The Reverse Mullet Healthcare Podcast
Ellen Brown, Justin Politi, and Dave Pavlik bring their 90 collective years of healthcare experience to BP2 Health where they're on a mission to effect real change in the industry. Connect with BP2 Health Here: https://bp2health.com/contact/
The Reverse Mullet Healthcare Podcast
Your Blood Is Telling You How To Live Longer—Are You Listening?
I'm Alan Brown. I'm.
Speaker 2:Justin Politi.
Speaker 1:And we're here live at Health. We're here with the Reverse Mullet Healthcare Podcast and we have our special guest, Gil, that I'm super excited to have him on the podcast. So tell us about why am I excited to meet what you're up to?
Speaker 3:So I'm a scientist in background, born and raised in Israel, phd in biology. I always wanted to stop the clock. I always wanted to stop the clock. I always wanted to help humans to live better, longer, and that's why I decided to move to the US, spent five years at MIT at the best lab that studied aging, and during that time, started to be exposed to the biotech pharma environment of Kendall Square, which is, I'm sure, the place I used to work there, yeah, which is, I'm sure, the telephone.
Speaker 3:I used to work there, yeah, and moved to the industry, worked there for a couple of years and developed a company that is trying to help humans to live better longer based on what happens inside the body.
Speaker 3:So what we do? We actually look at blood biomarkers, dna data from fitness tracker. We just added a food recognition that you can scan your food and know exactly what you ate for a week, and based on that, we are using AI, expert system and other to provide a very refined laser focus recommendation. What are the interventions that you need to do in order to allow you to live better longer, and that includes food supplement, exercise and lifestyle changes. What is cool about that is that we are doing it for more than a decade and we have more than 100,000 users that have done it, and we have a big data that show that a correlation is still a correlation because we haven't done a proper clinical trial, but it showed that, uh, our users, when they tested and then follow our recommendation, tested again, improve a lot of those blood biomarkers from baseline to follow-up, so that's very exciting. I think that's very relevant for your audience, because it might be a time for healthcare systems to start using personalized recommendations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so do you think it's interesting? Because, do you think that, like, I'm really intrigued by behavioral nudging? It's interesting because do you think that, like, I'm really intrigued by behavioral nudging and I think, when you give people the right amount of information, like, I'm a big fan of my aura, right, tom Hale knows, right, I'm always pinging and I love that. They you know their recent acquisition and it's very clear that they look to be much bigger than just a sleep organization. You know a sleep company. But I look at InsideTr, inside tracker, and I think is there a behavioral nudging components of that? Because, your point right, they, when people have the information that they need, they feel empowered to make change and that even that's enough yeah, no, it's.
Speaker 3:It's a great question and actually I uh, I'm thinking about it a lot and we started with blood, so I see blood as a mountain, because you receive, as you said, a lot of information. Some of it is very concerning for you, so you get pissed On some of it. You get excited.
Speaker 3:But, it makes a lot of emotion. And then, if you think about it, on average, our users are getting blood tests every 270 days, so you have a peak and then you have a valley of 270 days and another peak. So we try to allow the user to have a few small hills between the peaks to allow them to receive some meaningful recommendation. So the data from Oreming, for example, is a great example for that, or Apple Watch or whatever you have. We integrate with all of that because we can find that you haven't had a good night's sleep, so we'll provide for you a recommendation specific for that. But it's still connected for the background of what blood biomarkers are not optimized I got you, so we can tell you to drink this drink or to eat this food, or to do the exercise at the right time and so on. So that's one way to have a basically heal between of the mountains. Another example is what we had right now is the food recognition, so you can scan your food for a week and then we are telling you which macro micronutrient you are not consuming enough or consuming too much. Or also we can we develop like a gunshot that show you when you ate, when you exercise, when you slept, when you supplemented. And then we can start looking at timing and telling, hey, you ate too close to your sleep. No doubt that's the reason that you are not sleeping well. Or you haven't ate enough protein following your exercise, yeah. Or your intermittent fasting wasn't long enough, or so on. So we are providing that value for the user.
Speaker 3:And another thing that we have is what we call a pro tip. So, for example, we went for an exercise. A few minutes after that we are telling you, hey, congrats, you came back from exercise. Few minutes after that, we are telling you hey, congrats, you came back from exercise. Now you need to eat this amount of protein, this amount of carb and drink this amount of liquid in order to replenish. So that's another example.
Speaker 3:And the last one that we are going to release soon is a HealthPen Habits Score. So every week, you will receive basically a report that shows you what have you done well and what you haven't done well, mainly from the fitness tracker, but also from questions that we are asking you, and that's connected in a way to your longevity, because we have another solution that's called inner age, that we calculate your biological age. So this one will come tell you hey, you haven't walked enough steps and there is a correlation between step and longevity. Yep, or you haven't slept enough, and that's also my inner longevity.
Speaker 3:So the combination of all of those hills, with the mountain of the blood and the huge mountain of DNA, allow the user to be engaged more and we see that there is a correlation. As I told you pre-recording, we submitted a paper for publication with 20,000 users that tested baseline and follow-up and a few follow-up more than that, and we have a subpopulation, for example, that started with high LDL cholesterol that from the baseline to follow-up they decreased significantly, continued to be low. For the third, fourth and fifth and the sixth one, they even decreased it more.
