Ep. 135- Become An Inside Tracker To Hack Your Health with Royi Metser

This is the You Winning Life Podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights, and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, and certified entrepreneur coach Jason Wasser.

We're here, we're here.

My last interview. Congratulations. Thank you.

Honored.

Yeah, and right, and as we, as we were talking off air, uh, just the connections and the overlap of, of, of our similar experiences. But I'm sitting here with Roei Metzer. He is the director Of course my phone shuts off right when I'm doing this, right? And it's Metzer. Metzer.

Rui Metzer.

Yeah, well, you have to add the resh. Rui, name it Rui Metzer, the director of— Yeah. Yeah. So guys, you're going to hear some noise. We're back here. We're going to hear some noise. We're at the last interview of GoBundance. This has been an incredible weekend. And as you know, I've been interviewing people mostly from the real estate space. And I'm surprised that I got an extra addition. And my last of the day is Rui Metzer. He's the director of business development for a really, really cool wearable and data site stuff.

Yeah, app.

App.

Health app.

Health app, right? Called Insight Tracker. And we're gonna do that over again. So yeah. So guys, last day here at GoBundance. My brain is fried. I'm already on third introduction for my next guest, but I have a massive grinning smile sitting across from me, and it's Rui Metzer. He's the director of business development for Insight Tracker. Tracker, which is an app, and we're gonna get into a deep dive on health and fitness and biochemistry and nutrition and technology, all the cool stuff that I love. This was definitely the better interview of all of them that I've recorded so far. But Roey, welcome, man.

I appreciate it. Yeah, nice to meet you.

Pleasure, right back at you. So we're sitting here, we have some, some shared common history, and, uh, you're now up in Boston, you went to school in Boston. Let's start off with just like what got you into this field. How did you like, you know, technology and, and apps and, and health and nutrition? What What was your journey into that world?

Yeah, sure. So I've been with InsideTracker for a little over 6 years. I actually just relocated to Miami from Boston, which seems to be a common story, especially recently.

We'll take the Bostoners. We don't want any more New Yorkers.

Okay. All right. That's good with me. Same here. So I actually got into InsideTracker after spending the first part of my professional career in finance. So I was an investment banker for a little over 5 years as well. Doing M&A advisory for capital raising services and capital raising services for growth technology companies. So primarily in enterprise software.

Okay.

But personally, I was always passionate about health and wellness. I grew up in a house where I would say my parents were early adopters of the organic food movement. So buying organic foods and shopping at Whole Foods, which was a privilege, but before I would say it was mainstream. So from a very young age, I was The value of the quality of the food being so important that you consume, being so important, was instilled in me. And so nutrition was always something I paid a lot of attention to. I was very active growing up, played sports. I was a scrawny kid in college, 6 feet tall, 140 pounds, and started to lift weights and trying to figure out how I should be fueling to accomplish my health and fitness goals and Um, just over the many years that I spent trying to figure out how to optimize my own health and reach my own fitness goals, I would say I became a frustrated consumer of health, wellness, and fitness in general. There is so much misinformation and BS out there. Yeah, and it is overwhelming and paralyzing. At least that's how I felt, and I knew many others felt the same way.

Yeah.

So, um, I was always trying to navigate that on my own and found it very challenging. Um, and towards the end of my time in finance, I also felt a desire to, um, focus my professional career on an area where I was more personally passionate and interested in, and where I could— felt like I could have a much greater impact on many more people's lives. So, um, I met Insight Tracker. I fell in love with the mission of the company, which is to help every human being live a longer, healthier life. So I don't know that I could find a company with a better mission than that. Um, and I loved the team, but I wasn't sold on joining the company until I tried the product for myself. So we'll get into how it works in a little bit, but I got my blood tested, I got my results back, and I got the analysis and recommendations from the InsideTracker app. And I was blown away by the strength of the insights and recommendations, by the science that was behind them, by how personalized it was, by how user-friendly it was. And so that's really what got me excited about joining the company and trying to get the product in the hands of as many people around the world who could benefit from it and help them remove the guesswork from their health, wellness, and performance, and ultimately, we hope, live a longer, healthier life.

