Intakeroo started as a supplement tracker called Vitaminoxide.
From the start my goal was to make an app that lets you experiment with intakes.
After taking a pre-workout supplement a few years ago, I couldn't believe how powerful the stuff I took was.
I wanted to know exactly what supplements like citrulline, caffeine and off course creatine did to me: for the short term, but especially for the long term.
For example: when I stop taking caffeine, I get headaches: what causes these headaches? Is it actually safe to drink coffee? How do I get rid of the coffee-withdrawal-related headaches?
I felt that to answer questions like these and many many others - outside of university research programs - we need a different solution.
Before I started working on Intakeroo, I was working on another app called Taxigram, which was an app to help taxi travelers guard against taxi scams. I loved working on Taxigram, but this app grew high and deep and I needed to get a break from it, because it was too hard to build for me at that time.
Then Covid happened. I noticed that many people were trying and doing their own thing to understand supplements, food and medicine. It was science-ish, but not really. By building an app like Intakeroo, I could help people get the tools they need to do their own scientific trials. So you think eating carrots cures covid? Prove it, dummy!
I believe citizen science is important to answer all kinds of questions related to nutrition. Universities and research instutions simply can't do all this work alone, because of the amount of time and cost that it would require. With intakeroo you can 'do' the scientific method on your iPhone.
My name is Cihan Özkan, I live in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
I have a BSc. in Plant Sciences from Wageningen University. I used to maintain a blog where I wrote about my plant science studies. To get an idea of what I was working on back then: check out my post about the origin of resistance genes in Potato.
When I'm not coding up Intakeroo, I'm delivering poke bowls, pizza, pasta, döner, sushi, burgers, fries and many other plates, packs and bags of joyous nutrition in the City of Rotterdam with UberEats on one of my two beautiful bicycles.
Cihan Özkan