The Health-Nutrition economy: a trillion-dollar opportunity
The next trillion-dollar market may be hiding in plain sight. Like the behavioral shift that fueled growth in energy and climate tech, I believe health nutrition is going to be one of the most value-accruing markets over the next decade.
In climate, it’s been obvious for over 15 years that the shift to green energy must happen in order to sustain life on the earth. We’ve been conscious about not killing our own planet for such a long time, yet have barely started the conversation about why we’re killing ourselves.
According to Levels Health — about 90 million Americans are currently classified are pre-diabetic, and over the next 10 years, 70% of them will become diabetic. Almost 1 in 5 Americans will end up having type 2 diabetes until 2033 — these 63 million Americans are estimated to cost the US healthcare system around $1.05T per year. And that’s just type 2 diabetes.
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, right behind heart disease. Together, these two account for almost one in every two American deaths. The combined estimated costs for these accounts for almost $500B per year.
To put it into perspective:
- The annual military budget of the US is around $738 billion.
- The annual budget for Medicare, the government health insurance program for seniors, is around $700 billion.
- The annual budget for Social Security, the retirement and disability program, is around $1 trillion.
Questioning the obvious
I grew up with the concept of not being able to escape diseases like cancer and heart attacks. You’re either lucky enough to be healthy, or unlucky to die of a sudden heart attack or cancer. Cancer still kills Americans at almost exactly the same rate as it did fifty years ago, so maybe we’re indeed at the mercy of the world/god when it comes to fatal diseases. It’s only true if we assume what we did in the past 50 years is the optimal way of living, eating, and exercising.
Throughout my recent exploration of longevity and human performance — a theme I’ve been occupying myself with over the past year or so, I got to explore the Zeroth principle mindset by Bryan Johnson.
“Zeroth-principles thinking is about building blocks, or the structure of all things, whereas first-principles thinking is about system laws, or how things interact. First-principles thinking sets goals in known terms and then pursues them, inventing and learning new things as necessary, but it rarely uncovers brand new conceptual primitives of the kind which the world needs” (Zeroth Principles Thinking, Bryan Johnson.)
While thinking about some of Bryan’s ideas on longevity and the Zeroth principle mindset — I started connecting the dots and realizing how much of our day-to-day social norms are killing us. Only once you tap into the longevity matrix and start questioning the fundamentals regarding what we eat, practice, inhale, and consume — the missing pieces start to come together, and the answer to the question of why we’re dying of cancer or a heart attack becomes clearer.
Resetting the baseline
Living longer, maximizing our experience on this planet and the way we feel is something more humans start to become more conscious of. While trying to delay death as much as possible may seem a little obsessive from the side — there isn’t an obvious answer to; why not. In the end, it seems like it all ties together — healthspan ties well with lifespan, and ultimately how we experience life on earth. I suspect that a few decades from now, we’ll be looking back at the 2020s as being the most absurd time in the history of human longevity and the social norms around our health.
“Someone who drops dead of a heart attack did not just get sick an hour earlier.” (Outlive, Peter Attia MD).
I call it the peak self-destruction era. It’s so extreme one has to put a lot of effort into escaping it. Following the logic of our health equals what we put in our bodies, nutrition may be the no. 1 cause of mortality across all health verticals. It has been affecting us in ways we cannot fully comprehend yet. We’re surrounded by endless opportunities to consume an excessive amount of literal poison for our bodies and hurt our health without even noticing
- High-caloric, low-nutrient foods are cheaper than high-nutrient foods.
- There are endless possibilities to consume an excessive amount of calories, 24/7.
- Most governments don’t regulate any laws around food marketing or ban certain ingredients.
- We live in the era of peak amplification of food pornography through social media.
- Our foods are processed and packaged in ways that are poisonous to our health and reproduction.
If we could take a second to imagine what a society of truly healthy individuals looks like, I’m sure increasing the average lifespan of an American adult by 30% to 100 years old wouldn’t sound too crazy. But how?
The separation of food and the state
Before thinking about how we live to 100, it might be worth talking about how we got to where we are today. Looking back at how humans evolved to grow food at scale and convenience, it’s clear the US government has had a big role in shaping most of the west’s diet, and also their health. One of the most impactful ways it has unfolded is through the creation of the Standard-American Diet(SAD), which the US government has been involved in promoting over the past 100 years, as the country had to ensure everyone can afford sufficient caloric intake and access food during wars and recessions.
From Google Bard:
“There is no doubt that the US government has played a significant role in promoting the SAD. This has been done through a variety of policies and programs, as well as through close ties to manufacturers of processed foods.
