Let's find out more about personalized supplements: this is what Loris Zoppelletto, Meetab's CEO, tells us.

First of all, I would like to ask some questions about how the world of supplements is evolving, as this subject is becoming more and more topical in the health world. Currently, how many people use supplements in Italy and Europe?

It is a trend that is becoming increasingly popular in Europe for some years now and the trend does not seem to be decreasing. I say "also" in Europe because, in other countries as in the United States, according to statistics, about 35% of people take a supplement on a daily basis.

Europe, perhaps due to the fact of having on average more nutritious food, has felt less this need so far.

Unfortunately the data is now certain: the nutritional properties of food are also falling here with us and the resulting deficiencies gradually lead to a decline in health.

This is rather depressing. From what we deduce that the nutritional contents of today's food are so scarce compared to once?

There are many scientific publications and research that affirm it. Perhaps the clearest is the World Summit for Earth held in Rio in 2012. It is a study that every 20 years provides the general picture of the state of food on the planet and the data published in 2012, compared to those published 20 years earlier, they are clear: the amount of micronutrients such as mineral salts and vitamins have decreased dramatically. There is talk of an average 50% drop in the last 20 years.

The situation is even more alarming when one looks at the 1992 congress. On that date an 80% average soil impoverishment had already been announced compared to the previous 20 years.

It may not be obvious why we get sick due to nutritional deficiencies but we must remember that vitamins and minerals are the key ingredients to make our metabolism work. In their absence, it fails to carry out its tasks which are to continually make the body work and repair.

Despite the enormous capacity of the body to compensate for nutrient deficiencies, sooner or later the nodes come to a head and the situation falls into a health problem.

Now the scenario seems clearer to me even if it is even more alarming.

However, there are many manufacturers of supplements in Europe. How does Meetab fit into this scenario, or rather what are its specific characteristics?

As you said, there are many producers and, to tell the truth, there are more and more producers who make good quality supplements. The era is ending when people were not informed about the types of supplements and ended up taking what was cheaper, with terrible consequences on the quality of the vitamins they took.

Consumers are increasingly mature and know that certain varieties of chemically derived vitamins are useless for the body or even harmful.

However, in Meetab we have taken a step forward. The concept of personalization is the key to our work. A person does not know objectively what he needs to rebalance his personal metabolic state. There are many factors in between such as genetics, the expression of genes themselves (or epigenetics), eating habits and life .

One can take vitamin C because he heard about it well from someone and this will certainly not hurt him. But perhaps, at the same time he finds himself having a profound shortage of B1 which, if resolved, would give him enormous improvements and of this he knows nothing. It would be a shame to spend money for a small advantage when, even with less money, it could go to rebalance exactly what it lacks, perhaps for many years.

And how do you make this promise to discover for each of us what is the most suitable integration? I imagine that to make such a profound analysis expensive and in-depth examinations are necessary.

In fact we started from very sophisticated analysis to realize the dream of giving everyone the integration tailored to their condition.

However, thanks to the studies we have done, in collaboration with the European Institute of Nutritional Medicine, it has been possible to create a much simpler, and above all free, tool to estimate the actual metabolism condition and remedy it with personalized supplements.

The tool we use is the Numex® test that proves to be invaluable in understanding in what direction our metabolism is unbalanced and how to bring it closer to its ideal state of functioning.

Anyone can use Numex® to get an estimate of their metabolic status and a series of tips to improve it by changing their habits and integrating their diet properly with targeted supplements.

Obviously we talk about healthy people who want to improve their general health by resorting to personalized nutrition but an increasing number of professionals (including doctors, physiotherapists, psychologists, personal trainers and various health professionals) use Numex® to provide customers customized integration as a support to therapies since it is clear from numerous experiences that in the presence of proper nutrition the various therapies have a drastically greater success.