Dave Asprey left his surgical residency after noticing that sinusitis, laryngitis, and thyroiditis all stemmed from chronic inflammation rooted in metabolic dysfunction. He co-founded Levels, which uses continuous glucose monitoring to show people how food and lifestyle affect their blood sugar. A UNC study found 88% of U.S. adults have at least one marker of poor metabolism.
You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Now, you mentioned surgical training, but you started a metabolic health company. How did you go from surgery to metabolism? Because surgeons are usually the ones with like, the convertibles and the big egos, but they don't really do metabolism. So what happened there?
Yeah, so I was on that track and, you know, I'd done my undergrad and medical school training at Stanford, and then I went on to head and neck surgery resident. And in my surgical training, I was treating and operating on diseases of the ear, nose and throat. And I was really struck by how so many conditions that I was treating were fundamentally rooted in chronic inflammation. It was sinusitis, laryngitis, thyroiditis, and all of these itises. That is the suffix in medicine that means inflammation. And it really caused me to step back and say, why is there so much chronic inflammation at play? And why are we just reaching for our prescription, prescription pads for all sorts of heavy duty steroids to quell the immune system instead of asking what is causing the inflammation? What is the root cause of that? Because certainly we can, we can go to the operating room and we can bust a hole in the sinus and suck pus out, but that does not do anything to change the core underlying physiology that led to inflammation, because you cannot operate on the immune system. And so I became really sort of obsessively interested in understanding what are the root causes of inflammation and how to mitigate those, in hopes of truly helping people change their physiology and keep a lot of the operating room. And in that deep dive, it became very clear to me, abundantly clear with hordes of research to support it, that one of the key fundamental triggers of chronic inflammation in the body is dysregulated blood sugar and metabolic dysfunction. And so this means dysfunction in the way that our bodies make and store energy, and like you said, take food and water and air and turn it into energy that we can use. And unfortunately, as. As you know better than anyone, our modern lifestyles make it extremely difficult to escape metabolic dysfunction. A recent UNC study estimated that 88% of American adults have at least one biomarker of poor metabolism. And. And this is likely part of the reason why 9 in 10 of the leading causes of death in the US are related to or worsened by dysregulated blood sugar levels. And it's mostly preventable. But it means moving away from the factors of our Western lifestyle that hijack our core physiologic processes that are required for every cell in our body to function and that's our metabolic processes. And so I really refocused my clinical energy into thinking about how to help patients make better choices, healthier decisions that would ultimately lead to foundational metabolic health and how to do it at scale. And you know, I mean, I think it was sort of those days in the operating room where I'd be like I said, sucking pus out of the sinus or cutting a cancer out, you know, and there it's this very brute force thing and you kind of are, you know, feel like a, you're supposed to feel like a hero for doing this. But I feel like what is more heroic in medicine is actually truly changing a patient's physiology to make them fundamentally healthier. And so, you know, health care costs are going up. We're spending $4 trillion on health care per year.
It doesn't matter though, because we just print more dollars. It's totally easy.
Yeah. Although the costs are there, the costs are going up each year. So we're going to have to be printing a lot of dollars and you know, we're getting sicker, fatter and more depressed. And I thought, I'm a doctor, I'm a leader in this healthcare system and it is not working. And in face of that, if you're not stepping back and asking why then what are you you doing? So I moved away from the operating room. I started my own functional medicine private practice, I started a company, I co founded a company called Levels with four incredible co founders. And what Levels does is help people optimize their blood sugar and personalize their diet through a bioware bowl called a continuous glucose monitor and really get a sense of where they stand on the metabolic health spectrum and learn to eat and live in a way that does not push them down the spectrum of blood sugar, dysregulation, metabolic dysfunction and long term. My hope is that by empowering people with personal data and the ability to understand in real time, with clarity, closed loop biofeedback, how their food and lifestyle choices are affecting their health, their health, we will ultimately help move towards a healthier population, keep out of the operating room and as a secondary effect, totally change the way in which we're able to be influenced and I would say manipulated by the food industry because objective data just rapidly cuts through food marketing. So that's my journey from surgery to metabolic health and fundamentally comes down to how to be more proactive in health care, create healthy bodies in the United States and to empower people with agency to make better decisions.
