Empowered consumers able to make healthy and sustainable dietary choices

Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese. The specific focus of NUTRISHILED is to alleviate these pathologies and motivate healthy choices, using advanced analysis of all factors affecting health, related to food choices. The motivating nudges of this analysis will be interface to the subject through the intuitive and userfriendly NUTRISHIELD virtual dietary assistant, an always kept updated application that learns from the subject’s preferences and acts as a personal coach towards healthy and sustainable dietary choices.

Personalized diets upon scientific-based dietary assessment and advice, by 2025

NUTRISHIELD will set the ground for personalised diet to become a reality in EU in the coming years. Many similar efforts have failed in the past, because they lacked a holistic methodology. NUTRISHIELD focuses on recommending young individuals, children & toddlers, on their food choices (e.g. specialised baby-food, food supplements, allergen-free foods, etc), based on scientifically sound key metrics and specific metabolites/biomarkers monitoring (through urine analysis, breath analysis, breast milk analysis, microtyping, genotype, phenotype, psychological analysis, societal & lifestyle aspects, etc). By getting the younger generation motivated, NUTRISHIELD is capitalizing on the future of personalised nutrition, based on scientific facts. NUTRISHIELD is expected to produce sound exploitable results by 2022, with a very short time-to-market (2-3 years).

Increased consumer trust in personalized nutrition advice and/or support

57% of consumers trust a Registered Dietitian/ Nutritionist for both the types of food they should be eating and food safety69. NUTRISHIELD will exploit this trend by providing a wide range of complementary analytical methods, aiming at building a fact-based database that will be used toward personalising nutrition for each young individual. Each end-user will have complete access to that data, through the NUTRISHIELD App, where all readings and monitored data will be presented in a simple and yet descriptive way. This will provide increased trust in the provided suggestions/advice, and all results of dietary behaviour will be directly visible through specific KPIs in a gamified manner. The user will have access to historical data and will be able to see vividly how each dietary choice affects key biomarkers. Hence, the customer will be informed on his choices and also guided towards healthy practises, thus his trust in personalised nutrition will be increased.

Prevention of diet-related and non-communicable diseases

During the past decade, rapid expansion in the amount of population-based epidemiological evidence has helped to clarify the role of diet in preventing and controlling morbidity and premature mortality resulting from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Specific dietary components that increase the probability of occurrence of these diseases in individuals, and interventions to modify their impact, have also been identified. Building upon this baseline, NUTRISHIELD will support monitoring of specific biomarkers and known indicators connected to health disorders. Correlating those metrics to dietary choices, NUTRISHIELD has the potential to prevent dietrelated diseases. Furthermore, by correlating different nutrients to metabolic response, NUTRISHIELD will create a dietary shield against NCDs.

Increased/optimal health and well-being of individuals adopting long-lasting healthy and sustainable dietary behaviour

There’s a growing body of evidence that shows how current consumption patterns impact on health, society and the economy. Amid this, the concept of a sustainable dietary behaviour – a diet that’s healthy, affordable, environmentally sustainable and culturally acceptable - has stimulated public interest about how changes in diet may go some way towards promoting well-being and the social welfare. By targeting the younger population, NUTRISHIELD aims at setting the pace for a long-lasting healthy and sustainable dietary behaviour, with an impact on social welfare. The results of NUTRISHIELD would be easily replicable by adult populations too, however it is self-evident that the basis for a healthy life should be set at a relatively young age.

New market opportunities for novel concepts/tools/products, or services in personalized advice and/or support

According to Statista, the volume of the mobile fitness app market was $1.778bn in 2016, and it is expected to grow to $4.1bn in 2021. The market of mobile fitness apps is evolving in large part due to the fact that more and more people seek a healthy lifestyle. As a result, new devices helping people stay in shape have appeared and the Internet of Things is growing. In 2015, according to the Globe-Go company, apps in the Health and Fitness category came in second by increased amount of time spent with them, giving way only to music apps. The NUTRISHIELD platform will allow for the deployment of numerous services and application, both game-like and information-centred, endowing them with a set of breakthrough functionalities that will surpass existing personalised nutrition solutions. Thus the potential is excellent, especially if AI-based advice as an intuitive guide for personalised dietary choices, based on the user’s profile (monitoring data, activity data, etc) is to be considered.

New market opportunities for novel approaches/methods/technologies for dietary assessment

Dietary assessment, is a less developed domain, and consumer solutions have yet to hit the market. The potential is big and although the technologies and methods proposed herein have been validated in the past, they have not been exploited commercially as a platform for dietary assessment. The focus on the younger population further heightens the commercialisation opportunities and the NUTRISHIELD consortium plans to commercialise NUTRISHIELD as a technology platform immediately after the end of this project.

Contribution to innovation capacity and integration of new knowledge

NUTRISHIELD, as an Innovation Action, aims to demonstrate new knowledge and to explore the feasibility of cutting edge technology. Knowledge is brought into the consortium by all partners and is further developed to deliver and validate the complete approach. The NUTRISHIELD innovative developments address a real market need, not just at the European, but also at a global level. NUTRISHIELD is an application driven approach, completed by all necessary systems (hardware and software) and clinical methods, in order to prove the overall system’s effectiveness and facilitate its adoption by the end-users. Business opportunities are developed along the entire value chain, starting from the applied medical instrumentation industry and directly affecting also the medical practice industry (medical doctors and hospitals dealing with nutrition related health disorders)

New market opportunities, competitiveness and growth of companies

Apart from the side of the patients, the project can have a substantial socioeconomic impact in terms of reduction of health care costs towards more sustainable healthcare systems in the European Union, given the huge financial burden that the addressed diseases impose to European economies. Nevertheless, it should be noted that considering only the cost of such diseases to the EU health care ecosystem grossly underestimates their true cost. Production losses from death and illness in those of working age and from the informal care of people with the disease contribute greatly to the overall financial burden. Informal care costs are equivalent to the opportunity cost of unpaid care. This opportunity cost is a measure of the amount of money that carers forgo to provide unpaid care for their spouses, friends or relatives. Therefore, a platform towards better and more sustainable diet can significantly contribute to the reduction of health care costs through the envisaged decrease of hospitalisation and the decline of associated mortality rates. The financial resources saved can be transferred to other causes, including social activities such as in-home nursing for the elderly, disability subsidies, funding of social activities, etc. This becomes even more relevant in today’s ageing European societies in states that are struck by economic crisis and face the imperative need of austerity and budget cuts.

Quality of Life, Health and Safety of the Citizens

Poor nutrition remains one of the biggest structural challenges facing the EU today. The way we grow, produce and import food contributes substantially to climate change, and lifestyle related diseases are increasing. There’s growing evidence that current consumption patterns impact not only our own health but also the planet, the society and the economy. Sustainable diet choices constitute of a diet components that are healthy, affordable and sustainable. Nutrishield aims to put the sustainable diets promotion on the EU agenda and for this we will consider in our impact plan the role diets can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and also to show that healthy low-carbon diets could improve environmental sustainability and social welfare