The Levels Effect: A Biowearable Startup that Empowers People to Take Control of Their Health | 207

That's when you're going to go get that pizza and finish it off with a half gallon of ice cream. That's a lot of ice cream, bro. I love ice cream. Every person is actually playing around with these controls all day, every day, and they just don't know the effects of them. And I was right that I was having these hypoglycemic episodes, but I was wrong about what the problem was. Problem is not, I needed to eat more.

We're flying blind. We don't know the deposits and withdrawals, so to speak, that we're making every day, but we're trying not to overdraw and end up in bankruptcy. Well, you don't have to check your bank account. You got like 15 million, right? Well, let's continue building this business. My name is Josh Clemente. I'm 31 and I'm currently in Strathmere, New Jersey on the Jersey Shore.

And I am the founder and president of Levels Health, which is the first metabolic fitness company seeking to help people answer the question, what should I eat and why, by using real-time biometric data. with an insightful software platform so essentially you wear a full-time little patch on the back of the arm which is measuring molecules like glucose in the body and then we create a closed feedback loop with that

through our smartphone app, which tells you minutes after consuming a meal, for example, how your body responded to that meal or is responding to that meal. And then eventually scoring that response and helping you to understand whether that was positive or negative. what other opportunities there are to improve both a meal like that or lifestyle actions around it, like exercise, taking walks, sleep quality, stress, etc., to string together a lifestyle that is

personalized for you and is going to benefit your overall metabolic health in the long term. And what's the website in case anyone wanted to check it out? So the website is levelshealth.com and the blog is on there as well, which I highly recommend levelshealth.com slash blog.

There's an app too, if they wanted to download that. I mean, I imagine they'll probably still need your ARM device, right? But if they wanted to, is there an app that they would just get from any app store? So the app is still in development. So we're in test flight mode, which is invite only. But we will eventually be rolling that out to the App Store and to Google Play. I tried to sign up for the invite, but you denied me. Oh, did I?

No, I'm just kidding. I was going to say, we got to fix that. Yeah. So level two, okay. Tracks your blood glucose. So for anyone who's not kind of even understanding that, I mean. Can you make it even simpler to understand like, is it just going to tell me my health overall or is blood glucose like 100% correlated with that? Just give me a bit more oversight.

Essentially, what is happening is your body takes the food we eat and then other factors like sunlight, you know, and we convert that into energy. And the way that happens is... Your digestive system breaks your food down into basically two types of molecules, glucose, which is sugar and fat. And those are the molecules that your cells can use with oxygen to create energy. When that's working well.

Your blood sugar levels and blood fat levels are really well controlled and they stay in a tight bound. But when things start to break down, either through bad decisions or poor quality decisions, we aren't understanding that they are poor quality because we don't really have any way of knowing that.

for a long period of time, they can compound. And essentially, hormones have to respond to these molecules when they're getting out of line. And it starts to kind of wreak havoc on the body overall. It can affect cognitive clarity. memory, all the way down through the physiologic effects, which are eventually insulin resistance, which is also called type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, all the way through to infertility and PCOS, which are the leading causes.

women's infertility in the united states so there are all of these kind of syndromes associated with poor metabolic function and they are connected typically to blood sugar dysregulation so glucose irregularities and so by tracking these levels

specifically associated with the choices we're making every day, we can surface these insights for the first time. So rather than you doing things every day, eating lunch, eating dinner, formulating a meal plan that you think is going to work out, but not really having any feedback for a long period of time, you know, until the bathroom scale starts to climb or until the doctor says something's wrong.

We can instead surface this information immediately and help you understand both what's working well and what could be improved. Yeah, you might have to let me sign up. I'll make it is. Cool. It says request access. So I guess people could sign up on levelshealth.com just to...

get on a waiting list or something like that? Yeah, we're still in development mode right now. And we're, you know, we're building this behavior change software on top of the devices themselves to help make this sort of raw data easily interpretable. Like most people don't know.

really, that there is sugar in the blood or what it means when you know how much is in there. So we're building this software that abstracts that away. And instead, you have simple scores for your meals and for the sum of your day. to help you understand the positive negative. It's like a grade point. We're still rapidly iterating on that. And so we're in this invitation only mode. You can sign up for the wait list on the website. We are inviting people basically as quickly as we can.

but looking to launch more fully later this year. Sounds good. I mean, so if I'm looking at it or I'm just thinking out loud, tell me if I'm wrong in here. People used to always think of looking at our health as like overall calories, right? Like I'm only supposed to have so many calories, but.

over the last let's just say 20 years maybe people have become higher educated that okay 200 calories of a snicker bar versus 200 calories of spinach is way different right so we're looking at i guess the ratios of fat carbs and protein

I think that's kind of the level I'm understanding and looked at whenever I'm eating something. I just always want more protein, especially if I'm working out, then the carbs to me is the worst personally. So I'm like, I've always looked at that. And this is another.

oh, wow, I didn't even mean to do this. This is another level, if you will, as far as understanding this. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Historically, like we haven't had a good way of... easily measuring and explaining these things to everyone right they've been measured in labs and they've been measured in the medical field but we tried to simplify as much as possible down and what we ended up with was the calories theory which is basically that

You're eating energy and no matter where that energy comes from, like you said, it's all energy. That is just not the way the human body works. We're not this perfect machine where you put in some fuel of any kind and it will just burn cleanly and you'd end up with the same amount of energy.

What we are is like a giant chemistry set. As I mentioned, you know, we have these molecules that we can get energy from, sugar and fat, but the way that we get energy from them is through hormones, which are other chemicals. So certain molecules... generate different hormones. And in your example of spinach versus, I can't remember your first one, but Snickers bar, there you go. So spinach has mostly fiber.

some vitamins and minerals, a lot of water, and basically no carbohydrates. Whereas Snickers is almost entirely processed sugar. So when the spinach goes into your body, it's going to break down slowly. It's got a lot of fiber, which is insoluble, which is going to help clean out the digestive tract.

But the energy that comes from there is going to be very slow release. It is carbohydrates still, but they're a very slow release variety because they're bound with fiber. Whereas the Snickers bar breaks down immediately. It's essentially already processed sugar.

And it's going to go right into the bloodstream. And that's going to create a massive amount of insulin, which is a metabolic hormone that has to get sugar out of the blood into the cells. So the difference between those two is going to be that insulin response. And when over time...