Incredible. So many times I hear this, and I have these conversations with my clients as a therapist of like, well, I'm looking to go into this company, I'm looking to go into this type of business, and they may say fine, it's great financially, but they may not have any attachment to that, or it's like, but you're super organic hippie dippy, why are you working for a big pharma company? Right. Or, right, and people don't realize that these contradictions eventually, like they may not see it, and I know especially with nutrition, right, it's interesting over the years, the more and more I've gone deeper down rabbit holes of integrative mind-body medicine, which is where my practice now focuses on, the more nutrition pops up. And how much misinformation, especially— or, you know, I don't even call it disinformation, but misinformation of, you know, during the pandemic, like vitamin D levels. And I've ranted and raved on numerous shows about that. And zinc, where— why you're losing your smell, it's a zinc, uh, you know, thing to that, right? You're— and so there's simple, simple, simple, simple things we can do to enhance, but yet we aren't told, would you do this? Well, if everybody should be doing keto and intermittent fasting, but maybe you shouldn't be. And some people should be vegan, and some people— maybe you shouldn't be. And dairy— someone was talking last night about every 20 years, right? Well, eggs were good for you, now eggs aren't bad for you, now eggs are right, now everybody's allergic to eggs.

Great example. We actually wrote a great blog about that. We have a great science team that wrote a blog recently about eggs, and that's been something that I've been flip-flopping on personally because I'll read online different—

right, right, go to the Dave Asprey, that whole side of things. And you have the Liver King, that's the new— that just came out of nowhere. Is that Is that real? Is that like CGI? I hope. I actually got nauseous. My buddy showed it to me a week ago and I'm like, what the— he's like, dude, you gotta see this. And he pulled it out and I'm like, this is— I literally was nauseous. Like, I had to walk away from the video.

Listen, man, whatever gets views.

Yeah, it gets viewers. So in your own journey, right, figuring this out, like, was there something that you were struggling with that would have brought you to this?

Yeah, so I mean, personally, yeah, um, you know, I was Trying to put on muscle. It's a very superficial, I think, uh, objective, but that's really it. You know, as a college kid who's scrawny, trying to bulk up a little bit, that's really— that was my first goal.

In Boston?

In Boston, right? Actually, no, I was in DC at the time, so I went to George Washington University, um, did my bachelor's in finance. But, um, so it was really around, um, how to fuel for, um, gaining muscle and around macronutrient prescriptions around how many grams of of carbs, protein, and fat you should be consuming each day and how many calories you should be consuming each day and, you know, 3,500, 4,000 calories a day in order to put on a pound or 2 pounds of muscle per week and, you know, trying to do all these calculations. I was very numbers-driven too. So it kind of started there, but then it evolved from that into more general health considerations too. And then when I got tested with InsideTracker, I was 26 years old and I exercised 5 or 6 times a week and I thought I ate clean, right? I ate very healthy. And I found things out that were really surprising. For example, I had high cholesterol at the age of 26. Very high cholesterol. Like clinically high. And that was surprising to me, and I never would have known that if I didn't do any such tests. And all the years of going to doctors and doing regular labs and there was no indicator, or the doctors just didn't even like, "Oh no, you're fine, you might be a little bit—" At that age, yeah, at that age they just don't, the doctor is gonna, take action once it's reached a point where it's, um, you know, you're sick. Yes. And I had levels that were, you know, especially my age and the fact that I was active, um, I had levels that were high, not, um, critically high. Mm-hmm. But, um, even if the doctor would flag it as something that I should pay attention to, they, uh, they didn't give me any actionable guidance around, and specifically with natural. Yeah.

We're gonna keep an eye out. And it's not their fault.

I'm not knocking doctors. That's not the role that they have to play. The role they play is when you're sick, primarily when you're sick, they're there to help you, and they do a pretty good job of that.

Well, and I think that's the distinction that I talk a lot about of sick care versus well care. I bring a lot of functional medicine people, right? When I dabble in that world a little bit too, and talking about like the wellness side of like there is well care, which is proactive, and yeah, and there is sick care. Mm-hmm. You want to rely more and more on the well care than the sick care. But yeah, that's kind of where a lot of people I see are stuck in that system, whether it's with the insurances and they're just being bounced around, but they're not getting the data, the right information. Or I don't know, just avoid, avoid more dairy, stay off the dairy. Are you eating pizza? You're eating cheese? You're eating cottage cheese?

Yeah, just avoid the dairy. Generic recommendations.

Or it's genetic recommendations.

