We’re thrilled to kick off our Trailblazer series this year by featuring the impressive Robert “Rob” Sinnott
With 25 years of experience in biotechnology, life sciences, and nutrition, Dr. Sinnott has been a passionate advocate for the industry. Former Chief Scientific Officer at USANA Health Sciences, he now serves as a Senior Scientific Fellow, driving global innovations. He mentors healthcare startups, co-chairs the Senior Scientific Advisory Council for the Council for Responsible Nutrition and taught Eastern-Western medicine integration as a guest professor at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.
How do you think that personalization will redefine the future of health and wellness?
Personalization is THE most important key to unlocking health and wellness. It always has been the hallmark of the very best physicians and healers to make treatments as personalized as possible (think Mayo Clinic). Better ways of gaining insight have always led to better health outcomes, and today we are blessed with access to more personalized health information than was accessible in all of human history.
Both Eastern and Western practitioners understand that unlocking the very best treatment or prevention for any individual requires knowing the individual as intimately as possible by both what their biometric data reveals (which is constantly getting more accurate and precise), what the patient tells you directly (both verbally and through careful observation), and also insight into the family history, which used to be a crude, incomplete family tree but is now very sophisticated and insightful due to tremendous advancements in genomics.
Up until now, progress has been slower because science, technology and adaptation have been slow, but we are entering a new golden age of healthcare where everything is speeding up unlocking new opportunities that we have dreamed of for millennia. Large human clinical studies with data analysis by both conventional statistical methods and AI are uncovering unanticipated patterns and trends that, when applied to product design and targeted marketing, will result in new products that help people preserve and recapture their health in early stages of progressive disease, such as metabolic syndrome.
What is a recent consumer shift or behavior change that has surprised you and how is our industry adapting?
After pioneering the wellness industry for the last 30 years, you might think I wouldn’t get surprised often, but two recent trends have surprised me by their timing and their potential magnitude. Both could be game changers for the wellness industry. The first is how long it has taken the wellness industry to really gain mainstream momentum in the Western world and the second is how the millennials and Gen Z have, at least in theory if not in actual practice, embraced the concept of proactive wellness more so than their parents and grandparents did.
There were health food aficionados for decades before the dietary supplement industry officially launched with the passage of DSHEA in 1994, but 1994 is the date that most experts consider to be the official start of the U.S. dietary supplement industry. Most of the early entrepreneurs felt the industry would grow super rapidly because it offered cost-effective solutions for preserving health as mainstream healthcare costs were skyrocketing and becoming increasingly unaccessible for many. In fact, the industry grew much slower than anticipated because of very public resistance from many mainstream healthcare professionals who saw it as a threat and spread half-truths and rumors to undermine the industry. This changed significantly with the onset of the global pandemic in 2020. During the pandemic many people were cut off from their healthcare practitioners and turned away from conventional healthcare as clinics and hospitals tightly restricted access. Many of these people, out of necessity, began embracing self-care, using nutritional products, probiotics, healthy foods, etc., to boost their immune systems and successfully manage their own health conditions. While 100% of people didn’t stick to this self-care track long-term, a significant portion did, so we can see a clear upward global trend in integrative health and self-care from 2020 to present, and the lift is likely to continue.
The second trend of millennials and Gen Z embracing healthcare and wellness preservation more so than their parents is a bit of an enigma. Driving it, I think they have access to lots of information about health and disease and also as they have watched their parents and grandparents age, they have become familiar with the sad pattern of aging, chronic disease, incapacitation, loss of functioning and often long, drawn-out decline to death. They naturally, and thankfully, want better for themselves and their children. This, I believe will drive a new surge in preventative wellness once we overcome one big hurdle.
This hurdle is that although there is almost unlimited scientific information for the millennials and Gen Z to draw from, many can not distinguish what is true and significant and scientifically validated from stories that are entirely fabricated to influence susceptible minds and sell questionable, unvalidated products. This is a real problem that needs to be solved through more consistent validation standards for wellness products.
How do you balance the need for innovation with the responsibility of ensuring consumer trust and safety?
Safety and trust are non-negotiable! They always come first and should always provide the guardrails for technical innovation. Products that don’t work better than placebo or, worse, produce dangerous side effects must be screened out during the development process. This requires pre-market safety and efficacy testing, which, unfortunately, isn’t mandatory in the United States. This is why I have instructed companies that I have worked with to build to Australian and Canadian standards, which are much stricter than US FDA standards for dietary supplements. They require product-specific safety and efficacy data to be reviewed before sales licenses are issued. I think this should be the global standard.
The problem is that this high standard of testing has traditionally been too costly for small dietary supplement companies. This testing can be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per product for gold-standard testing. For many start-ups dealing with cash flow issues, the answer is to dump their limited $ into marketing and sales rather than clinical validation. Breakthroughs in the area of streamlining clinical studies, safety testing and validation will inevitably lead the best companies to compete at a high level of validation rather than being a short-sighted, storytelling also ran.