What Is Metabolic Health, Anyway?

< Full Episode

Transcript: What Is Metabolic Health, Anyway?

Season 10, Episode 2  | February 11, 2025

[MUSIC]

Welcome back to Life Time Talks. I’m Jamie Martin.

And I’m David Freeman.

In today’s episode, we are talking metabolic health. It’s a term that we often hear, but we maybe don’t go into a lot of depth about. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about what it means to really address our metabolic health and what is underlying those issues. It’s about looking under the hood, so to speak, and seeing what’s going on.

So we have two special guests with us. Our first set of guests, I think, in this season. So we’ve got more than one person.

Double trouble. We can go —

Yes, yes, yes.

So yeah, let’s go ahead and introduce them. We got Jim LaValle and also Cliff Edberg. Starting off with Jim. Jim is a RPh CCN and a clinical pharmacist. Alright. He’s the co-chair of the American Academy of Anti-aging Medicine, the chair of the International Peptide Society and the chief science officer for here at Life Time.

Alright. And then we got this, Mr. the man with the plan, Cliff Edberg RD, CPT. He’s a senior director of MIORA and has more than 20 years experience working directly with clients with their lifestyle and their wellness goals. So we’ve got some great experience sitting here at the table.

Yes, we do. OK. So let’s — we want to dive right into this, metabolic health. It’s something that we’ve been writing about in the magazine for years. But it’s so funny. You say metabolic health and we have a little one liner about, what is it? But what is it really? Like, let’s go into a little bit more depth on that.
Jim, do you want to kick us off?

Sure. So I think the first thing is he’s double trouble. I am no trouble. Now we can start talking.

OK.
So you think about metabolic health. So if you look at your health today, where you sit, your body has got all these reactions going on. So you’re the sum total of all of the biochemical reactions going on in your body. All the signals from your hormones, your neurotransmitters, your immune system, everything’s flowing together.

And it’s either flowing together, taking you to a position of health as you’re aging or you’re starting to pop up with a condition or you’re moving towards a condition. So metabolic health is about your body’s chemistry being in homeostasis, being in balance, being anabolic, but also not excessively pushing your metabolism, right? And not being catabolic where your metabolism isn’t keeping up with what needs to happen for you to maintain health.

Got it. OK. I love that.

And I shifted over to you now, Cliff. Like, why does it even matter to be aware? You got to understand being aware of metabolically healthy or unhealthy. Why does that even matter?

Well, that’s really — the ethos of everything here is the longevity piece, right? People want to live long. They want to be healthy. And to Jim’s point, there’s all these systems that you need to take into account to optimize that. And they all affect each other, which brings in the complexity of this.

And we know, we see it every single day in the clinic, you know people in your life, they don’t feel well or within their peer group, they feel normal, but then around somebody like a David Freeman that’s high energy, high mood, and how do I get some of that? Where it’s really just being proactive, managing your health, managing your nutrition brings that quality of life up.

And most people aren’t aware of the things that go into it. They’re not assessing it, they’re not taking care of themselves. And it might not even be something that they’re doing intentionally. They’re just not aware of what to do. And it slowly deteriorates their quality of life, and then can impact their longevity.

Yeah, so like our baseline of what we’re feeling, we kind of start to settle for what — this is just what it’s supposed to be, versus, living with greater energy, with greater vitality. Right?

That’s exactly it. I mean, it’s not just about living longer. It’s thriving in that journey.

Right.

And a lot of people forget what it’s like to be thriving, to have energy when you wake up in the morning, to not be tired midday, to not have trouble sleeping, to not have achy joints or achy muscles, or feeling like you’re foggy headed. They just — because a lot of their friends are starting to feel that and you’re told, oh, it’s normal. You’re 30 now. It used to be, you’re 40 now.

Right.
Now it’s, you’re 30 now. You should start feeling like you’re kind of on the back end of feeling good. And that’s where metabolic health comes in. So where are your lab values? How do you feel? How are you sleeping? How are you training? Are you overtraining? Are you maybe not just getting what’s right for you? All of those things add up to create the output, which is, hey, I have vitality, I have resiliency, I feel great.

