I'm Rachel Hunter, and this time I'm on a journey through the Americas, to discover more secrets to health, well-being and long-lasting beauty. (BOTH LAUGH) Natural make-up. That is so crazy great! Beautiful. Oh my God, that's somebody's face. (CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS RAPIDLY) This time I'm in San Francisco,... Are you wearing technology or is technology wearing you? ...where I enter the world of digital health and beauty. You're a genius. I discover how bits, bots and zips might make us more attractive,... I feel half of my face is wide awake and ready to go. ...make some new connections... So now we are plugged into your brain. ...and try some bugs I hope I never find in my software. OK. We say the first bug is the hardest. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017 (TRAM BELL DINGS) San Francisco is a place I've visited many times, and it's been fascinating to see it change over the years. I remember when it was most famous for its hippie culture. But these days it's probably best known as the centre of the tech universe. That's what I love about San Fran ` this wave of creativity. We're all gadget-crazy right now, so how has health and beauty been transformed in the home of the digital giants? There's a couple of beauty companies around here where I might find that out. Melanie Simon was once a beauty therapist to the stars but recently developed some digital technology she claims will revolutionise skincare. This is the ZIIP device. So ZIIP is all about putting energy back into the skin ` energy that you've lost. What does this do? These two probes on the bottom, the current runs out of one, into your skin and into the other. So it hits all the tissue underneath this spot. And then when you have the energy back in your skin, you start to see all the different kinds of results. You start to look lifted; you're more taut; your pores start to close; the texture looks beautiful. So how can I do this beauty treatment myself at home? I developed this app, and it has an assortment of treatments on it so that you can really choose. Do you want to do an all-around face treatment? Do you need also to, kind of, work on dark circles? Oh my God that's amazing. Do you need to have a little few blemishes? You just look at the picture and decide, 'I need an eye treatment,' and you click that button. So it's easy. It's really easy. The ZIIP device reads information from the app so it can transmit the right amount of nanocurrents to different parts of my face, giving me an electric facial. OK, the nanocurrents ` what is a nanocurrent? So, nanocurrent is in sync with the human body. We have electrical frequencies running all throughout ` So it's a frequency? Yes, it's an electrical frequency, but it's in the realm of the human body. I'm trying to work with the skin. I'm putting a message into your skin, and I'm helping you do the work. Can I try it out? Of course. Yeah, OK, good. Firs, Melanie applies the conductive gel treatment, which attracts the current into my skin. Oh my God, I just feel ready to go now. (LAUGHS) I'm going to do a few programs on you. Oh good. I need it (LAUGHS). I'm gonna start you with the eye treatment. OK, good. So just turn your ZIIP on now. (ZIIP BEEPING) And then it just connected, so now it's programmed it with the eye treatment. (ZIIP BEEPS ONCE) OK, so when you hear the tone, that means you're halfway done with this, but you can see right now how this side is already much more open and awake. Even around your mouth. Literally I feel half my face is wide awake and ready to go, you know, out and play and get into the day. Now I can see why Vogue named this in a list of high-tech skin gadgets of the future. But there's just one thing. We're gonna do the other side of my face, right? Yes! OK. Thank you so much. I'm a big fan of technology, so if the future means an app on my phone can personalise my beauty treatment, I'm wondering what the future holds for my nails. Right behind me are the headquarters of Facebook, but just down the road are the offices of a beauty entrepreneur. The Nailbot was created by Pree Wallia. She's preparing to give the world a digital manicure. So, Pree, it's great to meet you, and you have this incredible idea. Can you please tell me a little bit about it, how you kinda started it, how long ago? I had this idea to build devices to decorate your fingernails using your smartphone, and with that we really built out our company and each version of the Nailbot. That's amazing. So this is what we have. We have a smartphone nail art printer. And it prints photos, emojis. You can print on your nails in five seconds. And you can easily remove it if you don't like it. Really? We really designed this for... sounds a little bizarre, but my 13 year-old self. When I was 13, I loved decorating my nails. I loved expressing myself with, like, really cool images. I loved nail art. And this is a really great tool for creative expression. Can we do one? Yeah, let's get this thing going. So you go into the Nailbot app. Now I'm going to surprise you with something. 