LEVELS – A Whole New Level

What if we could measure the human body the way engineers monitor a jet engine?
For nearly two decades, Stanford geneticist Dr. Michael Snyder has been trying exactly that. By continuously tracking everything he could possibly track in his body—genome sequencing, metabolites, wearable data, whole-body imaging—he has turned himself (and ~100 study subjects) into one of the world's largest experiments in continuous health measurement.
The point wasn’t mindless biohacking. It was to answer a question: Are there clinically useful signals in all that data?
This conversation suggests the answer is yes. Snyder’s experience and that of dozens of his study subjects offer some of the first real evidence that continuous measurement intelligently analyzed can reveal that you’re getting sick before you have symptoms, help find solutions to medical conditions that work for your unique biology, and help you refocus on prevention of disease rather than management.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health
Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:
Dr. Michael Snyder is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Genetics and director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, where he previously chaired the Department of Genetics for 15 years.

📍What Dr. Michael Snyder & Mike Haney discussed:
03:10 Why Dr. Snyder started measuring healthy people instead of waiting for disease
09:18 Living in the future: tracking his own biology for nearly two decades
15:02 Why "normal" isn't enough: the importance of personal baselines
22:48 Discovering his own genetically unique form of type 2 diabetes
32:06 How wearables detected illness before symptoms appeared
39:18 Whole-body MRIs, incidental findings, and why change over time matters
46:55 Why everyone has abnormalities, but not everyone has disease
55:41 The promise of metabolomics, proteomics, and continuous biological sensing
1:06:52 Why AI is essential for interpreting thousands of health signals
1:15:34 What continuous measurement could mean for preventive medicine
1:23:10 The next decade of personalized health and what's still missing

🔗 Helpful Links:
Personal Omics Profiling Reveals Dynamic Molecular and Medical Phenotypes (Chen et al., Cell, 2012)
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(12)00965-3
Longitudinal Multi-omics Profiling Reveals Dynamic Personal Health Status (Price et al., Nature Biotechnology, 2017)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3695
The Integrative Personal Omics Profile (iPOP): A Decade of Progress in Precision Health (Snyder lab review)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-021-00409-3
Wearable Sensor Data and Self-reported Symptoms for COVID-19 Detection (Mishra et al., Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2020)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6
All of Us Research Program
https://allofus.nih.gov/
Connect with Dr Michael Snyder: https://med.stanford.edu/snyderlab.html

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/eUEYmLC1CcE
Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:
Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

For decades, we've been told that eating less fat is one of the healthiest things we can do. That advice reshaped the foods we buy, the way we think about weight loss, and even how parents feed their children.
But what if we misunderstood fat in the first place?
In this episode, nutrition researcher Dr. Arne Astrup traces how the war on fat began, why many of its core assumptions haven't held up under decades of research, and what we've learned instead. Rather than asking whether fat is "good" or "bad," he argues that the more useful questions are: What foods actually keep us healthy? Why do some people gain weight more easily than others? And what happens when we reduce nutrition to single nutrients instead of whole foods?

Free course: Improve your metabolic health
Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:
Dr. Arne Astrup is a physician, nutrition researcher, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Copenhagen whose research focuses on obesity, appetite regulation, dietary fats, and cardiometabolic health. He previously chaired the Danish Nutrition Council and helped lead Denmark's landmark ban on industrial trans fats.

📍What Dr. Arne Astrup & Mike Haney discussed:
00:00 Introduction
01:03 How fear of fat became public health policy
07:40 Did low-fat advice help create today's processed foods?
10:20 Denmark's trans fat ban and one lesson nutrition got right
14:00 "I was wrong." Why dietary fat isn't the main driver of obesity
18:45 Why your body fat isn't simply the fat you eat
27:00 Why fat can help you eat fewer calories
32:00 Are nuts actually easy to overeat?
36:00 Cheese, yogurt, and why whole foods don't behave like nutrients
41:00 Why insulin resistance changes carbohydrate tolerance
55:00 The LDL debate: what saturated fat actually changes
1:01:00 Why it's time to stop talking about "saturated fat" as a single thing

🔗 Helpful Links:
Diets with High or Low Protein Content and Glycemic Index for Weight-Loss Maintenance (DIOGENES Trial): Landmark randomized trial led by Dr. Astrup examining protein, glycemic index, and long-term weight maintenance. New England Journal of Medicine
Weight Loss Maintenance in Overweight Subjects on Ad Libitum Diets with High or Low Protein Content and Glycemic Index: The DIOGENES Trial (12-Month Results). One-year follow-up of the DIOGENES study. International Journal of Obesity
Dietary Saturated Fats and Health: Are the U.S. Guidelines Evidence-Based? (Astrup et al., 2021): Consensus review arguing that current saturated fat recommendations should place greater emphasis on whole foods and dietary patterns than saturated fat alone. Nutrients (2021)
Walter Willett's research on industrial trans fats and cardiovascular disease: Early epidemiologic work that helped establish the harms of industrial trans fats and ultimately informed policy changes worldwide. PubMed search for Walter Willett trans fat publications
World Health Organization: REPLACE Trans Fat Initiative: Background on the global effort to eliminate industrially produced trans fats from the food supply. World Health Organization REPLACE Initiative

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/ajqg7LdM0PM
Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠

👋 Who we are:
Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

Almost everything your doctor knows about you comes from a snapshot: a blood pressure reading, an annual lab, a handful of numbers meant to represent a constantly changing human body.

