Greg Horn’s business of nutrition: NBJ Summit 2024

The NBJ Summit, the nutrition industry’s annual CEO retreat, convened from July 29 to August 1 at the beautiful Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. Attendees rub shoulders with their peers; enjoy the cool ocean breezes (and this year a boat ride to Catalina Island); network; and attend educational content sessions that give them data, trend and management insights that are tuned to be relevant to their businesses.

This year’s Summit was the best so far, and I’m not just saying that because I was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award presented at the event. Nutrition Business Journal’s Content & Insights Director Bill Giebler and Market Research Analyst Erika Craft shared not just the latest trend and market data, but also market manifestation examples of trends via the products that brought them to life. In case you missed it, NBJ shared 2024 estimates of year-over-year growth in the industry.

Brain Health tops the list at 7.7%, followed by women’s health/menopause, healthy aging, mental health/mood, fitness and energy, and weight management and gut health. The latter category is growing at 6%, a full point above overall industry growth.

William Hood, managing director and founding partner of William Hood & Company, an investment bank and advisor in the health and wellness industry, gave his most insightful annual assessment to date of what’s happening now in mergers and acquisitions of health and wellness companies, and the dynamics and psychology of the industry’s most desirable buyers. Headlines: Health and wellness is still a highly desirable space as consumers prioritize health and wellness; deal flow is returning although still below 2021 levels; fundamentals are essential for building value (earnings matter!); and strategics are on the hunt for companies that can advance their strategies.

One of the marquis transactions of 2023, Bonafide Health’s $425 million sale to Pharmavite, was spotlighted in a fireside-chat-turned-masterclass on the anatomy of a successful acquisition. Jill Staib, managing director and partner of William Hood & Company, hosted both the buyer, Pharmavite’s Tobe Cohen, and the seller, Bonafide’s Mike Satow, in an engaging discussion on both the deal dynamics and post-acquisition integration and how it is helping Pharmavite fulfill its long-term strategy. Cohen’s narrative of the strategic thinking behind the deal and the vibrant women’s health franchise being assembled was particularly insightful and was a case study in doing M&A right.

NBJ co-founder Tom Aarts led a series of sessions on artificial intelligence and its potential impact on the nutrition industry. This series included a talk by Cepham President Anand Swaroop, Ph.D., on the possibilities for a whole new set of validated botanical ingredients, and one by Steve Brown (chief AI officer of Abundance360 and PHD Ventures) that featured entertaining AI-fueled avatars of Socrates, Aristotle and Tom Aarts as talking heads spouting sometimes wise and sometimes conflicting opinions about topics like cognitive health supplements. It was clear from these talks both that AI is not quite as intimidating now as we may have thought — and that as it gets better, it will revolutionize the way we work, live and discover.

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) is the statute that established the supplement industry’s regulatory environment. DSHEA turned 30 years old this year, and Jessica Rubino — vice president of content at New Hope Network — and the NBJ team put together an engaging and informative video on the history and implications of DSHEA.

The Summit always features some personal development speakers. On the surface, this year’s keynote by New York Times best-selling author Marcus Buckingham called “Leading with Love” initially sounded a bit squishy for the CEO crowd, myself included. But wow, was I wrong. It turns out he is a hard-nosed data scientist originally from Gallup, and his insights were stunning and highly relevant to anyone with clients or customers. Of the many insights shared, the most powerful one to me is how consumer data is evaluated and acted on in companies that do this kind of research. We’ve all taken surveys that ask, “On a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is ‘absolutely’ and 1 is ‘absolutely not…’” Most companies try to turn 2’s into 3’s or aggregate a “top two” box score from 4’s and 5’s. These are mistakes I will never make again after listening to Buckingham. It turns out that there is almost no emotional difference between a 2, 3 or a 4 when solving for commitment to a brand or a product. All that matter are 5’s if you are building a breakthrough company or brand, and that is what he means by love. I’m in love with that idea.

[On July 31, during the NBJ Summit in Palos Verdes, Calif., the author of this column, Greg Horn, was presented with the NBJ Lifetime Achievement Award. “Greg Horn’s career has been truly amazing. He started out as one of the youngest CEOs in our industry running GNC,” said Tom Aarts, founder and co-chair of NBJ Summit. Pictured above from left to right: NBJ's Bill Giebler, Greg Horn, Tom Aarts and New Hope Network's Jessica Rubino]

Pam Peeke from The Peeke Performance Center for Healthy Living is a brilliant medical doctor, author, scientist and athlete. She gave a riveting talk providing insights into the women’s health revolution and why it matters so much. She talked about how life stages impact a women’s nutrition needs, and the need for more research and specific solutions that can effectively address health issues where there are not necessarily great pharmaceutical or other solutions. Peppered with stories from her days as a young researcher and emergency medical physician, Peeke wove an inspiring narrative for the potential of natural solutions for women’s health.

The most thought-provoking topics at the 2024 NBJ Summit were on the ways that new technologies, societal forces and consumer preferences are shaping our industry. Fresh from the discussions, the following is my synthesis of opinions informed by the discussions.

Over the next 10 years, five macro themes will shape our lives and our businesses:

First, computers and software are going to keep getting better. Computational power will continue growing exponentially — and the software algorithms we know as machine learning and AI will tap into that power, build off an increasingly higher base and continue to improve.

Artificial intelligence is already revolutionizing the pharmaceutical field, and not just on the drug discovery front. AI is finding new connections between existing drugs and metabolic pathways that can benefit health. And it’s happening fast. It can’t be too long before AI turns its sights on the vast treasure trove of nutrition — by far the largest molecular input into the human body each day.

This will:

• Yield powerful new insights for the connections between nutrition and health.

