Wellknowlogy: 10/5/22

Molecules, vegetables, and ancient wisdom

Author

Dayton Simenz
October 05, 2022

Wellknowlogy is a curious, honest, and caring source of weekly news & thoughts on innovations in the wellness industry; an efficient way for providers, technologists, investors, and enthusiasts to stay in sync and informed about endeavors to increase wellbeing. For filtered information concerning your particular venture, reach out to [email protected]

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An action-packed week with tons of funding and repeat appearances of two of my favorite subjects in health and wellness: nutrition as the nexus of public health and the massive potential of computerized modeling of molecular interactions. These are quite different and both cool.

Nutrition is super important. Its impact on the health of individuals, communities, and healthcare systems is underrated and well studied, showing nutrition's strong impact on healthcare burdens, deaths from diet-related illness, and personal daily health (& its ramifications). Fortunately, this week saw attempts to solve this on a number of levels. With announcements of federal and private funding to close the nutrition gap along with multiple nutrition-focused startups raising money, there is movement in the right direction. Check out Tufts' report on food as medicine to learn more.

On a completely different note, multiple pieces of news today show the dawning of a new age as computerized modeling of molecular interactions are starting to yield results with massive implications.

Let's break that down as well as I, a non-specialist, am capable. Molecules, like vitamin D, are different compounds that may or may not have an impact on the molecules that make up our body (Reminder: Animal = many organs = tons of molecules = zillions of particles). Previously, we would discover certain molecules by back-testing the chemistry underlying strong correlations between behaviors and results... (Why does sun make me feel good? Hmm... it gives us more of the vitamin D molecule. We should look into that...).

As computers became capable of modeling the interactions of molecules like this (because computers can compute systems and molecules are systems of smaller particles), we began to prove why certain molecules caused certain reactions. However, because computers were slower and software was dumber, this took a really long time.

Enter Moore's Law. Computers have gotten faster and software has gotten smarter. Now instead of a single reaction taking a week to model, we can model a million reactions in an hour (totally making up these numbers but the gist is there). Also, we don't need to tell the software what molecules to model now because we have software that makes up molecules. As a result, we are now in an age where computers can find (and create) molecules that react positively with molecules in our bodies. Super cool!

Thanks for hanging with me on that one. It strikes me as an important paradigm shift and being able to understand how that came to be can inspire some serious gratitude for the powers out there that we don't quite understand.

With that out of the way, here's what happened last week:

Fundings

New funds:

Neat Articles

Market News

Tidbits for You and Yours

Closing Kernel of Wisdom

  • Amishi Jha's thoughts on strengthening attention are foundational and should be taught universally. For a catalogue of cool stuff, check out the Mind & Life Institute's Insights platform

You got to the end! Nice. I don't charge for this, but if you value this enough to give me money, feel free to do so — my venmo is @dsimenz. Also, please forward this to anyone that may appreciate it. I'll give them a button below to check out previous emails and add them to the list:

Wishing you a great week to come.

Warmly,

Dayton