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When to Claim Your Category: Lessons from Virta Health’s Decade-Long Journey to Metabolic Disease Reversal

Category creation isn’t a launch event. It’s a timing decision revisited over years until market conditions align with your proof points.

In a recent episode of The Narrative, we spoke with Judy Huang, VP of Communications at Virta Health, about a positioning decision the company debated four separate times across a decade—each time concluding the market wasn’t ready until last year.

The Discipline of Saying “Not Yet”

Eleven to twelve years ago at founding, Virta’s leadership team debated their positioning. They could claim “metabolic disease reversal”—their actual long-term vision—or start narrower with diabetes reversal.

They chose diabetes. Not because metabolic disease reversal was wrong, but because the infrastructure to support that category didn’t exist. “Most people have never heard of metabolic anything,” Judy explains. “They definitely didn’t know what any of it meant.”

More critically, bold category claims in healthcare require clinical proof before commercialization. “If you’re going to stake that kind of claim right out the door, that gives you very little wiggle room,” Judy notes. “It was really important for us at Virta to be able to prove what we say that we can do.”

The company inverted the typical startup playbook. “We are one of the few healthcare companies that actually spent the first few years of our life focused on peer reviewed research and scientific studies to actually show that our personalized nutrition actually works and reverses metabolic disease and reverses diabetes,” Judy says. “Only when we felt like we could actually prove that did we start to commercialize.”

Proof before positioning. Then the question came back periodically—at various milestones, during strategic planning, when competitive dynamics shifted. Even when Judy joined two years ago: “We said, is now the time? And we still said no.”

Identifying the Three-Trend Convergence

Last year, the answer changed. Not because Virta’s capabilities evolved, but because three external trends converged to create receptive market conditions.

GLP-1 drugs normalized metabolic health conversations. “The rise of GLP1s have served as a massive tailwind for us in terms of our business, but also the narrative,” Judy explains. “People were understanding more and more that all of these chronic, that all of these conditions that we previously labeled as chronic and progressive, like diabetes or liver disease, kidney disease, heart disease, actually aren’t chronic and progressive. They can be reversed and they can be reversed through food.”

GLP-1s proved a critical point: metabolic conditions respond to intervention. This created space for nutrition-based approaches.

Health influencers legitimized the scientific discourse. “The leaders like Huberman and Atiya have all done a really great job of making this a little bit more mainstream,” Judy says. These weren’t fad diet personalities—they brought research-backed metabolic health discussions to mainstream audiences, building scientific literacy Virta could leverage.

The MAHA movement elevated food quality politically. Whatever your stance on RFK Jr., “his emphasis on real food and revamped dietary guidelines and like ultimately calling out the dangers of ultra processed food and too much sugar also has helped to kind of, you know, transform a snowball into an avalanche.”

The team saw convergence: “We could see it coming. The avalanche is coming. It’s time now.”

This wasn’t opportunism—it was systematic evaluation of whether supporting infrastructure (public awareness, scientific credibility, political attention) finally justified the positioning shift.

Choosing the Defensible Narrow Over the Addressable Broad

Even with timing aligned, category definition required precision. The obvious choice: “metabolic health.” After all, “93% of American adults have some kind of metabolic dysfunction,” Judy points out.

But obvious doesn’t mean defensible. “Any company, from, you know, some supplement company to a, you know, a powder company or what have you could say that they are part of metabolic health,” Judy explains. “But how many companies can actually say that they are reversing metabolic disease? Not that many.”

Metabolic health was too broad to own. Anyone selling supplements, fitness programs, or nutrition apps could claim it.

Metabolic disease reversal required clinical outcomes: 56% reduction in stroke and death risk, reduced kidney disease diagnoses, 33% longer survival with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Most companies couldn’t produce those data points.

“We felt good about positioning ourselves at that intersection,” Judy says.

The lesson: category definitions should filter competitors out, not just describe your market. Choose the claim where your evidence creates moats.

Cross-Functional Validation Prevents Category Overreach

In healthcare, category claims that outrun capabilities carry regulatory and reputational risk. Judy’s category team composition reflected this reality.

Beyond Marketing and Communications, she included:

• CEO and COO for strategic commitment
• Chief Commercial Officer for sales conversation validation
• Chief Medical Officer for clinical accuracy

The Chief Commercial Officer’s role was critical: “Her insights into what it is our customers are actually purchasing today and what they are looking for and what’s resonating with them was really important.”

Categories that don’t survive real sales conversations fail. If your sales team can’t pitch the category without confusing buyers or if buyers don’t recognize their problem in your framing, your positioning is academic.

