Theranos have been trying to democratize blood testing, while Apple Watch, on the other hand, wants to get people exercising. Now here comes the newest player in the app. world which is up to fix diets, Habit.
Habit is peddling a "personalized nutrition" service and is said to be launched as early as next year. This will go in spite of having some nutritionists disagreeing with personalized nutrition.
The Habit app is acquired in exchange for $299 and samples of one's blood and saliva. Such requirements and raw data from tests on the body's response to different foods makes the Habit app usable. It is also possible to get information for a session with a certified dietitian.
Some people find this very useful, but some researchers claim about the huge gap between nutrition genomics and what companies like Habit claim to offer.
"We still don't have the ability to accurately predict the most healthy diet for an individual... with or without the use of genomics," Vox quoted Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California Berkeley, saying.
Lund University genetic epidemiologist Paul Franks also said in the interview that concept is probably not quite ready for public consumption. Habit's concept is quite appealing, but the public should be wiser at assessing the efficiency of diet tools they are getting.
Habit is one app that thinks one's genes can tell if there is a need to eat more protein, and so forth. Many have already tried to have this same concept in the past as well.
Personalized Nutrition, as some call it "Nutrigenomics," was innovated by some entrepreneurs in the past. Some of these are DNA Fit and Nutrigenomix. Some nutritionists, however, find it inapplicable to many human beings.
A European research called Food4Me found that personalized nutrition did not have very compelling evidence on an effective diet. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics even advises the public against direct-to-consumer nutritional genomics programs.