Speaker 1:And that's without Sounds like a true patient engagement.
Speaker 2:I know Patient engagement tool and I have to say like so.
Speaker 1:so Josh and I are both like when can we do inside tracker Right? I like I've been it's been something actually I have. I have. I have talked many times about doing it, but it's, this is like. I love that. Like we were just talking to somebody earlier who said yeah, my husband went great shape, amazing athlete, but come to find out cardiovascularly he wasn't healthy, right.
Speaker 1:Went to the cardiologist and they were like this is horrific. You know you're going to die whatever and she's on the nutrition side of the world, right A nutritional scientist, and so she was like well, it's food and the doctor's like no, no, it's a dire thing or whatever, and I love that. You've got users that are engaging. You're giving them the information they need. They're engaging, they're doing it and they're not going out by themselves.
Speaker 2:How long do they spend on average in the application? Because it sounds like you could really be super engaged.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so again, in the peak they can spend hours of time to understand and realize, and then in the hills it can be only one minute. You receive a notification. Hey, you haven't slept well. Drink this cherry juice so it can be one minute, half a minute a day or even half a minute a week, so we are not sending a notification if we don't have what to say.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this notification should be engaged with it a little bit, like they have to be. You have to be getting information yeah, I at least connect your fitness tracker which is unbiased yeah, yeah, very, very interesting.
Speaker 2:So we always ask guests this what do you think can affect real change in healthcare?
Speaker 3:I think that the real change in healthcare, in my opinion, should come from the consumer, or from the you call it patient. So I think that a patient should come to their clinician physician and tell them hey, we want to use data, we want you to use wearable data, we want you to look at my wearable data, we want you to know nutrition Wearable wearable See I win.
Speaker 2:She's converted me on wearables.
Speaker 1:They used to make so much fun of me. They're like Ellen and her wearables.
Speaker 3:No, but wearables. If you look at blood, blood is a liquid gold and then you look at the wearable, the value of the wearable data is much lower but the frequency is much higher. So you cannot do triglycerides every day. You can have your resting heart rate every day. You can have your VO2 max. You can have your sleep every day. So it's the frequency versus the value. So I agree with everyone the value is lower but because you have the frequency it can give you some estimate to understand what happened with the real blood biomarker.
Speaker 2:So that's why I like it. So you mentioned VO2max, so do you have an application? Do you have a suggestion for like VO2max exercises?
Speaker 3:Of course, of course. Yeah, you should do a high intensity interval training, more aerobic. That's my every week, yeah.
Speaker 2:Every day Sleep better.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, absolutely. We have thousands of recommendations for our users. So, if you are going back to, you asked me, what will convert the clinician? So I think that the patient should do that, but also the clinician should be more open-minded. For example, an average clinician gets trained around 20 hours in nutrition.
Speaker 2:And that's nothing. What is 20 hours? That's a theme we've been continuing in here.
Speaker 3:Reading a book is the 20 hours, yeah, yeah. So I think that something about the training of the clinician, I think that also the perception about a dietician is not as good as it should be. They are doing a great job. So I think that there are a lot of things to change and definitely the problem is the system. I'm sure that you know the hotel and gym model Basically a healthcare system like to fill the hospital like a hotel and fill the machine like a gym, so the MRI should be full all the time Instead of coming and saying, no, I don't want to go home and go to the gym, yeah Well we don't have.
Speaker 1:I'll say two things to that. First, I'll go back to your point about training for physicians. So we've become really, really big advocates of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, because to us We'll be there next week.
Speaker 1:Right, we'll be there next week at their hovers, but we think that's like a fantastic bridge tool to allow traditional provider organizations in the American healthcare system to say, okay, well, we need our doctors to understand the six pillars you know, sleep, all the things that your tracker you know is monitoring, right, Embracing a care model around that. And then that leads me to my second point, which is we need like we were talking about before we started is we have sick care? I mean, this hall is sick care, right, and we walked by a hospital bed which is a little disturbing to me. I'm not going to lie, we don't have health care, we don't. We have all these different point solutions, right, but imagine we bring these together to your point and somebody comes in and says I don't want cardiometabolic syndrome anymore. You can't figure out how to change that right now, but we need to have an alternative for that person.
Speaker 2:I don't want to just be treated, I actually want to right, and I feel like your tool is almost a tool for health literacy to a certain extent, because there's a lot of that's a really good point. It's just something that so many people are lacking. If you have something that you can engage in, that you know you're learning as you go right, it gets overwhelming to people when they're trying to improve. You know their current state, so you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, also, the disease are not starting at the age of 60 or 50. Oh no, I know. So if you have cardiovascular issues, if you will test your LDL cholesterol or APOB early and will take the statin or change your behavior, you have a better chance not to have a cardiovascular disease. The same way is if you will measure your insulin early and will see that it's spiked too much, you might be able to manage it by nutrition and not injecting insulin.
Speaker 3:So there are so many things that we can do using prevention, but there is no motivation for the healthcare system to do it right now, and I think that it's a mindset.
Speaker 1:And hence why we're all about value-based care and outcome-based care.
Speaker 2:It just has to be a movie. It has to be a movie, yeah.