Personalized Nutrition 2.0
18 Apr 2016 | TNO
This is Rob Myers at the VMT food event in Denbols in the Netherlands, and I'm here with Nard Klabbers from TNO, and Nard was speaking earlier today about some of the developments happening within personalized nutrition.
Nard, what do you mean by personalized nutrition and how can it be taken on board by the, by the food and nutrition industry?
Yeah, what we see actually is that the food industry has, , they've been involved in personalized nutrition for about 15 years perhaps.
So a lot of food companies started with personalized nutrition 15 years ago.
And they all stopped about 5 years ago because it just wasn't possible apparently to have a viable business model for a large consumer market.
There are still people who are doing it for niches for the big consumer market.
It just hasn't taken off.
What we now see is what we have kind of coined personalized nutrition 2.0.
Where personalized nutrition 1.0 is really based on DNA was really based on genetic information and the promise basically that based on your genetic information you could have a really personalized and specific nutritional advice.
We now say is that's a nice start, but if I would have a twin brother and he would not be active on a bike like I would or if he would be.
And we have a different lifestyle altogether.
You will also need a different nutritional advice.
So it's not only about genes.
It's also about not only the genotype, but also what we call the phenotype.
So it's also about your body and what your body needs now.
And actually.
This let's say last couple of years and the coming couple of years probably, there will be a lot more opportunity to measure what goes on in your body now.
So the ability to measure your health status with all kinds of wearable devices like an Apple Watch or like a Fitbit like activity trackers with.
In-home measurements of your blood pressure, etc.
Would be much easier for consumers to gather information about their own health, and our idea is that perhaps based also on genes, but at least based on phenotypical information on health information that you can give people a much more specific advice on what they need for their body at that moment.
And we see a lot of opportunities also to add value for consumers based on the data that they will gather about their health and about the effect of nutrition on their health.
So what are you researching then specifically?
So what we are researching, we're setting up a large research consortium.
Basically what we're doing there is we are.
Investigating in a practical setting.
So it's a field lab-based research program, you could say.
Basically, we're combining three scientific disciplines.
So we're combining life sciences, so food and nutrition research with, behavioral sciences.
And actually we are combining those two scientific disciplines with ICT and data sciences because what we see is that you can give people a lot of information about the effects of nutrition on their health.
You can give people a lot of information on their health, but if you do not do anything about their willingness to actually change their behavior, nothing will change.
And what we see is that their behavior can be changed if the data that they have gathered about around themselves, about their own health is, let's say wisely used, and that wisely used basically comes from our interaction with behavioral scientists.
So the question is how do we get people intrinsically motivated to change their behavior.
And that's also interesting, let's say, looking at new business models, looking at how to make money in this field, is it's only the change in behavior.
That will enable new business models.
If you don't change your behavior, then there's no way, yeah, let's say to, to, to have a changing business model.
What would you like to see the food and nutrition industry do from this regard in order to take advantage of, of an opportunity that's still somewhat from a niche and and is a little bit far off?
What I think.
Is that food and nutrition companies should look at services perhaps more than products.
So of course, let's say the way to to add value now is to introduce another flavor or to introduce another packaging or whatever if the possibility, the, the promise, the future promise of being able to measure the effects of nutrition on your health also has the promise to be to use health effects as a marketing tool.
Whereas now it's much more difficult to really use health effects as a marketing tool.
The health is marketed.
But it is now marketed as an intrinsic value of a product, so a product is healthy.
Basically that's, it's a bit rubbish of course because a product cannot be healthy.
It's only the effect that it has on me that can be healthy or not.
And as soon as you can measure that effect, then you can also use that to add value to your products, and it has more to do with guiding.
Your consumer to the products that are healthy for them than anything else.
Thank you.
