Personalised Nutrition

Editor's Note

Hello from London!

A quick plug: please join the webinar from my friends at Humbleteam who will detail (this Thursday) what it takes to win at fintech.

Onto this week: I'm not a medical doctor but I'm super enthused by the next wave of health wearables. We're at a point where sleep tracking and general bodily metrics can be monitored accurately. I'm using oura - others swear by whoop but, for me, what's next are continuous glucose monitors or CGMs. These have been the stalwart of those with diabetes but technology has improved significantly that we are now able to track the impact of food on our bodies on an individual basis - personalised nutrition. We know that sugar is bad for us, fried food is bad for us, but for some rice might be OK, and others may not be able to deal with nightshade vegetables better than others. There are already a few companies in this space which will offer personalised nutrition monitoring, but two I'm monitoring personally are Levels and January.ai. This area is not new but on the cusp of going more mainstream.

Levels is in beta in the US and coming to the UK soon and it looks like it is positioned to really impact lifestyle for those willing to invest to change their lifestyle. Speaking to Josh Clemente the founder, "Levels is oriented around the process of developing what we call "Metabolic Awareness" - closing the loop between the broad spectrum of daily actions we take and the reactions our bodies experience. In pursuit of this goal we do not provide structured meal or training plans, but rather make recommendations for exploration of the factors that may be driving your responses to your own lifestyle decisions. " That starts to help to put personalised data in our hand. Starting at $399 for the first month and $199 a month afterwards, I think whichever company you go with, this will be a short term investment on tracking what is affecting your metabolic health. Whether you do anything about it is another thing! The levels blog is a phenomenal educational resource for this area. And if you want to understand the worst food that they have tracked, check out this podcast - Hint - it's candy beginning with an S. Reply to me if you need to know.

January.ai is similar but is crunching the data on what might be the best and worst foods for you. In this interview with Noosheen Hashemi, she articulates how the power of machine learning and AI is going to revolutionalise this area. January.ai is earlier stage, although has been around for a bit longer. Last year, Nosheen said this: "We’ve built a multiomic platform where we take data from different sources and predict people’s glycemic response, allowing them to consider their choices before they make them. We pull in data from heart rate monitors and continuous glucose monitors and a 1,000-person clinical study [we conducted] and an atlas of 16 million foods for which, using machine learning, we have derived nutritional values and created nutritional labeling [that didn’t exist previously]. [The idea is to] predict for [customers] what their glycemic response is going to be to any food in our database after just four days of training. They don’t actually have to eat the food to know whether they should eat it or not; our product tells them what their response is going to be."

Why are areas like personalised nutrition and areas such as personalised medicine so interesting? I think it's really because we can take something that inherently something that is commonplace, apply technology, models and data - and transform people's lives. We all know that eating a chocolate bar or snacking at night is bad for us. But going beyond the generic "eat good food, exercise more, sleep 8 hours" mantra allows us to make conscious decisions on our lives, allowing us to live healthier longer lives. That's progress!

Stay Curious,

Onward! - Rahim

PS. I'm super excited for the first Brown (Female) Superhero. Or maybe that was Shah Rukh Khan?

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