According to Joshua Anthony, founder and CEO of Nlumn, a personalized nutrition consultancy, apps do not account for consumer behavior when creating personalized nutrition regimens. This often leads to individuals abandoning the apps several months after buying programs or to app-jumping, leaping from one personalized nutrition app to the next to try to find success.
What can be done about lack of long-term adoption? Anthony discusses the app landscape and why accounting for consumer behavior is the missing piece for most companies.
NutraIngredients (NI): In the last year or two, what have you felt were the most noteworthy accomplishments in the personalized nutrition space?
Joshua Anthony (JA): I’m seeing more companies focusing on, or at least asking, specific goals of people. That’s important because I think any successful consumer innovation really begins with the problem that you’re trying to solve. A good personalized intervention probably isn’t going to be a company based off of solving everybody’s problems but going deeper in one or more specific areas.
I think one of the things that’s really driving that is GLP-1 medication. I think there’s a emerging understanding that obviously a big part of that is around weight loss. But it’s also about not just delivering protein and fiber but also being responsive to different people’s needs depending on the conditions that they’re coming in with as well as where they are in their journey.
However, the industry is underdeveloped as it relates to GLP1 use at the onset, at a person’s onboarding. This is the period of rapid weight loss or somebody sitting in for weight loss, maintenance and potential rebound. So, I think there are a lot of opportunities there.
I also think AI is a technology enabler to really allow more adaptive systems. In other words, you’re not just getting your results and then waiting six to 12 months and testing but being able to have that conversation. Function Health and Thorne are examples of companies that have added adaptive AI systems.
What is lacking in the marketplace is behavior and it’s becoming recognized more in academia as the missing piece. Too often we confuse precision data with the promise of precision or personalized nutrition. And that’s really about not just the data, but the ability to make better choices and live healthier. And what is missing really is behavior.
There is one recent review that looked at 46 different studies with personalized nutrition intervention. Less than half of them included behavior, and less than a fourth of them did any follow up in terms of whether it was effective longer term. Behavior has to be a critical part of that phenotyping, and it needs to be a priority designed into research and commercial innovation. If you do not consider a person’s willingness to change and what changes they can make, how are you going to guarantee a better outcome. I think that’s the gap.
NI: You mentioned GLP-1s and the intervention period after people are on those drugs for a little while. Diet is important in conjunction with supplements but is there something that supplements can do that maybe diet in that context cannot totally fulfill?
JA: People consume 25% to 40% less calories and you’re going to be at greater risk for nutrient deficiency. In that context, supplementation could be important to help to close that gap. Some studies are suggesting that people on GLP-1s might be moving away from some heavier foods or have preferences for like lighter, crispier types of options.
NI: What are some of the key findings that have come about in the last year or two about why it’s so important for companies to focus on consumer behavior?
JA: I think that if we use some of our own Nlumn data what you tend to find is that most people that are on personalized nutrition programs have been on them for six months or less. Cost is the biggest reason that they typically cite for leaving programs. But I would say the issue is that they’re not getting value from them. What I mean by that is for most of these programs, we show that people spend like $200 to $250. They’re willing to spend that, whether it’s a subscription over the course of a year or a one-time payment.
We all pay a lot more for our iPhones and people aren’t necessarily complaining. So I think that there are value limitations. And I think that those come in a few buckets. The data that we see suggested people say the programs are not personalized enough for them. It worked for a while and then it stopped working. What’s in that is also this idea that it hasn’t adjusted to the individual, especially when their needs change.
There are two points that I want to make here on behavior. On the biology side of things, when we look at our data in younger individuals, their needs tend to be much more in-the-moment needs, managing emotional and mental stress and the day-to-day energy that they need to perform. Somewhere in midlife as people start to become diagnosed with more markers of chronic conditions, they become more concerned about cardiometabolic health and long-term issues.
So sometimes I think the gap in personalization really relates to whether we have good biomarkers of health or optimization. We have good biomarkers of disease but we don’t have markers that are aligned with needs. The behavior side of things brings a lot of other factors into it, because behavior needs to consider the environment, context and self-efficacy, or the willingness for somebody to make a change. And systems right now aren’t focused on that.
So you can have good information and good intentions, and you can even understand your personalized information, but then it’s the ability to kind of act on that that can be limited.
NI: Why do people abandon health apps?
JA: I saw one report that like 96% of people abandoned health apps within the first month. Health is hard and it takes time and it’s largely invisible. Also, somebody might say that they’re interested in cardiometabolic health but that might mean different things to different people. For one person it might mean blood sugar and for another it might mean improving weight or lowering cholesterol. What’s really the incentive?
NI: So the technology maybe hasn’t caught up to a lot of these personalized apps?
JA: I think when we talk about levers like biology, behavior and tech, AI is an enabler. Our own data suggests that 39% of people are using AI to help them with their health decisions. Three percent say it’s their most trusted source, although they still want healthcare professionals to help provide guidance. Consumers are not ready to give it all up to AI.
NI: For personalized nutrition apps, what are what are they doing right and what are they really failing at?
JA: The highlight for personalized nutrition apps is I think that they have continued to focus on biomarkers that are meaningful for a lot of people. They’ve helped to establish a more common language and greater awareness of key markers that are important to support prevention. And prevention is now much more in the public vernacular than what it was in the past. However, the problem is moving that into action. In research studies, what we’re seeing is that studies that combine biology with behavior change techniques do seem to be providing better outcomes. I think that’s the opportunity, being able to take the information that I think a lot of people are drowning in and make it actionable. In another study we did, we saw that a high percentage of people are actually very happy to provide their information in exchange for a few things. One of which is they want to be able to track their data in real time. The other thing is they want to protect their data privacy. And they want personalized recommendations. They want to be able to act on the information.
While apps are asking about goals, they’re not really doing intakes on behavior. If you have that, then you can make your recommendations consistent. You can design your AI to support that. And I think that you can create much stickier apps.
NI: You’ve said people give up on their apps in the first three months. Do they jump to another app to see if it would solve their problems?
JA: We do see a lot of app jumping, even if our latest study of consumers shows about 50% of people express interest in personalized nutrition. And out of that, about half of them are following some type of program. There are 25% of people that say that they are on a personalized nutrition program. We actually found is about two-thirds of people have a personalized plan or program that they created themselves.
NI: Can you think of any company on the horizon that’s really going to start to address behavior in a way that you think is adequate?
JA: My short answer is no. I wish I could tell you a company is nailing it. My hypothesis around personalized nutrition had been that a company could win at a specific problem. If a company worked on sleep, or if a company worked on heart health better than anybody else, that might bring together biology, behavior and technology. However, I don’t see a company that has been able to bring it all together yet. And it’s also further complicated by cost. Being able to do biology and behavior the best way can be very expensive.