Yeah. So we’re going to go into some of those. You mentioned lab tests and all of that, but there are a number of factors that contribute to painting the picture of what metabolic health adds up to be. So let’s go through those one by one. And if you can, as we mentioned them, why is it a measurement of metabolic health? And how do you measure it, and what does optimal look like? Let’s start with stress hormones. And I know that’s a bucket of things, but who wants to start? Stress hormones.

Go ahead, Cliff.

Well, a couple of the things that we specifically look at are things like your cortisol levels. That can be a morning cortisol. And often when we have people that are under a lot of stress will go as far as looking at it throughout the day and look at that circadian rhythm.

So ideally your cortisol should be elevated in the morning. It’s what gets you up. It gives you energy. And as the day goes on, your cortisol should gradually go up. As your melatonin goes up, cortisol goes down, melatonin goes up. I can fall asleep, I can stay asleep. I wake up really rested. And we know is all these external inputs, whether it’s marital stress, financial stress, work stress —

I have the kids, I have my workouts, but then there’s the stress of the foods I’m eating, the activity I am or am not getting, all add to this bucket. And if we’re not cognizant of that, to Jim’s point, we can be exposing ourselves to too much cortisol and we become catabolic and we start breaking down and we can start to deteriorate our joints and lose our muscle mass.

And it has a host of downstream effects when impacting your glucose, your thyroid, your sex hormones. So that’s a really important bucket for sure.

And it’s not operating in isolation at all. Again, it’s like, that’s affecting a variety of things that have downstream effects.

Absolutely.

Alright. Rapid fire coming right at you, Jim. So glucose regulation. Talk to us.

Well, glucose regulation is at the center of why we age, right? So when you think of it, when people are insulin resistant, meaning they start to have poor glucose regulation, their body has an inappropriate amount of glucose in the bloodstream, that starts to actually damage your tissues. And when your glucose levels go up and your insulin levels start to go up, that starts to impact things like your blood vessels.

So you literally start to plaque your arteries, your blood vessels get more stiff, your blood pressure starts to go up. And Alzheimer’s, by the way, is thought of as type 3 diabetes. So when glucose levels are not well managed, you’ll gain weight, your blood pressure can go up, you can start to experience issues with memory, you can feel more fatigued, you get the ups and downs called glucose oscillation, where you’re all of a sudden getting these big dips in your energy.

And I got to get something to eat, or I’m — or I feel like I’m hangry or I’m anxious or I’m getting a headache. So glucose is really at the crossroads of why people start to accelerate their aging and become chronically ill.

OK.

OK. Factor number three, thyroid health.

So your thyroid is — the way that I usually phrase it when I’m working with a client or with a patient, it’s like the thermostat for your metabolism, right? It’s going to help dictate the functionality and the efficiency of all the cells within your body. And a lot of people, again, due to chronic stress, nutrient deficiencies, that thermostat can get turned down a little bit. So I get a little bit sluggish, I get a little bit tired. Therefore, I’m not going to the gym.

Then I’m losing motivation. So then I’m not making the best food choices. So it’s really important that we monitor that. And unfortunately, most people don’t get a full look at their thyroid as well. We might just look at a TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, just the communication from your brain to your thyroid, is that signal happening and in a good range.

But from there, my body has to create T4 or an inactive thyroid, or mostly inactive. Then my body’s got to convert that to active thyroid, and I do that through my GI tract, I do that through my liver, I do that through the brain, I do that through the muscle, and I need a bunch of nutrients to do that. So there’s a full cascade that we want to look at to make sure if it’s — your thermostat’s turned down a little bit, that we know where so that we can put corrective action to it.

Got it.

OK. Let’s turn the thermostat up a little bit. Inflammation markers. Let’s talk about that one.
Yeah. So when you think of inflammation you think, oh, my joints hurt. But inflammation markers could be silent inflammation. So you have something called C-reactive protein for example. So CRP is a marker that can be measured that shows that your body is metabolically producing more immune compounds or called cytokines that are potentially damaging your cells and your tissues.
So C-reactive protein is a marker. I mean, platelet volume is a marker. One of the big markers of inflammation is actually looking — when you look at an advanced lipid panel. So everybody hears about HDL LDL cholesterol, but there’s subfractions of that that end up showing you that your body is metabolically inflamed. So you could have something called lipoprotein, little A that goes up, or apolipoprotein, B.

And those things can also show you that, oh, I have inflammation. Homocysteine is another one. So inflammation plays a core role in why are my cells getting damaged and why am I aging at an accelerated rate. It’s that story of metabolic inflammation leads to inflammation. And that’s why metabolic health is important. The more you keep it healthy, the less you show inflammation in your chemistry, the better you keep your cells and tissues healthy.

Right. OK, just to delve into that one just for a second longer because, is it apo — apoB? Is that the one that has a genetic component? Because is there some genetic factors within that one?

So there’s apolipoprotein E3, M4.

OK.

And if you’re a 34 or a 44 and if you’re eating saturated fats, everybody’s like, hey, I’m eating — drinking MCT oil and I’m eating butter and I’m —

Carnivore.

Eating that — yeah. I’m eating — I’m eating lard, right?

Yeah.

That would not be good for an APOE 34 or 44 individual because they don’t process saturated fat well, and that will trigger inflammatory cytokines or an inflammatory response and lipid profile gets off. So there is a genetic component to that. And there’s other pieces of the genetic story as well, like methyltetrahydrofolate.

If you’re low in folic acid, you could make more homocysteine. And homocysteine is very damaging for your kidneys, for your brain and for your heart. So yeah, there’s a few genetic components that do mean a lot. A lot of times some of them may have less influence, but those two have big ones.
OK, OK. So on to the next one. We have vitamin and mineral status, including like, B12, vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, et cetera. So some of those big ones that we hear about a lot.

Yeah. Super common nutrient deficiency, especially here in Minnesota. We’re not getting a lot of sunlight. So those — it’s critical to look at those nutrients. When I look at a zinc or a magnesium — we just talked about with Jim, the importance of regulating glucose. Magnesium plays a critical role in that.
And we’re — not very many Americans or people in general are eating a high diet that includes magnesium. And then you expand on that when you think about performance and longevity, magnesium is a very relaxing mineral. It helps with sleep, it helps with muscle tension and recovery. Zinc plays a critical role in testosterone production in a male or female.

It helps prevent the enzyme aromatase from converting your testosterone into estrogen. And when we look at people’s labs, their diet is just often absent or just really low in these nutrients, which are really simple fixes that can really help somebody feel really great.

Got it. OK.

Yeah. And the next one, we’ve talked about on a few of the podcasts, but I mean, it always comes back full circle when we’re talking about gut health and the microbiome. And we’ve heard like, leaky gut. So let’s just talk about gut health in this space.

Yeah. So gut permeability and gut health — first of all, the integrity of your gut means that the brush border cells that line your intestine are nice and intact and tightly packed, and they’re not allowing things to get through the intestinal lining into the bloodstream. So the first step is to have that intact. When that gets leaky or permeable, and that can happen due to stress, it can happen due to certain drugs that people are on oral contraceptives, proton pump inhibitors, acid blocking medications —

Overexercise.

Statins.

Overexercise is a big one to make that happen. But when it gets permeable, then you can get things like bacterial translocation. What’s that mean? That means that a bacteria, it’s supposed to stay in your intestine, gets through that lining and then gets into the bloodstream and then activates your immune system. So that’s called antigen presenting cell activity.

So your immune system gets fired up. When your immune system gets fired up, you’re going to make more inflammatory compounds contributing to that metal formation model. The microbiome is interesting because there’s a lot of tests out there right now. They’re like, oh, I’m going to make it customized probiotic of some kind. That really doesn’t work all that well because your microbiome diversity changes based on what you’re eating, the stress you’re under.

What you do need are the bigger, what’s called parent or chaperone microbiome, because they help to dictate what the diversity is going to look like in your body. But a good example would be Akkermansia. Everybody now is talking about the probiotic Akkermansia. Great if you’re low in it to take it, but high levels of it have been associated with things like Parkinsonism.

So taking a probiotic is different than taking some extra magnesium, because this is a living organism that is actually dictating your genetic expression and how your metabolism is functioning. So you bring up — David, you bring up — this is a big, big issue, is understanding gut health. So you want to protect from having a permeable gut, the —

Cliff’s point, people that overtrain, they get permeable guts. Pro athletes real prone to it because they train so much. And then, of course, what are the other things that can damage it? And then what do we do to repair it?

Exactly. Yep. OK. We’re going to get to that in just a couple of minutes. OK, cardiovascular health.
How is that considered here? Or why is that a factor? Either of you.

It’s the number one killer, right? So I say that’s a pretty big factor.

It’s a major one.

Yeah, and the interesting part is, again, all these things that we’ve been talking about and that collective wellness and metabolic health, all will impact how you thrive in that space. My blood sugar’s off, to Jim’s point, LDL LDLP can go up. My thyroid’s turned down, I’m not going to be metabolizing my lipids as well.
If I’m chronically stressed, my cortisol, my LDL can go up. So it’s really, really important. I think the unfortunate part is that people will get assessed and they’ll see that that’s the barrier to their longevity or their health, and they’ll attack just that with maybe just a medication without understanding the metabolic health, the root cause of what’s the causality that’s putting you at increased cardiovascular risk, without addressing nutrition and exercise and glucose regulation and managing your stress and managing your sleep.

Because that’s usually second — cardiovascular data is secondary to something that’s going on from a lifestyle, exercise or metabolic standpoint.

Yeah, it makes total sense.

Alright. I’m going to cap it off with sex hormones. Talk to us.

Yeah. Well, it turns out sex hormones are pretty important for our overall health. Both — and all of our sex hormones in both sexes, meaning that men actually need a little bit of estradiol. Estradiol is good for their brain and good for the cardiovascular system. Good for bone health.

Men don’t need as much estrogen as women. Women don’t need as much testosterone as men, but at the same time, they need both. And these sex hormones, which I think have always been called secondary sex hormones. So we kind of have thought of them historically as, hey, maybe they’re not quite as important. They end up being incredibly important because as we’re aging now, people are losing their sex hormones at earlier and earlier ages, and a lot of that is thought to be due to environmental burden.
It could be due to stress, it could be due to nutrition inadequacy. Actually gut health, as we just mentioned, is now implicated in disruptions in your sex hormone production. And so why is testosterone important? Well, testosterone is important for men because it helps their mood, protects their heart. It’s going to keep them stronger, protects their kidneys.

So there’s a lot of different reasons why we want to keep those hormones in an — in what I call a homeostasis or an optimal level. Same thing for women is they enter menopause. More women die of heart disease after menopause than men because they lose their estradiol. So that brings up this whole area of why is it important to consider bioidentical hormone replacement as you’re aging? And is it right for you? Some people may just feel like they either don’t want it or they’re still afraid of that. And at the same time, I think when you have a good, full discussion with them on the benefits, I think you can have tremendous impact. So the perfect example would be when women lose their estradiol, they trigger pro-inflammatory glycans. Glycans are structural components of every cell in your body.

Those get turned on as soon as the estradiol goes away. You give the estradiol back, the pro-inflammatory glycans go away. So it’s a real leverage point with sex hormones to maintain our vitality and resiliency as we’re aging and to keep our bodies more lean, protect our brain, protect our heart, protect our vital organs, when we have that balance of hormones intact.

I want to make sure to point out, not too long ago, we did a couple of series — a series on the hormones, so we did that for through MIORA. Those are available in the Life Time app, where you can get those for free. Both, we had a women’s specific one, one for men. People can dig into that. We went to a lot more depth there, but it’s a great resource if we want to go into that.

So we’re going to keep going down this path. So now we’ve talked about what the factors are to metabolic health. Now, what do we do about it? How can we affect and change our metabolic health? I think we have to then — we have to first know what’s happening. And I know, Jim, you have the metabolic code.
That’s what MIORA is leveraging. How are we helping people see, here’s my current status of metabolic health? And then what?

So there’s two things that you have to assess. Well, three. One is your biometrics because it does — resting heart rate does matter, blood pressure does matter. And then symptoms, how you feel, because sometimes you could be feeling a lot before your labs actually start to show something is up.
Yeah.

And sometimes you might not be feeling anything and you do your lab test and you get — Cliff having a discussion with you with Doctor Pippert. And it’s, you’re a train wreck. There’s a lot going on here. Nothing just — it just hasn’t expressed itself yet.

Yeah.

And so it’s that thought that you’re the sum total of how you feel and what your labs say. And so when we look at labs, it’s not enough to just look at labs in isolation, meaning glucose means this. It’s if my glucose is a little off — for example, a new Japanese study published a few years ago, nine points risk for being a diabetic for every point over 90. If I have a 96 blood sugar, I’m at a 54% risk.

But if that’s up and my lipids are a little high and my blood pressure is a little high and my magnesium is a little low, now all of a sudden, I’m lining up all these pearls that are telling me that my insulin resistance is starting to dominate my chemistry.

So the whole goal of MIORA is for us to point out, first of all, where are your metabolic roadblocks? And then how can we help you achieve your goals for health and help us uncover where you may be going down that road towards a future illness or future condition that you may not realize? So that’s the whole purpose. And how we do that is assessment of labs and how people feel.

Right. Right. And it’s so interesting. I’ve just recently done mine. And it was so — I had an idea of, OK, here are my risk factors. Here’s these different things. But it felt more accessible than I expected because of how it’s broken down. So it’s like, OK, hey, here you have this more adrenal stress. Then there’s gut health. Then there’s this. Of the five triads — It wasn’t overwhelming to come back because I felt like, you can get overwhelmed by all that information. And now what do I do about it? So I think that’s the next thing we want to get into. Like, what are some of the more general things that people can do to address metabolic health? And then we can get more into the medical side of it.

Yeah, one thing before we jump to the topic that I don’t want to overlook is the power of that time with the medical provider and a dietitian.

Yes.

A lot of people — and there’s a lot of great companies doing a lot of really great advanced testing. I don’t want to overlook any of those things, but it’s the power of sitting down with somebody. Who are you as a human? What are your goals? What are you feeling? What’s important to you? Here’s what your chemistry says. And then creating a plan that’s right for you because it’s really easy to go here’s where you’re at and this is what you should do. But there’s this whole chasm of what you’re willing to do. That’s the power of that human connection that we’re really, really passionate about.

Absolutely.

And it’s a journey.

Right.

I have in that pod — in the live stream that we shared — that you shared, I told my journey. But in a nutshell, I had to go down my own path 13 years ago, and that was really a performance-based goal. Now, 13 years later, I’m thinking wife, kids, longevity, grandkids. I still want to be doing what I love to do now. And, again, a snapshot in time with labs, without that partner that I’ve had in Doctor Pippert this entire time, to be along the entire way is paramount. It’s critical.

Right. And so really what that plan is going to be individualized to you depending on all of those factors, your goals, your values, your chemistry, your symptoms, and then working through the various ways that we do that. And often it comes back to a lot of the lifestyle factors that we talk about every single day.

Yeah.

Right?

Well, I think what makes a difference is when there’s some accountability. Because I always tell people, if you really want to reach for your health, it’s going to be work, but it is worth it, right? It’s work, but it’s worth it. And we all talk about the need for sleep, but I was in a room of 150 physicians who were there to learn anti-aging medicine and longevity medicine this last weekend and I asked, how many of you get seven to nine hours of sleep, restful, wake up in the morning and feel relatively rested? Raise your hand. Six people raised their hand out of a room full of health care providers. So if the health care providers aren’t there, well, then we got to make sure that we’re getting that story across to the people that are sitting in front of us, that it’s really that important. So a lot of times, we make the list, sleep more, exercise better, eat better. All these lists, but it’s actually creating action.

