It may sound strange at first: for about a hundred euros, one can order a test-kit which is discreetly delivered to an automated parcel terminal in your neighbourhood. You take a sample of your own stools – a simple procedure thanks to the test-kit – and post it to Flick Diet. From then on, it gets more pleasant: Flick Diet will send your stool sample to a medical lab where bioanalysts will extract the DNA of the gut bacteria and study it. According to the DNA sequence, Flick Diet then determines the bacteria in your gut and a computer programme compiles a personal nutritional advice report. The recommendations in the report are based on about a hundred scientific articles which have been published in magazines such as Nature, Science and medical journals. The process has been approved by nutritional experts. The report helps you to understand what is “living” in your gut, which foods you can tolerate and which ones you can’t. It explains what you should eat more of, or less of, in order to make your digestion as efficient as possible, to avoid bloating and other problems, to strengthen your immune system (where gut microflora play an important role), to provide you with a general sense of well-being and to ensure a healthy body as you get older. Most importantly, following the advice enables people to lose weight healthily without having to suffer through different diets. Flick Diet, a start-up from the Tallinn Tehnopol Stat-up Incubator, plans to take this service onto the market in February 2014. The company was founded by two engineers of the Tallinn University of Technology: Henri Raska and Liis Loorits. Together, the two of
them have been doing science for twelve years. They have used similar methods of microbiology research to characterize other types of environments, for example biogas, milk, bread and cheese. Now they are applying the same method to researching the human body. The scientific council of Flick Diet includes the renowned neurobiologist Toomas Neuman, who is linked to various biotechnology companies in Estonia and the United States. The idea was first born in early 2012, when Loorits and Raska were brainstorming different business ideas. In the summer of the same year, they participated in Start-up Garage – a summer school for start-ups – where they refined their business model and met the future seed investor of the company, the well-known Estonian IT entrepreneur Jaak Ennuste.
But why study stools and gut microflora? According to Raska, the answer is simple: “The gut has one of the most direct impacts on human health and is the organ which is responsible for digesting the food we eat.” Each and every one of us has about two kilograms of bacteria living in our stomach: approximately 100 billion, which is ten times more than the number of cells. Bacteria influence our metabolism, immune system and even behaviour. The bacteria in our gut are as unique as a fingerprint: they start to develop before we are born and they determine whether we play in sandboxes, our lifestyle, food consumption, travel, illnesses and thousands of other factors.
The scientific council of Flick Diet includes the renowned neurobiologist Toomas Neuman, who is linked to various biotechnology companies in Estonia and the United States.
WINTER 2013 / 2014
I LIFE IN ESTONIA
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