We're continually eating foods where the energy is coming from these very processed sources that are creating large swings in our hormones. We experience those as changes in our quality of life and or changes in our physiology.

If you're constantly in a high state of insulin because you're eating processed sugar or processed carbohydrates, your body is constantly having to store that as fat. That's essentially how the system works. And this is like the interesting thing is that different people process these things differently.

Some people, it seems, just can't produce body fat very effectively. Which is a good thing. It seems like a good thing. Right. But that hormone is still being released in high quantities. And what you can end up with are other factors like...

you know you have secondary systems breaking down and this is where like mental function gets affected your brain enters this sort of insulin resistant state something most people don't know is alzheimer's dementia is currently being taught in medical schools as type 3 diabetes because the way that the brain starts to change is that it's not able to process insulin effectively anymore so it's like for people who maybe aren't and this isn't exclusively people who don't gain weight but just

Generally speaking, these hormonal dysfunctions start to affect different systems differently. It can be the brain, it can be the body. For women, it can be ovaries. For men, it can be sexual dysfunction that leads to low testosterone. Basically, there's just all this mayhem that can happen.

And all of it comes down to the fact that what we eat very specifically matters. And the calories hypothesis, although it's true, like calories are a unit of energy, not all calories are the same. And the effects on us are.

Very, very different. And we have to know that with better detail. And luckily we can with this new technology. I still want to dive deeper into this real quick, but overall, just business-wise, can I ask about that first? And then we'll dive back more into the science because I'm kind of fascinated by it.

You said you're going to plan on coming out late 2021. So I imagine you're pre-revenue. So we're actually not pre-revenue. We've been doing a paid beta program for about a year now. We had an early prototype concept of basically bringing...

this hardware, the continuous glucose monitor, and then connecting it into our software suite. And we've built a business model that includes access to the devices, which are prescription controlled in the United States. So we have a relationship with a 50 state pharmacy provider. We have a relationship with an independent telehealth network of physicians who can take consultations with our members and determine whether or not to write a prescription for them.

And then we can fulfill our levels kit with the devices from the pharmacy to the end user. It's kind of like a direct consumerized version of getting access to this medical technology. So that's kind of like the business model. And then our software is built on top of that.

So we've been testing that model for about a year now. We've been slowly increasing volume. So far, we've had about 5,000 people use the program. We've exceeded about $2 million in total sales thus far, but we're not growing actively. Our focus is still heavily on development, on product milestones. And we're kind of limiting access to the product such that the number one thing that we care about, which is customer feedback, is what we're optimizing for rather than revenue growth, et cetera.

That's kind of where we are today. We're planning to finish up those product milestones here in the coming months and then move to a mainstream launch and then start our growth mode. In terms of capitalization and team, we raised about $12 million in seed funding.

from angels, and then new money from A16Z. And that round came together over a fairly long period of time. We were initially raising from strategics and angels on safe notes, brought on some strategic investors, some angels. And then later in 2020, When kind of the COVID uncertainty had passed and VCs were doing deals again, we raised that full round, that larger round and Andreessen Horowitz came in as our lead. So we've been moving quickly and primarily because we're a remote first company.

We had actually made the decision to be distributed before COVID hit. So it wasn't a major disruption for us and we could continue to hit our cadence. This time last year, we were at seven people full-time. We're now at about 17. Burn rate is quite low, bringing in revenue.

we're in a good position to capitalize on our product objectives and ramp out of this development mode and use our funding that we've raised to really start hitting our growth phase. If someone was interested in this... they can't really get it yet without going to the doctor is like the people who are still in the trial phase who are being given access are they people with like diabetes where this seems like it might affect them more or if someone wanted to get this now before

whenever you actually roll out with a public offering? How would they do that? Or who are your normal clients for that? Yeah. So quick history on the technology we're using. We didn't develop the patch itself. These are...

devices that were developed for specifically the management of diabetes, which for people who aren't super familiar, it's a disorder where it kind of is the effect that I was just talking about where glucose and insulin, the hormone that responds to glucose, that feedback loop is broken.

and blood sugar levels are out of control. This technology, continuous glucose monitoring, was developed for people with diabetes to keep an eye on their glucose in real time and be able to monitor and manage it effectively. We're using these devices, which have been developed over a very long period of time and have been approved by the FDA for the management of metabolic dysfunction. And we're moving it to a new space, which is general wellness and...

information, you know, better metabolic awareness and ultimately for metabolic fitness, which is the focus, effort and repetition that you take to the gym or to mindfulness for people who practice meditation. You kind of have to put in work over time to get better.

Same thing for this metabolic health. You know, we need better information and then we need to use it to make better decisions. That's where we're applying it. So actually our use case is not for diabetes and our earliest adopters are typically non-diabetic.

Now, I do have to clarify that Levels doesn't decide who ends up using the product. Because we have a telehealth organization, because these are prescription-only, physicians are reviewing information about each person that comes into the program and ensuring that... cgm specifically continuous glucose monitoring is right for that person and if they determine to do so they will write a prescription for them so it's a little bit of a unique scenario because there is medical technology involved

But for the most part, people are using these to just learn more about themselves and understand with confidence the connection between what they're doing every day in terms of diet, nutrition, sleep, stress, and exercise, and then what they could be doing to improve. We're all looking for ways to save money, right? Especially now. So let me ask you this. How do you like to keep an extra $961 a year in your pocket?

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I was looking for some sort of community where I could get some ideas on business. I could find motivation, inspiration to pursue my own things. I've technically had my own business for 12 years now. But it's a really small operation and I'm trying to do something bigger. Being told, just go out there and do it is very helpful. And that's why I joined. Yeah. So, I mean, understanding that, like you said, the doctors are writing the prescription.

people have to know it, I guess, to ask for it. Are most of those people, are they the ones going in not very healthy? Because that's what I was thinking when I'm looking at your website and, you know, maybe people who are super fit who want to...

get one of these, but I don't know if I would qualify or someone who's really fit would qualify to easily get a prescription. And it's like, how many hoops do I have to jump through to get it at this point? It comes down to just a few things. Like the physician wants to ensure that if someone has a concern, like they already have a disorder of metabolism, they should probably work with their personal doctor in a much tighter format to get healthier.

That's kind of the thing is that this program that we're building is for general awareness and general insight for people who are kind of flying blind today and they don't yet have a concern, a metabolic health issue. That's what the Levels program is for. And you may be an athlete, you may be someone who wants to lose weight.

