LEVL Hands-On: Measuring Fat Loss With Your Breath [UPDATE]
People, not to mention device makers, are quickly turning to technology to make health and fitness more accessible, more understandable, and more portable. But it's one thing to know how many steps your took or how fast your hear is beating. It's a whole different case when trying to measure how much fat your body is burning. LEVL thinks it finally has a solution to that ever elusive problem. And all it will take is a single breath. It's like taking an breathalyzer test but, instead of measuring alcohol levels, you'll be on the lookout for acetone.
Measure how much actual body fat we're burning with our exercise regimen and well-regulated diet is a tricky thing. For ages, people have resorted to weighing scales and measuring tapes, both of which can be deceptive, depending on your ultimate goal. Some weighing scales have evolved to include Bioelectrical impedance analysis to measure body fat through electricity traveling through the body, but that too can sometimes be inaccurate.
LEVL leans on 50 years of breath science research to make their point. The science behind the whole device claims that, when our body burns fat during the process called ketosis, it releases molecules called ketones. One such ketones is acetone, which gets released when we exhale. Clinical studies have likewise claimed that there is a correlation between the amount of acetone detected in that single breath and the amount of body fat burned.
Using LEVL couldn't be easier in that sense. Just breath into an inhaler-like device which collects your breath. Then you slot that into a machine that looks like a portable CSI lab kit. The nanosensors do their work and then relay the results to your smartphone. You get a numerical score of 1 to 6, in how much acetone was in your breath or how much fat you've burned. The app stores your history to provide you with deeper insight into your overall health trend.
The LEVL apparatus is indeed FDA approved but only as a Class I product. That would be on the same level as, say, an electric toothbrush. Could be therapeutic, but not completely medical. UPDATE: As of the moment, LEVL is actually still seeking FDA approval. But when it does, it will indeed be in that Class 1 category.
