As the founder and CEO of Diet ID, Inc., I have a personal, proprietary interest in this company that offers—among other things—the first truly fundamental advance in dietary assessment methods in decades. Not only that, but I feel so strongly about the value proposition of making diet the vital sign it deserves to be, I have made this effort the signature focus of this phase of my career.
I trust that will suffice for a blunt, complete, and fully transparent disclosure statement. I tell it because it is right to do so, and also because it hints at the prospect of me having a hammer, and being prone to see nails. Indeed I do, and indeed I am.
The nails that interest me are those involved—figuratively at least—in constructing new and better ways to advance human health, my life’s work.
Heart disease remains the leading, proximal cause of premature death among men and women alike in the U.S. Diet is firmly established now as the leading root cause of premature death. Combine these in the only way that logic allows, and you get this conclusion: diet is the leading cause of the heart disease that is the leading reason people die all too young, all too often.
The story is even one step worse than that, with recent evidence that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—in the form of every pharmacologic and interventional advance we can muster—are not enough to forestall the damage that misguided diet and lifestyle are doing. Rates of heart disease and related death are no longer falling. We are starting to lose the war.
This is not just unnecessary, but very nearly absurd. We have known the basic changes in diet and lifestyle required to eliminate 80% or more of all heart disease for over a quarter century. Then, there is the signature work of my friend and colleague, Dr. Dean Ornish. Dr. Ornish established the capacity of diet and lifestyle “rehab,” when robust enough, to reverse coronary atherosclerosis outright. After years of effort, the result of this groundbreaking research is a heart disease reversal program reimbursable by the federal government as an alternative to coronary bypass surgery. That is real rehabilitation.
My team at Diet ID has begun to license to cardiac rehab programs the capacity to measure, and thus effectively manage, diet quality routinely—we have discovered that few such programs are doing so already. This is less surprising than it may seem, as the tools currently sanctioned for that job are of the conventional variety: effort, time, and memory dependent. They are not notably user friendly, and thus, tend to dissuade routine use.
In contrast, Diet ID is an entirely new approach, depending not at all on the recollection of detail and relying instead on a native human aptitude: pattern recognition. This entirely new approach can assess diet comprehensively—type, quality, nutrient intake levels, and more—in an all-but-effortless 60 seconds.
Diet quality must be meaningfully and reliably rehabilitated for cardiac rehab to live up to the promise of its name. There is no meaningful rehabilitation of cardiovascular risk absent the genuine rehabilitation of the typically awful American diet.
We tend only ever to manage well what we measure routinely, and we have a new and better way to measure diet. Further, because the Diet ID platform has stratified a wide range of diets into objective tiers of quality using a powerful measure directly correlated with all-cause mortality and risk of chronic disease, the platform offers the opportunity to personalize the rehabilitative journey. There is just one general theme of eating well, but there are many variants on that theme. By pointing to the top-tier versions of them all, Diet ID makes it possible to rehab diet robustly, while still honoring personal preference. After all, the best dietary approach for any health goal must be one… that you are actually willing to adopt and maintain.
So it is that the hammers and nails I tend to favor are those used in constructing new and much-needed innovations. But I see other hammers and nails, too.
We are, as noted, losing the war to prevent, and rehabilitate, cardiovascular disease at scale. All too often, and for those succumbing all too early, the status quo for our culture is pounding nails... into coffins.
-fin
Dr. David L. Katz; founder/CEO, Diet ID Inc.
