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slotho 26.4 — the food before the feeling

slotho share card — the sloth app icon beside the slotho wordmark, the line "The food before the feeling" under a red rule, on a near-black background

slotho 26.4 is about the question the app was built around and has never been able to answer directly: which foods turn up before you feel bad.

It can now, and the how matters more than the what.

What turns up before a symptom

slotho takes the foods in your log and the digestion symptoms in your log, and asks one narrow question: how often does this symptom follow this food, compared with how often it happens on days without it?

Four things keep that honest, and all four are deliberate.

The window is two to twenty-four hours, and it is not a setting. Two hours is roughly gastric emptying of a mixed meal; twenty-four is where the food-intolerance literature stops attributing. A window you could tune until a food looked guilty would be a way to confirm a suspicion rather than test one, so the bounds are fixed in the code with their reasons written beside them.

A symptom-free day is evidence. This is the part that is easy to skip. Without recorded absences the denominator is “days you happened to log a symptom”, which makes every food look guilty. slotho records the absence: a bowel movement logged with nothing wrong writes a nothing happened against every symptom type, and that is what makes a comparison possible at all.

It waits. Five days with the food, five days without, and a clear gap between the two rates. Under that, slotho says nothing rather than something interesting.

It is never a diagnosis, and the code will not let it drift into one. The wording is descriptive — this followed that, this often, over this many days. A test in the suite fails if the copy ever says cause, allergy, intolerance or avoid.

Digestion logging, rebuilt

The old screen was a three-way picker over one symptom at a time. There are six symptoms now — bloating, nausea and heartburn joining diarrhoea, constipation and cramps — each with its own severity, chosen from the chip itself rather than from a second list underneath. The screen shrinks as you answer it instead of growing, which was the point.

And the primary control is Log a bowel movement, not a symptom. A visit with nothing wrong is the most common kind, it takes one tap, and — see above — it is the thing that makes every finding possible.

Where you ate it

A meal can now carry a place. Type one, or pick a nearby venue, and the name goes to Apple Health alongside the meal.

Where you have been is kept on your iPhone, not in Health. The coordinates live in a small ledger in slotho’s own storage, so walking back into the same café can offer you back what you had there last time. What rides the meal into Health is the place’s name, its Maps category and, when Maps supplied one, the venue’s identifier — where you said you were, never where you have been. To list the venues around you, slotho asks Apple Maps with a coordinate — the photo’s own, or yours once you tap Find places near me — and never with the meal. Nothing asks for your location until you tap that button, and the whole row can be switched off in Settings.

Also in 26.4

  • Tell slotho how you eat — vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, keto, halal or kosher — and generated meal plans respect it. It is a dietary pattern and deliberately not an allergen list: a preference passed to a language model is not a safety guarantee, and the app says so on both screens that ask.
  • Your name and photo now sit at the top of the Me tab, and setup asks for them. The photo is downsampled and re-encoded before it is stored, so a library picture does not leave its GPS coordinate and camera serial in the app’s container.
  • Add a product Open Food Facts has never seen by photographing the front, the nutrition table and the ingredients — three frames rather than one, because a nutrition table shot as a ninth of a wide photo arrives at a ninth of the resolution something has to read 6pt print from. Only the front is required: a table you cannot photograph in the shop’s light should not cost everyone else the product.
  • Illustrate a food you typed, on one explicit tap — never automatically and never as a sweep, because the name you typed is often personal and a background pass would send every one of them to a third party on your behalf.
  • Recovery and Training Load cards on the Me tab, both measured against your own baselines rather than a population figure.
  • Sleep in your Calendar, alongside workouts. Both are offered during setup now, and both only ever add events — slotho holds write-only access and cannot read your calendar.
  • Twenty sloth stickers, quantised down to a quarter of their original weight, so the pack costs 4.5 MB less to download than it would have.
  • Fasting no longer assumes a schedule you never chose. Where the app used to quote a figure from a default nobody picked, it now asks.

What we are not claiming

A finding names a food that preceded a symptom clearly more often than the symptom turns up on days without it — in your log, and nobody else’s. It is not a test and not a diagnosis. The most it suggests is an experiment: leave that food out for a week and see whether the pattern holds. If something here worries you, the right next step is a clinician — and slotho’s job is to give you something specific to show them.

slotho supports general wellness. It is not a medical device.