After reading this post on Springwise (a site/feed I enjoy very much), I realized that I needed to post another orphaned idea.

People have seen a number of “prepared food” offerings, where a company delivers a bunch of meals to you or your family that are designed (usually) to control portions and assist in weight-loss.

The story on leViv is different because the company takes a slightly different take, focusing on specific health “issues” and producing five separate programs, one for each.

At one spot, the company makes a reference to “evidence-based recommendations,” which almost makes me think that this idea is close to being adopted.

The idea that I had, building off of 23andme’s stated goal of continuously improving their product by reference to the evolving scientific literature connecting SNPs and other genetic sequences to specific diseases or other traits, was to develop a private chef company (what I called these prepared food delivery companies in the past) that would take a similar approach by integrating nutritional research into changing and updated recipes targeted to specific client attributes. So, a study that says 1/3 cup of blueberries a week reduces heart disease risk for 40 year-old male nonsmokers means that I would get a slightly different menu. The integration of the two businesses, genetic information about potential predilections for certain diseases along with nutrition guidelines related to those risks, would lead to perhaps not genomic medicine but almost certainly to genomic nutrition.

After all, there are very few nutrition studies that talk about taking in large amounts of dangerous things like fat and sugar, so it’s probably a riskless improvement to diet planning that can only help prevent possible medical problems.

Clearly, the more individualized the assessment and menu, the more complicated this would be. However, the true private chef could use this sort of information to create an optimized shopping list and menu for a family to serve as the palette on which to base his or her creations.

I’d be delighted to hear from the folks at leViv about their reaction to my idea, and even more delighted to read more about how they are actually constructing menus for their five plans.