Agricultural subsidies: The US government provides billions of dollars in subsidies to corn and soybeans each year. This has made these commodities cheaper to produce, which has led to an increase in their consumption of the American diet. Corn and soybeans are two of the main ingredients in processed foods.
Dietary guidelines: The US government’s dietary guidelines have traditionally emphasized the importance of consuming low-fat dairy products and whole grains. (these guidelines have also been criticized for promoting the consumption of processed foods and sugary drinks).
School lunches: The US government’s National School Lunch Program provides meals to millions of children each day. (the program has been criticized for serving unhealthy foods, such as processed meats, sugary drinks, and desserts).
Food marketing: The US government does not regulate the marketing of unhealthy foods to children. (this has allowed food companies to market unhealthy foods to children using aggressive and deceptive tactics).
Additionally, the US government has close ties to manufacturers of foods that are the base of the SAD. For example, the government’s agricultural subsidies benefit the corn and soybean industries, which are two of the main suppliers of ingredients for processed foods. Additionally, the government’s dietary guidelines and school lunch program have been criticized for promoting the consumption of processed foods from major food companies.
There are a number of things that can be done to reduce the government’s role in promoting the SAD. These include:
Ending agricultural subsidies for corn and soybeans: This would make it more expensive to produce processed foods, which would discourage their consumption.
Revising the dietary guidelines to emphasize the importance of eating whole, unprocessed foods: This would help to educate people about the health benefits of a healthy diet.
Reforming the school lunch program to serve healthier meals: This would help to ensure that children are getting the nutrients they need to grow and develop properly.
Regulating the marketing of unhealthy foods to children: This would prevent food companies from using deceptive and manipulative tactics to market unhealthy foods to children.”
The US government has had a huge influence and even interest in promoting certain foods to us. The problematic element almost all scientific research in the field of nutrition discovers is that governments haven’t been good at helping people eat well and live healthy. Otherwise, illnesses caused by bad nutrition wouldn’t cost the same system $1.9T a year.
Taking control over our health
In the last 100 years, we’ve relied on the government to tell us what to eat and take care of us when we’re sick. I believe this paradigm may soon be over. Looking at this shift through the lens of the sovereign individual, the separation of the state from money, and now health — we now ought to create our open-source guidelines and health standards to improve our health and lifespan. But before jumping into how can we potentially do that, and what might some of these businesses look like, it’s important to recognize why it’s that important after all. I look at this important shift from two angles and broadly on how it may impact human society, inspired by Peter Attia’s methodology.
Healthspan
Improving humanity’s healthspan means we would simply achieve more. Better healthspan essentially allows society can function more efficiently, innovate faster, and have better connections with one another. That’s what the world would be like when people would get better sleep, exercise, and eat better food. Like a 50% — 100% productivity kick for society. How does it translate to a TAM is still hard to assume.
Lifespan
Increasing lifespan on this planet may be as important as improving healthspan — it has several repercussions, of which i see the most meaningful one as being able to sustain ourselves, work, and contribute back to society for longer. In a world of declining birth rates, increased illness, and need for care, this may be one of the most impactful trends that can help humanity continue to sustain itself, even with less. A better lifespan means lowering the burden and reliance we have on others while being able to support more of those who are in need for care.
The major turn in nutrition could help improve humanity’s health and lifespan - impacting us in ways that are somewhat hard to fully realize. Perhaps, the biggest challenge in advancing nutrition is that it’s really hard to quantify its numerical value for society. Even by just recognizing the cost-saving value according to Carter Williams, who claims nutrition(a $1.7T market) can take market share from the $1.9T TAM of healthcare costs — it’s hard to dismiss the opportunity.
Currently, everyone seems to solely focus on the short-term costs of food without recognizing its long-term costs for society and the healthcare system, which we all pay for in the end. Only if the government even changes its perspective to the long-term and recognizes that health equals nutrition, it might subsidize different kinds of agriculture and save downstream healthcare costs.
Unfortunately, until government officials see Carter’s posts on LinkedIn and recognize this gigantic problem — we’ll continue seeing our lifespan decreasing by 0.28% per year(on average, for the past 10 years), despite living in the richest, most technologically advanced time in history. It seems that this problem is being left for the free market to solve.
Solving Nutrition
My thinking about the nutrition market is pretty similar to how some think about climate tech. For it to work and catch fire, it has to follow the natural path of technological evolution and present a better product that’s also cheaper(or sold at a similar price). A great example of an innovative product that somehow submerges the two markets and has failed to catch fire(yet) is fake meats, as i like to call them.
Beyond Meat ($BYND) is an example of a product that had a ton of initial hype and failed massively because it didn’t check any of the boxes mentioned above:
- It’s not better — doesn’t taste better than regular meat, and isn’t healthier(quite the opposite).
