Heali’s app provides personalized nutrition guide to using food as medicine

Image credits: Heali / Heali provides a menu scan option to assist with nutritional recommendations.

Taking control of your health can be complicated, especially when you don’t know where to start and when you’re presented with millions of options.

input Healya new startup that has launched from stealth a personalized platform to take the guesswork out for people who want to treat and manage their health conditions using evidence-based nutritional protocols.

Heali recipe search. Image credits: Healy

Kyle Dardashti, the company’s co-founder and CEO, knows firsthand how difficult it can be to start a nutrition journey.he is one of them 1 in 2 people Americans suffering from chronic diseases can improve with nutritional guidance, Dardashti said. He just didn’t know it at the time.

“I have had Crohn’s disease since I was 15 years old,” Dardashti told TechCrunch. “This was a battle, and I tried all kinds of solutions in the pharmaceutical field. In the end, I thought there had to be some other way to do this.”

After discussing other options with her gastroenterologist, Dardashti started a diet that has evidence to be as effective as some of the medications she was already taking. Dardashti tried it, and after about four months she “felt healthier than I’ve ever felt.”

medical nutrition model

He then began learning as much as he could about the concepts of medical nutritional therapy. He explained that this is a way to treat and manage diseases through various nutritional protocols. However, Dardashti found these protocols difficult. That means you basically need to become a food scientist to decipher which ingredients are effective and which aren’t.

“The joy of eating has been taken away,” says Dardashti. “What was clear to me was that you don’t have to go through that pain because you can use technology to do all the analysis. There are no fad diets out there that aren’t backed by research. But there are also many clinically-backed diets that patients don’t know about. Like me, I don’t think it should take decades for patients to learn that they have dietary options. Masu.”

of Personalized Nutrition and Supplements Market is crowded and its value is estimated at $43 billion. For example, we’ve previously covered apps like Wellory, Lifesum, and Zoe, to name a few.

You’ll see similar features in Heali, including meal planning and tracking, an in-app scanner for grocery stores, and recipes and recommendations. But Dardashti said what sets Healy apart is its unique comprehensive nutritional guidance and personalized meal plans, led by nutritionists and backed by scientific literature. The app’s Scan His option also leverages artificial intelligence, allowing users to scan restaurant menus and get recommendations on which food options are safe.

Additionally, Heali intentionally includes a way to search within its library of recipes based on specific medical conditions, health/wellness goals, and dietary preferences. The result is more than 30 culinary options that can be categorized according to cultural needs. It has also been recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control after undergoing in-market testing and clinical trials.

Heali’s personalized nutrition app. Image credits: Healy

Future growth

When Heali first developed its platform, it focused on 30 chronic diseases, including autoimmune diseases, allergies, neurological conditions, and variations of cancer. Today, his conditions have increased to more than 200, many of which have their own specific nutritional protocols. Dardashti said that with its meal engine, Heali is considered “the first clinical-grade, hyper-personalized nutrition platform capable of supporting medical nutrition therapy at scale.”

In the beta version, patients with irritable bowel syndrome who participated in Heali’s clinical trials had a 2.6-fold improvement in quality of life and two-fold improvement in symptoms compared to patients who did not use Heali.

Heali offers apps through healthcare partnerships, such as with Boston Heart Diagnostics. It is also available as a standalone His Software-as-a-Service option called Heali Intel for food companies looking to offer food as medicine. Although the startup is still in a very early stage, Dardashti revealed that Heali currently has over 10,000 users.

Today, the company announced $3 million in seed funding led by Astanor Ventures. Dardashti plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and partnership acquisitions to expand its commercialization model for medically tailored meal propositions. There are also plans to offer one-on-one health coaching services and expand Instacart’s grocery delivery relationships to include custom meal kit delivery options.

“I meet many people who don’t know that diet is an option,” said Dardashti. “With Healy, I hope we can create a world where food is the first choice, not the last.” he said.

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