World-class startups solve an important problem for people at scale. And there are very few problems as big and important as the one Nourish is solving.
Nourish is working on the most important problem in the world — health. If humans are not healthy, nothing else matters. Our species cannot flourish and advance if we are not healthy. Health is more important than wealth. And while our country is wealthier than it has ever been, we are not healthy. In fact, by some measures, the US is the sickest it has ever been. This is a crisis.
We spend 20% of GDP — over $4T per year — on healthcare and yet life expectancy is going down and chronic conditions are at an all-time high. We are spending more for less. Progress is happening in many sectors, but not healthcare — healthcare is moving backward. We are less healthy than our grandparents. The goal of Nourish is to reverse this trend and solve the healthcare crisis so that our grandchildren are healthier than we are and have more affordable care.
How did we get here? While there are many things wrong with American healthcare, the two most important problems are lack of access to (and focus on) preventive care and poor system incentives. Unhealthy lifestyle (especially nutrition) is upstream of the majority of cost / death in the system, and everyone in the system makes more money when people are sicker. To achieve a different result, we need a different approach.
<aside> 💡 Americans are struggling to eat well and it is making them sick. Nourish is improving people’s health by making it easy to eat well. We want to help one hundred million people live healthier, longer lives using Nourish.
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The best place to begin attacking this large problem is with nutrition.
Our healthcare crisis is a chronic condition crisis, which is itself a nutrition crisis: 150M Americans have a nutrition-related chronic disease, 85% of healthcare costs come from nutrition-related chronic disease, and almost 1M Americans die each year due to nutrition-related chronic disease. Nutrition is clearly hard — people are struggling to eat well and it is making them sick:
What the system has historically done — told people to diet and exercise — hasn’t worked. Nourish wants to turn food from the problem to the solution — food can be medicine. Better healthcare starts with preventive healthcare, and nutrition is the tip of the spear.
Registered Dietitians are trained to simplify nutrition and help people eat well. And RDs are proven to be highly effective at preventing, managing, and treating the most prevalent, costly, and deadly chronic conditions. For that reason, they are generously covered by commercial health insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid: most Americans have insurance that covers working with an RD. But fewer than 1% of people eligible to use an RD actually engage with one. The top reasons are awareness and access. People don’t know about this benefit, and even if they do, historically it has been hard to access this type of care because most RDs don’t take insurance due to the administrative burden of working with insurance. This access is particularly limited amongst lower-income populations that are disproportionately affected by poor nutrition.
Our platform makes it easy and affordable to improve your nutrition and health outcomes and connect with a dietitian, software, and food that is right for you (94% of our patients are fully covered by insurance and pay nothing out of pocket).
US healthcare is fundamentally broken. Ultimately, our success in achieving our mission is an equation with two variables: how many people we help (Scale), and how much we help those people (Outcomes). We are no better than the outcomes we deliver with our “product” (both quantitative and qualitative) and how many people are able to to use our product.
<aside> 👉 Nourish Success = Scale (# of Patients Served) x Outcomes (Quality of Healthcare)
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For more info, check out our website: