Design Futures — Final
News From 2037: The Personalized Nutrition Trend is Rapidly Emerging
An optimistic scenario about embeddable devices, biometric data, and DNA-genetic testing.
It’s the year 2035. Consumers care about their health. They rely on technology to make the best decisions for their lifestyles and keep tabs on their personal health data.
Today’s consumers spend twice as much on self-care than generations prior and view food as fuel and medicine. They purchase socially conscious food and plant-based/lab-grown proteins are more affordable and more common than traditional land grown meat. In the United States, a majority of households own a 3D food printer and food is routinely delivered to consumer’s homes, their cars, or a neighborhood farm-stand locker.
DNA-based diets were introduced in the late 2010s. Companies like Habit and Personal Nutrition delivered one-time test results and food delivery subscriptions to match your DNA profile. But with the daily demands of work and family, customers didn’t have time to research the next dining option. Skeptics claimed DNA dining was just the latest diet craze, but some saw the potential. In 2018 Keith Nunes, a writer for Food Business News said: “DNA testing, more sophisticated sensor technologies, smartphones and wearable devices, will allow consumers to increasingly track various aspects of their personal health and wellness.”
Embeddables are the New Wearables
For years, wearables, smart devices, and on-the-go access to personalized data have been how people curate a lifestyle that works for them. But what works for one person, doesn’t always work for another. As biometric data became an important part of personalized health care, consumer demand called for more accurate and less obtrusive devices. From smart tattoos to embeddable birth control chips, many of the earliest embeddable devices were health related. In 2022, the embeddable market reached a compound annual growth rate of 7.1 percent and has quickly outpaced the sale of wearable devices.
Your Body Knows Best
Nothing knows what your body needs better than your body itself. In today’s data-driven world, the missing key to unlocking a more precise, nutritional menu has been the ability to access real-time data directly from the source. With all the conflicting information available, it can be hard to know which advice to follow. Recent technology allows individuals to receive personalized, real-time, health information and to receive suggestions tailored to one’s body.
Tailor, a digital physician assistant, was created in October 2035 in San Marcos, Texas. Unlike traditional at-home DNA mail kits, Tailor monitors user health, interacts across devices, and makes food suggestions based on what your body needs at that moment. Using technology developed by scientists at Tufts University, the device monitors saliva for DNA and hormones like cortisol and testosterone, tracks caloric intake, and provides insight into stress, sleep patterns, inflammation, and immune system strength. Tailor provides the unique key to one’s dietary code so users can maximize body function and performance.
Benefits of Tailor
- PREVENT DISEASE: Catalogs chemicals, proteins, & physiological states to provide insights into preventative care. Saliva collected from obese/overweight children and adults show elevated levels of inflammatory biomarkers including C-reactive protein, tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-6, and interferon-γ in salivary antioxidant status has also been studied as a measure of oxidative stress in individuals with type 2 diabetes, according to researchers.
- TRACK FOOD: Record nutrients, caloric intake, flavor preferences, and ingestion patterns. A sensor chip records exactly what you're eating and how much.
- ANALYZE DNA: Know your body’s unique sensitivity to food, caffeine, carbs, and more. Research shows that dieting success is largely determined by the individual’s genetic composition, not the diet itself.
- MEASURE HORMONES: Cortisol, melatonin and other hormones provide insights into your stress, sleep patterns, and athletic/physical performance. These hormones impact nearly every process in the body, including energy production, immune activity, and cellular maintenance/repair. Additionally, they are key regulators of glucose, insulin, and inflammation; and play a major role in bone and muscle building, mood and mental focus, stamina, sex drive, and sleep cycles.
- NON-INVASIVE: A stress-free diagnostic alternative to blood testing. Saliva testing removes the fear and discomfort of a needle stick while delivering the most reliable method for measuring levels of available hormones.
- WIRELESS SENSOR: A small, thin, unobtrusive, wireless sensor chip connects to your devices. Previous wearable devices for monitoring dietary intake required the use of a mouth guard, bulky wiring, or necessitating frequent replacement as the sensors rapidly degraded. Tailor offers an invisible and 2mm x 2mm chip that can transfer information wirelessly.
- REAL-TIME RESULTS: Turn your devices into an on-the-go lab that performs real-time analysis and provides immediate results. Tailor syncs seamlessly across all your devices and wearables.
- AI ASSISTANT: Machine learning processes your eating habits and provides what your body needs in all your favorite flavors. Tailor sends reminders and recommendations, based on AI machine learning and real-time analysis.
How It Works
It starts at your next dentists visit. A tooth-mounted tracker is overlaid onto the inside of one of your incisors. This small device records nutritional data and provides instant results. Use Tailor on the go with restaurant smart menus, specially curated for your body’s current data or at home with your 3D printer, updated with focused nutrition in your favorite flavors.
Make an appointment with a Tailor-certified dentist to get this tooth-mounted assistant. This low-cost, non-invasive device is a three-minute destructive-free procedure, with no drilling or damage to your teeth. With no downtime and easy smart device setup and sync, you’ll be on the road to a tailored nutritional plan in no time.
To set up:
- Download the Tailor app.
- Sync your device by pairing your device with your unique code.
- Setup your preferences.
- Live. You’re ready to go.
Let the system that knows your system best, provide exactly what you need, when you need it so you can live a life as unique as you!
Conclusion
A healthy lifestyle has never been easier to obtain. Thanks to advances in science, medicine, and agriculture, people are now able to access healthy options in ways they haven’t before. Longer lifespans, higher quality of life, and noticeable drops in disease are all within reach thanks to these advances. Tailor is a natural progression of these trends and allows the wearer an upgrade to proven science. The option is always there to eat what you want, but the guesswork is gone when it comes to deciding what is best for your body at that certain time.
