Personalized nutrition to the max: Foodvalley shares promising results of vitality pilot

28 Mar 2024 --- Foodvalley’s first pilot in the Vitality via Personalized Nutrition Solutions (VIPS) program combined the commercially available services and products of different personalized nutrition start-ups and scale-up companies into one comprehensive offering to ten employees of a Dutch care institution. Nutrition Insight participated in the publication launch of the pilot’s outcomes, which improved health indicators and blood vitamin levels and reduced symptoms among the participants.

By 2028, Foodvalley aims to have a “viable, scalable business model for a personalized nutrition offering,” providing benefits to a wide audience. In a broad ecosystem analysis, the organization and its partners determined key personalized nutrition ecosystem challenges — issues that individual stakeholders cannot solve but must be addressed. 

Dr. Judith van der Horst-Graat, the innovation lead for Food and Health at Foodvalley, highlights the organization’s goals to overcome these challenges, aiming to strengthen the personalized nutrition ecosystem by unlocking silos and starting new partnerships, creating trust and credibility in the domain via data and insights and exploring a business model that can be adapted for the mass market. 

The pilot assessed participants’ vitamin status, DNA, hormone status, lifestyle and diet (based on questionnaires), fitness and general health.

“We combined all these data to give the participants one comprehensive, personalized advice to help them achieve a healthier lifestyle.” 

Amos Attali, CEO and founder of one of the community partners, MyOwnHealth, tells us that the nutrition advice provided was comparable with that of a nutritionist but with a more in-depth analysis to target and monitor specific parameters. 

He adds that one of the partners in the project, Phenomx Health, has substantial knowledge about the link between a specific health complaint and micronutrient gaps related to those complaints, such as vitamins and minerals, based on scientific literature. 

“Because we measured those nutrients, we understood that those people maybe had a higher need for those nutrients. We provided specific food advice and, if needed, supplement advice to target those micronutrients given those symptoms.” 

Without a control group, he asserts that it is difficult to say that the observed effect on those symptoms was due to changing the blood profile of those micronutrients. “But, we saw an improvement in the symptoms and the blood work.”

Dr. Judith van der Horst-Graat, the innovation lead for Food and Health at Foodvalley.Promising results  
The trial was not designed as a clinical trial but as a small proof-of-concept pilot to evaluate the impact of a dedicated, personalized nutrition offering on the individual health needs of ten employees. 

The program took place over nine months, starting with a first measurement of participants’ health parameters in April 2023, after which they followed three months of food and supplement advice. This advice was adjusted after a second measurement in September 2023, culminating in a final analysis in January 2024. 

After the project, seven out of nine participants improved their HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol levels, triglycerides values and blood pressure. The two participants with high blood glucose levels at the start of the pilot improved their values in the last measurement. 

Moreover, eight participants reported reduced overall average complaints at the end of the pilot, 75% of all symptoms improved and 64% of related biomarkers improved by the end of the initiative. 

At the start of the project, eight participants had at least one blood level below the healthy range. After nine months, seven of those people increased at least one vitamin to healthy ranges. 

The report states that participants’ most significant “wins” from joining VIPS included reducing physical complaints, gaining health insights and losing weight. Nine out of ten participants said they had changed their lifestyle and daily habits during VIPS and that working in a group was a good motivator. 

Proof from the field  
Trijn van der Meulen, CEO of Maeykehiem, a Dutch home care that employs the ten VIPS participants, notes that it is no secret that eating healthy and exercising is essential, having overcome an illness through diet and exercise without continuing medication. 

“I think every employer has a responsibility to its employees’ health care, even when it is complicated. It is too easy to place the responsibility solely on the government. That’s why Maeykehiem has been promoting vitality for years through programs and workshops to educate our team members on nutrition and exercise.”

The pilot assessed participants’ vitamin status, DNA, hormone status, lifestyle and diet, fitness and general health.“The VIPS program seemed interesting because it uses a personalized approach, and the six participating start-ups brought a range of specialized knowledge and insights that combined into an extraordinary offering.” 

Van Der Meulen underscores how easy it was to find ten participants for the trial, even though some participants were skeptical about the efficacy of vitality programs. Several participants lost weight, had more energy or experienced fewer gut health issues throughout the trial. She explained that the group dynamic was vital for the pilot, as employees encouraged each other throughout the journey. 

“My takeaway from the pilot program is that people will make changes more easily when we devise a personalized approach to health. With that personal touch, we can create habits that stick. Some participants were surprised that small lifestyle or dietary changes could have major positive effects. Awareness of personalized nutrition advice plays a key role in generating these benefits.” 

“Often people only adjust their lifestyle after they experience health issues like high blood pressure or suffering a heart attack. Because VIPS focuses on personalization, it is a great way to encourage people to change their lifestyles. By being proactive, they can prevent health problems instead of dealing with them after they happen.”

Improving collaboration  
MyOwnHealth’s Attali explains that the VIPS pilot aimed to learn about collaborating with all partners involved in the trial and determine how to scale it in the future. 

As the pilot included six personalized nutrition companies doing their measurements and analysis, he highlights that the team needed to “learn how to deal with different types of data, combined into one advice — a personalized supplement or nutrition advice.”

The VIPS pilot combined the products of different personalized nutrition companies into one comprehensive offering.He details that the company LHM Diagnostiek collected DNA to see how well nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, were digested and to determine the preferred sports profiles for each participant. Fitsurance collected data ranging from weight to cholesterol, blood glucose levels and various metabolic syndrome parameters. 

Noory collected information on diet preferences, potential allergies and goals participants wanted to achieve and provided recipes. Phenomx Health and MyOwnHealth analyzed blood samples to determine micronutrients and vitamin levels, while Phenomx Health also collected information on symptoms and health complaints. 

Together with The Right Meal, LHM Diagnostiek, Phenomx Health and MyOwnHealth provided dietary and supplement advice. 

“The whole project took nine months because it took time to generate the advice and collect all the data. But it was a very rich project in terms of learnings,” Attali continues. The participants were pleased with the proposition, drastically changing their lifestyle for the better and reducing physical complaints. 

“Regarding strengthening the personalized nutrition community, we worked on new opportunities and partnerships, which could not have been done outside this platform. We contacted additional partners to help us improve our proposition, and we identified expertise that we need to build on for the future VIPS.” 

“Instead of doing everything manually, we need to develop a data infrastructure and have a team to work on this. We also have an idea of how to create output guidelines for the reporting and opportunities to include additional lifestyle components in our proposition.”  

He concludes that to explore business model opportunities, a follow-up pilot — starting in April 2024 — will work toward a more scalable application. “We need to fine-tune the partners’ needs — what type of data will we collect? We must align that with the needs of the customer and the end user, which we need to identify next.” 

By Jolanda van Hal