You may just be the average person who's just trying to make better choices for better health. It's not specifically for any category. We're trying to build this such that it can hit the mainstream to really elevate our awareness of just how bad. metabolic health is at the societal scale and get people taking the lead in their health. So right now, there isn't any criteria that you be a certain type of person. And ultimately, as I mentioned, it comes down to the physician.

But it's just the belief that people who already have a concern that needs to be very rigorously cared for should work with their doctor, you know, one-on-one. Well, I'm feeling you on that. I mean, maybe years down the line where I understand that.

no one's going to be necessarily the perfect customer or you have a specific niche of a type of person. But like for me now, if I went in and went for the doctor and I think I'm pretty healthy, what are the chances they say yes to this versus no? Again, I know it depends on doctor to doctor, but...

I like testing myself and it's like, what happens if I eat a whole bag of candy versus again, like just talking about spinach, I would want one of these just to kind of see what it does. Cause then I would know versus like, now I don't know. I mean, I can kind of feel sometimes an energy rush and then a crash, but.

Just for a regular guy like me is the way I'm thinking about it. Like it'd be fun to know, but I could see my doctor saying like, Austin, you don't need this. Yeah. You know, so some background there for me, I started out in a similar situation.

I'm a CrossFit trainer as well. I'm like an engineer, but also CrossFit trainer. I've always kind of thought that if I'm physically fit, I'm really healthy. And I've had this lifelong obsession and addiction with candy. My friends in college will tell the tales. I would eat. peanut M&Ms for dinner. And I would just eat enough of them that I was full. And I would feel that energy rush. I would love it. Inevitably, I'd crash out an hour later. So I never really connected that to health.

I, through my work, ended up getting more familiar with human physiology and metabolism and started to understand that diet and nutrition are huge. You know, they have these massive implications. The way our bodies function and what we're made of is what we put in our bodies. and it does matter. And so I tried to get access to a continuous glucose monitor myself through my doctor. And early on, he did exactly what you had mentioned there. And he just kind of said,

You don't need this. You're not diabetic. You don't need to measure blood sugar at all because that's for people who already have a problem with blood sugar. That struck me as very strange because I knew that... these sorts of issues build very slowly over time. You can think of them as compounding interest, either positively or negatively. Like if you're making bad decisions every day, that can compound over time into steadily worse.

blood sugar regularity, and then ultimately it can really break down. And that's when you have diabetes. But if you're waiting until that happens to start measuring it, you never see it coming. So it felt to me confusing. And that's kind of why ultimately I wanted to do what we're doing here with levels.

And there's a piece in between here where I did end up getting a continuous glucose monitor, and I discovered that I did have blood sugar dysregulation. It was very erratic. It was well outside the normal range, and I was heading in a bad direction. And I had this gut feeling, and then...

My fears were confirmed when I got the device. And so that's one of those strange situations where I was just experimenting and I thought, man, I must be one in a million that this happened. And then I looked into the statistics and it turns out. There are 90 million adults in the United States alone with prediabetes. And the CDC says that 70% of those will end up with type 2 diabetes if they don't make changes. But the kicker is that 84% of those...

90 million don't know they have prediabetes. This is based on random testing, but they don't understand that there's a problem because they've never tested for it. That's the situation that we have in our current society is that about a third of the people walking around. currently are at high risk of type 2 diabetes, and they don't know it. And we have 10% of the population with type 2 diabetes, and that's increasing at an increasing rate.

So it's important that we change this philosophy around who should get access to their own body's information and when. And we need to start putting it earlier and earlier so that ultimately we are all well aware of how our bodies function. And we're making data-driven decisions instead of random emotional decisions. Kind of a roundabout way to answer your question, but that problem does exist. The access issue and levels exist to resolve it by connecting with physicians who are very open.

to the concept of real-time biological information being used to make better choices. Did you get your glucose monitor in the black market? Well, you know, it's funny. In other countries, these monitors are available over the counter. You don't need a prescription. So I actually got one in Australia where they're readily available. Okay, so I just got to get on to Mexico. I'm in Florida right now, so I know where I'm going. You're close, yeah.

I mean, yeah, because you see, we're two peas in a pod, man. We're thinking the same thing. I think how fucked up it is like that you're trying to be proactive. And I'm thinking the same thing. I already know what the doctor is going to say because they say it too. Like when I go in, they're like, you're healthy. I'm like, dude.

I still don't feel like I'm that healthy. Like overall, if you consider me to most Americans, I'm probably in the top 10%, but put me back 50 years ago, I might be average, right? Just because I'm not obese, right? So it's just like...

I want to be proactive like this. And it's funny, a lot of people who are business people are proactive in general. So it's funny that you said that doctor said that to you, because I feel like that's exactly what they would say to me if I go in. Yeah, you know, it's definitely individual and there's so much.

difference across different physicians who have different perspectives. And so that's why we have partnered with the network that we did. It's a forward-thinking network of physicians who basically...

believe in telehealth, which is the idea that you shouldn't have to go to a specific office in order to work with a doctor, you should be able to work with a doctor that works with you. And you should be able to do that from anywhere. So you know, that's the first thing is just making this telehealth possibility real. And then

Secondly, working with doctors who believe in the individual right to access their own information. What I think is strange is that we would ever limit someone from knowing data that is being produced by their own bodies. That's the first thing that has to change is just recognition that if my body's producing this signal and I measure it, that is my data to own. And then I should share it with my doctor who I trust to help me get to better health.

But the first step is just making sure that we don't have an unnecessary gatekeeper situation where a person is blocked from understanding something about their own body. Like you're saying that it's that hard to get it and you can go to other countries to do it. I mean, I imagine it's because big pharma might want people to be on diabetes. It seems like I'd go into ketosis. And do you know about that? I imagine. Yeah, totally up to speed on ketosis too. I didn't realize you were a keto guy.