• Help discover and validate a whole host of new bioactive ingredients.

• Find new applications for the current set of compounds.

• Reveal the potential to literally make food our medicine.

• Shed new light on highly complex fields like nutrigenomics — the interaction of nutrition and our genes and our various microbiomes.

• Ultimately usher in a new era of precise personalized nutrition.

Second, less invasive and more accurate measuring devices will provide new and almost continuous monitoring of our vital signs and biomarkers. Right now, we can measure heart rate, variability, breathing rate, blood oxygenation and even how well we sleep … all through a wristwatch. Companies like EyePromise are even looking at the eye macula as a window to brain health with its new device. These measurement tools are about to get a LOT better, and we can expect much improved markers to be part of our everyday life, providing an almost continuous health checkup. This continuous monitoring and the insights it provides will be a major enabler of precision nutrition therapies and preventive approaches to nutrition.

As we make stronger and more direct connections between the specifics of what we put into our bodies and our health status, the lines between food and medicine will likely blur. This will open up possibilities for nutrition to serve as a primary or adjuvant therapy for some of the world’s most prevalent health problems that we know are heavily influenced by nutrition.

Paired with better measures that provide proof of efficacy at the individual level, health care will eventually have to take notice of the power of nutrition and actually pay for therapies with proven benefits. Imagine prescribed supplements or even meal plans that tie to specific measures of your health. Millions of people could reap the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, the keto diet, fast-mimicking diet, high satiety GLP-1 diet and more — with prescribed, monitored-for benefits and at least partially paid for by one’s health plan.

Third, we are already in a new era of discovery of bioactive nutrition ingredients and the delivery systems that can make them even more effective. Plants alone produce over 10 million distinct compounds, and we have only identified and characterized about 100,000 of them — about 1%. Companies like Brightseed Bio are already applying AI to model what else from the 99% of plant compounds could be bioactive and what biological mechanisms they can activate. The firm has already identified and validated over 300 new compounds that are totally new to the industry. And that’s just from plants. I’m sure my friends Sandra Carter from M2 and Paul Stamets from Fungi Perfecti would say there is even more potential in compounds found in mushrooms. There is intriguing emerging research from across the industry on bioactive nutrition compounds that act as “master switches” in regulating biological processes like fat deposition, muscle growth and blood sugar metabolism.

New science is also revealing vastly improved ways to deliver bioactive compounds through the gut, into the bloodstream and to tissues where they can have the most benefit. Many of these are being adapted from the drug delivery field, where lives are literally at stake in the short term. There has historically been about a 20-year lag between when technologies are used to enhance drug delivery and when they are adapted for the food and nutrition business. For example, liposomes were used in the drug field in the 1980s. That gap is rapidly closing as companies like Nulixir are adapting current drug delivery technologies to nutrition in real time. This means making nutritional bioactives much more effective in much smaller doses, expanding the toolbox of effective nutritional ingredients.

This new era of discovery in nutrition is being enhanced by an accelerating body of published preclinical and human clinical studies that are validating the impact of new compounds on human health conditions. The growing body of research builds on past knowledge while providing new insights on compounds and their health benefits. This is the base material that becomes input for ever more powerful computer systems to analyze, creating a virtuous cycle.

Fourth, dramatically better computing power and software will be aimed at the highly complex sets of biological interactions known as -omics (genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, nutrigenomics, etc.) and the various microbiomes in the human body, and how they can be influenced and interact to maintain and improve health. These are mind-bogglingly complex systems and interactions that we are only just starting to even be able to describe, but they define our biology and ultimately our health. And once again, nutrition is the largest daily input influencing how they function. Models of these complex interactions, eventually down to the level of the individual, will create a leap in our understanding of how to influence our health with nutrition that will be the equivalent of going from the telegraph to an iPhone. This will happen in the next 10 years.

I am especially interested in nutrigenomics, the interaction between nutrition and the activation or deactivation of specific gene pathways. This has so much potential in part because the early science in this field tells us that only very tiny amounts of nutritional compounds are required to influence these pathways. Genes are the most powerful force in shaping our health, and harnessing their power and influencing it with nutrition is a next great frontier for our field. Researchers in Switzerland and elsewhere are already in the clinic validating with nutrigenomic-activating micronutrient solutions that hold tremendous promise for human health. I can’t wait to see how this field evolves.

Fifth, the previous four themes — smarter computers, better metrics, a bigger toolbox of bioactives and advanced insights into -omic interactions — come together to herald in a whole new era of personalized nutrition with a degree of precision and tunability with feedback that we can only imagine today. Rich people and performance athletes will probably be the first to benefit, but at scale, this set of advancements can benefit tens of millions of people and help manage (and even prevent) the largest nutritionally-addressable health conditions facing humanity. Conditions like diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, obesity and other major killers that are well known to be highly impacted by nutrition. The democratization of information made possible by the internet will enhance accessibility for these breakthroughs.

Over the past 10 years or so, we have validated a few bioactive ingredients that can enhance cellular energy in the mitochondria, renew cells by replacing senescent or lazy ones via autophagy, and improve cellular health through enhanced detoxification of free radicals. But we are only at the beginning, and the convergence of advances will teach us how to better use what we have and also tell us whether these are even the best tools at our disposal — I’m sure we will find better ones!  Nutritional and lifestyle protocols are coming that will help you look, feel and perform better every day more efficiently, so you don’t have to take 50 pills a day and just hope for the best. You will know what’s working and be able to make adjustments in real time to reap real benefits in health span. It will be like having a continuous clinical trial of one going at all times, and the benefits will be very tangible.

It's an exciting time to be in the nutrition industry.

Thanks for reading.