Habit - Biological Test for Your Ideal Diet

Is nutrition universal? Is there a perfect human diet? Does eating "healthy" mean the same thing for everyone? Habit suggests it's much more personal than that. That we as individuals might share a lot - 99.999-whatever-percent of our genetic material - but that on certain biological and metabolical levels, a lot of us are very different. Particularly in how we digest, process, and store the macronutrients in our food.

Habit is a mail-in service that measures various biomarkers in your body, and then analyzes 60+ indicators of what your body craves to develop a personalized diet plan based on your personal biology.

The Habit approach requires 3 things of you:

1. A DNA test. Habit will include an at-home DNA test with their kit - basically containers and instructions for submitting saliva samples. However, if you've already done a home DNA test through 23andMe or Ancestry DNA, Habit will reuse those results, and charge you $100 less for their kit.
2. Drink the Habit Challenge Shake. And you thought you were going to get through American Ninja Dieter course without drinking someone's proprietary shake! Ha! You only have to drink Habit's once though. The Challenge Shake was designed to test your metabolism. You'll have to collect blood samples at specified times before and after you drink the shake, which Habit describes as "nutritionally equivalent to a large American breakfast." The Habit lab will measure these samples to help determine how your body responds to carbs, fats, and protein.
3. Take and submit some measurements. Age, height, and weight. Waistline. Activity level. Blood pressure.

Habit test results provide a metabolic analysis of how your body handles macronutrients, and what your best balance of them is. For example, word on the street these days is that carbs are evil, but they might not be so bad for someone with a metabolism built for fighting that brand of evil. Similarly, Habit's report might show you you can get too much of a good thing, and that you're actually hindering your health by eating 722 grams of protein a day.

Via the DNA portion of the test, Habit will also report on caffeine and lactose sensitivity, blood sugar biomarkers, cholesterol biomarkers, triglyceride biomarkers, and weight control biomarkers. Interesting nuggets here include you glucose levels before and after a meal, your weight gain risk and control gene variants, and your endurance and physical strength gene variants.

Habit gives participants the option of purchasing a Core package, which lays out all of the above for you to apply or ignore as you wish, or an Ally package, in which the company provides additional guidance on health and nutrition plans, recipes, and tracking tools.