‘I was overeating’: the Zoe nutrition app founders on diet, raising millions and the perfect microbiome
Tim Spector, professor of genetics and co-founder of the personal nutrition company Zoe, is recovering from a mild illness when the Observer meet him and the other founders of the company.
“People expect Tim to have an immune system of perfection,” jokes co-founder and CEO Jonathan Wolf, “but even he, with his near-perfect microbiome, gets sick every now and then.”
Since launching in April 2022, more than 130,000 people have signed up to Zoe’s personalized nutrition program, which aims to improve gut and metabolic health. Spector is a well-known figure on TV and radio, and through his books The diet myth And Spoon fed.
Zoe customers can be recognized by the round yellow arm patch, which means they are wearing a blood sugar sensor. Carrie Johnson, wife of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, recently announced on Instagram that she had signed up. Television presenter Davina McCall is one of its biggest proponents.
Zoe (‘life’ in Greek) provides personalized advice via an app on what users should eat, based on the results of gut health and blood fat tests and 14 days of blood sugar monitoring, all done at home and sent to a laboratory.
Spector doesn’t believe in miracle diets. But he has faith in the microbiome – the trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that live in our gut – which, in addition to digesting food, also plays a crucial role in regulating our immune system and brain chemistry. “We have now realized that food is the most important choice people can make for their health,” he says.
Born in North London, he trained as a doctor and subsequently became one professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London. In 1992 he set up a register of 15,000 adult twins at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. TwinsUK And To predict Studies have shown that even genetically identical people react very differently to food.
He experienced his first eureka moment in 2012 during the twin study, when he looked for factors that would explain why some had different diseases. “It wasn’t until I tested the microbiome that it was the first thing I ever found that was radically different between identical twins.”
He had another “aha” moment on a ski trip after suffering a mini-stroke that left him unwell for three months. He revalued what he knew about healthy eating.
“I shifted from being an epidemiologist conducting population studies to providing accurate advice to individuals. And that first person was me.”
Spector found that his high-carb breakfast of granola with skim milk and orange juice was “super unhealthy for me: it left me exhausted and tired and probably made me hungrier. So I ate too much, slowly gaining a kilo a year.”
Nowadays he doesn’t eat until 11 a.m., when he eats kefir and full-fat yogurt with berries, nuts and seeds, with a plant-based meal such as curry for lunch.
Wolf studied physics at Oxford and worked for technology companies for twenty years. He gained experience with artificial intelligence in his previous job as Chief Product Officer at Criteo, one of Europe’s largest technology companies. He says he overcame food intolerances by cutting out highly processed carbohydrates and switching to a plant-based, high-fiber diet. “I’m hungry for breakfast, so yogurt and nuts aren’t enough. I still have some bread, but I have rye bread and often avocado.”
Zoe’s third co-founder and chairman is George Hadjigeorgiou, an engineer from Greece. He founded the largest online food takeaway company in Greece, e-food.gr, which was sold to German Delivery Hero in 2015. He had high cholesterol, but lowered it by 40% by switching to berries, nuts and seeds, fish and legumes. and extra virgin olive oil that he brings from Crete every year.
He and Wolf had worked together at Yahoo. After hearing a public lecture from Spector about the twin study, they decided to create a personalized pitch to food companies.
“I said we really needed to do a big scientific project to prove this,” Spector says. “And you’re going to raise a few million to make this happen. I really wasn’t sure if I would see them again.”
But they raised €7 million in seed money and Zoe was born in 2017. Then came Covid. The trio decided to pause the project in March 2020 and launched a Covid symptom tracker app subsequently had more than 4 million users.
“It really proved that if you can get millions of people participating in science at home, you can do better science than has ever been done in labs,” Wolf says.
from Spector five top nutrition tips include eating a plant-based diet, fasting overnight and reducing ultra-processed foods – from 60% in the UK to almost 15% in the Mediterranean countries.
Ten years ago his son Tom, then a student at Aberystwyth University, volunteered as an experiment Eat only McDonald’s food for ten days. Tom reported feeling well for three days but then became lethargic and unwell. Although he didn’t gain weight, Spector says, “what was really concerning was that he lost about 30% of his microbial species, and even now his microbiome is below average.”
Zoe has identified almost 5,000 never-before-seen gut bacteria. Of these, across all 35,000 participants, 100 were strongly associated with health – 50 good and 50 bad. This is entered into the app and members’ personal scores are updated over time.
Some doctors have reportedly said that personalized nutrition apps can cause unnecessary worries for healthy people. Zoe says it provides “evidence-based advice and a clinically validated personalized nutrition program designed to improve health”.
The company will announce the results of its recent publication this week Method studyThis showed that people who followed Zoë’s personalized program for 18 weeks saw improvements compared to a group that received standard nutritional advice. The Zoe group lost weight and had a healthier body composition, improved blood fats and a better gut microbiome.
Critics had said that before that the process was flawed because people knew which group they belonged to. Among those critics is the former Deborah Cohen News night health editor, and Margaret McCartney, a GP and writer, who wrote on UnHerd: “Zoe is just one of hundreds of apps that measure our biometrics in this age of the quantified self. But…are these promises of personalized advice based on sound medicine?”
A recent surge in demand means new Zoe users may have to wait several weeks for their test kit. It has attracted $101 million in investments from various venture capital firms to date. Dragon’s Lair Steven Bartlett and NFL champions Eli Manning and Ositadimma “Osi” Umenyiora.
Results filed with Companies House, Zoe shows a pre-tax loss of £10.5m in the year to the end of August 2022, up from £7.9m the year before, despite a £1.8m increase in turnover to £5.9 million, as distribution and sales costs also rose dramatically.
Joining the program isn’t cheap: a starter pack costs £299.99 and membership starts at £24.99 per month. The company says the price will drop as lab tests become cheaper, and is offering free health advice via podcasts in the meantime. It also hopes to work with the NHS in the future and says its membership database has been anonymised. And data is not shared with health insurers.
“We know from our Covid discussions how painful it is to reach agreement on anything within the NHS, but all three of us would like to see the NHS adopt the Zoe programs in some form,” says Spector.
CV
Tim Spector
Age 65
Family Married with two children.
Education University College School, London; St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School, London.
Last holiday Istria, Croatia.
The best advice he’s received “Make sure you enjoy what you do, otherwise life will be boring.”
Biggest career mistake “I applied for really bad jobs, but luckily I never got them.”
Words he uses too much “Amazing” and “complete nonsense”.
How he relaxes Sports, cooking, red wine and meditation.
Jonathan Wolf
Age 48
Family Married with two children.
Education Physics at the University of Oxford.
Last holiday Italy.
The best advice he’s received “Do something you love.”
Biggest career mistake “When I joined a dotcom company in March 2000, the day the Nasdaq bubble burst. At the time it was worth billions, and eight months later I was fired.”
Words he uses too muchs “Great”, “useful advice”.
How he relaxes “I am known within the company for my need for a nice cup of tea at regular intervals.”
George Hadjigeorgiou
Age 48
Family Married with two children.
Education Anatolia College, Greece. Studied mechanical engineering at Tufts University, Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Last holiday Skopelos, Greece.
Best advice he is given “Truth is the beginning of great results.”
Biggest career mistake “Working for large companies longer than necessary.”
Words he uses too much “Focus”, “orthogonal”, “double click”.
How he relaxes “Going to a musical with my family, tennis, karaoke – if you can tolerate my terrible singing.”