Well, yes. So we now know obviously DNA plays a pretty big, uh, role as well. But I think there's a few things that are happening that, that are driving people to want things like InsideTracker, which is— you talked about one of them, which is healthcare is really sick care underlying, right? And it really starts with the fee-for-service model of healthcare, right? The more treatment you get, the more money they can bill for. So I think underlying that, the system is not built from the ground up the right way to encourage proactive and preventive health. That's number one. I think number two is it's not, it's not, um, novel anymore to say that we're all different. And the concept of personalization is status quo in pretty much every industry. And I think today in health and nutrition as well. So, you know, when you go to Netflix, you get a personalized recommendation on what to watch. When you go to Amazon, they're going to recommend things that you should buy. I mean, in every— there is personalized fashion, right? So in nutrition, personalized nutrition is now mainstream, and we know that we are all different. And what works for you and what's right for you is not necessarily what's going to work and what's right for me. And in InsideTracker's opinion and the founder's opinion, let's focus on natural interventions and nutrition and lifestyle to improve health, and let's do it in a way that's personalized. And the best way to figure out what's right for you is to start by looking inside your body.

Interesting. So we're starting off— so if someone's going to the doctor, they're getting their labs, and right, you're looking within, within normal limits and you're seeing things and you have certain numbers that you have to be matching and they're like, okay, you're fine, go on. We'll see you in 6 months. We'll see you in a year for your next checkup. What's the, what are they looking at once you draw? You said it's a, it's a blood draw. What are they looking for differently? What lens are they looking at that through?

Yeah. So there's a few things that InsideTracker does that are unique that really attracted me to the company. So the first is it starts with the mission of the company, which is around healthspan and longevity. So our founder, Dr. Gil Blander, he's Israeli. So he studied in Israel and then came to Boston to do his postdoctorate fellowship at MIT at a lab and then decided at some point that he wanted to apply all of the research that he had done in aging, which is the area that he's been devoted his life to for the last 40 years. He wanted to apply all of that research to build a company that could impact many more people than if he stayed in academia. Sure. And so, um, the mission is to help someone live a longer, healthier life, not just extend the number of years that we have here, but also the quality of those years so that when we're 70, 80, 90, 100— hopefully we all live that long and longer— we're still able to do all the things that we'd love to do, like pickleball that everybody's— sure, where did that come from? I don't know, I, I haven't tried it yet, but I need to. Yeah, I've heard a lot about it.

Yeah, pre-pandemic, a few people I knew were playing it.

Now it's like Well, and this is probably not, um, new, but, um, I read it's the fastest growing sport in America.

Yeah, so it might overtake NASCAR. Yeah, I think I just offended some people out there.

Sure, pickleball, playing with your grandkids, um, whatever it is you like to do, running, right?

And you could do it at 70, 80, 90 years old.

That's what we hope. That's what Gil's mission was when he started Insight Tracker, was to help people do whatever it is they love for as long as they CAM. So it's this, this concept of a healthspan, which is becoming, I think, more and more mainstream as well. And Gil was really ahead of his time. So he started it in 2009, and he built a technology, an application that could provide you with, first of all, a picture of what's happening inside your body, because he believed that if you want to understand how to eat, what supplements to take, what lifestyle interventions to make, you have to start by establishing a baseline and identifying where you have opportunities for improvement. And he uses the analogy of plugging your car into a computer every few thousand miles, and you can tweak what's— what needs tweaking, or your mechanic can fix what's broken. You know, you change the oil and then it runs smoothly again, but you do that on a regular basis. And in his mind, it was crazy that we don't do that for our bodies on a regular basis. So what he wanted to build was a way for us to plug our body into a computer, so to speak, and get a reading and and measurements of what that looks like inside, identify where you have opportunities to improve, and then use that to drive actionable science-backed recommendations. Yeah. So what's different about InsideTracker is that it starts with a blood analysis because Gill decided that blood biomarkers are the most scientifically validated and credible data source to drive both that picture of what's happening inside, but then also actionable recommendations. We don't do the blood test, so Insight Tracker is not a blood testing company, but we partner with companies like some of the largest labs like Quest Diagnostics to do a pretty comprehensive blood analysis. So it's looking at up to 40-something biomarkers, which is much more comprehensive than you would get at an annual routine physical, and looking at markers that are connected with health and wellness, not disease. Um, so things like vitamin D, like you mentioned, homocysteine. Yeah, so cortisol, um, B12. Full iron panel, hormones like testosterone. So it's, it's a pretty broad look across many health, wellness, and performance areas. And then based on that pretty comprehensive analysis, it does a few things. First of all, for every one of these markers, it's giving you an optimal range. So you touched on the broad clinical ranges. These are really designed for the purpose of screening you for the presence of disease, right? But because we're all different, Gill created an optimal zone, which is much more narrow than the clinically normal range. And then if you're not optimized in that marker— and that optimal zone is based on your age, your gender, your ethnicity, how active you are— if you're not optimizing that marker, it's going to give you nutrition and lifestyle recommendations to optimize that marker. And the important thing that I think attracted me the most at the company is that every single one of those recommendations is backed by at least one peer-reviewed scientific publication. Incredible. So the hard work that his team has done is they've reviewed tens of thousands of studies and they've created a database of thousands of food supplement lifestyle recommendations that come directly from the strongest available peer-reviewed literature. And so in a world where there's so much BS and it's hard to know who to trust and what's really science-backed and what's not they built an algorithm that could deliver science-backed recommendations to the right person in a way that was ultra-personalized and can help you improve your health over the long term.

