AllNutrition or its mission. I have not spent a dollar on paid ads. They simply had a nutrition question and found us.

Ten people a day is not a big number. But it is real, and it is the first time anything I built has been pulled by people rather than pushed by me.

A few investors have noticed too. They keep following up on progress and asking about traction, which is a question I am starting to enjoy.

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My Own Lab Results

The last signal is personal.

My most recent blood test, drawn on October 12, came back with an LDL cholesterol of 71 mg/dL, the lowest of my last four tests and close to the 70 I have been aiming for.

Why 70? For LDL, my view is that lower is better. Dr. Michael Greger has made the case that an optimal LDL is somewhere between 50 and 70 mg/dL [1], drawing on a review arguing that this range is what is physiologically normal for humans [2]. That is a stricter goal than the standard lab cutoff of 100, and I am comfortable aiming for it.

I wrote about the earlier part of my journey, including the LDL peak during my kidney disease flare, in Why I'm Building AllNutrition. This post is about the past year.

Over that year, the main change I made was to cut back on one food: eggs. I now eat them only rarely. My LDL, which had sat around 74 since early 2025, came down to 71. That is a small move, and a single test can shift by a few points on its own, so I hold it loosely. But it went in the direction I hoped, and it has stayed in a range I am happy with.

My triglycerides have moved in the same direction, from 92 mg/dL in early 2025 to 66 mg/dL.

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What I Have Not Given Up

I want to be clear that I have not become an ascetic.

I still like eating meat. I still eat an egg once in a while. I do not avoid meat only for health reasons, and I did not change everything at once. Over the past three and a half years I changed my habits one at a time, very gradually, until the new ones stopped feeling like sacrifices.

Now I genuinely enjoy vegetables. Who likes raw broccoli? I do, especially with hummus and a little sumac. An apple or a bowl of frozen berries is my afternoon snack. And don't get me started on my wife's lentils, a delicious hybrid of adasi, adas polo, and sabzi polo.

I have had failed experiments too. I tried to cut back on feta cheese, and it did not work. I love it. I grew up with it, and I believe it is one of the least unhealthy of the cheeses I grew up with. As far as I know, no current science says I should give it up. If future science ever does, it will be the very last thing to go. 🙂

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Why This Matters to Me

A doctor who prefers our answers despite the gaps. A veteran of the field who believes people deserve to see all the evidence. Strangers who find us without being asked. Investors who keep checking in. And my own labs, quietly agreeing with the choices I made by reading the evidence for myself.

None of these is proof. All of them are reasons to keep going.

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Sources

1. Greger M. Optimal Cholesterol Level. NutritionFacts.org (video). nutritionfacts.org/video/optimal-cholesterol-level/

2. O'Keefe JH Jr, Cordain L, Harris WH, Moe RM, Vogel R. Optimal low-density lipoprotein is 50 to 70 mg/dl: lower is better and physiologically normal. Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 2004;43(11):2142–2146. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15172426/