🌊 Health Optimisation

Sep 13, 2021

Welcome! I’m Ivan Landabaso, VC at JME.vc. Join 1.7K+ entrepreneurs discovering new tech waves, startup trends & leverage bi-weekly (+ surfing 🤙)

Summary

🌊 Wave: Health Optimisation
🦾 Leverage: Skill Stacking
🇪🇸 Deals: Factorial, Biome Makers etc!

Health Optimisation⚕️

Buckle-up as my friend Mehdi, founder and CEO of Vital, takes you down one of the most important rabbit holes of the decade.

😟 Problem

People struggle to get and maintain great health.

🤩 Solution

Continuously optimise our physical existence through technology.

⏳ How we got here

We are currently at the crossroads of two trends of modern life: on one side, the industrialization of food, production, and pollution makes us less and less healthy compared to a few decades ago. On the other side, technology has brought us tracking tools and a new scientific perspective on how to optimize health and reach new health-span frontiers.

Over the last decade, the space of health optimization has exploded. Different types of companies sprung up in recent years mainly focused on:

Exercise
Sleep
Recovery
Nutrition/Fasting
Metabolic health
Mindfulness
Health dashboards / Consolidators

These solutions are very diverse and target many different approaches but they all fit within the 'High-Performance Lifestyle,' a new concept that describes the will to optimize health, performance, and live better.

Combining elements of technology, athletics, medicine, and mindfulness, the high-performance lifestyle (HPL) aims to optimize our existence.

Virgin Media | Usain Bolt | #BeTheFastest GIF | Gfycat — Source: https://gfycat.com/aggravatinguntimelydachshund

The premise of most of these solutions is to help people gather valuable data about some part of their bodies and then explaining the data collected and guiding the user to improve their health upon this understanding.

We're still early in this space, so many skeptics claim that the existing solutions aren't precise and contribute to increasing anxiety without adding any tangible benefits. Although some of these criticisms can be right to a certain extent, they often miss an important point: we are still early. The initial phase of data collection, low precision, iterative learning and added value is necessary to reach better results in the future.

Another important piece of criticism is that data is far from being the solution to everything. Tracking metrics and collecting data is an important part of the picture, but it's often not enough to trigger long-term improvement and behavior change.

For example, most people know junk food isn't healthy, but this knowledge isn't enough to refrain them from eating it. Health tracking advocates explain that seeing the effect of some habits on your metrics can be a strong wake-up call to stop engaging in unhealthy behaviors. Still, it seems that currently, the big missing part in the field is on the behavioural side of things.

Today people can track many metrics relatively easily, yet they often lack the tools, guidance, drive, discipline and motivation to stick with it for the long-term.

Chocolatebars GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY — Source: https://gifer.com/en/Qaeu

That's exactly what the new generation of health optimization products is targeting with innovative approaches such as Vital’s `social health optimization’ solution.

Vital: Vital is a company we (JME Ventures) recently invested in. Its a super interesting space, 👉 I encourage you to signup for their beta here 👈. They are also hiring, if interested get in touch with Mehdi!

Finally, although on a different timescale, it's worth mentioning the progress in the space of longevity biotech. More and more people are starting to be bullish on the field, pouring a lot of funding to help researchers and scientists come up with human therapies aiming at reversing our biological age.

Mehdi Yacoubi @Mehdiyac

People will soon realize that aging is a problem that *can* be solved. Be ready because this paradigm shift will change everything.

What's essential to understand here is that curing singular diseases alone, say we completely cure cancer, would only add a few years to our life expectancy because the other causes of death increase exponentially with age. The only solution to living longer and healthier is to target aging itself, not the diseases that stem from it.

The space recently got a lot of great news, from major crypto figures like Vitalik Buterin, Balaji Srinivasan, and Brian Armstrong being vocal about it to billionaires investing in the space:

David Sinclair and Peter Attia, both giants in the aging space, will be co-chairing a $200M biotech SPAC, Frontier Acquisition Corp., to acquire promising longevity startups.

SENS Research Foundation recently received the largest cryptocurrency donation in history ($27M) to support R&D for aging therapies.
Google-backed Calico Labs renewed its $1B partnership with AbbVie to continue R&D efforts into the underlying biology of aging.
Altos Labs, a new anti-aging research company, just launched with backing from the world’s wealthiest, including Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner.

🚀 Today's Market Map

Nutrition framework

Longevity Framework:

Source: Created by Oleg Gavryliuk - https://www.mindmeister.com/1445194891?t=2oLrVXYW4R

👌 Hacks

Zone 2 training: Train your cardio at BPM= 180 - age to train your mitochondrial efficiency. Ideally, 180+ minutes per week with sessions of 45+ minutes fasted.
Glucose tracking: Optimize your metabolism by tracking your blood glucose levels to find the optimal nutrition for your individual physiology.
Sauna & cold exposure: Try cold plunges, cold showers, and sauna sessions to optimize your longevity and your immunity.
Supplements: There are many things to try here, but it's crucial to do so with the supervision of your physician. Another important point is to monitor the effect of the supplements you're taking. You can do frequent blood tests and see if things are evolving in the right direction. Here's a guide to where your values should stand (🔒 subscribers.) For all your personal research, use examine.com.
Fasting: Fasting has been repeatedly shown to be a great practice for health and longevity. You can start with time-restricted-feeding and try longer fasts if they're suitable for you (20:4 Intermittent Fasting, 72 Hours, and more!)
Training for the Centenarian Olympics: It consists of training with longevity in mind. Specifically, train your stability, strength, aerobic efficiency, and anaerobic performance.

🐇 Follow the White Rabbit 🕳️

This space can get overwhelming at first, but a good way to approach it is to get interested in one aspect of your health that you'd like to improve or understand. For many people, starting to monitor one metric of their health, be it heart rate, glucose, or weight, leads to a clear understanding: this metric responds to my lifestyle and my habits. After this first 'aha moment,' it's much easier to see the point of all of this and be engaged for the long run.

Resources:

🦾 Skill Stacking

Great article by Tomas Pueyo on how skill stacking - developing your own unique combination of skills that you master enough to be roughly in the top 10% - can make you “uniquely world-class”.