Persona Nutrition
Summary
Persona is a vitamin subscription service that offers personalized supplement recommendations based on your unique responses to the company’s nutritional assessment.
Persona Review: What You Should Know
Persona Nutrition is a personalized vitamin subscription service that promises to help you achieve better health for your unique stage in life.
Based on your answers in the company’s online assessment, Persona Nutrition will recommend a variety of vitamins, minerals, and other supplements for you to take each day and provide you with a convenient way to purchase them.
In this analysis, we take a look at the important details behind Persona Nutrition to help you decide if it is right for you.
How Does Persona Nutrition Work?
Each personalized pack will come with a 28-day supply of vitamins as well as an information card with details about everything you receive. This includes instructions, supplement fact sheets, and other relevant health information.
Depending on your health specifics, you might receive between one and three vitamin packs (labeled AM, PM, and Night) to take each day.
This way, morning-only supplements can deliver a boost of energy without keeping you up in the evening, and so that you can better absorb all ingredients in case the combination they prescribe for you might interfere with each other if you were to take them all at once.
To provide accurate supplement recommendations to every subscriber, Persona Nutrition relies on an algorithm that was created by an advisory board of doctors and nutritionists.
All Persona supplements are offered on a subscription basis, meaning that you will receive a new order every 28 days unless you choose to opt-out before the next shipping date.
You can pause or cancel at any time, but that you need to make changes at least five to seven days before your next processing date to stop the upcoming shipment.
Persona Nutrition states that all their supplements are manufactured in the United States and using FDA Good Manufacturing Practices. The supplements also undergo extensive quality control and testing at every level of production to ensure you receive what they promise.
How Does It Customize Your Vitamins?
Persona’s questionnaire for new customers includes questions about your gender, age, dietary preferences/restrictions, allergy information, your fruit, veggie, dairy and fish intake, whether you have low iron, and other details about your overall health.
It also includes lifestyle questions about your exercise levels, alcoholic consumption, whether you smoke or are exposed to secondhand smoke, your overall energy, happiness, and stress levels, how well you sleep, and your past and current medication use.
The assessment also takes into consideration the interactions of medications you might already be taking with supplements.
According to the company, Persona Nutrition is the only personalized nutrition company that cross-references more than 850 prescription medications (including birth control pills, blood pressure medications, etc.) to ensure you’re avoiding drug-nutrient interactions (DNIs).
The company claims to eliminate all supplements from your recommendations that contain ingredients that could potentially interact with your medications.
They also state that they provide you with recommendations for nutrients that replenish losses from medications you are taking. As an example, many statin medications can deplete the body of CoQ10, an essential nutrient for energy production.
If you are taking a drug that doesn’t show up in their assessment, they suggest contacting one of their on-staff nutritionists for guidance.
At the end of the questionnaire, you will receive a customized vitamin guide that’s priced out at your cost per day.
When I took the test, my total recommended purchase came to $66.08 per month ($2.36 per day), but your price will vary depending on your personal health metrics.
Below is the complete list of supplements that Persona Nutrition recommended I take:
- Foundation Multi and Omega 3: Recommended to cover nutrition gaps ($15.68)
- Hair Skin and Nails Formula: Recommended to promote growth and maintenance ($14.84)
- Green Tea Extract: Recommended to reduce energy slumps ($4.20)
- Milk Thistle for Liver Support: Recommended for counteracting the effects of alcohol ($10.92)
- Astaxanthin and CoQ10: Recommended to support cardio training ($20.44)
There was an option to reject any recommendation that I didn’t want or add a supplement to my pack that was not suggested. This gives customers final control over what they receive and the cost of their order.
Analysis of Customer Reviews
Persona Nutrition averages 4-stars out of five on Facebook and Trustpilot. Many people reported that they appreciated the convenience and presentation of the packs and that they noticed positive differences in their health from the supplements they took.
A few people seemed to struggle with the subscription side of Persona Nutrition and had complaints that they were billed after they thought they canceled their account.
By far the most significant negative comments were in regards to price. Many people noted that they could find the supplements cheaper through other retailers like Amazon and that they had to cancel their subscription after their new customer discounts ran out.
Persona vs. Care/of and Ritual
Care/of is a monthly subscription service that gives you personalized supplements in single-serving containers. Like with Persona Nutrition, you’ll need to take a five-minute assessment about your health and habits on the site to get your recommendations.
The company classifies each ingredient they sell based on the existing research to give customers a sense of what the scientific consensus is for their benefits.
Beyond this assessment, Care/of also allows customers to build their own packs from a selection of 30 different vitamins, herbs, and probiotics.
Like with Persona Nutrition, the monthly price of Care/of depends on what you order, but the company prices out each ingredient on their site so you can see the pricing breakdown.
Also similarly to Nutrition, the biggest complaint that we saw customers had was that the service cost a lot more than buying similar vitamins from a standard retailer.
Designed for women, Ritual is another subscription vitamin service. The company states that their supplements are vegan-friendly, and gluten- and allergen-free, non-GMO, and free of synthetic fillers.
Unlike the other two companies, you won’t receive a variety of pills to take each day. Rather, each clear capsule contains everything the company thinks you need. The pills you are shipped change depending on how many months you have been taking them (there are no options for customization). Each monthly order costs $30.
One fundamental way that Persona Nutrition is different is in its in-depth assessment of your health history that looks both at DNA test results and your current prescription medications. The company states that this process helps you avoid potentially dangerous interactions between them.
Persona has licensed nutritionists and registered dieticians on staff so that you can chat with experts over any questions that you have. For those who are already on a lot of medication, this could potentially be a deciding factor for choosing Persona to get supplement recommendations.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to researching personalized supplements, a key question you need to ask is whether you need them in the first place.
Unless you have a deficiency in a specific nutrient, there’s not much clinical evidence to show that taking the majority of dietary supplements will provide you with real benefits.
There’s some evidence that taking supplements tailored to your specific health and lifestyle situation can make a difference for your health. Persona’s in-depth assessment and transparent recommendation process lets you see exactly what they are suggesting to you and why they think you need it.
There’s also a good chance you can buy supplements Persona recommends from other retailers at a cheaper price, though you’ll sacrifice the quality of ingredients and the convenience of pre-portioned vitamin packs for day and night.