- It’s not cheaper, and most often even more expensive than real meat.
The only claimed benefit for Beyond Meat is that it’s less harmful to the environment, and also appeals to vegetarians and vegans — turns out that’s not enough.
(A seemingly better iteration on fake meats, which I’m excited about its potential is lab-grown meat, which uses animal growth-cell for large-scale meat production in a laboratory instead. It should taste like normal meat, or even better(because of flavor programmability) while avoiding animal abuse. The only part that’s yet to be solved is its scale and cost, which should improve with technology).
Tesla may be the only climate-tech company to achieve product-market-fit, precisely because it offers a better product that’s also cheaper(or equivalent to the legacy auto manufacturers) and is greener as a side feature. The go-to-market strategy for Tesla has looked a bit different than the ones of traditional auto manufacturers, yet it still competes on the consumer’s pure benefit-based choice and nothing else.
Approaching the nutrition market
I suspect products who’d succeed in nutrition will have to follow the same formula of better + cheaper while being healthy. This has two possible directions:
Path 1: Creating incentives to change behavior and choice (seemingly easier)
Sharing health data is an under-discussed issue among athletes and fitness monitor users. Most consumers today opt-in to sharing their health data with unknown 3rd parties by default, without even questioning what this data is used for. Nick Kokonas once said on a podcast that whenever he finds an opaque product someone is selling behind closed doors(in his case, buying truffles for his restaurant, or knowing the printing costs of a book), there’s an opportunity for disruption through the creation of a more efficient and transparent marketplaces. I suspect health monitors’ data might be ripe for a change.
Ideas in the direction of Healthshift(also from Carter), try to achieve better alignment for sharing health data with food manufacturers, healthcare providers, and pharmaceutical companies. This naturally connects to the thesis of decentralization of data and its value, and the shift from being the product to owning it.
“In addition to its impact on the food industry, HealthShift’s data has also been used to improve the efficiency and accuracy of drug trials. By integrating data from its users, HealthShift has been able to provide researchers with a comprehensive view of how different factors, such as diet, exercise, and medication use, impact health. This has helped to accelerate the development of new drugs and treatments, improving the lives of millions of people.”
Under this model, consumers not only get a better experience(optimized diet, medicine, and lifestyle) but also get paid to supply valuable health data.
A different model like Levels Health tries to help people improve their health and nutrition with data through a straightforward D2C subscription model. Despite its great potential and improvements in UX(compared to legacy CGMs), products like Levels might always be limited in reach due to their cost and appeal. The big opportunity for this model might only fully realize itself through incentives or increased subsidizing through health insurers or providers. Ultimately, the direction of integrating health and data must come with baked-in incentives, because there isn’t enough of an appeal for most people to track their health.
Path 2: trying to compete for the consumer in a world with endless choices (harder)
We might be witnessing the rise of healthy fast-food chains with a self-bootstrapped food delivery chain for Blueprint meals. I don’t think it’s crazy to imagine this succeeding massively as it catches more fire with better distribution. I suspect new (actually) healthy food chains in that direction can take market share and value from fast-food chains($300B TAM).
With this model, anyone can become a franchisee of a science-backed nutrition protocol without buying anyone’s brand. It can offer the same features McDonald’s has but with a guarantee to provide nutritional values that are 3rd party proven by the cutting edge of longevity science.
Grocery stores may also be ripe for disruption in that direction through a new shopping experience of grocery shopping experience that limits choice to specific foods that are backed by science, instead of competing on variety. Consumers would then shop through sections that are categorized by specific nutritional values, diets, meal plans, or protocols. Through elimination, such a product can enable better choices for consumers.
Despite their quirkiness, I believe these ideas check the better + cheaper formula. Moreover, they might actually introduce a change by the way of enabling (actually) healthy nutrition opportunities through the same distribution channels that work so well today.
It’s time to build (yet?)
Despite all the question marks I might have left you with, I do think now is the time to build in nutrition. In some weird way, building in that space scratches everyone’s itch to live a better life. My goal in writing this blog post started as being pretty selfish — to help organize my thoughts around this problem and understand what I can build. As I’m ending this post on such a note, I hope it struck a tiny bit of inspiration or motivation to start thinking more seriously about the massive problem most of the modern world is facing today.
So before one goes into building another crypto exchange, a SaaS product or an Indian restaurant, maybe stop for a second to think from zero about the food we consume and how to disrupt it. It might help us live to 100.
As I continue exploring building in longevity and nutrition, I invite you to reach out and chat. I’d be more than happy to read any comments and learn more about your thoughts on this opportunity.
A special thanks to Adam Breckler and Konrad Tittler for providing feedback on this piece and helping me shape my thoughts around this topic.