'Oh my God, that's my dog, Stanley!' So we're gonna put Stanley on your nails, right. My God, look how amazing that looks! Yeah. I did it very quick earlier. You can take your loved ones away with you. Like, if you were travelling, you can put your entire family on your nails. Exactly. You could do your entire family; you could put sceneries` Oh my God. ...sights, monuments ` you name it. So let's do a lot of prints here. So I'm just gonna show you. Well, it's still an early prototype. I'm, like, 47 and I feel like a 13 year-old right now. OK. All right, it's done. Oh my God! It's done. Yeah. That's amazing, I mean, look. Stanley. That was so fast! Yeah it was super fast. Imagine if you were 13. I wanna do the bee. Yeah, let's try the bee. When Pree's nail printer makes it to the market, I'll be lining up to purchase one, regardless of my age. That is great too, strawberry shortcake. That's so cute. Fun. I'm loving the beauty tech way of life. You know what it is. It's a logo. You wanted to be in a technology powerhouse of the world, right? It's a little Facebook logo. (LAUGHS) Wow, that is so cool. You're a genius. Next, how can technology improve my well-being? Wait, how many do you have? I have three on today. And does a cricket taco taste better than it sounds? OK, here we go. 1 My tour of beauty has brought me to San Francisco, where hippie values meet the Fitbit age. Silicon Valley has given us a wealth of technology to discover more about our own health and well-being. But are we reaching information overload? Hi! Hello. How are you? How are you? I'm doing so good. Are you staying dry? Sorry about the weather. Chris Dancy uses digital data to measure everything about himself so he can live a healthier life. So, for about eight years, I've been wearing sensors on my body and putting sensors in my home, and extracting the information from my phone to collect a more holistic view of how I'm spending my time. What does your day look like with your apps? Upon awakening, I usually am awoken by an application that watches my sleep cycle, so it wakes me up at the highest level of my sleep so I'm not coming out of a deep slumber, and then I review the app just to see how I slept for the night. So, my bed has a respiration sensor on it, so it knows how I'm breathing through the night. My room has a sensor in it that checks for noise and light during the night. So if there's something like a weird night's sleep I'll say, 'Was it bright or noisy?' Then I'll quickly jump over to another application to see how much I dreamed. That's cool. Sometimes I'll take my temperature. Just swipe right across your head. And it goes ahead and takes your body temperature. Oh my God. You're, like, perfect, 98.7 Thank you. What made you do this? I turned 40, and like everyone else, I had a crisis. And my crisis was very visible. I was about 320 pounds. I was on blood pressure medicine, cholesterol medicine, antidepressants, and I thought, 'I don't want to be propped up. I want to know more about what I'm doing.' And I'd spent my entire life in technology, and I thought there might be an answer there. The new wearables today, most of their functionality` What, how many do you have? I have three on today. (CHUCKLES) But, you know, they will tell you, 'Hey, stand up', you know, if you've been sitting too long. They'll even tell you, 'Hey, take a breath. You need to meditate.' So they are getting more in touch with us. To manage his health, Chris is full-time monitoring his sleep, activity, stress, and even the nutritional value of food. Do you wanna grab a bite to eat and we'll just try to scan something and we'll see what we learn? Yeah, yeah. So I could have some grapes, or I could have some chips. So most food-logging apps today have a scanning routine. And you'll see it automatically calculates one serving. So 13 chips are gonna be 150 calories. Yeah. It's not a pretty sight. Some grapes. OK, let's see. Serving size is 1.5 cups. Yeah, 190 calories. 1.5 cups. So that was actually a full stem. The fat is only a gram in our grapes, and yet for our potato chips the fat is 9g. So right away what this does is it gives you a view into how that food is actually adding up inside your body. Not sure I'm ready for this much health tech, but I'm prepared to give this sleep app a go. So tonight, when you're sleeping... I mean you have a Fitbit now, so just make sure you leave your Fitbit on; it'll automatically detect your heart rate, and it's got a little sensor in it that will know when you're moving around. So the minute you fall asleep, it will say, 'Oh, you've fallen asleep.' It will start watching you sleep. And tomorrow morning when you wake up, you'll have this great graph of your heart and your sleep, both from tonight. Wow, you're amazing. Oh, thank you Rachel. Thank you so much for this. So good to see you. (UPBEAT MUSIC) Yep, San Francisco's always been a place where crazy ideas are welcome, and some where people change the world. Why not? And that's good news for the people I'm about to meet, who believe our future nutrition is linked to a diet of bugs. Not computer bugs. I mean the six-legged variety. I'm walking through this warehouse, where I'm trying to find a room full of insects. Now, for a lot of people, this would be a place of nightmares. Hello. Hello. Welcome. But not for Andrew Brentano, from Tiny Farms. He's getting ahead of the trend by working out how to sustainably farm millions of crickets for human consumption. Are insects the future of our food? We believe that they're gonna be a critical part of the future. So, a few years ago the United Nations put out a big report that said, 'Hey, Western world, wake up. We should start eating insects. 