That's incredible because I see this, and I, like I said, I was going on a rant and a rave throughout the entire pandemic just about vitamin D. And we can just get into the numbers, just if people haven't heard this before, right? The average lab, they talk about having it between like 30 and 40, right, for vitamin D. And then all this research started coming out during the pandemic. If you have less than 40, you 50% chance higher, you know, comorbidity factors. And then what does that mean? Comorbidities, right? Potential autoimmune issues and inflammation, asthma, allergies are all connected to vitamin D deficiencies. And then I started doing some more research— erectile health for men. But here we are having this multi-billion dollar pharma industry with a blue pill, and you might just have a vitamin D deficiency.

And most of us, especially in the Northeast, are deficient and don't even know it. I shouldn't say most of us are deficient, but a lot of us are deficient. And in the Northeast, I would say, um, probably most of us are deficient.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I lived there for 3 years. The time I was in New York, 3 years, I would wake up at 6, I would be at my job at 7, I would be inside all day at 7, and then I would drive home for an hour to my afternoon, my Hebrew school jobs, and teaching there, back from Brooklyn back into Long Island. And then I'd be in another building for the next 2 hours 3 hours and it was dark. So I had an hour in the wintertime, maybe, of being in the car with my tinted windows. So I maybe had no sun. So I'll tell you— months at a time.

I'll tell you that I moved to Miami in December, so about 5 months ago, and I had been supplementing with vitamin D for a long time due to InsideTracker. I learned that I was about to be deficient, and I thought, well, I don't need to take my pill anymore because I'm gonna be in the sun a lot. And It turns out my vitamin D dropped almost 20 points in a few months because just because you're in the sun, if you're wearing sunscreen, you're not absorbing it. If you're not in peak hours, you're not absorbing it. If you're wearing clothes, you're not absorbing it.

The color of your skin affects it.

I mean, there's so many factors, but unless you're measuring, you have no way to optimize these things.

Right, and I hear over and over again from multiple people, whether it's people people or medical practitioners, oh, your vitamin D is probably fine.

But why? Yes, but right, right.

And why? Right. And it drives me mad because so many things from that— and vitamin B stress handling, right? If you have made it through and you're listening to this, that means you made it through the pandemic, at least this stage of it, and you are probably somewhat stressed out. And you may have had all those wonderful, like, you know, cocktail teenies, the, the Corona teenies and all those other things. But we know that alcohol diminishes your vitamin B. But yet I'm stressed and I need a drink at the end of the day. So you're now taking out more vitamin B and— but you're now stressed, right? So you have that reciprocal wheel that you're not getting off. Absolutely, right? I'm stressed because I drink, I'll drink because I'm stressed. And but that's all vitamin B and stress-handling vitamins amongst many other things as well.

But yeah, and the other thing, you have a lot of people who are moving more towards, you know, plant-based diets and becoming vegan, vegetarian for good reason. Um, and they're probably not getting enough vitamin B through their— B12 through their diet.

So again, these are all things that I mean, we could talk about lectins and all the saponins and all the stuff that like the plants are using to protect themselves that might actually cause inflammation in us. So we got an— that's another conversation maybe for another time. But yeah, right, but people are going into those plant-based diets but they feel like crap, or they're doing more of a ketogenic diet and they feel like crap.

I think at the end of the day, the key is, is not to guess. Yeah, the key is to measure so that you can optimize. You can't optimize what you don't measure, and it's starts by getting that reading of what's happening inside your body, and the best way to do that is a blood analysis. And so that's really what, um, what InsideTracker is about, is helping you understand what's happening inside your body and then arming you with nutrition and lifestyle recommendations to optimize your health.