I go back and forth. Like I said, when I just try to be like less carbs or whatever, I'm just pointing out is like, if I could measure something, you could buy keto sticks, which you just piss on. And it shows you whether you're in ketosis or not. Right. So I can't.

tell you like how much more momentum that would have me on not eating as many carbs if i saw that right so it's like that would make me want to be excited be like okay i ate this now i can see what it actually did to me and when i can measure it like

I might only need this thing even for a month. It would seem like for me personally, they're like, okay, I knew what that did to me that spiked it up and that ain't good, Austin, you know? So it's just like people, again, trying to be proactive. Like you were saying, it's like, that would make it so much better in the future as far as.

people getting in diabetes and whatnot. But it's just frustrating to even think that doctors, when you went in for a glucose monitor, were kind of like giving you shit, it sounds like. Yeah, you know, it's... Something we have to slowly change. It's just a matter of recognizing that this technology exists. It's ready. You know, people can access it. It's not super affordable yet, but with wider adoption, we can make it affordable. And by doing so.

we can kind of change these crazy statistics that I was talking about. Here and globally, metabolic dysfunction is on a rampage. So it's really important that we recognize that and equip people. the people who are responsible for maintaining their own health. I think that each individual is responsible for maintaining health. It's not the doctor's responsibility for me not to get sick.

That's just a personal belief of mine. And I think that everyone, if we adopted that philosophy and gave everyone the responsibility and the tools to keep themselves healthy, we would quickly change the situation we're in. And that would only benefit doctors. I think the medical industry...

is not equipped to both cure people who are sick with disease while simultaneously preventing everyone else from getting it. It's just not how this is going to happen. So we've got to really shift the responsibility metric and get rid of any regulations that are limiting that.

I'm going to keep just asking about this because I don't know how far we'll get into until we discuss business. We might have to do that on part two later on, if that's OK, because I'm just so fascinated by this because, I mean.

I mostly listen to business podcasts, but every once in a while I'll do health, especially again, type A personalities or whatever, like you want to strive to be your best self. And I was talking about ketosis in case anyone doesn't understand that and tell me if I'm wrong, right? You're trying to make your body...

burn fat. So I'm trying to have less carbs and have higher protein and fat. And so my body's going to use that instead of the carbs for energy. Is that right first? I mentioned at the beginning, there's basically two molecules your body can use for energy, fat and glucose. And there's kind of a third one, which is ketones. But ketones are a fat molecule, but they can dissolve in water. And what that means is that it's a little bit tricky, but there's a barrier around your brain.

And you have to be able to get energy molecules across that barrier. And ketones can cross that barrier to be used by the brain for energy. So usually glucose is the only molecule that can be used by the brain for energy. And when you're in ketosis, you're producing this ketone molecule, which is fat, but it's fat in a format that can be used by your entire body, including your brain for energy. So it's a really unique, specific and...

Kind of a really cool molecule that does, yeah, exactly that. It burns your fat and makes it available to every tissue. Yeah. And most people aren't in that state. I don't know how maybe 1% if that get to that. And it's because everyone's eating so many carbs, right? So your body's going to only use that if they don't have the carbs as the energy, like you were saying. Exactly. Because here's one of the things, I mean, I started hearing in it.

I think Dr. Mark Hyman, I think I heard it from him. Yeah, yeah, we're working with him. Because I like to have an energy drink every once in a while. But every once in a while, I mean every day. But it says zero sugar on it, right? So I'm like, I'm going to get the zero sugar because, again, I try not to eat too much sugar.

They keep sneaking sugar into stuff. And especially, I think he said something about this, is that it says zero sugar, but really, if you go look at the ingredients, they have all this other shit in there. that's basically hiding and it's basically is sugar they just don't have to put it on the ingredients label and that makes sense to me because why i'm becoming addicted to this like

It's just frustrating. And that's why I'm like looking at your thing. I'm like, dude, I really want to know if this other ingredients that they say on this can right now that I'm even looking at. Is this really 30 grams of sugar, but they're just hiding it? You know, that's why if I had your levels health right now, I'm like.

okay, that would help me figure that out. Exactly. Yeah. I think what you're feeling right now, which I don't know if you've felt this before, but like, it's certainly for me when I first dug in and realized, I don't know anything about what's going on in my body, like what I'm putting into my body.

There's all of this marketing, but what it is, is just marketing and nutrition labels don't tell the whole story. And I had no confidence in what I was doing. And so when you first put on this device and you have that closed feedback loop, you eat something and within 15 minutes.

you're seeing a live data update from your body on how that's affecting you. It's completely transformative. We call it a magic moment, but like it's a light bulb. You're like in conversation with your body. You're able to see something and that builds confidence.

Even if you end up being betrayed by some of your favorite foods, you're betrayed and you're happy about it because you're like, now I know and I'm not going to keep doing that to myself. Or if I do, I'm going to do it on my own terms. Like I'm going to decide to indulge in that energy drink or in that. dessert that I know isn't great for me, but I'm going to do it on my own terms. And so that's really unique. And it's something that changed my life. Again, I kicked my candy habit.

In two weeks, just using this device, I just realized how bad it was for me. It was so much worse than I had ever imagined before. Now that I knew. what the human body, you know, where it should be in terms of blood sugar ranges and then where it was going just from regular foods, let alone from candy, which is just pure sugar. So I just decided not to do that to myself anymore.

I stick to richer desserts that have fats and proteins and are more balanced meals. And I did that because I have data. I have an objective source of truth now. And so one of the beautiful things that I think wide adoption of this technology will lead to... we will be able to eliminate or at least push back misleading marketing. So what you're talking about, hidden sugars, putting molecules, ingredients in something that aren't recognized by the USDA as added sugar.

specifically so that you can get that nice zero sugar label all over your marketing materials, but you know very well that it's having similar or the same hormonal effects on that person. Those are the types of things that are happening. And once we have this technology out there, we'll be able to...

to identify them. And then people will make different decisions. Consumers will buy other products and that will force, I think, our food supply to change. So the marketing will change and the options will change and we'll have across the board, I think, healthier opportunities to eat.

for more affordable prices. This is what I've decided to, I mean, you can tell me if I think I'm wrong, between listening to Mr. Hyman and understanding basics, I guess, hopefully, of nutrition and whatnot. But when all these energy drink companies... Why do they have like 25 different flavors? They must be making profiles that get some people addicted.

Because there's only one flavor that I like versus the other 24, you know, and I feel like there's certain profiles where, and it's not just the energy drink, right? There's other like candy or whatever it is. And it's like. you almost get hooked into it and i need to see what it actually does because now i'm just used to it and then you get kind of just addicted to your habits and

I don't feel horrible. I still think I'm quote unquote healthy, but I know I can be like a better healthy me. And if I saw that, hey, this thing was really messing me up, right, by using your app, I just feel like it would change the habits, kind of like you're saying.

