Confidente — Master Overview
Confidente is a citizen science project at the intersection of food sensitivity research, statistical methodology, and accessible hardware. It has three interconnected components:
The Three Pillars
1. Food Science Kit
A DIY colorimeter and protocol kit for measuring histamine, salicylates, and oxalates directly in food. Motivated by the fact that existing “low-histamine food lists” circulating in patient communities are built on inconsistent, undated, poorly-sourced data. The kit enables actual measurement over lore.
2. Mast Cell Reactivity Test
A home-usable kit for semi-quantitative nasal mast cell reactivity scoring and longitudinal monitoring. Complements the food kit — the food kit measures what’s in the food, this kit measures how reactive your cells are to it.
3. Confidente App
A Rails + PWA application that treats food sensitivity testing as a structured experiment. Generates scientifically-designed meal plans, logs meals and symptoms, controls for confounders (sleep, stress), and uses statistical modeling to surface ingredient-symptom correlations.
How They Connect
Food Science Kit → ground truth on food composition
Mast Cell Reactivity Test → ground truth on individual reactivity
Confidente App → structured experiment + statistical analysis
correlates food exposure to symptom outcomes
integrates lab data to boost model confidence
The app’s “lab in a disc” integration (future) is literally these two hardware projects feeding data back into the statistical model.
Motivation
Existing approaches to food sensitivity identification are broken:
- Elimination diets have poor completion rates and no statistical rigor
- “Cheat days” invalidate the experiment rather than adding data
- Confounders (sleep, stress, hormones) are ignored entirely
- Food composition data is inconsistent and often wrong
- No accessible way to measure individual mast cell reactivity exists
Confidente treats the body as a system under study and brings experimental design methodology to a problem that has always been handled informally.
Name
Confidente = confidence interval (statistics) + al dente (food). Pronounced con-fi-DEN-tay.
Status
| Component | Status |
|---|---|
| Food Science Kit | Chemistry identified, hardware specified, prototype pending |
| Mast Cell Reactivity Test | Concept validated, feasibility experiment pending |
| Confidente App | Pre-alpha, active development |
License
All components are open source. App: AGPL-3.0. Hardware/protocols: to be determined (see Open Source and Distribution).
Copyright (C) 2025 Christopher Hagmann