Saks Snacks #19: Movement is Medicine, Mindfulness Mergers | Wild - Training App for Women

Tokenizing a Community | Calm Acquires Ripple | Glucose Goddess

Hi friends from Denver and welcome to the 11 new Saks’ Snackers 👋.

If you’re new to Saks’ Snacks, I’m Adam Saks, a Digital Strategy Lead at Google, and a writer focused on the emerging intersections of health and technology.

Reading is and should be fun. I encourage you to explore what interests you most.

Today’s content: 1: 🥑 Snacks of the Week (x5) | 2: 💪 Startup of the Week - Wild.ai 3: 🤝🧘Mindfulness Mergers | 4:🎙️ Pod of the Week - Tokenizing Communities 5:💥 Spark Moment - writing online led me to the Glucose Goddess

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#1 🥑 Snacks of the week x 4

1. The Church of Wellness (Fitt Insider): With a slow shift away from organized faith, >60% of young adults reporting feeling “serious loneliness”, and a new generational focus on holistic wellness, where do we turn?

   I remain optimistic that movement is medicine. Not to be misconstrued with running marathons, being jacked or having a 6-pack, but I firmly believe our sedentary nature is a foundational element worth chipping away at.

Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab

During a health symposium @StanfordMed I learned from a cardiologist colleague that even if we get our 180min of zone 2 cardio per week, the benefits are largely (or entirely) erased by sitting >5 hours per day. Solution: standing (1:1 ratio w/sitting) & 3-4, 10min walks per day.

2. Is exercise medicine? We’ll have more and more proof that the answer is yes, and I plan on covering it more. Here’s what the science says, analyzing exercise’s effects on symptoms of anxiety in primary care patients.

Image Source Science Direct, found through Marco Altini on Twitter

3. A glimpse into futuristic wearable use cases: Can wearables detect language without any actual speaking? Check out SpeeChin, a wearable smart necklace that claims it can measure “silent speech recognition”.

Utilizing machine-learning-based algorithms, the device is able to determine which commands its wearer is silently speaking, based on chin movements.

SpeeChin uses a necklace-mounted IR (infrared) camera that can capture the movement of the chin from underneath the chin.

This tech is in early stages but I selfishly had to share this interesting project being developed at my alma mater Cornell! For context, the smart necklace can recognize 54 English and 44 Chinese silent speech commands).

4. Healthcare: from facility to home: McKinsey suggests that $265 billion of care delivery services could move into the home by 2025, without a reduction in quality or access. A variety of pandemic-related factors have created an opportunity to rethink care at home.

A look at “digitally enabled interventions”

The chart below shows some of the services that could be shifted to home. (based on surveyed physicians that serve Medicare + MA populations).

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#2 Startup of the Week - Wild.ai

Wild.ai is a science-backed training app for women that helps users learn how their physiological needs change across cycles and life stages.

In FittInsider’s article, CEO Hélène Guillaume Pabis discusses misconceptions around a woman’s body, developing a female-focused solution in a men-dominated industry, and how data is unlocking female performance.

Source: Wild.ai website

While all products, apps, and wearables seem to serve men well, Wild.AI interprets data through a female lens. Your readiness score is calculated by the combination of your wearable data (like Ōura, Garmin, or Fitbit) and daily subjective check-ins (symptoms, stress, periods, etc.).

Wild offers nutritional adjustments around training, based on hormonal fluctuations, helping users find patterns in data and learn to mitigate symptoms. The article shared tangible differences with interpreting men and women’s data…

As a man, if your body temperature goes up, it could mean you’re sick. As a woman, it may mean you ovulate (optimal moment of the cycle to hit high intensity, opposite of men), you’re pregnant, or have perimenopausal symptoms.

What other women’s health startups should be on our radar?

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#3 🤝🧘Mindfulness Mergers

Let’s check out 2 mindfulness mergers from the last 2 months, starting with Calm, the first “unicorn” mental health-oriented startup.

