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Impressions of the NEWTRITION X. Innovation Summit 2021
Personalized nutrition is the central tool for preventing nutrition-related diseases - this became clear once again at the third Innovation Summit for Personalized Nutrition, NEWTRITION X. at Anuga in Cologne. At the invitation of the industry network foodRegio e.V., speakers from medicine, the food industry, nutrition consulting and technology provided insights into the status quo of Personalized Nutrition. With the focus on practical implementation of the future-oriented nutrition concept.
Michael Gusko, Chairman of the Focus Group Personalized Nutrition at foodRegio e.V. as well as Global Director Innovation, GoodMills Group, appealed to the more than 100 congress participants on site and in the live stream: "Personalized nutrition is already a reality today. You should take care of the issue before your business model is turned upside down by innovative technologies." The knowledge that people react completely differently to the same foods must lead to a change in thinking, he said. Global players in the industry are also aware of this, he said: For many companies, personalized nutrition is the next megatrend after plant-based meat alternatives. This was also confirmed by Peter Heshof, founder of the trend and marketing agency Bloom. His Zeitgeist model says that trends repeat themselves cyclically. We are at the beginning of a phase that revolves around control, rationality and scientificity as well as individual differentiation, he said, thus opening the door to personalized nutrition.
Nutrition as medicine
The health benefits of Personalized Nutrition were explained by Dr. Torsten Schröder, Medical Director at Perfood. The startup offers a nutrition program based on a two-week blood glucose screening, but it's not just for weight loss. After all, says Schröder, "80 percent of diseases are related to nutrition." In comprehensive clinical studies, personalized nutrition recommendations also showed far-reaching improvements in acne, migraine, psoriasis or polycystic ovary syndrome. From a medical point of view, precision nutrition is an important adjusting screw in the treatment of systemic diseases, says Prof. Dr. Christian Sina, Director of the Institute for Nutritional Medicine at the University of Lübeck. Now, on the one hand, the food industry must accept its new role as part of the healthcare system, and on the other hand, technologies are needed to ensure that customized nutrition can be implemented for consumers. Benedikt Kurz, Business Development Manager at Garmin Health, shed light on this technological side of Personalized Nutrition. "With wearables like smart watches, we can increase motivation, facilitate access to health markers, support rehabilitation and, on the other hand, provide a caregiver or health coach with data 24/7." In the future, generic nutritional concepts could be replaced by individualized recommendations thanks to wearables that communicate with smart patches for measuring blood sugar or vitamins, for example. Melissa Snover, founder of Nourished, presented how micronutrients, for example, can then reach customers in a personalized way. The company uses 3D printing to produce so-called stacks, chewy candies that contain seven nutrients tailored to individual needs.
The Personalized Nutrition Ecosystem
For the nutrition revolution to succeed, an open ecosystem of Personalized Nutrition is needed, says Mariette Abrahams, founder of the Qina platform. Rather than individual companies being able to cover everything from science to technology, she said, different partners need to link their expertise to "optimize customer experience, customer value and health impact." Nutritionists are an important link in this chain, said Rachel Clarkson, founder of The DNA Dietitian and a nutritionist herself. This is the only way to ensure that the medical and scientific data can be interpreted for the layperson and lead to truly lasting behavior change, she said. A different model is being driven by the startup My Healthy Food, which was presented by business developer Sergei Vdovitchenko: The platform, whose soft launch is planned for the next few weeks, combines a test for the so-called Nutri-type - via a self-test or ideally via a blood sugar analysis - with type-appropriate as well as lifestyle-relevant nutritional recommendations, recipe suggestions and a web store that carries, for example, highly functional pasta, flakes, rice substitutes or flours based on innovative raw materials from nature's biodiversity.