BetterMeal AI Delivers Hyper-Precision Nutrition Through Better Understanding of the Gut Biome

Founder Swathi Arulguppe Nagendra combined her personal chronic disease journey with her love of data analysis to build a platform that delivers clinically-validated, hyper-functional nutritional recommendations to patients suffering from conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, Type 2 diabetes, thyroid disorders, and PCOS.

Challenge

When Hippocrates said “all disease begins in the gut” over 2000 years ago, he certainly didn’t know that one day researchers in the fields of heart disease, neurology, auto-immune disorders, diabetes, cancer, and others, would corroborate his statement. Gut health is exploding as a health area, with good reason: there’s a world of connections being made between the foods we eat (or don’t eat) and their impact on our gut microbiomes and overall health.

These connections are a gut check to healthcare as usual, which manages chronic disease symptoms but rarely gets to the root cause. More and more, doctors and patients are aware that the microbiome–the collection of microbes such as bacteria, fungia, and even viruses that naturally live in and on the body–is a critical part of overall health and wellbeing. What is less clear is how to actually improve and optimize a person’s microbiome in such a way to improve symptoms and even cure disease.

Most people end up taking a one-size-fits-all approach by incorporating probiotics and vitamins into their diet. Unfortunately, this often causes more harm than good. Participants in studies who consumed probiotics for longer time periods were more likely to end up with autoimmune issues. Not every person or health issue requires the amount or the type of bacteria present in these supplements. Without customized gut health recommendations, it’s easy to disrupt the delicate ecosystem that exists to protect against pathogens, digest food, and develop immunities.

Origin Story

When Swathi Arulguppe Nagendra was a teenager, she did what most teenagers do: ate what she wanted without thinking about nutrients. By the age of 16, those habits caught up with her. She was pre-diabetic and suffered from polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). She followed the recommendations of her doctors, managing the conditions through various medications and weight loss, but developed gastric conditions that necessitated multiple endoscopies.

“I felt like my life was over,” Nagendra explains. “I was surrounded by doctors, dependent on medication, and wasn’t getting better.”

While at university pursuing her degree in engineering and information science, her conditions flared up again. Nagendra went into research mode, looking for ways to improve her health. That’s when she came across the wealth of research on gut health and started to see the relationship between her diet and her symptoms. She followed a recovery process to calm her inflamed system and tweaked her diet to reduce irritation.

The results were eye opening. She reversed her pre-diabetes numbers and her PCOS symptoms abated. Nagendra began sharing her experience and what she learned about diet and gut health on a food blog, all while building her career as a data scientist. It was through that online nutrition space that she met Dr. Ramya Ram, an obstetrician researcher in Birmingham, England. The two shared a passion for helping people understand interactions between what they ate and their microbiomes.

In 2019, the pair started analyzing food to understand what compounds were present and how they interacted with the gut. Using a databank from over 500,000 patients, they cataloged many food compounds and analyzed unique biomarkers from basic blood and stool tests. From this analysis, they mapped biomarkers related to specific diseases and created a novel algorithm that connects these biomarkers to a precision nutrition plan to provide solutions for five specific health issues: diabetes, thyroid problems, PCOS, celiac disease, and irritable bowel disorders.

The team knew they were onto something big–biomarkers correlated with gut issues tested at 82% proof positive, meaning their solution could reach large numbers of people with greater results. Other gut health companies use their own at-home testing kits that have mixed success rates at detecting what’s happening within a patient’s microbiome. The success rate of their clinical studies meant that the solution they were creating could be applied just through looking at the standard blood panel that gets taken at a patient’s yearly physical, with no need to perform extra tests.

Under the Hood

“We had one user, a man in his late 70s, who was in constant joint pain due to an autoimmune disorder. After he went through our program, his pain went down by 80% and he told us he was able to walk comfortably for the first time in years.”

To get started, new users simply upload their existing blood panels into the application, which then decodes and interprets overall gut health. The user begins their healing journey with a simple gut cleanse to repair and replace the protective mucus layer in the digestive system. Then the app acts like a nutritionist that goes with the user, making specific suggestions about meal choices, even when out at a restaurant. Using a comprehensive meal and ingredient database and natural language processing, BetterMeal AI can “read” menus and give the user a score to help choose the best option for them.

After an initial launch in 2020, the company gained traction this past year in several hospital partnerships. For instance, a pilot program in the UK brought nutritionists and doctors together on their platform to support patients suffering with digestive issues. This collaboration produced an 11% increase in revenue for the hospital, mainly in patient retention. Nagendra attributes the better retention scores to the fact that patients felt truly cared for in their treatment plan.

“So many of us leave our physicians because we feel like the care is lacking. BetterMeal AI helped the nutritionists and doctors work together to really address patient concerns.”

The success of this program provides a roadmap forward for BetterMeal AI. Besides going directly to consumers, they are preparing a similar pilot program at a hospital in the US for this year, and are in talks with major corporations to offer their services as an employee benefit. Because of the ubiquitous nature of nutritional health, they see themselves as a global player in the gut health market and are building partnerships in the US, India, and Europe.

“These conditions are everywhere. Every day, people suffer from these problems that precision nutrition through BetterMeal AI can address. We want people all over the world to sleep peacefully at night, knowing they are in good health.”

Why We’re Proud to Invest

StartUp Health backs BetterMeal AI’s mission to transform gut health because of their global thinking and a novel approach that allows them to quickly provide personalized insights using existing blood work for patients. Although their solution draws on comprehensive data analysis, it is elegantly simple, allowing them to address digestive health issues without requiring expensive or logistically challenging tests. This means their platform works in many different healthcare systems and settings for many different types of patients.

The two co-founders, Swathi Arulguppe Nagendra and Dr. Ramya Ram, bring together a complementary skill set and subject matter expertise that sets BetterMeal AI apart from its competitors. Gut health is complicated, multi-faceted and ever-changing. By applying Nagendra’s data science know-how to the latest gut health research from Dr. Ram, they stay ahead of the curve in terms of applications and approaches. Their passion for the subject and Nagendra’s personal health journey dealing with PCOS, motivates them to keep pushing for better and more results for their users.

It’s those results and the many testimonials of people who’ve seen a dramatic reduction in symptoms, pain, and the mental stress and strain of dealing with chronic illness, that make us most proud to invest in BetterMeal AI. They provide a powerful tool for people to proactively change their own health and wellbeing.

Join us in welcoming BetterMeal AI to the StartUp Health family! We can’t wait to see what gutsy move they make next.

→ Learn more and connect with the BetterMeal AI team via email.

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BetterMeal AI Delivers Hyper-Precision Nutrition Through Better Understanding of the Gut Biome was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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