1. Relaxation / meditation app Calm acquired Ripple Health Group, a health care tech company that connects users with proper healthcare options.

A look at Calm app screens on iPhone (Source: Calm)

Calm will leverage Ripple to build out a new employer (B2B) offering, Calm Health. In Edition 8, we explored Headspace + Ginger’s merger. This is another story of a large private company (last valued at $2B in December 2020) looking to enter the employer market. Calm already had a b2b offering, Calm for Business, but looks to launch Calm Health soon to support mental health across the care spectrum.

2. Two months ago, publicly traded Gaia Inc., a streaming video platform that includes yoga, acquired Yoga International, a digital media publication. It has a digital-only platform and community of paid, global subscribers. The acquisition adds 4,000 hours of unique yoga content to Gaia’s library in addition to the 565,000 monthly unique visitors they’ll get to leverage.

Yoga International is highly regarded as an authentic voice of yoga in the West. Of its 560k+ monthly visitors, over 91% of this traffic comes direct or via search.

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#4 🎙️ Pod of the Week - 1 of 2022’s listens

Podcasts can be helpful first mediums to learn about less familiar concepts. I’ve found it helpful to listen and fill my learning gaps with focused reading, researching/googling around and being resourceful. I found this conversation between David Spinks and Jeremiah helpful.

1. How to Tokenize your Community with Jeremiah Owyang

   Here’s my take. Looking forward, we’ll see established communities consider tokenizing their community, whether it’s a reward-mechanism or caused by FOMO. Regardless of reason, communities should only consider this if they’re comfortable with some of the consequences listed below and have a clearly aligned vision and mission to accomplish their most important tasks.

   It’s important to always question: why web3?… Some takeaways below 👇

   • Tit for tat implications of tokenization: Once you tokenize, all relationships change. (Between community members, between the members & the community leader).

     • This might introduce a “I do this for that” mentality, a sense of entitlement/ownership.

   • Market norms vs. social norms: Pulling lessons from Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, you can strategize and predict motivators within communities and how they fundamentally change

     • Introducing market norms can replace social norms, as proven by Ariely’s study.

   • Risks/downsides of tokenizing: There are several risks and potential downsides of tokenizing a community.

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#5💥 Spark Moment of the Week

I’m a nerd at heart - I love learning.

This September ‘21 tweet turned out way truer than I could have imagined…

Adam Saks - Denver @AdamLSaks

1️⃣ Learn in public. It's a forcing function to: 🌐 Build a network 🤓 Become an intellectual lighthouse for likeminded people 💡 Force your brain to always be on

Writing has been a beautiful medium that’s turned me into an intellectual lighthouse for likeminded people, and I love it.

Earlier this week, I was catching up with a friend/colleague (PM in the health space who I met through Twitter). As we were wrapping up, he excitedly asked a question that made me laugh out loud.

2/14/22 Daily Moment Entry: 30 minutes into a catch-up convo with 👨, he excitedly asked “Have you seen the Glucose goddess’ instagram?” and I couldn’t help myself from cracking up at how “gen-z / millennial” it sounded.

Her page was awesome though - she’s a biochemist sharing informative “easy health hacks” and helpful synthesized takeaways with great visuals.

It’s going down as a daily moment because he made a powerful comment that “women are so notoriously excluded from CGM’s and health optimizing from an objective perspective”, which I view as a truth I want to explore more.

If you’re curious about what the content looks like - here’s a visual showing how a Vanilla latte during PMS and a Vanilla latte + walk during PMS compared.

glucosegoddess

A post shared by Jessie Inchauspé (@glucosegoddess)

The caption further explains:

During PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome), we're more prone to big glucose spikes and to cravings cycles. So it's extra important to use some of my hacks to nip those cravings in the bud!

I hope and fully expect VC funding for these innovative women’s health solutions to continue growing. I look forward to covering, supporting, and contributing to the startups, ideas that are focusing on modern health tools for women.

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✨Endnote

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Have a creative week,

Adam