Helping professionals biohack personalised health

We speak to the founder of Aimee Health – currently raising seed funding for its nutrition monitoring AI platform.
Californian nutrition health start-up Aimee Health is on a mission to put nutrition at the top of the longevity agenda. With an initial focus on immunity, the company is now raising funding for its AI-powered nutrition assessment platform.

Longevity.Technology: Improving our nutritional health is a sure-fire way to help improve our longevity, but it’s also difficult to know whether we are getting enough of what we need from the foods we eat. And achieving nutritional health requires much more than a one-size-fits-all approach. We caught up with Aimee Health founder Alan Gale to find out how he is working to address this challenge.

“I have been a so-called biohacker since my college days at Berkeley and MIT,” says Gale, who studied biology, cognitive psychology, and electrical engineering, focusing on how the body processes information. After many years as a successful technology entrepreneur, Gale decided to focus his business and technological skills on his passion for health improvement.

Aimee Health founder Alan Gale
“I had just sold a company and wanted to start another, but I wanted to combine engineering and all those great tools with biohacking,” he says. “So I sat down in my office and I broke out these large sheets of drawing paper, and I started drawing what happens when you put a piece of food in your mouth – outlining metabolism as an engineer would.”
After about four or five months, Gale had an epiphany.

“I realised that all the systems communication tools we use for engineering satellites, WiFi and cellular systems could be applied to the human body,” he says. “We can think of the body as another complex system, with signals that come into it and signals that come out of it. By measuring those signals, we can start to understand how that system functions and the rules that guide the interaction between those inputs and outputs.”

Gale reasoned that the primary input signals are nutrients that we get from foods and supplements, and that the primary output signals are more traditional biomarker tests – blood tests, vital signs, even symptoms, for example. The relationship between those nutrient inputs and biomarker outputs is described by the combination of nutritional science guiding optimal inputs, and medical diagnostics guiding interpretation of outputs.
But, while there are many existing nutritional protocols suggesting which nutrients are required and how much of a certain nutrient is needed, and well-established medical diagnostics governing biomarker values, Gale spotted some key gaps in the system.

“A problem is that people are generally not tracking nutrients in their diet – you might be tracking what’s on your plate, but you’re typically looking at calories, not individual nutrients,” he says.
“Even if they are, you still don’t know if that’s the right protocol for you individually, versus somebody else. And so that’s where you need a biomarker test to validate if, in fact, you’re getting the results that you would expect following that protocol.”

This led Gale to start Aimee Health – starting with an AI-powered mobile app implementation allowing users to photograph their food and detecting up to 132 nutrients. Nutrient levels are compared against evidence-based, customizable nutritional quantitative goals, identifying nutrient gaps that can be filled by food recommendations. So when you next see someone taking a picture of their food in a restaurant – think again!

Helping professionals biohack personalised health