I can't speak to the formulations of the products, but I know what it's like to be addicted to certain things like sugar. The taste was so rewarding. There was nothing to tell me not to do it. It was like I wasn't getting overweight. I wasn't gaining weight.

And it tasted delicious. So why would I not do it? You know, calories are calories. And that's what the food system had led me to believe. But the reality is that I was wrecking havoc on my metabolic function. And historically, my family does not have a lot of...

overweight and diabetes, but we do have heart disease and we do have cognitive decline, dementia. At the time that I discovered this tech, I was burning out mentally and physically. My mood was terrible. My mental clarity was just shot. I felt like I was walking around in a fog all day long.

And I think the effects for me are different than the effects for other people. Like you're saying, you know, there's a lot of individuality and because of just probably my genetic makeup, I manifest metabolic dysfunction differently than other people.

And so all of the negative effects of that candy was hidden from sight because I couldn't see into my body. And, you know, now with just this one data stream, you can do so much with it to better understand yourself and understand what choices you can make to live a healthier life.

There's also some really cool research that's been done, and I'll just touch on one of these studies, but there's a lot of fascinating stuff happening in real time. One study was done in 2015. They took 800 people who did not have diabetes. They put continuous glucose monitors on them. and fed them a whole bunch of identical foods. And they showed that two people can eat the exact same two foods. In this case, it was a banana and a cookie made with wheat flour.

and they can have equal and opposite blood sugar responses. So a big spike to the banana and a flat line for the cookie for one person, and the exact opposite for the other person. What that means is those two people are probably having... exactly opposite hormone responses too. So the insulin, the weight gain, all those downstream effects are probably different. And we need more research to confirm that, but more research is being done, which is showing that

Not only is that effect true, but it's also true for people who share all of their DNA. So identical twins who share 100% of their DNA have that same amount of variability. You and your twin can have very different responses to the same foods. So genetics isn't everything. It seems to be like context, your body composition, how much fat you have, how much lean body mass, how much stress you have, how well slept you are. All of these things affect how a person processes their food.

Ultimately, the only real solution for someone to know exactly what they should eat is to have more information in real time until we at least crack the code. And at that point, maybe you don't need to continue measuring, but some of us like myself prefer to anyway. Hey guys, Energetic Austin here.

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can invest in mobile home parks today. One more time, go visit MidwestParkCapital.com. So I know this past Friday was your first group call. Did you get the answer you were looking for? Actually, I got a really good answer that led to more questions. So those are the best answers. Awesome. Yeah, I try to make sure all of our new members get their questions answered first.

yeah that was perfect that was definitely perfect yeah i was like okay now i've got to research this and ask my team this like it was perfect yeah Again, even if someone used it for a week and understood, because people get regular eating habits, right? And then you at least see what it does then. I think there's certain people like maybe you and me who love maybe measuring things. There's maybe other people who won't as much, but...

I could see I'll be benefit long term, but even short term for people who have no idea. I was kind of going Alex Jones on the flavor profile ideas. But I have a feeling a couple of years because there's certain things that like I ask people if they like.

are hooked to something they're like yeah i'm hooked to that too and but again like you're saying two people might have opposite responses to one energy drink like you were saying earlier but so i mean what are the craziest things that since you got to put on the levels

patch do you call it the levels patch or what do you call it exactly yeah levels patch is good the you know levels device okay yeah so once you put that on and what's your craziest response is that you weren't expecting well one of the

craziest was just very early on in the project. I was actually trying to raise money. I was going into an investor meeting. Let's see. I slept really poorly. I was preparing all night, took a train up to New York and I'm walking into this office building and I saw this little organic juice cart.

you know, about pressed juice, you know, this is like all the rage. It's a really healthy thing. You like press a fruit or vegetable and just get that clean, healthy juice. So I ordered from the menu, this drink called health drink, and it was just a green apple.

some carrots and celery, and they were all pressed. You know, there was no sugar added. I watched the lady make it right in front of me. And I took this into the meeting and I'm drinking it about 30 minutes after I finish this healthy drink. My blood sugar was at 210 milligrams per deciliter, which...

For people who don't know. Which is like almost everyone listening. So don't feel dumb if you don't know, because I don't know either. So tell me, Josh. You shouldn't know. Nobody talks about this stuff. But let's just say that the highest you should go after a very sugary meal, if you are healthy.

is lower than 140 milligrams per deciliter, and you shouldn't exceed 180 unless you have diabetes. And I was at 210. Now, a year later, my goal is to stay below 110 after every meal all the time. So I was basically... double the blood sugar concentration that based on the research, I believe to be healthy from a drink that's called health drink that is just pressed fruits and vegetables. And I think what's happening there is that we're, you know, we're stripping out.

all of the fiber from these healthy plants and you know these vegetables with the intent of getting more of them into our bodies like to get more of that health stuff in but what we're doing is we're actually completely changing the way that our bodies can digest and metabolize these things. And it's causing a really unhealthy response, at least for someone like myself. So I don't know how everyone else responds, but I know...

For me, that is not a good choice and I will not be making that. And it was alarming to see it happen in real time. Another interesting one is oatmeal. Oatmeal is... If you Google the healthiest breakfast. Yeah, I see that. I fucking hate oatmeal. My wife likes it. I'm like, I wouldn't even try this. Yeah. I've never been a big fan myself. I'm more of a cream of wheat guy, but.

Anyway, you Google the healthiest breakfast and top three, I guarantee you, is going to be in any list, oatmeal. And I don't know how this ended up happening. It's some sort of slate of hand or marketing. But at the end of the day, oatmeal is a processed grain. And when I ate oatmeal, which I thought to be a very healthy meal, completely plain, I did not add any syrup, any brown sugar. My blood sugar was again in a diabetic blood sugar range. Like it was way out of control.

The thing is, is that blood sugar spikes and what we call variability, the number of spikes and crashes, is very closely associated with inflammation and with cardiovascular disease. So people who have diabetes and prediabetes are at a much higher likelihood of having a disease of their arteries or cardiovascular dysfunction.

So oatmeal is marketed as this heart-healthy food that everyone should have every morning, especially if you want to maintain cardiovascular health. Yet for someone like myself, if I were to eat that every morning, I would be... driving myself daily closer and closer to a cardiovascular condition. So it's a very real and concerning problem that...