So when you started using it, from the time you started to the time you started seeing differences and changes, what was going on for you? What were some of those results? And now you've been doing it for a while, and What have you seen like longitudinally just for you? Because yeah, right, you're here, you're the—

you know, that's a great question. Um, so I've been testing with it for over 6 years. I actually bought it myself before I joined, and like I said, I was 26, I had high cholesterol, so my LDL was about 160, which is pretty high. Um, and that was one of the first things I worked on improving. One of the recommendations was to start eating oats and barley. They're high in beta-glucan and there is some peer-reviewed literature that shows that it can have a— because they're high in fiber, can have a pretty dramatic impact on your lipid levels, a positive one. So that was one of the big changes that I made. And again, that was right for me. I eat grains, I eat oats, I don't have any problem with that.

Do they take into consideration your preferences? Okay.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if I indicated that I didn't— and I can choose not to do that. Exactly. Yeah, dairy-free, gluten-free, you can say whatever you are and it'll personalize the recommendations based on your preferences. But for me, that was one of the big changes that I made. I was able to drop my cholesterol about 40 points in 3 months between December and March of 2015-2016. But it's been a little bit of a roller coaster for me, and I've been keeping tabs on it. So I was able to bring my cholesterol very, very low, and then I went low-carb for a while. I tried to get a six-pack. It wasn't worth it. And my cholesterol went back up because for me, what was helping bring the cholesterol levels down was these high-fiber foods like oats and beans and so on and so forth. So when I cut those out of my diet, my cholesterol suffered. Wow. And then I stopped exercising when the pandemic hit completely. So I was in Boston, we locked down, gyms shut down. Um, I started ordering a lot of takeout. Uh, we have delicious New England IPAs up in Boston. Yes, you do. So I developed, um, what I fondly refer to as a hobby for New England IPAs.

I went to like really good coffee and learning how to measure and grind and where to get the beans and all that stuff.

So, okay, well, I went for a different vice. Yeah, um, I went for the alcohol. And, you know, I was drinking a beer a night, maybe sometimes two on the weekends, three. Um, I put on 25 pounds, and I tested with InsideTracker a couple times. So the weight gain was, um, you know, obviously I could see that. Sure, visually. But then I got an InsideTracker test and I saw that my cholesterol was 173, my LDL. It's about a year ago. That was the catalyst I needed to really make a change again. So a couple days later I signed up for a marathon. I said I gotta change something. InsideTracker also gives you a biological age. It tells you how old you are on the inside. So what did it say? It said I was about 10 years older than I should be. Wow. Wow. I had a mean air age of 42. I was 31, 32.

So that was the case. You turned into me. See, this is Jason's results. The hell?

But seriously, seeing, seeing the number on a graph and seeing the longitudinal data of how I was able to improve it, and then, you know, I went in the wrong direction, that was the catalyst that I needed to make a behavioral change. And I started exercising. I trained for a marathon for about 6 months. I started eating pretty healthy. I ran the marathon in November, so about 6 months ago. First one? First marathon. I caught the bug. Full marathon? Full marathon.

Not even a half? You just went all the way?

I had done a few halves in my past, but I was very out of shape at the time. So that was a great experience. I lost the weight. I was able to bring my cholesterol down. But it was InsideTracker that really got me to make a change, because I saw something that at the age of 32, I still had time, luckily, to correct it. But I wanted to start then, and I wanted to try to use diet and lifestyle. And I'm not against taking medication. If I have to take one day of statin to keep my cholesterol levels down, then I'm willing to do that, but I wanted to try with diet and lifestyle first, and InsideTracker gave me the power to do that.

Incredible. So what are some of the other— I'm assuming there's some really great stories coming out of your community at this point.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, what's beautiful is that everyone is different, right? So some people don't have cholesterol problems, but they find out other things. So we have a lot of active individuals that use InsideTracker. Many of them are runners or triathletes. And so, you know, one very common one is female athletes, endurance athletes, female runners, female triathletes are, um, you know, when they're very active, they have higher iron requirements than the average person. And you have these normal ranges for iron that are incredibly broad and they're feeling fatigued all the time. And they go maybe to their doctor, they get their iron tested and their iron is clinically normal, but it's so low that they're going to be feeling tired all the time. Um, and so that's a very common one is low iron, um, especially for those active, uh, women. But yeah, we have, we have some pretty awesome stories.

