Supersapiens, metabolic fitness and the data-driven wellness revolution

Did you know that the daily target of 10,000 steps was created for a marketing campaign in the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games?

Part of me wants to celebrate this as one of the best campaigns of all time: the mythical target has seeped into our global consciousness! Yet on the other hand, it has been a resounding failure given few of us actually manage to take this many steps each day.

This gap is hardly limited to just our step counts. Nowhere is there such a chasm between knowledge and action. We know the basics of good health: eat well, exercise regularly, get lots of sleep. Yet we don’t follow them.?

Without getting too breathless (!), things are about to change dramatically. By the time you get to the bottom of this week’s newsletter, I guarantee you will think very differently about the future of data-driven health and wellness.?

This promises to be the biggest revolution in personal healthcare for generations. Let’s get to it.

The Normal.?

Despite the billions we collectively spend on health and wellness, the humans of earth are not well:?

• Poor diet causes one in five deaths worldwide, or an astonishing 11 million deaths a year (consider COVID-19 has killed 4 million in 18 months).?
• In the US, the total economic cost of obesity is $1.7 trillion per year .
• 40% of US adults are obese, while 100 million Americans have diabetes or pre-diabetes.?
• By 2045, over 700 million people globally are forecast to have diabetes, with a cost of $845 billion.?

It’s not for want of trying. In the half-century since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics introduced us to the idea of step counts, thousands of organizations have tried to get us to eat, exercise and sleep better. In the last 15 years, countless new technologies have promised to nudge us into healthy behaviors. Yet the scorecard above shows how they have failed to create widespread and lasting positive changes to our collective wellbeing.?

The Future Normal.?

What if you were able to easily manage and optimize your body’s energy levels so that you could perform at your physical and mental best, reduce your risk of chronic disease, minimize your mood swings, slow aging, and more??

The underlying concept here is your metabolic fitness. From the Levels website :

• Metabolism is the set of cellular mechanisms that produce energy from our food and environment to power every process in the human body.
• Metabolic fitness is a term to describe where we fall on the spectrum of metabolic health and how well we are generating and processing energy in the body.
• Glucose is a primary precursor for energy in the body, and needs to be tightly regulated for metabolism to work effectively.
• Metabolic fitness can be improved by consistently making choices that keep glucose levels in a stable and healthy range, and minimize large glucose swings.

Today, it’s mainly diabetics who monitor their glucose levels closely. They have to: their glucose levels can spike or plunge to dangerous levels. However, nearly 9 in 10 Americans are not metabolically healthy and are at risk of not just diabetes but a host of other chronic conditions too, such as obesity and high blood pressure.?This is a largely invisible epidemic.?

But a number of new technologies are coming together to offer people an accessible ramp to improved metabolic fitness: a wearable, waterproof patch monitors your glucose continuously, rather than getting sporadic readings; this data is sent to your smartphone, giving you information on how you respond to certain foods; image recognition makes it easy to record the food you eat, while sensors capture your activity and sleep levels; all of this data is analyzed by AI, constantly improving the algorithms that offer you personalized and real-time diet and lifestyle advice.?

Instigators & innovators

That’s not a pipe-dream. There are already a bunch of startups doing this, and given its revolutionary potential it is unlikely to stay that way for long.?

Supersapiens targets athletes looking to boost their performance. Phil Southerland, the company’s founder, was a professional cyclist despite having suffered from Type 1 diabetes since childhood. His story reads like a movie script: determined to prove that diabetics could still perform at the highest level, he entered Team Type 1 (a cycle team made up of diabetics) into the 3,000-mile ‘Race Across America’. Using early prototypes of continuous glucose monitoring devices, the team went on to win the race four times, which led Southerland to form Team Novo Nordisk, an all-diabetic professional cycling team in 2012. After years studying how blood sugar affects athlete’s performance, he founded Supersapiens in 2019 to bring this insight to non-diabetic athletes. The app provides data about a user’s blood sugar levels, enabling them to understand when and how to refuel for optimum benefit.???

January.ai. The company’s co-founder, Dr Michael Snyder, was a researcher at Stanford who discovered that even many non-diabetics saw extreme swings in their blood sugar levels after eating certain foods. The company’s Season of Me program monitors users’ glucose levels while also using AI to give recommendations on food choices as well as telling you how long you will need to walk for after eating certain foods to keep your blood sugar levels within a healthy range.?

Similar diet-focused, general wellness companies are popping up all over the world, including Levels and Nutrisense (both also in the US), Vital (France), Veri (Finland), MyLevels (UK), UltraHuman (India). It’s a trend ;)

Apple, Samsung, and Google. The elephants in the room. Healthcare is the ultimate frontier for any personal consumer tech company. While all three are rumored to be working on CGM, it’s Apple where the rumors are loudest. Tim Cook has been vocal in suggesting that “Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind will be about health”, and it was revealed recently that Apple was the largest customer of Rockley Photonics , a UK startup enabling non-invasive monitoring of multiple biomarkers, including glucose.?Given the millions of Apple Watches on people’s wrists, this would be game-changing.

What if…??

• Behavior changes start to stick? Arbitrary targets and goals are not motivating. They are not personal, and the cost of missing them is minimal. If you can see into the future and understand the exact impact of a decision on your energy levels or mood over the next few hours, then the near-instant feedback loop makes it harder to make the ‘wrong’ decision.?
• Your personal data was shared for collective benefit? Yes, privacy… But lots of data becomes more valuable when aggregated. Tesla’s autopilot software famously trains itself on its drivers’ real-world data, ingesting the millions of miles they cover each day. A giant (secure, anonymous) database of how individuals respond to food would enable us to understand our collective health in new ways.
• Our food systems were transformed by this data? It’s not hard to imagine a world where recipes are tweaked in order to minimise their negative impact on people’s blood sugar levels. Will people start to cluster in tribes defined by their glucose response profiles?
• Governments ‘encouraged’ everyone to monitor their blood sugar levels? Will vaccine mandates set a precedent that public health concerns trump individual liberties, given the crippling future cost of healthcare??
• This splits the Have (Data) and the Have (No Data) further? Thanks to consistently higher energy levels and lower risk of chronic disease, will data-empowered people pull away from those who aren’t able to afford these technologies??

The Future Normal ?is an exploration of where we’re heading, featuring the ideas and instigators building a fairer, healthier and greener future for us all.

But The Future Normal isn’t pre-determined. We must build it.

If you know someone who can take these optimistic glimpses of what’s around the corner and run with them, then please share it with them!