'It's good for you; it's good for the environment; 'and, quite frankly, the traditional livestock is not sustainable. 'We're not gonna make enough of it for all of you in the future.' Right. There was kind of a big reaction to that. Ounce for ounce, crickets provide more than twice the protein of beef and three times more iron. They're also packed with fibre, good fats and minerals. I actually do like crickets. By dry weight, they're between 60% and 70% protein, depending on the species and what you feed them. Ours are about 65% protein. And the rest? It's a mix-up, so probably about 10% to 15% fats. If you give them a high-quality feed, they end up with a 3 to 1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, which is just about that perfect salmon ratio. There are 2000 edible insect species on Earth, so there is lots of variety to choose from. But I'm struggling to believe crickets could be a part of my kids' diet in the future. How many crickets do you think are in here? There's gonna be about 5000. OK, so we have sexy time in here for about two to three weeks; they breed, then... We give them a little puff of CO2 and they go to sleep. And then we just put them in the freezer. For those who want to eat protein, I mean, it's such an amazing choice. Yeah. Well, we find the best way to convince people` You know, we can tell them about it all day, but then if we just get them to eat some, it falls down; the barrier falls right down because they're delicious. Right. You just fry them up; you toss them back and you're like, 'Wait, I'm sold. I can eat these.' Really? Yeah. I'm yet to taste the cricket; I've tasted a couple of other things, but not the cricket yet. Well, we should fix that. Ooh, wow, OK. Some little salad wraps? For sure. Great. I'll take you to meet Jenna. She's been getting ready to cook up some crickets for you to try. Jenna, Rachel. Hey. Hi, how are you? Good thanks. How are you? Nice to meet you. Jenna will cook them up for you. You can try them out. Jenna's favourite cricket dish that she's cooking up for me is cricket tacos. About now, I'm kinda pleased to see I can add some salsa and guacamole. Look at all their little bodies, oh God. All right, I think these are done. Not sure if deep-fried was the most healthy version I could have given you, but they are delicious this way. Their heads and their legs right now, it's kind of a little bit disturbing. So do you want to try one, au naturel? OK. Eating insects is popular in many Eastern and African countries, so how bad could it be? OK, so I'm just going to eat him. OK. Yeah, I mean... that's a really nice taste. What does it taste like to you? It has the fats in it, but at the same time it tastes salty, a little bit. A bit crunchy, um... A sweet-salty taste, almost, isn't it? Do you want to have a little lettuce wrap with`? Yeah, I'd love to! So how many crickets do we put on here, just a spoonful? Tiny Farms wants food like cricket tacos to become part of a Western diet. And if I just add a little bit of chilli sauce, that might make me a believer. OK, here we go. That's amazing. Good? Mm-hm. Wow. I mean, a very efficient food. Again, the visual of it is something that you have to get used to, but I don't think it will be long before people do get used to it, right? We say the first bug is the hardest. (LAUGHS) With a belly of bugs, I'm back in my hotel preparing to get wired for sleep. So I'm going to try the sleep cycle app tonight and see what my rhythms are while I'm sleeping tonight, so I'm kind of excited to see tomorrow morning what the outcome of that is. It's always good to have your beauty sleep, right? So we're gonna set the time with that, and let's hope I have a really good night's sleep, so, goodnight, sweet dreams, and I'll see you in the morning. Next, I go back to the future to create a drink some call an immortal health elixir. This really gets the juices going down in the stomach, doesn't it? 1 San Francisco's nightlife was probably buzzing last night, but I took to my bed at 11pm, armed with a Fitbit and an app to measure my quality of sleep. There's loads of research these days that says a good night's sleep is essential to our well-being, so how did I do? I felt like I slept OK. A little bit wakeful but... So, I dropped pretty hard and fast ` because I went to sleep around about 11 ` dropped pretty hard and fast for 12 and then woke up between 1 and 2 ` the witching hour ` and then kind of went up and down into some very deep sleeps. So that is my sleep cycle last night. The bottom being that I nearly passed out during my sleep. The results show