For decades, the US healthcare system has been struggling to treat the dietary chronic diseases affecting Almost half of all adults.
That has changed in recent years with the discovery of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs that help people lose weight. While insurance covers these medications, doctors often require patients to see a nutritionist as part of their treatment plan.
“I would argue that GLP-1 for dietitians is the largest tail that any supplier type in US health care has ever seen,” said Noah Kotlove, co-founder and general manager of Berry StreetNutrition consulting platform that launched two years ago.
Berry Street, which provides registered dietitians with tools to manage independent practice, recently earned a financial round of $ 50 million investors including Northzone, Sofinova, and FJ Labs.
“We grew up very fast,” Kotlove said. “It’s a very big market.”
Berry Street is one of several nutritional advisory companies growing due to GLP-1 drugs.
Faystartup, which, like Berry Street, matches independent dietitians with patients, revealed on Wednesday that it raised $ 50 million series B Led by Goldman Sachs at rating $ 500 million. The funding comes just nine months after the company announced its $ 25 million series A of general catalyst and predecessor.
Nourish, which raised a $ 35 million series or last March, is another startup that offers similar services.
Kotlove says that the growth of GLP-1 usage is not the only factor pushing people to seek nutritional therapy.
“If you have business health insurance, you most likely have a really generous coverage to see a dietitian,” he said.
However, most people do not know that nutritional counseling is typically 100% covered by insurance, with $ 0 powerful for patients. “It is probably the most under-utilized benefit in all US healthcare system,” Kotlove said.
Starts like Berry Street make it easy to virtually covered with health insurance and care about how they eat to get advice from a registered dietitian.
Berry Street allows registered dietitians, many of whom are also employed full -time in clinics, to start their own practices in the evening or weekend, which means that patients have more opportunities to use the advantage they probably didn’t even know that there was in the past .
Kotlove, a serial entrepreneur whose previous business was a popular alcohol recovery -App, personally experienced the benefits of nutritional counseling. He says he has been clinically obese since childhood.
“I tried everything to fight my bad diet,” he said. He was at his heaviest when a doctor recommended seeing a dietitian.
“I left that visit thinking, ‘I know what the healthy foods are and what the sick foods are. I really don’t need a dietitian to say that to me,” “he said. But he still tried nutritional therapy.
Then Kotlove was surprised at how much his sessions with the dietitian helped him. “It felt a lot like therapy, but instead of talking about my relationship with my family members, or my partner, we talked about my relationship with food,” he said.
He ended up losing 60 pounds and keeping that weight. Another surprise was that all his sessions were completely covered by insurance.
Kotlove’s transformation was the inspiration for Berry Street. He hopes his company will help a lot of people have similar transformations.