The Chief Medical Officer ensured they didn’t promise outcomes they couldn’t deliver: “Really critical that we honed in and were using the right language with what they’re seeing on that front and that we are not leaning out over our skis and over promising, which can obviously be very dangerous, particularly in healthcare.”

This team composition ensured the category could withstand commercial scrutiny and regulatory review—not just win marketing awards.

Building Category Infrastructure, Not Just Category Claims

Virta’s November launch went beyond announcing their positioning. They built the educational infrastructure that defines the category itself.

The anchor: their first annual Metabolic Disease Reversal Report. But Judy didn’t stop with a branded asset. “We also co launched with it a metabolic disease microsite which is also hosted on our website. But we made sure that, you know, it looked a little bit different from our report. It wasn’t virta branded because we wanted this to be much more of a resource for people.”

The microsite served as category education: “If they were like, oh, you know, they’re just putting into Google or ChatGPT what is metabolic disease and hopefully to lead them there to that website so they can just learn a little bit more about, you know, about how metabolic disease manifests.”

They created practical content: “Friendly, you know, grocery food, you know, swaps that you can make or, you know, when you’re craving this, eat that. Just making it really more… bite sized content for people to immediately understand.”

This separation matters. Branded content promotes your solution. Unbranded educational content defines the problem space and positions your company as the natural authority—even before prospects know they need your specific product.

Reaching Consumer Media as a B2B Benefits Provider

Virta faced a structural challenge: “When you are a B2B brand that is seen as a benefits provider… when you don’t cover the vast majority of Americans… New York Post, People magazine today show they have very little reason to cover you,” Judy acknowledges.

Why would consumer outlets cover a company most Americans can’t access?

The November launch included a New York media event with 30-40 consumer outlets—Today Show, People, Oprah, New York Post, Fox News. “We had probably 30 to 40 media in that room with us that night and all talking about metabolic disease. We have some of our members there talking about, you know, their experience with reversing disease and gaining their life back.”

But the critical shift was message elevation. “By talking about metabolic health and metabolic disease, we’ve elevated the conversation beyond just plain old weight loss, which everybody and their mother hasn’t opinion on, into something much more medical and scientific and factual. But also that’s still really tied to food and nutrition and those are things that people want to talk about every day.”

They made their business model invisible by leading with universal outcomes: metabolic disease affects 93% of Americans, and it can be reversed through food. That’s newsworthy regardless of whether every viewer can access Virta specifically.

The result: “From that point on, I feel like at least consumer media wise, we have seen a massive uptick in our coverage, but also just recognition for us and that message pull through that we’ve seen of us being referred to as metabolic disease and metabolic health leaders.”

Leveraging Low Awareness as Repositioning Advantage

Virta’s lack of brand recognition outside healthcare became strategic advantage during repositioning.

“The unfortunate beauty of Virta is that Virta was also super under the radar,” Judy explains. “We existed for 10 years, but most people outside of those two realms had not heard of us.”

Healthcare and diabetes industry stakeholders knew them as diabetes reversal. But most potential audiences—consumer media, broader health plans, general public—had never heard of them.

“It’s been much easier to build it in places that had never heard of us before, clearly, then, than companies that have known us for 10 years to be diabetes reversal.”

This inverts conventional wisdom about brand equity. When repositioning, high awareness in the wrong category creates drag. Low awareness creates clean slate opportunity.

Map your awareness by segment. Concentrate resources building new narratives where you’re unknown rather than fighting to change decade-old perceptions.

The Systematic Approach to Category Timing

Virta’s journey challenges the “move fast” startup orthodoxy. They debated the same positioning question four times across a decade, saying no three times.

“This trend towards embracing metabolic disease and metabolic health is certainly, it’s a conversation that has been revisited every several years,” Judy reflects.

Each “no” wasn’t hesitation—it was discipline. They were waiting for market infrastructure: public awareness, scientific credibility, regulatory attention, cultural conversation.

When those conditions finally aligned, they moved decisively. The November launch included the report, microsite, media event, and NASDAQ Times Square billboard. “It felt like for so long that this company was fighting the uphill battle of diabetes reversal is real… and people just kind of writing us off being like, you guys are nuts. Like, there’s prescriptions for that, like, you can’t do this with food. And it felt like finally a moment that’s like, you know, we are on the cusp of something really big.”

But that moment only arrived because they had the discipline to wait for it—building proof points while monitoring market conditions until convergence justified the category claim.

The framework: revisit category timing systematically (not opportunistically), identify the specific external conditions required for category success, build proof while waiting, then move decisively when conditions align.

Category creation isn’t about inventing new markets. It’s about recognizing when existing market conditions finally support the positioning you’ve been building toward.