that my sleep quality measured 64%, which isn't too bad. I'll definitely try this again sometime. But today I'm leaving technology behind, to visit a place where they believe the future of our health lies in the past. Three Stone Hearth is the place for everything fermented. They deliver their community-prepared meals to your doorstep and are big believers of old world fermentation methods. Andy Renard is the master of producing the fermented tea drink kombucha, famous for its ability to detox the body. Andy? Hi. Hi. I'm Rachel. Rachel, hello. Nice to meet you. Welcome to Three Stone Hearth. It's amazing in here. I mean, it's just incredible. We make probiotic, fermented beverages, fermented vegetables. It's a whole range of fermented products. Why the popularity in it? In traditional Chinese medicine, they've known for thousands of years that your gut health is sort of the beginning of your general body health, that most of your immuno-response starts with a healthy gut. These probiotic beverages have a whole host of living cultures that help stimulate a positive production of gut flora. We talk about your gut flora, which do everything from regulating your metabolism, helping you sleep better, and maybe even make you a happier person. I'm going to learn how to make the perfect kombucha. Oh my God, it's like wrestling a shark. It is like wrestling a shark. But first, we need to add what's growing in this vat. Oh my God. OK. It's like` It's like a snail. A sea snail, oh my God. Say hello to the giant SCOBY. That is amazing. Clearly, I'll have to overcome a fear of bugs and slimy things to improve my nutrition in the future. It looks like` It looks like a sea slug. But in fact, it's called a SCOBY. The letters S-C-O-B-Y stand for a 'symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast'. So this is not just a living organism; it's a host of living organisms that are working in communion to transform sweetened tea into the probiotic beverage. Basically, what we've done here is we've taken some black tea and we've brewed it. To that, we add some organic cane sugar, so you'd have your sweet tea, and you'd kinda pour that, let's say, in a jar. So you want to add a couple of cups of kombucha from the last batch. OK. We call that, like, starter, and then you would store your living SCOBYs in the starter in the refrigerator. That's how we do it. And now we've diluted it with a little bit of water, and you drop your SCOBY on top of there, OK? You put a little cheese cloth on it, and we let ours go for about six or seven days, and this sweetened tea becomes kombucha. So, Rachel, in honour of you, we're making kiwi kombucha,... Perfect, ok. ...that you can take back to New Zealand with you. We've got some kiwi juice. Good vitamin C in there. So just get your pitcher. Yeah. And it's a black tea kombucha. There you are. Salud. I can't wait to taste. That's a really nice kombucha. See how different that is? It really gets those juices going down in the stomach, doesn't it? Right. Wow. How lucky are the people from San Francisco to have this in their own backyard? Super healthy home-made food delivered straight to your door. Thank you. It was so nice to meet you. Aw, you too. (RISING MUSIC) San Francisco had been incredible. I discovered here that beauty and health are headed for a more personalised and individualised approach, which has got to be good for all of us, and it all adds up to human technology. The tracking thing can seem a little bit offensive at first, but then once you kinda get into it, you can make it work to how you want it to work. I mean, like Chris said, you control these; they don't control you. These ideas that have been bred in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley, are so vital for moving forward. Not sure if crickets will make my dinner table, but I'm desperate to get my hands on one of the Nailbot printers. And my fridge is soon going to be growing its own SCOBY. San Francisco has been inspiring and creative and kind of jaw-dropping at the same time, and I think it's shaken me again to think out of the box, and that is so important to where we're moving forward. (BELL DINGS) (UPLIFTING MUSIC) My tour of beauty has once again brought me so many great moments and great memories. I have found sexual well-being in New York City. (CRASH!) (LAUGHS) Texas swag from head to toe. I think I might have found the Hawaiian secret for anti-ageing. That's pretty crazy. Why not look like I feel? I can't be scared of my own urine, can I? It really is beautiful and pristine and magical. (BELL RINGS) (WHISTLES) Is there some bad energy around? I would have travelled the world to see this. It's just stunning. We're going to the moon. If you want to feel alive, why would you eat something that's dead? This is absurd. I can't do what they're doing. Would I ever find myself on an operating table having plastic surgery? I still don't know. I haven't still found a boyfriend, though. We must be prepared to open our arms to each other, but let it start with yourself. Live, love and laugh, all your life. Love, health, vitality ` it's beautiful. Copyright Able 2017