Is Lumen The Future Of Personalised Nutrition?

LONDON, United Kingdom — Lumen, a hand-held metabolic tracking device that debuted at the annual Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, has launched in the UK, as demand for health optimising products and services continues to rise.

The cutting edge device and app, which measures the user’s metabolism in a single breath to provide daily personalised nutrition based metabolic data, aims to empower individuals to make smarter decisions about their nutrition and lifestyle. It joins a wave of disruptive startups including Levels, WHOOP and Vessel, targeting consumers looking to ‘hack their health’ in order to unlock higher levels of performance. And it’s already won the seal of approval from wearable giant Garmin, which recently announced integration with its Connect IQ device.

“With Lumen, we are bringing scientifically rigorous insight into personal metabolism for the very first time,” explained co-founders Michal and Merav Mor.  

“We’re not only allowing anyone at home to measure how efficient their body is at burning calories but also sharing research-driven recommendations on how they can reach their health and fitness goals faster.” 

By opening up accessibility to insights that were previously only possible to gain through an hour-long lab test, Lumen hopes its £299 device can become the go-to method for those looking to understand the real-time fuel source of their body-fats or carbs. It believes, in breaking down barriers to entry, it can revolutionise the way people approach weight loss, fitness and healthy nutrition decision making. 

Having already raised over $17 million via a $2.3 million IndieGoGo campaign in 2018, which attracted nearly 10,000 backers, as well as additional venture capital from H&H Group, Disruptive Technologies Venture Capital and more, the startup has certainly made an impression with investors. Now it plans on capturing the attention of the mainstream market.

Here, CEO Daniel Tal discusses how Lumen is shifting the approach towards health and wellness, why data is so important, and how Lumen fits into an increasingly hyper-connected future……..

What was the vision behind Lumen?

The original vision behind Lumen came from co-founders Michal and Merav Mor when they were embarking on their own nutritional journey while training to compete in the Ironman race. 

It was hard for them to find anything that could help them understand if they needed more carbs to fuel up, or if their bodies were sufficiently charged. 

Today, Lumen is for everyone to fuel their day or their workout by understanding the real-time fuel source of their body — fats or carbs. 

How is Lumen addressing current consumer pain-points?

Lumen’s vision is to allow people to manage their nutrition and lifestyle based on a scientific method calculating their metabolic fuel. We believe that by doing so, this will help people reach their goals — whether that’s weight loss, improving athletic performance, or staying away from diabetes. We’re enabling people to make smarter decisions based on their unique metabolism. 

By bringing accountability through data, Lumen puts a different goal in front of the user — if you improve your metabolic health and you pay attention to what you are eating, you can steadily work towards your goals holistically. 

It’s about shifting the perspective towards health and the rest follows. 

Is Lumen The Future Of Personalised Nutrition?
Image: Lumen
Who is the typical Lumen customer?

Our consumers range from athletes all the way to people wanting to make a lifestyle change. 

On one end of the spectrum, we have athletes like professional swimmer Michael Andrew or world-class cyclist Chris Froome who want to fuel their performance in real-time and with precision. On the other end, we also have people who are conscious about their nutrition and lead normal lifestyles, who want to better understand how their body responds to food. 

How does Lumen encourage sustainable and relevant lifestyle changes?

Lumen provides people with guidance to make lifestyle changes that can be applied for years, not weeks. The changes users make are small adjustments to their carb intake as Lumen guides them towards healthier options and food portions that fit their body’s metabolic needs. 

Lumen focuses on nutrition and understanding first. Then it taps into other lifestyle factors such as sleep, stress and activity levels to show how paying attention to your lifestyle holistically can boost your metabolism.

Essentially, we want users to think of Lumen as part of their morning routine like using a toothbrush but instead, they’re cleaning up their metabolism. 

What gap is Lumen filling?

Even before this pandemic people wanted to know what was happening with them physiologically to act in a more personalised way. But if you think about all the data we have regarding our health, nutrition is an area where there is still so much to explore. 

The potential for more awareness on the impact of what we eat in a real-time and in a data-centred way is endless. 

Lumen is focused on metabolism and nutrition — our goal is to use our data insights to help our users get clarity on this very mysterious part of our lives.

What does the future of wellness look like, and where does Lumen fit in?

Eventually, everything about our health and fitness will be hyper-connected. 

Today, we outsource everything. We buy groceries online, we have apps to track sleep, and we are the main hero in this hyper-connected ecosystem. Our insurance policies, our stationary bikes — eventually they will all connect into our data-run fitness and wellness lifestyles and everything will be integrated.

It is up to us to move towards a clear and focused goal to leverage this level of integration. 

Lumen will continue to promote metabolic health which will be the compass that guides all of our health data and that drives our daily exercise and nutrition decisions. By doing so, we hope to positively impact the wellness and preventative health spheres with an innovative approach to empower consumers to lead sustainable and healthy lifestyles.