Spice MD

Inspiration

“Spice MD was inspired by my Chinese American friend whose family always knows the right food for any situation or ailment. Although compiling 1000+ years of herbal medicine in one website is a daunting task, much less in a single weekend; I was able to narrow our scope to 100 of the world's most popular spices, their flavor profiles, and medical values based on modern studies.” - Caleb C. Hairston

When you think of the most popular food, rarely are they ever sourced from the wealthiest social class; peasants had to use what they had available, and often, this led to innovation from those looking to change their meager circumstances. Ultimately, our ancestors became experts at utilizing easily cultivated plants outside their community for their medicinal, flavor, and ornamental value. Even a few generations ago, Americans used folk remedies that were shared in the form of locally sourced food recipes for ages. You might ask what happened to this art honed over thousands of years of human civilization. The answer is simply traditional soft skills across the board have been slowly phased out by our fast-paced modern life, affording little time to pursue skills deemed less essential. We believe in these remedies' extraordinary results and have anecdotally seen these herbs in action when used in our respective families' cultural dishes that are mainstays as comfort food post relocation; these spices are only recently being acknowledged by leading physicians and are seeing promising results in pre-clinical trials. As the producers of SpiceMD, we do not wish to discourage modern medicine but instead inspire consideration and accessibility for complementary medicine.

What it does

Recommended complementary herbal medicine on a simple-to-use web page.

“Let thy food be thy medicine be thy food” - Hippocrates (400 BC)

How we built it

We read two books on Friday afternoon and then developed a MERN application. We chose a MERN Stack because it complimented our newly formed team's skill set.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with time as the two books I read the afternoon the competition started took away from development. Next time we should have notes ready and a project idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

High-level research.

What we learned

To work in a diverse Interdisciplinary team. We also learned more about spices than a person could reasonably be expected to know.

What's next for Spice MD

In the future, we plan to streamline medical insights that may have taken generations to uncover in years rather than centuries. We will do so through horizontal integration, gathering feedback from our users through small financial compensation. We will then leverage machine learning to further our collective understanding of spices.

Beyond that, we can utilize genetic testing to give actional dieting insights to our customers, testing if specific genes react well or not so well with certain foods. We can also integrate real-time recipe feedback based on what foods are in season and what is available to the customer. We hope to become the one-stop shop for all things healthy eating.