I can't entirely say that it's fraudulent or anything like that. I don't know the whole history of how heart healthy ended up on oatmeal, but it's certainly not heart healthy for everyone. You know, those are two examples that like...

definitely changed my perspective on food. And I believe that they made me healthier in the long run, because it's one thing to find out that something that you thought was unhealthy really is unhealthy. It's another thing to find out that something you think is healthy.

is actually the opposite. So I now eat a much higher fiber protein and fat breakfast. You know, I'll have eggs or avocado toast, or I'll even do like chia seeds and pudding and like this chia seed pudding, which is like these seeds are high in fiber, high in healthy fats.

I'll mix in protein powder. I'll have this really tasty breakfast dish that's kind of similar to oatmeal in consistency, which I actually like the consistency, but I think it has much better flavor and it has absolutely no response, gives me energy all day long. And those are the types of things that like... I would only know through better information in real time. I might even ask for some more examples if that's okay, because...

The reason I was wondering, especially the surprising ones, recently I've had a sugar kick where I've wanted candy. And so we all know candy's not good for you. But I guess there's some people who still don't understand that. But it's the surprising things that, especially if I'm forcing myself to eat oatmeal.

and I hate oatmeal and it doesn't do well on this glucose spike, I'm like, no way I'm going to touch that again. Right. Yeah. And again, it's individual. There are people on my team who have no response to oatmeal. Like they just don't have a big spike from it.

And so, again, we don't really understand the mechanisms well enough yet. We will in the future. And that's what Levels Research is working on is better connecting the dots between all of these interesting variables. But other examples that even go beyond nutrition, you know, I also tested.

fasting. You know, for a long time, I thought that I was a person who got hypoglycemic, you know, just like I felt shaky and I felt hungry and I would feel irritable. And so I was like, oh, I must be, I must have low blood sugar because I haven't eaten. And, you know, this is when I was eating.

I used to be like one of those proponents of kind of the bodybuilding mindset where you need to eat six meals a day, right? Six meals a day is healthy. I did that in college. It would even be hard to do. Like I did.

I forget the guy's book. I'm going to have to look it up, but it's like the perfect ratio of carbs to proteins to fat and something body. I'll have to look that up. But yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. And I did the same thing in college and that like I tried to kind of keep that up after school.

And I would just assume that anytime that I was feeling the sensation, like, oh, I need to eat again. But once I got the device, I started to see that I was having these meals that I thought were really good. An example would be like sushi, right? I would have brown rice sushi, or I would have a burrito bowl with brown rice and black beans and a tortilla on the side. And I'm like, I'm getting in a lot of carbs, a lot of protein, a lot of fat. This is a great meal.

And I was going to say, too, real quick, is that you were even trying your best to make sure it wasn't white rice, right? So people understood that, the difference between brown rice, the slow burn versus the fast burn of white rice. So you're trying to do everything that everyone says.

Exactly. Yeah. So that concept there, the brown versus white rice is the glycemic index. It's the idea that there's this list of foods and it's like ranked by how sugary it is or how fast it will affect your blood sugar. So that is why I was eating brown rice.

So yeah, I'm like, again, I'm a CrossFit level two trainer. Like I've taken fitness seriously my whole life. I'm trying to eat in such a way that it will fuel my body and give me muscle and give me energy. And I'm seeing with this device that like after these meals, my blood sugar is skyrocketing.

It's staying elevated where I feel this kind of strange, like kind of fluttery, like weird chest sensation, a little tingly in my face, like a bit strange, like nothing that I would call home about typically. But when I see that data and connect it to the sensation, I start to like recognize it.

And then two hours later, my blood sugar is crashing. So my body has like flooded my system with insulin to try and get control of the blood sugar situation. And I just get this plummeting glucose level. And that is when I feel that shaky.

fatigue situation where my mood is dropped out from under me. I'm irritable. I'm like immediately hungry, desperately hungry. I feel like I need to sit down. And I was right that I was having these hypoglycemic episodes, but I was wrong about what the problem was. The problem is not I needed to eat more.

Problem is that I was eating the wrong things, which were causing this roller coaster. So when I tuned my diet and like pulled back heavily on really all carbohydrates, because I'm very carbohydrate sensitive. and replace them with high fiber, high protein, and moderate fat, my blood sugar levels completely flattened out. And so I ended up, you know, right now where I am is like, I stay within plus or minus 10 points all day long with all my meals. And that like sensation.

of, you know, shakiness of fatigue and irritability is just gone. I don't experience that anymore because I'm not experiencing the highs that come before the lows. And that has also connected me with fasting. where I can now see I've done 72 hour fasts at this point and learned that, you know, what I thought was hypoglycemia, a need to be eating six times a day is not real at all. And in fact, my body will produce.

exactly how much blood sugar I need to not only survive, but perform from the fat stores I have and the sugar stores I have already in my muscles and liver. And so I can just cruise and my glucose will be nice and flat. consistent, no weird elevations and crashes for three days at a time without eating a single calorie. And so seeing that, it's pretty powerful to see and recognize your body's a pretty fine-tuned machine.

And as long as you're not kicking it repeatedly, it will perform well. And it brings about a lot of freedom when it comes to food to recognize you can eat once a day if you want. You know, it's just a matter of getting as much energy as you need. And, you know, most of us don't need that six meal thing. And I looked it up. I don't know if this was the book that did it for you, too. I was somewhat right. I knew what Body was in it. It's called Body for Life by Bill Phillips.

I never read it, but I think I'm familiar with what you're talking about. I know that it's the same content, right? Same concept. Yeah. Basically, just make sure you have the same amount of carbs. And he wasn't even low carb then. This is before I kind of started doing lower carb.

But they're just like the same ratio of carbs to proteins to fats. Right. So at least I was on a level of understanding that again versus like just don't have too many calories in a day. I'm like, dude, I'm bigger than most people. I need more calories. So that makes no sense.

So I would eat exactly. And when we say six meals, they're supposed to be smaller, quote unquote. But at the end, dude, when you have to time every three hours to eat, and I'm doing that in between classes and trying to have the protein drink and eat an apple with it.

my levels are equal and i've done the whole route of like and now if i could measure it like you were saying i don't do that anymore but that's the reason i brought up spinach because from my understanding that's probably the healthiest thing you can have so it's just like

I try to make sure I eat some of that stuff. I'm not going out eating, you know, McDonald's. Luckily, I don't even like that stuff, to be honest. But if I had even a better way of measuring, there's certain people, even if you take a personality test, I think I mentioned this. It's been a long time since I did.