Yeah.

And I think that’s the biggest thing that we’ve tried to do, is create action and accountability. That’s a partnership.

Yeah.

Because it is important that people — we’re committed at Life Time that people move.

Right. Yes.

Because it is very important that they move.

Yeah.

But when you start to dive into their, hey, we’re going to change your chemistry now because you’re already here. You’re already at Life Time, you’re already exercising.

Yeah.

You already maybe — you’ve drank a little bit of the Kool-Aid already, right? But —

I say it’s kombucha, not Kool-Aid. Right?

OK.

But the issue then is now we’ve got to take you to the next level because we’re going to really dive in and change your chemistry.

Right. So let’s say that somebody is doing most of those lifestyle habits right, but things are still off. So what is the next thing? If you to get more specific and more targeted for maybe a pharmaceutical standpoint or a medical standpoint, where do people go from there? What might that look like in practice?

Well, I mean, obviously if it’s, hey, I tried eating better, but I’m still bloated, I’m still gassy, I’ve still got that permeable or leaky gut, you can think of peptides like KPV or BPC, which are very popular now, which can help to accelerate kind of the healing of those tissues. If you’ve been under a lot of stress, a lot of times you shut down your ability to release growth hormone, and you could be in your early 30s and you’re already catabolic and you’re already injured from that breakdown.

You can use something like a peptide that would support helping you relearn how to release the growth hormone you should normally be learning. So that would be something like sermorelin. Cliff, you can go through the importance of the GLP-1, right?

Yeah. So when we’re working with people and we see insulin resistance and their chemistry is simply not working for them, right? I have the cravings, I have the oscillating in blood sugar. I can’t get through the night without waking up thinking I have to go to the bathroom, but it’s really just a dip in my blood sugar. The constant food noise. And they’re doing a lot of things right. They’re being active, they’re making the choices, they’re getting the fiber and they’re getting their magnesium. There’s a lot of people that their chemistry is just in such a point where they need a lifeline, and that’s where we’ll leverage something like a GLP-1 to calm the food noise, help break through the insulin resistance, slow the gastric emptying so they feel more full, more satiated.

So there’s not this constant obsession of thinking about food and trying to be good. And I always call it like, white knuckling your food choices, right? Like, don’t go into the kitchen, don’t go into the pantry, don’t eat that last bite off your kid’s plate. Like, that constant fight is exhausting and everybody only has so much willpower. And at some point, you’re going to lose it. And most people lose it in the evening and it gets really challenging.

And a lot of people are working with their type A, so then it’s, this day is done. I’ll start again tomorrow. So then all bets are off and it becomes this vicious cycle. So we have the tools and the strategies with our medical providers to implement them in a unique way, to make sure we’re giving them what they need, to break through that, calm that noise and give them their lifestyle back because they’re making a lot of decisions.

They’re not here because they’re not trying. They’re trying everything, especially at — our Life Time members are doing everything they possibly can, and we have the tools and resources to help them break through that.

It’s connecting a lot of those dots. But then that other tool in the toolbox, as we’ve often talked about.
Absolutely. Even bioidentical hormones is replacement rate for you. If you’re a man and you’re feeling lethargic and you’re gaining weight, especially weight around your belly and your testosterone is low, the thought of how do you replace that testosterone? Depending on what age you are, you may just be using something like a drug, like a clomiphene to stimulate your brain, to tell your body to make more testosterone, because you’re young and you may not be ready for testosterone replacement yet.
Same thing for women. Imbalances in estrogen and progesterone can affect their menstrual cycle, can affect all aspects of women’s hormonal health. And so everything from bioidentical hormones to utilizing peptides, picking the correct nutrients — everybody knows they need to take a multi and take some fish oil. And hey, maybe I need some vitamin D or something, but you don’t want to take up all that space when you have other things you need to take to save, for example, manage stress or sleep better, or build bone density back, right? So those are the things that we can deploy. And it’s a pretty big toolbox, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah. When we look at MIORA, we know it’s the diamond level of what it is that we’re talking about in this space. For those individuals, the listeners, if we want to empower them — we talked about just being able to advocate for yourself when you’re going to your PCP. Like, what questions should we be able to arm them with? Or saying, hey, I know I’m doing my annual I would like these things to be checked, too.
What would you provide them with?

