From cryotherapy to hot yoga to salt rooms and various cleanses, there’s a ton of options out there in the world of wellness, but that’s not to say they’re for everyone. You might have tried keto and it’s simply not your thing, while your bestie raves about it — the point is there’s truly no one-size-fits-all approach for health and wellness. We did a bit of investigating into personalized wellness, a trend that’s become more popular in recent times and isn’t going anywhere in 2020, so read on below to get familiarized!
What is personalized wellness?
There’s no doubt that customization abounds across today’s marketplace. As this industry report notes, “You can begin your day scrolling through a newsfeed based on your preferred outlets and reading history, make a trip to your closet for a stylist-recommended outfit per your online style profile and then, finally, head out the door with a personalized playlist piping through your headphones. And when it comes to health and wellness, customization continues. To be sure, it’s no fleeting fad.”
The report goes on to highlight personalized wellness as a sweeping and likely lasting shift from the traditional, “top-down, one-size-fits-all nature of Western medicine,” adding that it’s essentially a means of providing individually informed and precisely tailored care to each individual.
Products
One sector that’s experiencing large growth in the realm of personalized wellness is consumer products. Wearable trackers like Apple and Fitbit “have led the way to the discovery of the “quantifiable self,” a term referring to the vast array of numerical health measurements that can be recorded and analyzed from an individual at any given time via wearable technologies.” This particular industry of wearable tech has absolutely no signs of slowing; in fact, it has been estimated to reach a whopping $54 billion by 2023, as more and more consumers are interested in tracking personalized health data like heart rate or movement. Aside from trackers, companies ranging from clothing to makeup to vitamins have also delved into the world of ultimate customization.
Nutrition
Personalized nutrition services are also growing by leaps and bounds — UBS has estimated it could reach annual revenues as high as $64 billion by 2040 and noted that the “future of food” might look like receiving personalized nutrition advice based on your personal biologic or genetic profile — pretty amazing! Additionally, your smart fridge might be alerting you to the foods you need to purchase to complement your personalized diet, while food delivery services will start specializing in providing offerings which cater to your exact, personal needs. The 2019 Global Wellness Trends report stated that one major reason for the growth of customization in nutrition, specifically, is because of the desire (and somewhat wherewithal) to live a longer, healthier life. Another interesting tidbit — one of the researchers who presented at this summit, Giovanni Mario Pes, PhD, MD, and senior researcher at Italy’s University of Sassari, revealed that though he “originally assumed genetics was the key to living beyond 100, his on-the-ground research in Sardinia, Italy, showed that genes are only 25 percent responsible for lifespan and that lifestyle factors make up the rest.”
Healthcare
Personalized wellness is finding its way into healthcare services, too. While you may have visited with an alternative health practitioner who understands how individual health and wellness truly is, companies out there like Parsley Health and Forward Healthcare are offering preventative health offerings for contemporary times. For example, Parsley Health “combines modern medicine and smart technology with a functional, whole body approach.” As this article notes, keeping people healthy while our population gets more and more diverse will increasingly depend on how well healthcare systems understand and address diverse populations — which really comes down to treating us as true individuals.
Looking Forward
It’s hard to say what this trend will look like in 5, 10 or 20 years and beyond, but it’s safe to say it isn’t going anywhere. That being said, we appreciate that everyone is uniquely different and there certainly isn’t a singular approach when it comes to the way our bodies feel, so we welcome the idea of having a variety of tailored solutions out there to help people optimize their personal health and wellness!