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Adnan Muhammed, Founder, KYEAL Nutrigenomics
Precision nutrition in India is often dismissed as a luxury product designed for the urban elite. That criticism is not entirely wrong. But it is also incomplete. On the ground, the real bottleneck holding back scale is not science. It is structure.
India today does not lack nutritional science, diagnostic capability, or data-driven insights. What it lacks is a delivery model that aligns precision nutrition with the country’s economic realities, healthcare pathways, and everyday food habits. Personalised nutrition in India has largely been built on a flawed assumption—that complexity must be expensive, and exclusivity equals credibility. This model has been imported from Western wellness ecosystems and applied to a country that operates on very different clinical, cultural, and economic foundations. As a result, precision nutrition has remained a boutique service rather than evolving into a meaningful public health lever.
What needs to change begins with reframing the objective itself. Personalised nutrition must stop trying to replace clinical care and start integrating with it. In India, the doctor continues to be the first and most trusted point of contact for health decisions. Precision nutrition becomes scalable only when it positions itself as a clinical support layer—one that improves outcomes in diabetes, thyroid disorders, metabolic syndrome, gut health, and cardiovascular risk. Adoption follows naturally when doctors see measurable improvements in biomarkers, not just lifestyle narratives or wellness claims.
The second shift required is rebuilding cost structures from the ground up. The challenge is not biomarker testing itself, but over-testing. Many platforms test everything simply because they can, not because each marker meaningfully changes dietary or lifestyle decisions. Scalability demands ruthless prioritisation—identifying the smallest biomarker set that can meaningfully shift nutrition recommendations for Indian phenotypes. Fewer tests, tighter feedback loops, and faster iteration cycles are essential. Precision is not about volume; it is about relevance.
Third, data must translate into action, not dashboards. Indian consumers do not fail because they lack information. They fail because execution is hard. A detailed report that does not integrate into daily food availability, household habits, and cultural patterns is effectively dead on arrival. Personalised nutrition becomes clinically useful only when insights are embedded into what people actually eat, not what they are theoretically told to eat. This requires local food mapping, regional recipe integration, and dynamic nutrition plans that adapt to income levels, seasonal availability, and shifting lifestyles.
The fourth requirement is moving from one-time diagnosis to continuous feedback. India’s most pressing health challenges are chronic and slow-moving. A single snapshot test offers limited long-term value. What creates scale and sustained impact is longitudinal tracking, where nutrition plans evolve with biomarker trends, symptom progression, and real-world compliance signals. This, in turn, demands digital infrastructure, ecosystem partnerships, and simplified monitoring models that support both users and clinicians—without overwhelming either.
Finally, precision nutrition must abandon vanity positioning. This space is not about optimisation for biohackers or elite wellness seekers. It is about risk reduction at population scale. When personalised nutrition speaks the language of prevention, productivity, and long-term healthcare cost savings, it begins to align with insurers, employers, hospitals, and public health stakeholders. That alignment is critical if precision nutrition is to move beyond niche adoption.
The opportunity cost of not addressing these structural gaps is enormous. India will continue to spend heavily on late-stage disease management while ignoring early metabolic signals that nutrition can effectively modulate. Precision nutrition will remain a talking point rather than a system-level intervention.
The science is ready. The market is not. Scale will come when personalised nutrition stops trying to look premium—and starts acting useful.