The Future of Wellness and Health

Where Do We Go From Here?

The Future of Wellness and Health

Traditionally, recovery protocols have been thought of as something reserved for athletes. However, deliberate hot/cold exposure, compression therapy, and percussion guns have percolated into gyms and households. Increasingly, fitness facilities have become a more accessible solution to preventive health compared to the United States healthcare system.

For example, Equinox launched a membership program integrating biomarker testing from Function Health, giving customers the ability to deeply understand their health and connecting them with sleep, nutrition, and health experts. Fitness SF, a gym with multiple locations in the San Francisco Bay Area, partnered with InsiderTracker to offer blood and DNA testing, allowing members to track progress and receive personalized nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle recommendations. Across the United States, Crunch Fitness gyms have introduced saunas, and Planet Fitness gyms have introduced red light therapy.

Far from cultural fads, these protocols are validated by scientific studies. Sauna use, with its 10,000 years of history, has been shown to decrease the risk of mortality from all causes by 40% when comparing frequent sauna users to infrequent users. Cold exposure has been shown to positively impact human metabolism. Red/near infrared (NIR) light therapy, on the other hand, has known anti-inflammatory properties.

Recovery protocols once used by elite athletes have now been adopted among office workers, not because of the desire to become top athletes, but because people are increasingly looking outside the healthcare system to support their health. The trend is due to many factors, but this short blog will focus on three: the increasing assault on our health, dissatisfaction with healthcare systems, and consumers deciding to take charge of their well-being by focusing on preventive health.

Obliteration of Health in the U.S.

According to the U.S. National Health Survey data from July 1957 - June 1959, there were about 9 cases of diabetes per 1,000, a rate of 0.9%. In less than 65 years, 11.6% of the U.S. population had diabetes in 2021. As of 2023, more than 1 in 3 American adults have prediabetes, making nearly half the U.S. population either diabetic or prediabetic. Cancer rates are rising among adults at younger ages, and new cancer diagnoses in the U.S. are expected to top 2 million for the first time in 2024. Since 1973, total sperm count in Western countries has more than halved, corresponding to a 1.6% decline per year. Nearly 20% of young Americans between the ages of 3-17 have a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder. The statistics can continue - our bodies are not functioning well in today’s environment.

Failing Healthcare Systems

At the same time, healthcare spending in the U.S. reached $4.5 trillion, equating to $13,493 per person. 41% of working-age Americans, or 72 million people, have medical bill problems or are paying off medical debt, and that’s not including an additional 7 million elderly adults facing the same issues. For cancer patients in the United States, the average cost of medical care and drugs is more than $42,000 in the year following a cancer diagnosis. Two years after a cancer diagnosis, 42.4% of Americans have depleted their entire life’s assets. It is no wonder then, that 73% of U.S. adults report that the healthcare system is failing them.

If we asked children how they are doing in school, would we be satisfied if the answer was “Great, I didn’t fail the tests?” Yet, healthcare systems today primarily focus on disease, specialty care, and technology rather than preventive care; health is framed almost exclusively in the negative, and achieving “health” means that one hasn’t been diagnosed with a disease or a major risk factor for disease. Patients are categorized based on the level of the problem. In an acuity table consisting of four levels - stable, moderate risk, complex patient, and high-risk patient, the best one can do is stable.

Yet, we want to be more than just stable, and the disconnect between health and the healthcare system is not limited to the United States. The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The definition aligns with how most people think about health. In a survey conducted by McKinsey, 85 percent of 19,000 respondents across 19 countries said their mental health is as important as their physical health, and a majority viewed their spiritual and social health as “extremely” or “very important.” Yet, less than 2 percent of physicians and nurses worldwide were trained in managing mental health problems in 2020. Moreover, a large and growing body of evidence suggests that at least 19 of the 23 drivers of our health are outside conventional healthcare systems.

Achieving and Maintaining Health

Often, the pursuit of optimizing one’s health gets the “biohacking” label, one that’s typically reserved for affluent people or elite athletes. However, why is spending on a pill or surgery a more legitimate health intervention than walking in nature, engaging in social interactions, eliminating ultra-processed foods, and limiting exposure to pesticides/herbicides? The distinction between “clinical” and “lifestyle” health interventions is mostly artificial - if something works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

Dr. Casey Means, a Stanford-trained physician and co-founder of Levels, commented on the root cause of the chronic disease epidemic in a conversation with Athletech News: “Most of the chronic diseases and chronic symptoms facing the U.S. - essentially, all the top killers of Americans today - are rooted in the same thing, which is metabolic dysfunction.” However, the paradigm of Western healthcare has led us to largely ignore metabolic health, and instead focus on treating all the downstream symptoms that result from metabolic dysfunction.

When reflecting on the trend of GLP-1 drugs, Dr. Means expresses concerns, not because of a lack of efficacy, but because it doesn’t address the causes of the problems, which are unhealthy lifestyles and toxic living environments. Dr. Means explains:

It’s a very dark trend that is essentially trying to gaslight Americans to believe that health is found in a weekly injection for life and not from changing the environment that is so obviously crushing our ability to be healthy. If you had a sick fish in a fish tank filled with dirty polluted water, you obviously would not inject that fish every week for the rest of its life. You would change out the water.

Unfortunately, the food that we eat and the water that we drink continue to burden our bodies rather than nourish them. The adoption of various “recovery” protocols in households and gyms is a reflection of our desire to be more than just symptom-free - we want to be well physically, mentally, and socially. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world are increasingly focused on improving their health and well-being. In 2022, around 50 percent of U.S. consumers report wellness as a top priority in their daily lives, a significant increase from 42 percent in 2020. As science-backed protocols and technologies such as at-home diagnostics become more accessible, consumers are increasingly looking outside the healthcare system to improve metabolic functions and achieve health - a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

When various infrastructures fall short of supporting and maintaining our health, entrepreneurship can help close the gap. At LEAD, we are excited to support companies such as Bitewell, Silver, Lotus Health AI, and others that are making it easier to live healthier lives, and we are committed to continue supporting bold founders and innovative solutions that will help people achieve and maintain true health.