Why to Bother about My Health and My Food?

As we ´re waking up these spring mornings, our minds and consciousness shift from rest to activity, our bodies do that, too. What does it take to keep up good health and overall balance in a rapidly changing world? It is challenging to maintain and keep up with the good health and the overall balance nowadays. What plays an essential role is foremost the active role of an individual to stay connected, be adaptable or to seek support when needed. There, we find rapidly growing number of devices, solutions, products and services that promote our connectiveness or bring the needed support to us no matter where we are. Additionally, there are tools for self-care, for example, supporting to eat a healthy diet, be physically active or getting a good sleep. Especially our millennials have grown up with tech-solutions and the active use of those.

Personalized nutrition can play an important role in promoting adequate health condition by tailoring dietary recommendations to individual´s needs, health status and lifestyle. Personalized nutrition may consider an individual´s gut microbiome, food preferences, and other factors to develop more tailored dietary and healthy empowering recommendations. Having an eye on young adults of working age with busy lifestyle and more and more impaired physical condition, we may note that this target group avoids seeking medical or preventive attention until there is a health problem (such as diabetes, heart disease, or other chronic health hazard). Therefore, we spotlight early signals and their detection as well as more conscious decisions for healthy food and nutrition playing key roles for our health status. MeHeFo explores and develops personalized eating solutions and services with high consumer interest and business potential for Finnish companies. In this project, eight companies and three research institutes together identify and explore both preventive health and personalized eating solutions.

To combat the above-mentioned issues, MeHeFo finds it essential that both functional and personalized foods are designed to support health and wellbeing by providing the nutrients for our bodies we need to function optimally. Additionally, these solutions and products may be able to improve the overall health and wellbeing and, thereby, reduce the risks for negative health development.  In our co-innovation project, food companies together with health promoting tools and communication services study and innovate potential for better health and nutrition development, habits and not the least, the opportunities for growth through an innovation ecosystem engagement.

Connected to the co-creation work by the companies, VTT has developed a prototype of a rule-based personalized eating solution. It is a flexible data platform that can tailor food recommendations for facilitating dietary change. Briefly, the data platform is integrated to an external food product database and a user interface and utilizes user’s personal profile to provide personalized food recommendations. In addition to dietary criteria the solution considers personal preferences, such as values related to ethic and sustainable products, to motive users.

Additionally, involved MeHeFo companies will realize a pilot developed by the companies and coordinated by University of Turku. The company pilot will be realized in autumn 2023. Experiences from the pilot will be reported later by the MeHeFo project. The work of company ecosystem will support the involved companies in their joint and own innovation of potential solutions for better health and nutrition development, leading to opportunities for growth through an innovation ecosystem engagement. That is, more fulfilling and enjoyable life makes it worth bothering my health and my food for, foremost, individuals but industries and research, too.

The writer works as a MeHeFo Program Manager at University of Turku. Her expertise is in international business and, especially, in the Nordic ecosystems and export partner groups. Her entrepreneurial background and engagement with Nordic growth and innovation companies within Health and Wellbeing supports the collaboration, commitment and interaction of the companies involved during this project. She is also a doctoral candidate with the focus on exploring the business modelling and internationalization of ecosystems.
Jenni Lappi
The writer is a senior scientist and project manager of the MeHeFo project at VTT. She has studied nutrition, and her doctoral thesis was about effects of whole grains and grain fiber on glucose metabolism. She also has experience from working in food industry. Nowadays she is working with personalized food, eating experiences, and nutritional quality of alternative protein-based foods.