I think it’s important they do even the most basic things like homocysteine, C-reactive protein. I mean, heart health is our number one killer.

Right.

Get an insulin and a glucose, could you — cortisol was almost never done, but it does have to be drawn in the morning. DHEA, which is a building block for both sex hormones and cortisol, should be looked at as it’s an important factor for cognition as you’re aging as well as for hormones. So there’s — and then of course, just a very comprehensive blood test, that I think Cliff mentioned, for thyroid hormone.
Not just a TSH, but to look at all your thyroid hormones, see if your immune system is attacking your thyroid, autoimmune thyroid. I mean, and then of course, sex hormones, because I think we don’t look at sex hormones nearly enough.

Yeah.

It feels like it’s becoming more a part of the mainstream conversation. So hopefully that becomes more a part of that at some point.

I was going to say, even once you get those results, the key is if they get the results and say you’re normal, the one thing that I’ve heard you both champion a lot is, we want you to be optimal. So understanding the difference between, oh, you’re within normal range versus being optimal. So I don’t know if you want to elaborate just briefly on that, being optimal in this space.

We could go down a whole rabbit. That could be a whole episode.

Yeah, it’s biomarker by biomarker —

Yeah.

— here’s the range. Here’s the range. Here’s the range.

They’re basing it off of what normal is based off of —

Well, let’s define what that means.

Yeah.

So normal — when you go into your doctor right now and you get a blood test — and this is nothing against going to your doctor and getting a blood test. They’re looking for an illness. Do you have a disease yet? So when they tell you you’re normal, it means that you don’t have any markers in your blood yet that would say, I could put a disease of some kind or condition, a label on you.

Right.

While we know that there are optimal levels of nutrients — vitamin D, 30 to 100 is the range. We know that people should at least be at 55 if you look across all the published studies on it. So there are optimal levels within the normal range that would say your body has a better chance at metabolic health and performance by having this value versus another value. So that’s the difference when you start to look at — with MIORA, we’re looking for optimization and the best lab value. And not just, are you sick yet?
Right. I think that’s an important thing for people to hear and know and to ask more about probably as they see those results.

Absolutely.

OK. We went through a lot in a pretty short amount of time, but did we miss anything? Anything you want to make sure we cover before David has his quick mic drop?

Mic drop.

The mic drop.

[LAUGHTER]

But overall, did we cover metabolic health? Did we get a good baseline primer for everybody?

I sure think so.

Awesome.

You can always invite us back in another year or two.

Come back sooner. We’re not going to wait that long. We’re not waiting that long. All right. All right.
We’ll bring you back.

Alright, alright, here we go. Easy, easy. I’m going to give you both a word, first thing that comes to mind. Super simple, simple. All right, I’m going to go from left to right.

Longevity.

First thing comes to my mind?

Yeah.

I’m just in the space so much.

[LAUGHTER]

Right.

I think about my kids.

Love that. Love that.

Yeah.

You know where I’m going? Vitality.

What everyone deserves.

That’s perfect.

I like it. I like it.

That’s great.

I love it. Yeah.

Alright. Well, you two — you will be back, and it won’t be a year or two. We’ll have you back sooner than that. If people want to learn more about MIORA, they can visit miora.lifetime.life. Are there any other places you want to point them for right now? Or should we just focus right there and get people there?
I think that’s the great spot, right there.

Alright, so point them there and we’ll put some additional resources in the show notes as well. But thank you both for being on today. We appreciate you.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah.

Double trouble did not disappoint.

Alright.

[LAUGHTER]

[MUSIC]