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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #184:

The entrepreneurs striving to improve human health

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Can a humdrum eating utensil move the American diet in a healthier direction?  

I asked myself that recently while interviewing the inventor of a spoon that uses an electric current to enhance the flavor of sugar and salt, which could get people to reduce how much they add of both to their food.

My interview with the spoon’s energetic inventor, Ken Davidov, came during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (see the interview here). CES is an annual showcase of dazzling innovation, with more 115,000 attendees perusing the wares of 3,000 exhibitors from 174 countries. The show featured the expected tech behemoths (like Amazon), but also old-line companies trying to prove their technology chops (like Caterpillar and John Deere) and companies you’ve never heard of (like Bitbrain).

I gravitated toward the peripheries of the massive exhibit spaces – they’re spread across two million square feet – in search of the creative upstarts like Davidov who are using unorthodox tools to try to improve human health, and make a profit along the way.

The first one I found was Melissa Snover, the founder and CEO of Nourished. She was at CES to launch her partnership with Neutrogena, the skin care company. Their joint product, known as SkinStacks, leverages the power of machine learning and 3D printing to create a customized supplement for your skin.

Before buying, consumers takes photos of both sides of their face, and those photos are assessed for more than 2,000 facial attributes. AI is then deployed to generate a skin score in categories such as elasticity, fine lines, wrinkles, hydration, smoothness, and clarity.

This (potentially humbling) information is combined with answers to questions about lifestyle, and individual goals, to create recommendations for clinically-validated nutrients that will meet the user’s health and cosmetic objectives. Once a consumer agrees to the recommendation and wants to buy the product, a 3D printer creates gummy-like squares featuring the needed nutrients, and the final product is packaged and mailed to the consumer.

I went through these steps with Snover and her team at CES (yes, they brought along a 3D printer) and I liked getting a customized product that was sugar-free and vegan and made with natural ingredients, colors, and flavors.

Skinstacks is just one of the Nourished products, and Snover – a dynamic entrepreneur (see my interview with her here) – has tapped into something powerful with her focus on personalization, given that the precise drivers of optimal health can vary widely from person to person.

Personalization is also central to Tastermonial, a company focused on addressing one of quirks of America’s food system: there is little to no FDA regulation around the health claims made by companies selling food and supplements – and many of these have never been tested in the real world.

Tastermonial’s founder, Bude Piccin, discovered this after being diagnosed with gestational diabetes and told to consume low glycemic foods – only to discover severe limitations in the glycemic index. For example, foods are given glycemic scores based on a very small sample size – as few as 10 people – and glycemic response can vary widely among different individuals (and even in the same individual).

Piccin’s response was to focus on collecting more data to showcase the real-world impact by getting more people to test and eat the same thing. Today, consumers who sign up for Tastermonial can be prescribed a continuous glucose monitor, which is a tiny sensor that’s inserted under the skin. The CGM is connected to an app that shows the real time glucose effect of foods being consumed – and that information can be used to optimize one’s diet for better health.

Tastermonial is also hired to vet the health claims food companies want to make for their products – such as “keto friendly,” “low glycemic,” or “lower blood sugar.” They collect at least 30 data points from at least 30 participants to measure the accuracy of the claims – a valuable service given the proliferation of misleading health claims made on so many food labels. (More information about Tastermonial is available via my interview with Piccin.)

Tastermonial is ultimately about helping consumers make healthier choices, and that’s also the at the core of Capnos, though it’s focused on curbing a different behavior: the ingestion of nicotine.

Brendan Wang, the youthful founder (he only graduated from Michigan State last year), began vaping as a high school freshman and developed an addiction to it that lasted for five years. Seeing a friend die in 2019 was a catalyst for him to change his behavior and try to find a way to change the behavior of others. Recognizing that much of vaping’s appeal stemmed from an oral fixation or something to hold in one’s hand, he set out to create a device that would satisfy vaping or smoking urges without sacrificing the user’s health.

He designed a flavored air pressurizer that resembles a vaping device. The user takes hits from the device, but there’s no smoke and no nicotine – it’s just air scented with extract oils (a brief demonstration video is here and my interview with him is here) Self-reporting by users has shown a 50 percent reduction in vaping with the first week of using a Capnos device.

There’s a clear need for products such as Capnos. (The name is derived from the Latin word acapnos, which means “smokeless.”) Each year, smoking contributes to 480,000 deaths in the United States seven million throughout the world. And while the sharp decline in the U.S. smoking rate shows that people can quit, the Mayo Clinic reports that 95 percent of smokers need some kind of product to help them do so. The Capnos devices have the advantage of being both very affordable and very accessible.

The same can be said for the aforementioned innovative eating device, which goes by the name SpookTEK. The company describes it as “the first commercial spoon to excite the taste buds and immediately alter and enhance taste.”

It’s powered by the human body's natural energy as well as two electrodes that generate a mild electric current that courses through the food on the spoon. The result is enhanced sweetness and saltiness, while also suppressing sour tastes.

Davidov, the founder, calls it “a real game changer,” noting that, “no one has done anything with the spoon in a few thousand years.” He says they’ve pitched to all the big food companies in the United States and throughout the world. And his spoon would be a game changer if it led these companies to reduce the sugar and salt they add to their products.

I’m not optimistic they’ll do so without federal regulation. But anything that gets people to use less of both commodities is worthwhile, given that more than 99 percent of Americans consume more than the daily recommended amount of sodium, while the sugar consumption figures aren’t much better. And both are leading contributors to the abysmal state of metabolic health in the United States.

All of these products are responding to the sad reality that diets (and nicotine use) in the United States – and many other countries – are contributing to high rates of disease, disability, and death. Having those habits move in a healthier direction without tools and tricks would be preferred, but there’s little reason to believe it will happen.

In the meantime, bring on the electric spoons.