Meet the Startup That Thinks DNA Can Predict Your Best Diet

In stressful times, one of my favorite acts of self-care is to hunker down behind my desk and binge-watch TED Talks, riding the swells of emotional well-being that come along with, say, learning how David Blaine held his breath for 17 minutes underwater, or uncovering the secret power of introverts. It was in this context that I first discovered Neil Grimmer, the CEO of Habit, a company that aims to liberate humans from fad diets forever, using a concept called personalized nutrition.

Grimmer took the stage at TEDx San Francisco clad in thick-rimmed glasses and black jeans, a pair of tatted sleeves descending from his black T-shirt. The dad-punk aesthetic belies his past as an organic baby-food tycoon; Grimmer is the founder of Plum Organics, the leading purveyor of vacuum-packed kiddie purees, which he sold to the Campbell Soup Company in 2013 for a cool $249 million. But the topic at hand wasn’t what babies eat (or even what babies think, another fascinating TED Talk). Rather, it was Grimmer’s own personal health journey, which follows an arc that has become a trademark of the self-help genre.

Grimmer was running one of America’s fastest-growing food companies, and the strain began to take a toll on his health. The year 2013, when he sold Plum Organics, was rock bottom. Grimmer had gained a lot of weight. He was prediabetic. He took stock of his life and did something that most of us non-baby-food-millionaires could only dream of: Grimmer traveled the world, submitting himself to the most sophisticated battery of genetic and metabolic tests available, and then enlisted a team of experts to translate that information into a diet.

Within six months of his new regimen, Grimmer reached his goal weight, regained his energy, and restored his blood work to healthy numbers: the holy trinity of modern dietary victory.

Ever since, Grimmer has been on a mission to give others the same experience. If he could harness the power of his own biological data to design the perfect diet, why couldn’t everyone? That, in a nutshell, is the promise of Habit: to collect the right biological inputs and convert them into a perfectly tailored diet. “Powered by big data and computational biology, for the first time ever we’re able to tap into nutritional insights that live inside our DNA, our blood work, our gut microbiome, and even our metabolism,” Grimmer told the TED crowd.

It’s a tantalizing premise: What if for millennia we’ve been groping blindly around the edges of human nutrition, making crude food decisions based on one-size-fits-all dietary research, when the the precise cocktail of nutrients needed to optimize health and longevity has been with us all along, written into our very DNA?

It seems remarkable, when you stop and think about it, that humans have managed to invent self-driving cars and tiny robots that can do surgery before we’ve nailed down what counts as a healthy lunch. Seven billion eaters on this planet — untold trillions of meals served since the first Homo sapiens carved their first stone blade — and we’re all still grasping at dietary advice that is both ever-changing and flatly contradictory. Low fat, low carb, low sugar, paleo, keto, vegan, gluten-free: They all work for someone, but no single diet works for everyone. Few of us feel we’ve cracked the code when it comes to eating for weight loss, let alone optimal health.

“It’s not inconceivable to imagine walking up to a vending machine, and through Bluetooth and a smartwatch carrying your genetic information, the vending machine is able to dispense a snack tailored your genetics.”
Today, nutrition researchers are coming around to the inconvenient reality that two people can stick to the exact same diet and experience vastly different results (an idea that anyone who has ever had a diet buddy will accept intuitively). Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist and professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, tells me there is now a solid body of clinical evidence — including his own recent, high-profile study into the efficacy of low-fat versus low-carb diets — to support this phenomenon. “If you get a group of people eating almost exactly the same thing, they don’t respond the same way,” Gardner says. “There’s massive variability. It’s just staggering. One would think that given that variability is there, there’s a way to explain it.”

One potential explanation currently gaining traction: that variations in our genome determine how each of us processes the nutrients in food.

Consider, for instance, the Inuit people living in the Arctic. Scientists have long puzzled over the fact that, despite eating a diet consisting almost exclusively of fatty fish and meat, the Inuit have a relatively low incidence of heart attacks — an observation that flies in the face of conventional nutritional wisdom and has helped get everyone popping omega-3 supplements for heart health. But a 2015 study published in the journal Science identified several gene variants in the Inuit population that appear to help them break down fatty acids differently than the rest of us. That finding suggests that for the majority, downing omega-3s may have no positive impact.

Caffeine is another example. Coffee toggles on and off the naughty list, with some studies celebrating its health benefits while others raise red flags about heart risks. In 2006, researchers at the University of Toronto pinned down a single gene that affects how caffeine is broken down. They found that people with a “slow metabolizer” variant — about half the population — were at greatly increased risk for heart attack when drinking four or more cups of coffee per day, whereas those with the “fast metabolizer” variant could safely consume higher doses of caffeine. (Side note: Whether or not you are a fast metabolizer of caffeine has no relationship to how long you can feel its effects.)

The examples go on. Researchers have identified genes that influence whether you’re the sort of person prone to deficiency in a number of vitamins and minerals (including vitamins C and D and folate), whether sodium makes you hypertensive, and how you tolerate lactose. There’s even a gene that appears to determine a person’s chances of losing weight on a high-protein diet. It all adds up to a pretty compelling explanation for why nutritional studies so frequently contradict each other.

“Pick your nutritional factor, pick your health outcome—if there have been enough observational studies, you tend to see results all over the place,” said Ahmed El-Sohemy, a prolific nutrigenomics researcher at University of Toronto, in a recent lecture. “We used to call these people outliers and try to figure out how to get rid of them from the statistical analysis. But more and more, we find these so-called outliers are consistently there.”