There's like traits that you look at. And one of mine is like being a competition or achievement. Those are my top two, I think. And if like, dude, if I can see that I'm achieving certain things and not going too high or too low, like you were saying. I know that could take me to another level. If you're looking back, can you tell us the difference you feel as far as if you're able to keep it level all day versus before when you were eating oatmeal and whatnot? Can you remember the difference?

For sure. I mean, when I was going through the early experiments, just trying to measure this myself for the first time, I actually went to my doctor prior to getting this device and I said, I think I have a terminal illness. Something is very wrong with...

my something because like, I don't feel healthy and every day I'm struggling to get through the day. Like I was remembering back to when I was in college or just out of college and I just had a lot of energy all the time and my mood was upbeat and I felt like, you know, I was cruising.

And then this, you know, now six years on, I was just like, every day I would get hit by these waves of fatigue that I was describing. And it was not just physical, it was mental. And it was mood. And so now the difference is dramatic. primarily I think the major benefits. So I don't want to say that I've got nitrous oxide in my veins and I'm flipping cars over and like flying around, you know, like Superman. It's more so just I don't have those low lows and I have a consistent.

output of energy and the biggest thing for me is mental clarity. So my mood and my ability to just recall words and maintain a steady output of mental and physical energy all day long is restored. So, you know, I certainly feel like, and I think this is just standard aging, you know, I'm a decade later after school. I'm not the same as I was when I was 20, but my consistency and performance daily and my ability to just get up and work out and then do a...

an 18-hour workday and feel good is back. And that is what was completely broken just a year or two ago. I really put all of it on this metabolic dysfunction that was developing. And it wasn't just nutrition. I'd love to touch on some of the other stuff.

The ways that I was breaking myself down previously were the nutrition I was eating and the fact that I couldn't, I was too sensitive to it. And then also just like the sleep and sustained stress that I was putting myself under, which, you know, stress of course is related to hormonal releases like cortisol. And those have direct implications in metabolism. So connecting all of these dots together, I've changed a huge number of things about basically every decision I make every day.

See, I mean, if I would monitor my glucose right now, I would have been able to remember it was called Body for Health instead of, you know, Body for Life. See, I can't even remember, dude. I went over to a different tab. I'm like, I'd almost remembered it, but if I... I've been eating right and measuring everything. I wouldn't have to even use Google anymore. Maybe. Yeah.

So I guess what are the other points of it? Again, I'm just fascinated by the nutrition, but I think that's the foundation of everything. If you start eating a little bit better, that's almost going to fix everything out. So that was the most interesting thing to me. And when I'm just looking at it, what else does it do? So I was always kind of the person that believed that you could sort of sleep when you're dead.

You'll sleep a long time. I was really wondering, like, too, I was like, when you said 18 hour work days, I'm like, maybe you don't have to sleep anymore if you can monitor your glucose levels. No, no, I should take that back. I don't like doing 18 hour work days anymore. That's not good for me. But I didn't learn that lesson. really until I had the feedback from a glucose monitor because I was finally able to see the negative impact of the stress that I was producing for myself.

So basically, stress is a state probably best defined by cortisol levels. So cortisol, it's a fight or flight hormone. It is released in response to stress and it primes your body for a fight or a flight. The way it does that... is it interferes with insulin and other hormones in the body and causes you to produce a ton of energy. So the goal is get your body ready for an endeavor.

Once I put on this device, I recall specifically like going into a very stressful meeting, you know, preparation, presentation, like it was all really important. And my blood sugar skyrocketed like I had just drank a health drink, you know, one of those pressed juices. It went up like 50 points and stayed elevated for about 35 or 40 minutes, like during the most stressful part of this presentation.

That was like one of the first lessons where, holy cow, it's not just nutrition that can have major physiologic effects, but this stress thing and the way it's impacting us both acutely, like in that moment where you're in that meeting and long-term where... you are constantly in a state of stress because of either psychological concerns or because you're sleeping poorly or not enough.

And your body is never recovering. And so it's always in this elevated state of readiness almost because you're never allowing the full process of deep restorative sleep to happen. So that can compound over a long period of time. And people are ending up with a lot of weight gain issues and a lot of adrenal issues and a lot of, frankly, metabolic dysfunction that is blatantly due to their poor stress management. So you can be eating a good nutrition-filled diet.

But just a single night of short sleep, you know, sleeping four hours instead of eight hours can cause people to have 40% higher insulin requirements to clear the same amount of sugar out of their blood. So basically a meal that you ate yesterday after eight hours of sleep.

can be 40% worse or more taxing on your insulin-resistant system or on your metabolic system the next day if you only get four hours of sleep. And that's been studied repeatedly, and I've seen that relationship. So, you know, I've taken red-eye flights. And, you know, I sleep terribly, get off the flight. And the whole next day, my blood sugar is at a constantly elevated mode, just 10, 15% higher than it normally is. And every response to every meal is dramatically worse.

So this lesson taught me that A, sleep matters, recovery matters. I need to start prioritizing it. And then B, when I am compromised, when I've had that poor sleep, I tend to be more likely to cheat on my diet. When you're all stressed out and you've had a tough day and you haven't slept well, that's when you're going to go get that pizza and finish it off with a half gallon of ice cream. That's a lot of ice cream, bro. I love ice cream. But the reality is that...

The preservation of your metabolic health matters most when you are so compromised by sleep. So it's like you have these four levers, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress. When you're compromised on one of them, it's more important to make up for it on the others.

So it's the opposite of what we tend to do. We tend to like beat ourselves while we're down with the poor sleep followed by the poor nutrition. And we need to be more mindful and more aware that we have to start doing the opposite. And if you're going to be indulging. in a meal or getting poor sleep, you should make sure that you're doing everything you can to keep things on the straight and narrow on the other parts of your daily lifestyle.

And so if I have one of these patches on while I'm sleeping, can you just like make me exercise while I'm sleeping? So there I'm like getting that balance. We haven't gotten that far yet, but it's on the roadmap. Version two. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So you're saying exercise, nutrition, and stress, were those the three things that you kind of were alluding to? But if you have balance in all those, you're going to feel much better? Yeah. I mean, I consider sleep to be separate from stress, but it really is the same thing. It's a stress control mechanism.

