The Power Of Using Your Apple Watch To Hack Your Health!

“We are not celebrating the prevention, we are celebrating the treatment”

?- Michael Snyder

Unfortunately, that’s how we look at health. Diseases are sneaky. We don't always know right away if something is wrong because symptoms don't necessarily show up in the beginning stages of an illness. What can help? TECHNOLOGY.

How can technology help you track real time data about your health and wellbeing? And why should you track anyway? This is what Michael Snyder and I explored during our episode on my podcast, The EDGE. Michael Snyder is a pioneer in the field of functional genomics (the study of genetic material) and proteomics (the study of proteins present in an organism). His Lab was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. Currently, he is a Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Director at the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine.

You can watch the full episode with Michael Snyder here or you can click here to stream it on your preferred podcast streaming channel.

Snyder stresses on tracking your health to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on in your body. Illnesses often begin developing in our bodies quietly. Snyder’s research shows that by tracking our health on a regular basis, we can pre-empt diseases. Health data collection using wearable tech can help us take a proactive approach toward the prevention of diseases.?

We rarely go to the doctor when we are healthy. But, the key to good health is keeping track of various health scores so that it is possible to diagnose conditions before the symptoms begin to show.?

“Diabetes is an endemic worse than covid and it's only becoming worse”?

??- Michael Snyder

A revolutionary wearable piece of technology is the Continuous Glucose Monitoring device. I myself use the Abbott Libre 2 CGM patch to measure my blood (cytosolic actually) glucose levels in real time. A CGM device allows us to learn how our blood sugar levels react to food; they can help indicate the exact food items that cause a spike in our blood sugar levels. These foods can be very different for different people.?

Hence tracking for yourself can be a great way to keep your blood sugar levels in healthy ranges. This is because these spikes cause damage in the long run as our body may not be able to lower blood sugar effectively which can lead to type-2 diabetes. Therefore CGMs are powerful devices that can help modify eating habits and prevent diabetes. This is especially important in a country like India where the majority of the people are not even aware that they have diabetes.

A CGM patch sits painlessly on your triceps muscle behind your arm. The patches have small sensors (microfilaments) that poke inside the skin (you don’t even notice it and no there is no needle) for two weeks.?

They keep taking a little sample of the your interstitial fluid which is the fluid present under the skin. A biochemical reaction occurs here where an enzyme called glucose oxidase reacts and this is the measurement that is picked up by the CGM. The body’s glucose levels are measured every minute and you get a detailed data report for 14 days about your glucose levels.?

This information will tell you how the foods, exercise, and sleeping patterns affect your glucose levels and take steps accordingly.?

If you’ve ever used a CGM patch you can download your data (as a CSV file) and the team and HumanEdge and I would be more than happy to analyse it and help you decipher its outputs.???

Another bioermark you can begin tracking is your heart rate! Tracking his heart rate helped Professor Snyder diagnose his Lyme disease. Around eight years ago while travelling, he observed that his heart rate was up and his oxygen dropped down much more than usual. While heart rate does increase on flights, this was an unusually high rate. He also learned that his body temperature was high at that time. When his physician did a number of tests, he saw that his immune system was also flared, indicating a bacterial infection. His doctor wanted to give him Penicillin but because he had been to a place where Lyme disease is prevalent, he convinced his doctor to give him medications for Lyme. It in fact was Lyme disease because he saw the specific antibodies and antigens for it later. He was able to observe these using his pulse oximeter and a smartwatch much before the symptoms of Lyme disease had surfaced!

Like this there are many more biomarkers and I’ll do an entire series on this later in the year for you. But, if you have a device and would like to know more about how to use the data, then call me today!?

We make almost 90% of our medical expenditures in the last years of life. Whereas we should try to create a system that will help pick up different signs early on in life before they have drastic effects on the person’s life, happiness, healthspan, and lifespan. Ideally, we must be able to live a long life and then just die. That would be called healthcare. What we have now is just sick care.?

With the evolution of science, it is now possible to now see how people age. This is important because now that we know how we are ageing, we can pick out the correct kind of intervention for us and work towards longevity.?

“You can’t treat if you don’t measure”? -Dr Marcus Ranney

If you wish to begin your journey towards a healthier and longer life, a good idea would be to talk to a physician.?

You can also book a session with me, and let me help you get started on your longevity journey.??

If you found this topic of interest, then check out the podcast episode I hosted on my podcast, The EDGE, with Snyder on quantifying health with wearable technology. You can watch the full episode here or you can click here to stream it on your preferred podcast streaming platform.

This newsletter is a part of our ongoing series The Longevity Hack. Our aim is to help you understand the science, learn to recognise the markers of ageing, and to develop biohacks for each of these.?

You can read the previous editions here.?

Curious to know more about longevity, ageing and how you can cultivate a lifestyle that will help you live longer, healthier and happier???

Click here to set up a 1-on-1 conversation.