The advance of new technologies also coincides with one major societal phenomenon: the emergence of GLP-1s.
Three panelists joined NutraIngredients this week for the webinar, “The Next Chapter of Personalized Wellness: GLP-1s, Wearables, Diagnostics and Targeted Supplementation”. They discussed how technologies have altered the concept of personalized nutrition to one more about personalized health.
Ari Tulla, CEO and co-founder of Elo Health, said personalized nutrition is about finding the right nutrition plan, the right supplements and the right macro and micro nutrients to help people be better and maybe even heal themselves. New technologies and techniques push for an even deeper analysis to enhance nutritional integration.
“Can we look at the body, the DNA?” he said. “Can we look at the diagnosis? Can we look at the blood biomarkers? Can we look at the wearable devices? And can we build on top of those a plan that can help people get better or stay well? That, I think, is where we are today.”
The COVID factor
A decade ago, personalized nutrition began gaining traction as a commercial industry, according to Noah Voreades, CEO and co-founder of Thrive Advisory Group. It was driven by the rise in popularity of direct consumer genetic testing and an openness of the mass market wanting to learn more.
“I also think there was a significant influx of VC money coming into the space that allowed companies to start to understand the kind of product-market and consumer-market fit,” he said. “I would call it personalization 1.0.”
He added that by 2016 consumer genetic testing and questionnaires, or a combination of the two, were dominant tools to inform VMS regimens. Blood tests were less common, and the use of the microbiome and other omics were even smaller.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic altered people’s mindsets, Voreades noted.
“I think COVID created this mentality of, ‘What do I want my life to be?’,” he said. “I think it started to create a lot of existential questions that people asked themselves. Also, to be quite honest, we just had significantly massive wealth appreciation. And within that demographic of the top one percent and above, they had the means and the interest to basically reach new heights of longevity.”
From a financial perspective, there were some companies that had early exists which created benchmarks for venture capital to deploy money differently, spurring new innovation, Voreades added.
That environment coincided with the influx of wearables and at-home blood testing. Thousands of data points are being collected from people’s bodies daily, possibly even hourly. Few people had a Fitbit 10 years ago. Now, a hundred million people in the United States have a wearable with Apple Watch leading the pack, Tulla noted.
“We kind of leaped ahead almost a decade in a normal evolution because of COVID,” he said.
The rise of GLP-1s
Technology change has paralleled pharmaceutical innovation, as GLP-1 agonists have flooded the market.
“Over 25 to 30 million people are on GLP-1s,” said Jason Brown, CEO and co-founder of Persona Nutrition. “It’s anticipated that by 2030 that it will double.”
Although the weight loss drugs have side effects like nutritional deficits and muscle loss, which some tests can track, the panelists emphasized the positive impacts.
“There are negative side effects, but there are positive side effects,” Brown added. “People will live longer. They will have better family lives because they can get out and run with their children and they can participate in sports. They can do things that they only dreamed of doing.”
Tulla acknowledged side effects have existed because dosing was inaccurate.
“On the early data, on the early testing of Ozempic and others, doses were too high,” he said. ”If you happen to be a smaller person, a woman, for example, it was just too high a dose.”
Some physicians who have worked with GLP-1s for years are now at the point of avoiding side effects entirely with their patients, Tulla noted.
Voreades agreed that side effects might be minimized with further iterations of GLP-1s but may increase drug cost.
“The latest generation [of the drugs] will have very few side effects, if at all,” he said. “But it’s likely going to be more expensive.”
The webinar can be accessed here.