Was there anybody who like took this and they found something? Like, I mean, obviously we're looking at labs, we're looking at like known names, like, oh, you have high cholesterol, or your thyroid might be out of whack, or whatever it is. Is there anybody that's come along, used this, and there was some like game-changing, life-saving thing that they found out and figured out? Yeah, absolutely.

And that's not our— our job is not to treat or diagnose disease, but people do find things out and catch things before they become a problem. Or if they didn't catch them when they did, they would have been a much bigger problem. It happens all the time. And for that, we obviously recommend they go to their doctor and they talk with their physician about it. But it happens all the time that people catch things before they become a bigger issue. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's so tricky.

And I, and I always go back to like, I just, you know, a family was referred to me recently and they were describing what they wanted to come in for, and I'm like, I won't see you until you go to a functional medicine specialist. And they're like, no, no, but we really want to schedule. I'm like, well, okay, but I'm going to tell you the exact same thing in our first session that I'm not going to continue doing after doing an intake, which you're going to pay me for, to go to do functional medicine, right? And because I knew intuitively, just based on what they were describing, this situation with their child, that there was some type of nutritional biochemistry absorption right? There was just something that didn't make sense, especially when you're dealing with like a 10 or 11-year-old where— I mean, listen, can we say a kid's ADD? Can we see every kid's having learning processing disorder? But I would first want to rule out anything that could be done with the metabolic and nutrition and gut chemistry, brain chemistry, neurotransmitters. Sure. And that alone, I've seen it over and over again, versus like, nope, let me— well, you might need a psychiatrist, which it's so interesting. So pre- pandemic. Um, I was in my, my last office for 4 years. Literally behind my wall was a psychiatrist. Okay, wall-to-wall. Not once— like, and this is my, like, commitment to, like, finding these problems— not once did her or any other psychiatrist get a referral. Because the first thing is going to be, let's go into figuring out what your biochemistry is. Let's look at it from this lens, exactly as, as Insight Tracker and what you're talking about. And let's see what we can figure out that you can change by exercise, nutrition.

I think generally that's the right approach. Generally, right? I think so, yeah.

And what solidified that— I remember one day during lunch break, she came in, she had like this bag in her hand, and she's like, I bought extra of these at Publix. I'm a grocery store now. You're here, I'm very familiar with it now. Right, at the grocery store. Do you want any for your clients? And I'm like, what is it? She goes, oh, it's diet soda.

My response was, are you fucking kidding me? I guess people still drink soda. Yeah, right.

And I guess it's a thing. What do you mean? I'm like, I wouldn't— I would never give this to my clients. Yeah. She's like, what do you mean? I'm like, chemicals. And it's got, right, this thing is gonna— right, it's a precursor to, you know, whatever. What's the fake— so one of the fake sugars? And aspartame. Aspartame. I mean, neurotoxin right there. And blah blah blah. And she's like, well, it's okay every, every once in a while, isn't it? And I'm like, I don't know, is it okay for like a married person to go to a hooker every once in a while? And she just like looked at me and walked out of my office, and that was the last time she ever talked to me. Oh no. But I do believe, like, I mean, it's really good. I don't think that was the most blunt you guys have ever heard me on the show about this thing. Truth is coming out when I'm around a bunch of entrepreneurs that are in my wheelhouse. But like, I do adamantly believe that, right? I mean, I happen to find this at Publix, right? Nope, nope, Arden's Gardens. I mean, listen, it's a cold-pressed fresh juice. I love— I've been to the actual places in Atlanta. Oh cool, very cool. So I'm like, oh, they have it while I'm here, might as well.

Nice.

But, uh, yeah, that's— I'm trying not to have the junk crap.

It's hard when you're traveling. Yeah, very hard. Um, but I agree with you 100%. We need to start with nutrition and lifestyle. Yeah, that can solve so many problems. And, um, I prefer to do it in a way where I know that the recommendations that I'm getting are, uh, backed by some research. Yeah. And I think that's the difficult thing for people to navigate these days is they don't know who to trust. They don't know what recommendations to trust. And every day it seems to be different, right? You brought up eggs. That's a classic example. But there's this dieting approach, right? And keto and paleo and vegan and plant-based. And it's confusing for people. So I think the best approach is to focus on an N of 1. Focus on yourself, understand what's happening inside your body, and then follow recommendations that are backed by strong evidence that are right for you to improve the things that your body uniquely needs to improve. So that's our approach, and that's the approach that really resonates with me.

