Personalised nutrition: the next step for health and life insurers

Health and life insurers should form partnerships with companies that provide personalised nutrition advice, to help improve their customers’ health and wellbeing.

Personalised diets and nutrition plans are a growing service area globally, facilitated by advancing technology in addition to growing interest in health and wellbeing among consumers.

Large companies such as Nestlé have joined the trend in offering personalised nutrition services, alongside a host of smaller start-ups such as VitaScan and Viome.

Such propositions generally provide consumers with home-testing kits to analyse their DNA, blood, and/or stool samples in order to offer personalised advice about what they should or should not be eating.

This is a significant opportunity for life and health insurers. Policy personalisation is currently focused around fitness, using wearables to track activity. But in future insurers could also look to personalise propositions based on diet and nutrition.

Even if insurers do not want to base insurance premiums on diet, they could still form partnerships to offer nutrition services. Insurers should be moving towards preventing illness and injury and encouraging their customers to lead healthier lifestyles, with personal nutrition advice being complementary.

The question is – which will be the first insurer to do so?

Vitality could be well positioned to offer personalised nutrition. It already has a number of partnerships to support customers in improving their health and lifestyles. For instance it has a partnership with the meditation and mental health app Headspace, in addition to a stop-smoking program by Allen Carr.

A personalised nutrition service would also sit well alongside Vitality’s partnerships with Weight Watchers and Ocado. Helping individuals understand what they should eat will help them to lose weight and become healthier generally. A personalised diet plan could also be linked to grocer Ocado, helping consumers buy the right types of foods.

Health and life insurers should begin to tap into consumers’ desire to improve their health and wellbeing by providing added-value services such as personalised nutrition.

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