Nutrition platform Lifesum partners with ŌURA to add sleep tracking

Almost half of U.S. adults, or 46%, have a poor-quality diet, and children are doing even worse, with 56% having a poor diet. More than 34 million people, including 9 million children, in the United States are food insecure.

Lifesum is a nutrition platform that wants to democratize healthy eating by empowering people with tools to understand their personal nutritional needs. The idea is to enable smarter food choices, whether someone wants to reach a healthy weight, build healthy eating habits, or extend their longevity.

"We create beautiful experiences, infusing premium nutrition guidance in a context designed to take guilt and shame out of lifestyle improvement. We then make Lifesum simple to use and accessible to millions of people with advanced technology and a unique, inclusive approach that promotes food to fuel life," Markus Falk, CEO of Lifesum, told VatorNews. 

Now the company is adding another feature to its platform: sleep tracking, and it is doing so via a partnership with ŌURA, the company behind the Oura Ring, a device that gives users personalized health data, insights, and daily guidance. 

Founded in 2013, ŌURA uses its device to measures the quantity and quality of rest, including sleep stages, schedule, and nightly heart rate, to provide an overall Sleep Score; activity, which means looking at all movement habits including calorie burn, heart rate, inactivity, and recovery time; and readiness, providing a Readiness Score that uses sleep, activity, and body stress signals, such as temperature and HRV, to predict how much a person can take on that day.

Partnering with ŌURA enables Lifesum users to track sleep across data points including duration and quality, and receive personalized sleep insights and actionable feedback to improve their eating habits and reach their health goals, Falk explained.

The feature will also builds on Lifesum's integration of Health Connect by Android, which allows health and fitness apps to easily manage shared data in one place. With Health Connect for Android, Lifesum users will be able to access their sleep data from ŌURA and get actionable insights related to how they eat and sleep.

"ŌURA was a natural company to partner with as sleep is the focus of their business. The Oura ring enables users to automatically track their sleep and easily access their sleep data. Partnering with an innovative company like ŌURA, and building on our integration of Health Connect by Android, is another exciting step towards Lifesum’s holistic approach to health, which empowers users to live a longer, healthier life," said Falk.

60 million people currently use Lifesum globally, with its core users typically being health-conscious Gen Z and Millennials who want to actively track how they eat to ensure they achieve their recommended macro and micro nutrients. They also can use Lifesum’s recipes and meal plans to explore new ways of eating.

Adding the sleep tracker function, which will be offered to Lifesum Android users who opt in to the open beta, before being roll out the service to all Android users in the coming weeks, was important because understanding the relationship between sleep and nutrition is key to weight management and improving overall health and wellbeing, Falk explained.

"Sleep data is a core pillar of users' overall health. Sharing data across Health Connect for Android allows Lifesum to deliver a more holistic approach to health for users by managing relevant data points from all partners," he said. 

"Lifesum’s ultimate goal is to help everyone reach their long-term health goals by taking a holistic approach to healthy eating. This is achieved by innovating and expanding on core pillars that impact how you eat, including sleep. By tracking sleep in the Lifesum app, our users will understand how their dietary choices impact their sleep, and vice versa, which will  help them to reach their health goals with actionable insights."