Yeah. And when using the app, so you're going to get all these recommendations if someone does a blood test. So once they're in the app, is it right? Is there trackables? Is there things that— data that they put in meal, meal stuff that they— I ate this, I drank that, or like walk us through that.

So it starts with a questionnaire. So it's going to collect a lot of information about you— your age, gender, ethnicity, height, weight, how you currently eat, your dietary preferences, how you currently supplement, if you're willing to take supplements. So again, if you're not willing to take a supplement, it's not going to recommend one. Sure. Um, your exercise routine, if you exercise, your lifestyle habits, so how you sleep and so on and so forth. Then it's going to do a blood analysis. So you either go to a lab, you get a new blood test done with one of our lab partners, or you can have someone come to your house, or you can upload existing test results if you just went to your doctor. Oh, cool. How far back will they take? Um, you can upload as many test results as you have.

Okay.

And that'll give them much more of a— Correct. So you can get all your historical data tracked. And the nice thing is you get that longitudinally too. So I think that's really the, the value comes in when you get multiple tests in there, and you can see how you've progressed over time. Um, there's also a DNA analysis as well, which you can do if you'd like. So you can take 23andMe or ancestry.com DNA test results, upload it, or you can do a DNA test through the company, through Insight Tracker. That's going to tell you your genetic predisposition and marry that with your blood, which is what's happening inside your body at that time. We also have connections with fitness trackers. So I'm wearing a Garmin watch. We're connected with Garmin, Fitbit, Apple, So we're going to collect your heart rate, your sleep, your activity data. And so the app is getting a very holistic and comprehensive picture of what's happening. And it's going to use all of that information to then tell you, here are the specific foods you can eat, supplements you can take, lifestyle modifications you can make to optimize the markers that need to improve. So it creates a plan for you, recommends you follow that plan for 3 to 6 months. You can log into the app every day and you can check in and you can say, today I had my oats and I took my, you know, alpha-lipoic acid, my vitamin D. Hold yourself accountable. And then you measure progress every 3 to 6 months. They recommend you get another blood test, and that's really when the value comes in, is you can do a baseline, make some changes, and then objectively see with data coming directly from your own body if you're improving or not.

Incredible. Yeah, so many different ways about going about this, and I, I see it because I know my own stuff, right? Food sensitivities. And one of my good friends, he's like, you know, when they were creating you, they turned the dials up really high. It's like, oh, gluten sensitivity? Yeah, let's give it to a 14. Allergies to everything in Florida when you walk outside? Yeah, let's put that in. Like, yeah, like, and now we're just gonna send them down to South Florida and like, you know, perfect. Yeah, and we're gonna make them 5 foot 2. So we're just gonna have fun with this dude. So, so I very, very much relate to everything you're saying, right? I've run, I've done half marathons, I work out, I eat clean, I eat gluten-free, and yet, right, high cholesterol, can't lose weight, hired trainer, right? There's always something that is left unturned. And if you're not looking at it from a database scientific perspective, we're just throwing darts at a wall and hoping it sticks. It's correct.

Correct. And I think people are realizing that they need to take control for their own health, um, especially with the last 2 years, 2, 3 years.

Yeah. Has there been any studies that they've been done connected to any biomarkers with people who have been, you know, feeling— who've gone through it and feel worse versus feeling better? Is there anything connected to that, that research that they've been looking at?

For our app? Yeah. So we've published a few papers. One of them we published a few years ago in a nature journal called Scientific Reports where it was actually fascinating. They, um, our science team looked at 1,000 people that have done InsideTracker. And had a baseline and a follow-up test. And what they saw was statistically significant improvements in those 1,000 people across many key biomarkers of health and wellness— cholesterol, vitamin D, so on and so forth, blood sugar. So they saw that at baseline, on average, the app was able to help someone go from pre-diabetic, which is a fasting blood sugar level of over 100, to, um, normal, which is under 100, at follow-up. Just from using and having access to InsideTracker. That's absurd. It's amazing. It's pretty incredible.

And food allergies, food sensitivities, are they going into that at all?

No, not looking at food allergies or sensitivities. We are asking for preferences, obviously. So if you indicate that you don't want to eat a specific food, then it's not going to recommend those things that you might be sensitive or allergic to, but you have to indicate that you prefer not to see those.

That's awesome. And what's the next steps that they're working on? Any new upgrades or things? Are they staying with this —little box, right? Not that it's a little box, but are they staying in this box? Is there stuff that they're like starting to talk about that you guys can talk about on air? And what's next for the company?

