The Trillion Dollar Lifestyle Problem
More persons will die this year because of their lifestyle choices than from contagious pathogen induced diseases. We are paying trillions of dollars for food that is making us sick and then paying trillions again to treat the illnesses our diets inflict on us.
There are over 400 million diabetics worldwide. In the US in 2012, 9.3% of the adult population had diabetes. The resulting impact on the US healthcare system totaled $245B. And the problem continues to worsen. At current growth rates, it is expected that over 30% of the US population will be diabetic by 2050. Diabetes alone will be a trillion dollar burden. Annually.
Lifestyle choices such as our diet are behind most heart attacks, cancers and diabetes worldwide. Almost nobody really knows how to eat healthier or that some of our activities or exercise choices can actually make us sick. Personalized nutrition and lifestyle guidance is broken. One side of the problem is that neither the food nor healthcare industries stand to benefit from preventing or curing these diseases. Therefore, very little corporate-sponsored research is conducted in relation to lifestyle and nutrition interventions. Further, government research is slow and understaffed.
Another side of the problem is that the solution is too complex for the existing medical research and trial processes. Every person’s genetic makeup and metabolism interacts differently with his activities, his food and his environment, generating many unexpected effects. All these factors limit lifestyle research to being conducted either on very small groups of persons or by studying statistical population-wide correlations. Neither approach renders a valuable cause and effect analysis on what specific food-activity-rest-psychology-gene combinations lead to maintain or restore health.
Lifestyle diseases are one of humanity’s most pressing problems, with incumbent trillion dollar industries that have no incentives to change. On the other hand, many sick individuals are already trying different alternatives. This is evidenced by the supplements market (a.k.a. nutraceuticals) which is already a $100B+ industry worldwide growing at over 8% CAGR. People around the world are desperately seeking better means to be healthier, but most lack the knowledge to be effective. In parallel, more research institutions and universities are interested in solving lifestyle problems through new disciplines such as Nutrigenetics, Nutrigenomics, Nutrimetabolomics and Nutriproteomics, but they generally lack the massive data, machine intelligence tools and the access to millions of individuals to conduct the required large-scale studies.
