Living With Crohn’s Disease commercial

My roommate and I are watching 13 Going on 30 on FX right now, and this came on during commercials:

My roomie looked at me and said “huh. I’ve never seen that before. Have you?” I actually have never seen a Crohn’s commerical on TV before. I immediately hopped on the advertised site Living with Crohn’s Disease to see what it’s all about. The site is run by the biomedicine company Centocor, which makes medication for Crohn’s. I think it’s interesting that nowhere in this commercial do they mention Centocor or its medications. I wanted to take the Crohn’s control quiz on the Living with Crohn’s site, but you must enter too much personal information for me.

Also, I thought the commercial was a little too overacted. They were so dramatic that it actually amused me. They’re so serious, but what I’ve learned from Crohn’s is that you can’t be too serious about it. It is a disease and you must have control over it, but you don’t need to be such a downer about it. In my family, we joke about my Crohn’s and it helps me not to fret about it too much. Overall I think they need to replace their lame actors with real people and make something more uplifting.

Tweet What You Eat: taking food diaries to the next level

As usual, I was going through my Yahoo! Group discussion board emails for SCD and I ran across one post about a new web site. The site, Eat Right, is based in Ireland. While exploring this site I found something very interesting: Tweet What You Eat It’s a Twitter-based food diary. “Use Twitter to track what you eat, and now your weight, by ‘tweeting’ food items to your personal food diary on Tweetwhatyoueat.com from your mobile phone, IM or through Twitter.” Using your Twitter account you send direct messages to TWYE, so

your friends can’t see what your food diary. TWYE says, “Twitter is the perfect platform for a food diary application. You can send Twitter messages from a phone via SMS, your favorite IM client and even the web through Twitter.com! That makes it very versatile for our on-the-go lifestyles.”

It’s cool to see a new application for the Twitter technology, and I think it shows that Twitter can be used for more than just updating about your life. I’m not sure I’ll be tweeting my eating habits anytime soon, but perhaps someday.