Tangelo is transforming healthcare with Diet ID, a breakthrough method of diet quality assessment.
Backed by scientific rigor and extensively validated, our patented Diet ID technology makes the assessment of diet quality as easy as measuring blood pressure, and enables the delivery of tailored nutrition interventions that improve health outcomes and generate measurable ROI at scale.
In the US alone, poor diet quality is linked to an estimated 678,000 deaths annually. Meanwhile, science shows improving diet quality leads to significant outcomes, like lower rates of diabetes and heart disease. Food as medicine interventions can reduce chronic disease risk, but to do so, they must prove they can improve diet quality.
Organizations like the American Heart Association say diet quality should be measured at every clinical encounter. Tangelo’s Diet ID assessment makes that possible for the first time ever.
Our unique ability to assess diet quality at scale enables us to measure the ROI of population-wide Food as Medicine programs in real-time. Improved diet quality translates directly to cost savings, making it possible to easily quantify the financial impact of interventions. Linking health outcomes to economic value, we provide a clear path for healthcare organizations to realize measurable impact while improving patient health.
Typical dietary assessments rely on detailed recall or record of every food and drink consumed, taking 90+ minutes to complete. We’ve introduced the first fundamentally new approach to measuring diet quality in 50 years: a breakthrough assessment that uses pattern recognition instead of recall, takes as little as 1 minute to finish, and generates more data in real-time compared to a typical dietitian led-assessment.
In order to effectively measure a risk factor, healthcare needs a solution that’s cheap, easy and accurate. Traditional ways to measure diet quality can’t do all three. Our assessment can. In the same way that the invention of the blood pressure cuff made this easy, accurate, objective, standardized, scalable tool a standard of care at every clinical encounter, we’re doing the same with our assessment for diet quality.
Validated, standardized, and scalable, our objective Diet ID assessment uses thousands of images representing virtually every permutation of how people eat and simply asks: Choose which image looks more like your diet. Each image represents a real-world dietary pattern scored against how well it aligns to leading dietary recommendations using the Healthy Eating Index 2020, the most robustly researched, validated method for scoring diet quality.
After a few rounds of pick-this-or-that, our assessment narrows down to an individual’s current dietary pattern, captures a few additional data points, and instantly generates a comprehensive analysis that details: their current nutrient and food group intake; a diet quality score on a scale of 1-10 correlated to their risk of chronic disease; and target nutrient levels with exact changes needed to improve their diet quality and reduce their risk of chronic disease.
Our assessment is designed for population-wide deployment, to any and all demographics. It includes culturally-relevant, inclusive dietary data, encompassing global dietary patterns (such as Latinx, Korean, Vietnamese, Caribbean, South Asian, and many more) and dietary preferences (such as vegan, paleo, low carb, and many more). Accessibility is key, with pediatric assessments and audio- and text-only versions available; with English, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and additional languages available upon request.
Our Diet ID method maps the most common real-world, diverse dietary patterns across 10 tiers of objectively measured diet quality. We turn thousands of points in the map into high definition images, or fingerprints, to visually capture the essence of how someone eats. This experience, paired with our algorithm, allows us to generate detailed nutrition analysis in as little as 1 minute, relying on humans' native aptitude for pattern recognition—no detailed recall required.
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The Diet ID methodology was developed by Tangelo’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. David L. Katz and a Supervising Panel of renowned, independent nutrition and lifestyle medicine experts who've been designing, studying, and using dietary assessments for decades: Michael Dansinger, Christopher Gardner, Frank Hu, Gail Frank, David Jenkins, Mary Murimi, Linda Snetselaar, and Walter Willett.
Diet ID is validated against gold standard methods in dietary assessment, including Food Frequency Questionnaire and 24-hour recall, and has been robustly correlated with diverse biomarkers including lipids, insulin sensitivity, and BMI. Our commitment to validating our method is reflected in ongoing publication efforts, with a growing evidence library continuing to strengthen the scientific foundation of our approach.
Our assessment can be completed in any context — by a person themselves or assisted, in- or outside of a clinical setting. Integrated into Epic, Diet ID is easily embedded into clinical workflows, making measuring diet quality as a standard of care seamless for providers. Meanwhile, Diet ID is increasingly being adopted as a new research standard, with 30 NIH-funded studies using the assessment to measure diet quality.
Traditional food as medicine programs take 2-3 years to publish provable, positive results. Meanwhile, programs using Diet ID show ROI within the first year, some in a little as 90 days. With over 500M opportunities to measure and improve diet quality missed annually, healthcare payers are left waiting for the downstream impact of poor diet quality to emerge. We’re changing this paradigm.
We enable health care payers and providers to understand their population’s diet-related chronic disease risk at scale, by subsegment, in real time. No other solution can do that. We are also enabling payers to address and reduce that risk in a way that no other solution can.
Validated measurement of diet quality risk
Prescription of tailored interventions to improve diet
Delivery of those interventions to members
Ongoing measurement of intervention outcomes
Re-prescription of interventions based on changes in risk
Chronic disease related costs decrease over time
We demonstrated measurable changes in diet quality and health metrics in a 90-day period.
We captured 5,000 dietary assessments in a week — the same amount that NHANES does in a year.
Join us in establishing a new standard of care and start measuring and improving diet quality today!
