HAPIfork by HAPILABS is evidence that the human population is determined to create utter ridiculousness that exists simply to fill up the drawers in our house and add to our landfills. When I read about this product, all I could think about was how someone spent thousands of dollars from personal savings to develop it and probably never see a return on that investment. If this product takes off, it will take off for about two minutes and then disappear into the ether with all the other health and weight loss trends that do nothing for us.
The HAPIfork is a smart fork used to measure metrics while you eat. The back of the fork pops off to reveal a USB connection that dumps information onto your computer and sends it to an app that does its best to make the metrics it receives look useful to you. What will you know after you use this digital fork? You’ll know how long you ate for, how long there was between mouthfuls, and how many bites you took. Why you want to know this information, I really don’t know. The fork can’t tell you what you ate or how many calories you ingested. HAPIfork only tells you, in its own opinion, if you ate too fast.
The problem with this fork is that it doesn’t really help you with anything. Instead, HAPIfork gives you the mindset that healthy eating is related to how many bites you take of whatever it is you’re ingesting. So, you can have 10 bites of fried butter and feel awesome about how little you ate and then feel bad the next meal because you took 28 bites of green beans.
What the HapiFORK will do for you, however, is tell you when you eat your fried butter or green beans too fast. When the fork thinks it’s going to and from your mouth too frequently, it starts to vibrate so you know you should slow down. But really, this feature would only encourage me to eat faster because the sensation of my fork vibrating while I’m eating my butter sounds awesome and hilarious. I’m sure the vibration is much more subtle in real life than it is in my head, but still. In addition, there’s an LED on the end of the fork that is green when you’re good to eat and red when you need to slow down, because who doesn’t love to play Red Light Green Light with dinner?
Don’t worry all you folks on a liquid diet or those who simply like soup. You too can have these useless metrics because there’s a spoon attachment as well. However, I’m not sure how you’re supposed to learn to eat your potato chips, pizza, and sub sandwiches slowly unless HAPILABS creates an implant that would make my hand vibrate when it went to and from my mouth too frequently. In which case, I wouldn’t be using my vibrating hand to eat.
If you’re still set on trying this beeping and jostling instrument out, you can buy the fork for the small fee of $99. SERIOUSLY. That’s $99 for something you’ll use for about a week or that you’ll have for three days before Grandpa Jo sticks it in the dishwasher for you (the fork end detaches from the smart end so you can easily wash it without ruining the electronics, but Grandpa Jo doesn’t know that).
I’m going to do you a favor and teach you right now what this fork is trying to make you learn by vibrating at you, and I’m going to do it for free. My facts are totally dishwasher safe too. It takes a minimum of 10 minutes for your brain to register that you’ve had enough food. So, you could eat half a sandwich in five minutes and it could be the perfect amount of food for you (it generally is for anyone, because we need a surprisingly small amount of food to experience the full and satisfied sensation), but there are five more minutes until your blood sugar levels and insulin levels peak out in response to that food and allow your brain to tell your stomach, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m full.” In the meantime, you eat the other half of your sandwich and the chips and the cookie that you got with it. Then, just about when you’re finished eating, you’ll feel comfortably satisfied and full from the first half of your sandwich. However, 10 minutes after you finish the #2 combo, your body will register the other half of your sandwich and the chips and the cookie and you’ll suddenly feel reeeeeally full and have a strong desire to take a nap. This is because all the energy you have is now going toward processing this huge amount of food you ate. That’s why eating slowly is good for you and when done can help you lose weight; it helps you realize how little you actually need to eat to fuel your body.
At the heart of its purpose, the HAPIfork is trying to help us make an important change to our eating habits, but a vibrating fork is just a novelty. Save yourself the $100. Realize you and the decisions you make are the best health and weight loss tool you have. Taking the time to learn about your health now can add several hapi and healthy years onto your life. So, go forth and eat your fried butter if you must, but at least do it really slowly.
P.S. If you really want a utensil for weight loss, I recommend any of these.
Humorous but pungent review of an unnecessary gadget.
But I think Grandma Jo might actually be tech-savvy (being of the generation that revolutionized computing, after all), so she may have stuck it in the dishwasher out of a sarcastic view that the grandkids rely TOO much on technology and not enough on common sense. ;)