That's beginning to change. New sensors promise far more continuous health data, and AI may finally give us the ability to interpret it. But medicine has been through a data revolution before, and almost none of what people initially promised actually happened.

In the first episode of NextLevel, Mike Haney sits down with Dr. Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF and one of medicine's leading thinkers on technological change, to ask what healthcare's messy transition from paper to electronic records can teach us about the AI era.

Wachter explains why digitizing medicine didn't transform care on its own, why your doctor is already overwhelmed by data, and why simply sending them continuous feeds from your watch, ring, or future sensors would make the problem worse.

The missing piece is an intelligence layer: a system capable of deciding what matters, helping patients act when they can, and pulling clinicians in when they're actually needed.

They also explore how AI is changing the balance of knowledge between doctors and patients, the danger of trusting systems that are usually right, what healthcare can learn from airplane cockpits, and why collecting more health data may be much easier than figuring out what any of it means.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health
Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:
Dr. Robert M. Wachter is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He’s also the author of six books, including the 2015 bestseller The Digital Doctor, which examined medicine's transition from paper to electronic health records, and 2026’s A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future, his examination of generative AI's arrival in medicine.

📍What Dr.Robert Watcher & Mike Haney discussed:
0:00 — Dr. Wachter and medicine's technological revolutions
7:00 — How healthcare finally went digital
12:40 — Why digitizing healthcare didn't fix it
19:00 — AI is fixing problems computers created
29:40 — Does AI know more medicine than your doctor?
33:00 — The hidden danger of trusting computers
42:30 — What healthcare can learn from airplane cockpits
56:15 — Why medicine has to move beyond the office visit
58:20 — Healthcare's missing intelligence layer
1:04:20 — Why more health data isn't enough

🔗 Helpful Links:
Dr. Robert Wachter, UCSF Department of Medicine: https://medicine.ucsf.edu/people/robert-wachter
A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-giant-leap-how-ai-is-transforming-healthcare-and-what-that-means-for-our-future-robert-wachter/e6a7ecb6556f9f02
The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-digital-doctor-hope-hype-and-harm-at-the-dawn-of-medicine-s-computer-age-robert-wachter/9187727
Pattern Recognition, Dr. Wachter's newsletter on AI and healthcare: https://robertwachter.substack.com/
Dr. Robert Wachter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wachter-3102b963/

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/762DTOa7uTY
Find us on YouTube: ⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1

👋 Who we are:
Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

Healthcare is entering a new era.

AI is improving faster than our ability to measure the human body, while a new generation of sensors promises to change that. Together, they’ll reshape how we understand health, disease, and medicine itself.
NextLevel is our new series inside the podcast where we try to make sense of that future through conversations with the people building it.

Our first episode, featuring Dr. Bob Wachter, arrives this week.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health
Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

👋 Who we are:
Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

You probably spend more time thinking about protein than friendships.
According to today's guest, you’ve got it backward.
In this episode of A Whole New Level, Mike Haney sits down with Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, one of the world's leading researchers on social connection and health. She explains how data now unequivocally show that social isolation drives early mortality. And why simply not feeling lonely doesn't necessarily mean you're getting enough social connection, as well as why even weak connections matter a lot to a healthy social life.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health
Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:
Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University and one of the world's leading researchers on social connection and health. Her landmark meta-analyses involving millions of participants established social isolation and loneliness as independent risk factors for chronic disease and early mortality.

📍What Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad & Mike Haney discussed:
0:00 — Introduction
1:18 — How Dr. Holt-Lunstad began studying social connection and health
3:00 — Why relationships belong alongside diet, exercise, and sleep
4:10 — Social isolation vs. loneliness vs. living alone
11:45 — How researchers measure social connection and health outcomes
16:20 — The biological pathways linking isolation to disease
27:30 — How scientists study social connection without randomized trials
33:00 — Family, friends, weak ties, and what kinds of relationships matter|
37:00 — AI companions, loneliness, and whether technology can replace human connection
46:15 — Is there a minimum effective dose of friendship?
58:10 — Why Americans are participating in fewer clubs and community groups
1:03:20 — Why objective isolation predicts health better than loneliness
1:10:40 — Making friends as adults and overcoming the friction of connection

🔗 Helpful Links:
Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad
BYU Faculty Profile: https://psychology.byu.edu/directory/julianne-holt-lunstad
Social Connection in America Survey: https://www.socialconnectionguidelines.org/
U.S. Surgeon General Advisory on Social Connection: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
Key Research
Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010): https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015): https://perspectives.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201500160
Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (U.S. Surgeon General, 2023): https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
Bowling Alone (Robert Putnam): https://bowlingalone.com/

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/g6D2CIpB2n4
Find us on YouTube: https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1

👋 Who we are:
Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.