Meet Diet Doctor’s new owner

Let’s start with you. How did you get into caring about health and what you eat? What does your own approach actually look like day to day?

I came into nutrition through performance, not because I was looking to manage a specific health condition or lose weight. I run companies, I work a lot, and for me the interesting question was always: what makes me think clearly, have stable energy, sleep well, and perform consistently?

Food is a big part of that. Over time I started paying attention not just to what I ate, but to how I felt afterwards. I experiment quite a bit. I generally eat relatively low carb, with a lot of whole foods, protein, fish, meat, eggs, vegetables, and fairly simple ingredients.

I’m not dogmatic about it, and I’m not going to pretend that I live in permanent ketosis. But I notice very clearly that some foods leave me sharp and energetic and others don’t. That made me increasingly interested in metabolic health more broadly: not just weight loss, but glucose, energy, hunger, mental clarity, and the relationship between what we eat today and how we feel years from now. The more I looked into that world, the more frustrated I became by how difficult it is to know whom to trust.

How did you come across Diet Doctor, and what made you take it seriously?

I knew Diet Doctor before the bankruptcy. What stood out was that it had something most health companies never manage to create: genuine trust accumulated over many years. There was an enormous content library: recipes, guides, meal plans, medical information. More importantly, there were people who had actually changed their lives using it.

When the opportunity came to acquire it, I kept coming back to one thought: there are surprisingly few truly independent places to go for nutrition information.

Most health information you encounter has a commercial interest behind it. Someone wants to sell a supplement, a drug, a meal replacement, or a food product. That doesn’t automatically make the information wrong, but incentives matter. Diet Doctor already had the ingredients to become something different: a place whose primary job is to help the person reading it make better decisions about food and health. That was much more interesting to me than simply buying another subscription business.

Diet Doctor members have been through a lot. The platform lost focus for a while, then there was a bankruptcy. Some of them have been waiting a long time to feel like this was still their place. What do you want to say to them about all of that?

I think the first thing is to acknowledge what happened. Diet Doctor lost focus. Resources and attention moved elsewhere, while the people who had built routines, communities, and trust around the platform could see it was no longer receiving the same attention.

Eventually the company went bankrupt. I understand why that damages trust. It would be strange if it didn’t. I didn’t live through those decisions from inside the company, so I won’t rewrite that history or assign blame. But I won’t use careful language to pretend nothing happened, either.

What I can be responsible for is what comes next. Diet Doctor is Diet Doctor again. We’re not using this community as a stepping stone toward some unrelated idea. We bought it because we believe the original mission is still extraordinarily valuable, and because millions of people are still looking for trustworthy help figuring out what to eat and how to improve their health. Trust will not come back because I say that. We have to earn it again through what we do.

What did you actually inherit? What was the state of things when you took over?

Something genuinely valuable, but not something ready to switch back on. There is a huge content library, thousands of recipes and guides, a well-known brand, and most importantly a community that still cares deeply. But there was also a lot of rebuilding to do.

Teams disappeared. Systems and workflows need attention. I never saw this as buying a finished product. We acquired the foundation and the history. Now we have to build the next version properly.

Is Diet Doctor the focus — genuinely — or is it one of several things on your plate?

I own and closely operate other businesses, so I don’t want to give you the artificial answer that Diet Doctor is literally the only thing in my life. But it is not a passive investment, and it is not a side project. I am personally involved in what we build, the product direction, the people we bring back or recruit, how we communicate with members, and what Diet Doctor should become.

And, crucially, there isn’t another project inside Diet Doctor competing for resources. The mission is the product. Helping people understand food, improve their metabolic health, and know what to eat is what we are here to build.

Some companies buy assets to sell them. What’s your intention here?

I’m not building Diet Doctor for an exit. We have already had people interested in buying it, and I have no interest in selling. Long term means investing in the platform, rebuilding the team, improving the product, and protecting the credibility of the brand even when that means taking the slower route.

I also think independence matters enormously in nutrition. Diet Doctor has to be able to say what the evidence supports, even when that is commercially inconvenient. If the science changes, our advice should change. If the evidence is weak, we should say so. That’s how you build something that lasts.

What does Diet Doctor look like in three years?

I want it to be the first place people think of when they ask a very simple question: “What should I eat?” Because we’ve earned that, not because we’ve said it loudest. To me, credibility means showing the evidence, being transparent when it’s weak, involving people who actually understand the science, and correcting ourselves when we’re wrong.

It also means making all of that useful. People don’t only need another scientific paper. They need to know what to cook tonight, what to buy at the supermarket, how to lose weight without being hungry, how to manage their blood sugar, or how to change a diet they can’t stick to. I think Diet Doctor can connect those two worlds better than almost anyone: serious evidence and practical food.

Andreas’s mission included trustworthy guidance from medical professionals. You’re coming in without a medical background. How does that credibility get maintained?

By not pretending that I have expertise I don’t. I’m not a physician, and I shouldn’t be the person deciding what the medical evidence says.

My job is to make sure Diet Doctor has people around it who can do that extremely well, and to create an organization where their judgment matters more than a marketing objective. That includes bringing back people who understand Diet Doctor and its history.

Jill Wallentin, Diet Doctor’s longtime food director, is back as food director and product manager. I’m personally very happy about it. And we’ll continue building the scientific and medical expertise around the platform. I can ask questions, challenge assumptions, and care deeply about the subject. Credibility comes from having the right people, the right processes, and the willingness to follow the evidence.

What can members expect to stay the same, and what changes?

The fundamental idea should stay the same. Food matters, metabolic health matters, and the evidence is what guides both. Low carb and keto remain important tools, and Diet Doctor should continue producing exceptionally good recipes, guides, and practical information for people who eat that way. What I don’t want is for Diet Doctor to become ideological.

If someone does well with strict keto, we help them do strict keto extremely well. If another person does better with a less restrictive low carb approach or more protein, we help them too. What changes should mostly be things members have wanted more of: investment, speed, product development, better personalization, and a sense that someone is actually building Diet Doctor again.

A lot of the people reading this have genuinely changed how they eat, how they feel, how they think about food because of this platform. What do you want to say to them directly?

I think what I would say is: don’t trust me because I bought Diet Doctor. Judge us by what we do next.

I know this platform means much more to many of you than a website or an app. Some of you lost enormous amounts of weight here. Some reversed health problems. Some found a way of eating that finally made you feel in control around food. Some of you have been part of this community for a decade. That deserves respect.

My ambition isn’t to take that history and reinvent it until nobody recognizes it. It is to protect what made Diet Doctor useful in the first place, and then give it the resources, energy, and independence to become better than it has ever been. I hope that, a few years from now, the people who stayed through this period will feel that it was worth staying.

Anything we didn’t cover that you want to add?

Nutrition has become an incredibly noisy field. Food companies, pharmaceutical companies, supplement companies, influencers, academics, governments — all telling you different things. And the person in the middle is just trying to answer: what should I eat?

I think there is enormous value in building a place whose loyalty is ultimately to that person. Not to keto as an ideology. Not to a particular product. Not to an advertiser. Not to me. To the reader and to the evidence. If we can make Diet Doctor into that, I think it can matter for a very long time.