Santorio

Problem

I wanted to know, on any given day, whether I was actually meeting the health thresholds I’d set for myself. The issue with the Oura app is that it is not fully comprehensive, and is limited to only what the ring can track.

I noticed that left on autopilot, I often made the easy decision instead of the right one. Namely, I would eat whatever was convenient, and I’d skip exercising on a given day if I thought I had more important things to do.

It was hard to know what the impact of such decisions were though, especially since I wasn’t seeing most of it in my Oura app (which up until now was my primary interface with my health data).

The data to correlate this was already out there. My Oura ring had sleep, workout and recovery stats; my lab work had bloodwork; and my own memory served as a log of what I ate. But it all sat in different places. Also, logging it manually was too tedious to want to attempt.

Solution

Santorio sits underneath all of it as one database, with a dashboard on top that reads sleep, exercise, food, and bloodwork against each other instead of one at a time.

My Oura data syncs in on its own. Bloodwork is easily ingested. Meals get logged by describing them to an agent, which writes the structured details in for me. Everything lands in the same place, on the same timeline, so I can actually look at it.

Features

Santorio tells me whether I’m recovered enough to go hard on any given day, reading sleep, HRV, and readiness together.

Given my exercise history, it tracks which specific muscles are still rebuilding and which are fresh (so I know what to work on) and it watches how my training load is trending week to week so I detect any potential injury risks.

Santorio also checks if I’m getting (approximately) 60 important micronutrients that matter for long-term health, and an AI-generated summary tells me specific foods to eat (from my inventory) to close whatever nutritional gap may be open that day.

My bloodwork gets read against people who match my age and sex, so a marker comes back as optimal or not for me.

Method

Santorio runs on a SQL database. Everything gets backed up and encrypted on a daily cycle.

Wearable data comes in through scheduled syncs.

Conversational logging is deliberately loose. I don’t format anything when I speak to my agent, and instead the system infers structure from whatever I say. It reconciles fuzzy details, such as an approximate workout time, against precise sensor data afterward.

Implication

Jocko Willink has a line on how discipline is freedom. My natural proclivity to trade a long-term good for a short-term comfort won’t disappear, but now my conscious mind is at least engaged, and becomes an active participant in decision-making.

The conflict between genes and memes is perhaps the centrepiece of the story of Homo sapiens. There are other more pertinent examples of how technology helps negotiate this conflict, namely religion and law. However, Santorio is a simpler and less abstracted example, which helps one conceptualise the limitations of man and the benefits of dogma.

Reverence

The name is an homage to Santorio Santorio, a physician who wanted to move medicine from subjective guesswork into a reproducible mathematical science. He is the founding father of quantitative experimental physiology and a spiritual ancestor of the quantified self movement.

Physicians at the time were prescribing fasting, bloodletting, and purging to restore balance to the body, but Santorio’s argument was that they had no idea how much deficiency was required (it seemed like guesswork). Santorio hypothesised that illnesses were preceded by obstruction of perspiration from the skin, where its matter would putrefy in the blood vessels and trigger disease.

If this were the case, a weighing scale would serve as a diagnostic tool. By weighing a patient daily, a physician could detect an uneliminated surplus of matter days before the patient felt symptoms.

He spent 30 years weighing himself, his food, and his own waste on a giant scale he built in his house - a steelyard weighing chair. Before sitting down to eat, he would move a counterweight so that his suspended chair tilted slightly upward, balancing at the exact weight he intended to reach once he had consumed an optimal amount of food and wine. As he sat in the suspended chair eating his meal, the chair would sink lower and lower. The moment the lever reached a horizontal, level equilibrium, Santorio knew he had consumed his target mass of nutrients and would put his fork down.

Every single input and every single output was measured. He discovered that a human being sheds much of their daily intake of food and drink invisibly through the breath and skin (insensible perspiration), and that such loss fluctuates systematically based on emotional state, temperature, digestion, exercise, and sleep.