Three reasons we invested in Second Nature, empowering people to change habits and tackle the obesity crisis
We were busy over the Christmas period working on an addition to our UK portfolio that we are incredibly excited to announce today. Our UK funds have led a $10m Series A investment into Second Nature, a digital ‘habit change’ programme that is seeking to tackle the country’s $35bn obesity crisis. Second Nature has also announced a re-brand from OurPath concurrently with the investment.
Increasingly sedentary lifestyles, changing diets and a lack of general understanding about healthy habits and wellbeing have led to a rise in obesity and its associated illnesses throughout the UK, Europe and North America. As Western lifestyles also take hold in the developing world, this trend is expected to become a global phenomenon over the coming century.
The cost of this burgeoning crisis is vast. It is projected that a combination of healthcare expenditure and a decline in productivity associated with obesity will cost the global economy $1.2tn a year by 2025. It is imperative, therefore, that we equip people with the means to empower themselves to foster healthy lifestyles and reduce the burden upon healthcare systems and global economies.
We believe that Second Nature is the business to tackle this challenge head-on, as laid out in our thoughts below. Check out the coverage on TechCrunch as well.
Tackling a systemic, growing problem
In the UK, nearly two out of three people are overweight and more than one in four people are obese, which create a significant risk of millions of people developing diabetes.[1] The personal cost of these illnesses can be immense: long-term diabetes can cause blindness, amputation or stroke, while sustained obesity is linked with various types of cancer.
And yet, this is a growing problem facing the UK population and the healthcare systems attempting to support them. Between April 2017 and December 2018 — the latest period analysed by the NHS — 711,000 people in England alone were admitted to hospital with obesity as a contributing factor. This was a 15 per cent increase on the prior year.[2]
Throw in the fact that 20 per cent of children are classified as obese by Year 6, and it is clear that we are facing a systemic problem of obesity in the UK. As childhood obesity compounds the challenge of treating overweight adults, Public Health England estimates that the total cost of obesity to the UK economy to double from $35bn today to $65bn by 2050.[3]
A similar story plays out in many countries across North America and Europe, with 93.3m adults in the US suffering from obesity at an annual cost of $147bn to the economy and an estimated 60m people in Europe currently living with type-2 diabetes.[4] The global cost of obesity and its associated illnesses is, therefore, spiralling out of control, and we must begin to find ways of tackling it head-on.
Enter Second Nature: building sustainable, long-term habit change
Helping people to eat well, exercise more, and lose weight is nothing new. Since the 1960s, Weight Watchers (now WW) and Slimming World have built multibillion-dollar businesses out of calorie-counting, carb-cutting, weight-loss initiatives. However, this approach to losing weight is coming under substantial scrutiny — check out the Second Nature guide to WW and Slimming World for a bit of helpful background.
First, counting calories and cutting food groups are proven to develop unhealthy relationships with food — a situation that is often compounded by weight-loss myths and misinformation. Meanwhile, modern attitudes to physical and mental wellbeing are shaping our understanding of how to foster healthy habits through body positivity and a more nuanced view of eating well.
Second, traditional approaches to weight-loss and healthy eating have struggled to keep pace with the influence of technology on our daily lives. People are more accustomed than ever to tracking and monitoring their health and, as a result, weekly WW classes appear anachronistic. Digital apps such as Calm and Headspace have shown the impact that technology can have on fostering mental health and wellbeing — the same must take place for physical health and habits.
These social and technological shifts have hit the incumbent businesses and it is clear that there is a meaningful opportunity to transform millions of people’s experience of weight-loss. Second Nature, through incorporating advances in medicine, psychology and technology, empowers people to feel good about eating well, thereby creating much more lasting and positive habit change.
Second Nature offers a tailored 12-week programme, providing access to daily online advice from certified health coaches, a support network of fellow users, and insightful recipes shaped to your preferences and tastes and designed to develop your healthy relationship with food. As a result of this targeted support, participants in the Second Nature programme build better habits that enable long-term weight-loss.
Analysis of 10,000 participants in the programme found they had each lost an average of 5.9kg at the 12-week mark, while peer-reviewed data showed that much of this weight loss is sustained at the 6-month and 12-month mark — a key indicator of long-term, beneficial, lifestyle change.[5]
The founders have instilled purpose throughout the business
Second Nature was founded by Chris Edson and Mike Gibbs, who met as strategy consultants whilst advising the likes of the NHS, healthcare charities and multinational pharmaceutical companies. The insights that this career provided into the vast challenges associated with obesity, as well as the technological transformation of healthcare, have proved invaluable.
It is clear from the moment that you meet Mike and Chris that they are driven by the purpose of building a product that will change lives. This passion has led them to build a team around them that embodies the mission of the business, creating a vital empathy for the problem that they are seeking to address, and therefore developing a programme that fosters happiness as well as good health.
This is plain to see in the reviews that Second Nature receives on Trustpilot and the App Store. Both platforms can be challenging for consumer apps, but Second Nature has an average rating of 4.9 on each of them across more than 2,750 reviews, which are full of glowing praise for the programme and its positive impact on the lives of its users. It is clear to us that Mike and Chris have instilled a purpose and empathy that builds a transformative product.
We wish Chris and Mike all the best in scaling this business across the UK and beyond over the coming years and are delighted to be working with you on the next stage of your exciting journey.
[1] Diabetes UK: Diabetes and Obesity
[2] NHS: Statistics on Obesity, Physical Activity and Diet, England, 2019
[3] Public Health England: Health matters: obesity and the food environment
[4] http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-diseases/diabetes/data-and-statistics
[5] JMIR Diabetes, Effectiveness of a Digital Lifestyle Change Program in Obese and Type 2 Diabetes Populations: Service Evaluation of Real-World Data
