Saks Snacks #6: Healthy Lifestyle App For Seniors, CGM's, Interoception
Saks Snacks #6: Healthy Lifestyle App For Seniors, CGM's, Interoception
Innovative App Promoting Longevity, Interoception, Experimentation with CGM's (Nutrisense), Cumulative Blood Pressure, Evergreen Feedback, and More!
Hello from San Francisco! 👋 Let’s dive right in again. Here’s what we’ll explore:
Health Tech Snacks
🤑 Startup Scene / ♾️ Longevity: an innovative, healthy lifestyle app for seniors
👨💻Wearable of the Week: Cumulative Blood Pressure - measuring duration + magnitude with cuffless, BP monitors without calibration
Personal Snacks:
👨🔬 Experiment of the week - CGM Learnings + the Power of a Virtual Coach
🎙️Pod of the Week - How to Optimize Your Brain-Body Function & Health
💥 Spark Moment of the week - ideas stem from the process of writing
“Evergreen” Feedback - Please provide feedback below! You’ll see this footer in each newsletter moving forward - let me know what you think! The most energizing part of writing has been engaging with each of you, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
🤑 Startup Scene / ♾️ Longevity
I want to highlight a very early-stage healthy lifestyle app for seniors, Rosita Longevity. Rosita designs strategic healthy long-term plans for their users by offering coaching, motivation, and activities to help users reduce muscle pain, improve agility, form community, and are completing their seed round very soon.
Here’s what Rosita has to say about the aging process and what they focus on.
The aging process is 80% epigenetic and it is not "magical" or "anti-aging" BS. It is all about your lifestyle choices. You must limit the factors that shorten healthy aging, and power the factors that extend healthy aging. Rosita solves the hardest problems:
👉 Defining a strategic plan long term that works, rather than accumulating random tips or doing unstructured activities.
👉 Adherence to the methodology because Rosita gives fun, engaging healthy activities
Tech is often built with the younger population in mind, with little consideration of seniors’ constraints, preferences, and unique user perspectives.
What will actually fix the problem then?
The formula for success for any digital fitness/health/longevity app seeking to change long-term behavior will be combining full-stack tech platforms to deliver experiences that meet its members/users exactly where they’re at.
More specifically, Rosita and other health platforms can build inclusive, supportive environments through coaching (live or asynchronous), robust catalogs of fitness options to choose from, and a socially engaged community and/or classes. Rosita is doing this.
My most recent self-experiment with Nutrisense (below in Weekly Musings) reinforced the power of a virtual coach.
Currently, Rosita is available for Spanish-speaking users in Spain and is translating into other languages to expand into new countries by the end of 2021.
If you want to keep up, here are Rosita’s live updates and noteworthy events (mostly for investors, fans, and other stakeholders).
👨💻Wearable of the Week - Cumulative Blood Pressure
We’ve known for a while (through large meta-analyses) that lowering blood pressure can reduce mortality and many diseases.
However, we’re seeing more research demonstrating that elevated cumulative BP level is significantly associated with increased cardiovascular disease (CVD).
Increasing amounts of clinical research are pointing to the importance of so-called “cumulative blood pressure” calculations, as opposed to measurements from a single day or period of time, in assessing risk for a long list of health conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke to dementia, cognitive performance, and kidney damage. Researchers have begun to demonstrate that the more the human body is exposed to high blood pressure, both in duration and magnitude, the more direct and indirect damage is caused
Ok… so what’s needed according to Kraudel and the Valencell team?
Monitoring BP even before levels elevate is needed.
Simpler BP monitoring: Cuffless tech and more easily calibrated and re-calibrated steps will make this more accessible.
Looking forward: “Consumer medical wearables provide a platform to accomplish both simplicity/convenience and accurate BP readings over long timeframes. More specifically, cuff-less calibration-free BP monitoring will enable clinical and economic studies to further explore the impact of cumulative BP in the field. We look forward to contributing to those studies in the future.”
Weekly Musings
👨🔬 Experiment of the Week
The year is 2025 - what am I certain will be more mainstream?
Conducting meaningful health experiments based on wearable data.
This past week I started using a CGM through Nutrisense (one of my past Google clients) to get real-time feedback and understand my body’s metabolic response to different foods, paired with different exercise types, stressors, and quantity/quality of sleep.
I’ve been floored at the helpfulness and responsiveness to my dedicated dietitan, Elizabeth. After observing some spikes purely from my pre-run meals, she suggested I test adding more fiber (chia seeds), less carbs before runs to mitigate the spikes I was observing.
Sure enough, this minor tweak helped keep my glucose exposure (AUC) and delta (shifts in glucose) optimal before my next run. My recent experience with Nutrisense confirmed the power of personalized coaching.
Why we need to care: 1 of every 3 medicare dollars are spent on diabetes management, and as I’ve written before, >70% of the global population is on a path to progress to Type 2 in their lifetime.
With early access to this tech, insight-driven software, and a little help from a virtual coach, our population can optimize their health behaviors before reaching clinical thresholds for disease. I’ll be writing more on comprehensive learnings and my experience, so stay tuned and reach out if you have specific questions!
🎙️Pod of the Week
I’ve been on an Andrew Huberman, Ph.D binge lately. My favorite listen from the past week was his most recent episode on “How to Optimize Your Brain-Body Function & Health“ where he discusses how the organs in our body influence the function and health of our brain and vise versa.
He introduced the term interoception, our sense of internal landscape.
Metaphorically, your organs and your brain have a contract, and with a little bit of self-knowledge, you can use that to “set the conditions of your brain”.
I leveraged mechanical interoception after a workout by doing the breathing exercise to control heart rate that’s introduced around the 21 minute point. Through focused, controlled breathing, I lowered my heart rate from 113 bpm to 79 bpm in approximately 90 seconds.
If you’re remotely interested in setting better conditions for your brain, I recommend giving Huberman a listen. If you’d like to queue up some 🔥 on Spotify, feel free to check out a running list of the past 3 months’ listens.
💥 Spark moment / Endnote & Tweet of the Week
When I read David Perell’s tweet this week, a truth was reconfirmed for me.
Sure enough, 522 days ago, I’d jotted something similar down while reading…
2/26/20 Daily Moment Entry: "Write to get Ideas not to express them"
This is a quote from Kevin Kelly (founding executive of Wired Magazine) while reading Tools of Tians. I had the realization that the ideas come through the process of writing, writing isn't just an expression of ideas already existant.
Last February, I was trying to build a consistent journaling habit in my life.
Today, this serves as a reminder as I work towards building a new daily writing practice for at least 60-90 minutes per day. Implementing this will help me bring more, refined, better writing to you.
Endnote & Feedback
How’d you like this week’s edition? Your feedback will help me make this great.
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Thanks for reading and see you in 2 weeks!
Adam