Leave it to Silicon Valley to reposition a massive industry that’s hit the wall in terms of growth to grab more of your cash.
This time it’s the diet industry, which was worth $66 billion in 2017 even though the number of dieters is shrinking. Dieting has a couple of big problems that have caused the numbers to slide.
First, most diets are based on pseudoscience and simply don’t work. Meanwhile, the right approach to eating is simple and unsexy — a diverse, primarily plant-based diet of fresh foods. No app required.
The other issue is that the American dieting industry is almost exclusively aimed at women. That leaves out market growth that would come from appealing more to men, which is why it’s being re-imagined from the dude perspective.
“Optimizing your personal ecosystem”
New tech companies are flipping the script and changing the language of weight loss. It’s all about performance enhancement and personal optimization, not vanity or thinness.
Where bodies might have previously been idealized as personal temples, they’re now just another device to be managed, and one whose use people are expected to master. We’re optimizing our performances instead of watching our figure, biohacking our personal ecosystem instead of eating salads.
Startups such as 23andMe, Bulletproof, Viome, and Habit all focus on weight and other nutrition-related health concerns, but don’t characterize themselves as dieting companies. Because what’s world changing about that?
A regimen by any other name …
So let me get this straight. You pay money in order to eat some things, and avoid eating other things? Sounds like a diet to me.
The new set of terminology, however, is specifically tailored to appeal to tech-obsessed young men:
So if we’re no longer dieting and instead biohacking in order to fine-tune our personal microbiome using state-of-the-art testing and results-based methodology, then the potential market broadens.
If paying a tech company to “fine-tune your personal microbiome” gets the job done for you, then by all means, have at it. I’ll be over here having a salad.
The Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Language of Dieting (The Atlantic)