Yeah, I mean, we have some pretty big ambitions. Obviously, we want to help every person live a longer, healthier life around the world. So I think it's a— it's many things that we're working on. It's both on the inputs, so to speak. So how do we collect more data about you? Science-grade inputs. So things that have real strong peer-reviewed literature around them where we can take that data point and then we can say, here's a study that shows that because your level is A, therefore you should do B. So looking at more inputs like that, things like continuous glucose monitors potentially, epigenetic age. So there's many exciting things that we can do.

Telomere, anything telomere stuff. Yeah, maybe one day.

But we have some of the brightest minds in aging research involved in the company. So they're looking at the latest and greatest peer-reviewed literature and determining what to do based on that. So adding more markers, connecting with more devices. So we have Apple, Fitbit, and Garmin. We want to do additional integrations with devices like the Oura Ring, the Whoop strap, those many devices that people are wearing today. And then on the output side, just continuing to refine the algorithm and recommendations so that we have recommendations that are based on the latest and greatest.

Research. So people want to track this down, they want to take a look at this, they want to try for themselves, where are they going?

InsideTracker.com.

Oh man, that was easy.

Pretty easy. Yeah, yeah, cool. You'll get everything you need there, direct-to-consumer. So you can sign up on your phone and then— how will that— yeah, you'd sign up on our website. There's a bunch of products that you can pick from. They vary in the, obviously, the price, but then the comprehensive of how comprehensive the analysis is. The most popular one we have is called Ultimate, and if you do Ultimate, you can go to a lab. So you would buy it, you'd get a lab slip, you'd go to a Quest lab near you, they draw your blood, within a week your results are ready. You download our mobile app on your phone, we're on Android and iOS, and then it would give you your plan from there.

Oh wow, and what's the turnaround from once we take the lab to— about a week.

Wow, that's fast. Could be much faster.

It could be a couple days. Holy crap. Yeah, there's one of the other companies I did that recently with, and I did a blood test, and it's a great company. I've known about it forever, and I actually met the founder of that company at a conference years ago, and it was super cool. And I'm like, all right, all right, all right, this was like already 6 years ago. I finally, finally, finally did it. Um, it was not easy, right? It was a blood prick by yourself, but the things that they gave you unfortunately were not enough, and I only— well, you had to do like these 2 huge—

I've done those home tests. We do have a home kit. Yeah, I've done it. So not recommended. Listen, don't get— getting a blood test is not, I don't think, fun for anyone, whether you go to a lab or you do it at home. But the value that you get from blood markers are massive. Yeah, it's unmatched, right? So, um, we do it via a lab test usually, but, um, we do have a home kit. It's a finger prick. Those are not so fun to do at all. They're tough.

Yeah, yeah, they're tough. Then you run out of— let's say if you don't run out of the whatever— exactly— puncture thingies. Oh, it was awful. I had a friend of mine who came over, she's a nurse practitioner, and did it for me. I'm like, sweating, and I'm like, this is awful. We like only filled up half a vial. But they sent me an email back, we might not— wait, we don't have to rebatch you. Oh no, it worked out. But yeah, so, so this sounds a lot more efficient and a lot more fun, for lack of a better—

it is very, it is very efficient. Again, you go in, they spend, you know, 5-10 minutes drawing your blood, and then within a week your results are ready. You can do it as much as you want.

Ah man, yeah. And especially now, again, right where this is now, we're— what month are we in? Where are we? I think it's April.

I think it's still April. Yeah, I think we're barely still in April. I think it is.

It might be May. It is April 30th today. I completely lost track, right? So as now we're getting into summertime, as we could get more vitamin D, as we could be going outside and getting more of the nature, but we want to see what you really need to be fueling yourself with to enjoy your life and everything. And as we're sitting here with a bunch of entrepreneurs, and it was really cool, I was actually shocked. There's vegan on the first night. It was vegan, gluten-free stuff that was marked at all the different options. That's great. I'm glad this is embedded into the culture of this becoming—

it's becoming more common, more mainstream, which is good. It's very good, I think, for everyone.

Yeah, man, so glad that you were a surprise throw on my schedule. I appreciate you accommodating me. Oh, I'm glad. This is like, you know, this is my wheelhouse and my jam, so I really do appreciate it. So thanks for having me.

My pleasure. Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life podcast. If you are ready to minimize your personal and professional struggles and maximize your potential, we would love it if you subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at You Winning Life.