NutraCast: Combining medicine and tech for precision nutrition
AHARA, a Sanskrit word referring to nourishment, was conceived by Dr. Melina Jampolis and entrepreneur Julie Wainwright.
AHARA leverages the power of multiple data inputs from a scientifically developed health questionnaire, as well as genetic, epigenetic and biomarker testing. It then combines that data using a patent-pending, AI-enabled algorithm. The output identifies an individual’s key nutrients and provides ultra-personalized nutrition recommendations and a practical and actionable way to get them.
“We start with genetics and then we look at something called epigenetics, which is above the gene, which is how genes are turned on and off. And that is a very new and very exciting area of medicine. And that tells us a little bit about aging, how cells are aging, how they're being turned on and off, your rate of aging and it's very predictive of chronic disease.
We then look at select biomarkers, so the end points of all that we're looking at. In particular, we look at unique things like the amount of omega-3s in your red blood cells. Everybody knows that omega-3s are good for you, that we should be eating more salmon. But are we really having enough to have an impact on our health? And so as you can imagine, that's a pretty complex data set for even a human being to interpret. So we hired one of the top data scientists, an expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning,” explained Jampolis.
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