LEVELS – A Whole New Level

Twenty-five years ago, sequencing the human genome seemed poised to usher in an era of personalized medicine. Dr. Euan Ashley helped turn that promise into an actual clinical experiment, leading one of the first efforts to interpret an entire human genome in the context of a real patient’s health. The challenge quickly became apparent: medicine could suddenly generate billions of data points about one person, but making sense of them was painfully slow.
That history feels newly relevant. Ashley recently gave an AI system his own 15-year-old genome data and watched it reproduce most of an analysis that had originally required months of work by a team, in about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, genomics is being joined by wearables, multi-omics, and other technologies capable of tracking far more of our biology over time.
In this episode of NextLevel, we use the genome revolution as a case study for what happens when our ability to measure the body advances faster than our ability to interpret and use the information. The next leap in personalized medicine may depend less on collecting another mountain of data than on building the tools, reference datasets, and healthcare systems capable of turning that information into decisions.

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. Euan Ashley is Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University and the Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor of Genomics and Precision Health, with appointments in medicine, genetics, and biomedical data science. He’s also the author of The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them.
📍What Dr. Euan Ashley & Mike Haney discussed:
03:33 What happened to the promise of personalized medicine?
06:33 The first clinical interpretation of a human genome
11:26 AI interprets in 30 minutes what once took months
21:25 Why genomics still needs better, more diverse reference data
27:41 Building a molecular map of exercise with MoTrPAC
32:01 Exercise changed nearly every organ researchers measured
39:05 Why your personal baseline can matter more than a "normal" range
42:46 How wearables opened a new era of longitudinal health data
47:48 The biggest barrier to continuous, personalized healthcare
51:39 What medical AI needs to become genuinely useful
57:05 How AI can ace medical benchmarks for the wrong reasons
58:20 The heart measurement Ashley considers a medical "holy grail"

🔗 Helpful Links:
Clinical Assessment Incorporating a Personal Genome, The Lancet, 2010. Landmark integrated clinical analysis of a complete human genome.
Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC), NIH Common Fund. Large-scale project mapping how exercise changes tissues and organs. 
MoTrPAC: Human Studies Design and Protocol, Journal of Applied Physiology, 2024. Human study of molecular responses to endurance and resistance training.
The Mitochondrial Multi-Omic Response to Exercise Training Across Rat Tissues, Cell Metabolism, 2024. MoTrPAC study on molecular changes across organs after exercise.
Harmonizing Standards and Resources for the Medical Genome, Nature, 2026. Ashley et al. on genomic reference standards and clinical-grade sequencing.

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/bD2YVGdwviE
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.

Is intermittent fasting biohacker wellness hype or legit health intervention? Some studies show real benefits, others find nothing, and the occasional headline calls it bad for your heart.

Dr. Courtney Peterson has spent nearly two decades running some of the field's most tightly controlled feeding trials, and her data points to a clear pattern: there is a real effect to a restricted eating window, but when you eat may matter as much as how long you fast. Her studies found that eating in a short window early in the day lowers blood pressure and improves insulin sensitivity, even without weight loss. A physicist by training, she brings that same rigor to a field built mostly on people's own food diaries.

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. Courtney Peterson is an Associate Professor of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She holds a PhD in physics from Harvard and leads clinical trials on intermittent fasting, meal timing, and circadian rhythms.

📍What Dr. Courtney Peterson & Mike Haney discussed:
0:00 Introduction
02:39 The three types of intermittent fasting
05:29 The 2012 mouse study that started the field
11:24 Why fasting works through appetite, not extra calories
13:48 Her six-hour study: lower blood pressure, no weight loss
25:34 Why results depend on who's being studied
28:45 The shift worker whose health got worse
36:45 Her theory: timing over fasting length
43:08 Heart attacks, blood pressure, and the body's clock
45:55 The camping trip that reset people's body clocks
58:11 Early findings from her unpublished aging study
1:08:16 Should you eat ice cream for breakfast?

🔗 Helpful Links:
Time-Restricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet (Hatori et al., 2012) — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2012.04.019
Early Time-Restricted Feeding Improves Insulin Sensitivity, Blood Pressure, and Oxidative Stress Even without Weight Loss in Men with Prediabetes (Sutton et al., 2018) — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2018.04.010
Early Time-Restricted Feeding Improves 24-Hour Glucose Levels and Affects Markers of the Circadian Clock, Aging, and Autophagy in Humans (Jamshed et al., 2019) — https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11061234
Calorie Restriction with or without Time-Restricted Eating in Weight Loss (Liu et al., 2022) — https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2114833

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/dKauIgX3IH4
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.

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.