These are the four big levers that we're pulling on every day. You know, every person is actually playing around with these controls all day, every day, and they just don't know the effects of them other than... Like every once in a while, you'll be like, man, I really feel bad right now. Or I feel really great right now. I wonder what it is. You know, maybe it was that health drink that I got from the juice car yesterday. You know, it's like.

We don't have the ability to connect the dots between all the things we're doing. And these are like the four big things that we can control. There are, of course, systems that will break down that are out of our control. There are illnesses that... won't be prevented by managing glucose. You're not curing cancer with this. Yeah. It's certainly not a cure for really anything. What it is, is a tool. It's a tool to help us better understand how our bodies work and what...

the implications of our choices are. And then we can use it kind of the way that we use financial information. You don't open a bank account and then say, I'm never going to check this balance, but I don't want to overdraw. That's kind of the situation with metabolism.

We're flying blind. We don't know the deposits and withdrawals, so to speak, that we're making every day, but we're trying not to overdraw and end up in bankruptcy. Well, you don't have to check your bank account. You got like 15 million, right? Well, let's continue building this business. But, you know, that's kind of the metaphor is just like, we've got to make it more like financial information where...

we're using it to plan a strategy. You know, like all of us or many people have their retirement plan and they're like slowly but surely building towards that end goal of like being financially secure and being retired and being able to enjoy their lives. But guess what? Most of us don't know whether we're going to be healthy enough to be around for that retirement or to be able to take advantage of it. And we've got to get to that point where we're using health data to plan our daily.

decisions, the way that we're going to compound positive actions to make sure that not only are we financially secure in retirement, but we're also healthy enough to live and enjoy it. Can you measure your heart rate too and all those other...

I don't know if there's any other functions on there that it actually measures that would help like throughout the day. Well, we've got integrations built with Apple HealthKit and Google Fit. So we do auto import exercise activities and heart rate data and sleep data.

We're building feature sets on top of each of these to really bring together all of your lifestyle choices combined with CGM and allow you to see in the context of metabolic information or in the context of blood sugar information how...

different activities affect your metabolic response, how your heart rate implications affect response, and how your sleep quality and duration affect you. So definitely building all of that in. We consider all of those to be kind of secondary to... the main metric, which is glucose, but they can contribute pretty significantly to understanding if you eat a piece of pizza or something, or you have a whole pizza for that matter, and then you sit on the couch.

for two hours. You've been watching me? Yeah, we got eyes on you. But, you know, that's an example. You eat a whole personal pizza or a whole pizza and sit on the couch for two hours. and then see how your blood sugar responds. And then we'll prompt you to try the same thing, but eat that pizza and then go for a walk. Go for a 25 or 35 minute walk around your neighborhood.

And we'll pull in the activity information knowing that you took that walk. And then we'll bring all of those together into two insights where we compare pizza plus no activity with pizza plus activity right after it. And you can start to see that... What happens is your muscles in your legs as you're walking are immediately pulling in the sugar that's flowing into your bloodstream from the pizza and using it for energy.

that is changing the way that your body is metabolizing this pizza. And it is actually improving your overall exposure to high blood sugar and tends to, for most people, give you a much more favorable response. So it's a tiny thing. It's a little like kind of intuitively makes sense. Like, you know, more activity is better. We've been hearing that our whole lives. But when you see it in that moment and realize, wow, that's like kind of a really powerful little micro optimization I can make.

And you can get a little receipt from levels that shows you, you made a better choice by taking that walk and it improved, you know, your response over doing nothing. Appreciate you doing the call here. Yeah. Favorite podcast by far. I love it. Oh yeah.

What was that? So I graduated 2017 from Michigan. I heard that shout out the other day. That was pretty cool. Basically, two months after I graduated, I started listening to the podcast. I think there were maybe 30 episodes or something out by that point. And I consider myself to be pretty entrepreneurial. Started a business last year. This helped a ton. It's hard, I think, to find entrepreneurs. I was just looking for entrepreneurial meetups.

And I think, wow, this is more of an awesome opportunity to talk with other entrepreneurs. The value is, I mean, it's insane. Like people make these types of entrepreneurial insight things are thousands of dollars. This is. 12 per month but a month is like nothing so i mean for you personally since do you have one on right now i do always have one

I figured it'd be good marketing regardless. You're making sure people can see it. Yeah, never take it off. You have it on your forehead for every Zoom video? It's my barcode on the back of the neck. Oh, there you go. Just future-wise, 50 years from now.

They're talking about putting chips in people's brains, right? Like your boy, Elon, like, which I would be down to, too. I told my wife I'd be like, so this thing makes a lot of sense to me of like, OK, this kind of stepping stone to that, at least. Right. You want to know like we're all.

How addicted is everyone to their phone? That's basically anonymous in your brain now, you know, to an extent of like, you won't drop that. But this is something that's on you and that's actually going to help you. But I was wondering for you personally.

Do you even look at like the nutritional facts anymore? Because it seems like this is the highest level of understanding your fitness, if you will. I mean, unless I'm understanding that wrong. Like, so are you even looking at proteins, fat and carbs and all that other stuff? I do. I pay attention to it. But what I do is I actually look at ingredients more than I do nutrition facts. So as you mentioned, you know, the nutrition facts don't always translate.

And so I now know how I respond to most specific foods like corn versus flour versus kasava flour or coconut flour, you know, all of these different ingredients that will show up on a label as fiber or carbs. I respond differently to all of them. So I'm going to pick foods that I don't have a personal sensitivity to, and I'm going to look at the ingredient label, and then I'm going to look at the nutrition facts. But I will try to avoid foods that require a nutrition label.

And what I mean by that is that if you're making your own meals and you're making them from whole foods. You don't need a nutrition label on the beans or on the rice if you're going to eat that. You know what's in it. And you can understand that that's like entirely carbohydrate. And then the meat that you're using is entirely protein for the most part with some fat. So I guess what I mean is that I try to get...

further away from foods that are unknown combinations of ingredients and more towards meals that I'm preparing. And it's been a very slow process. Like by no means am I someone that is a great cook and enjoys the process. Like it's tricky. It takes time. It's something I got to make space for.

But I've just realized through this process how important it is to be knowing what's going into my body and controlling it. The most important thing to me is quality and choosing ingredients that I know I'm not specifically sensitive to. And the secondary thing is... trying to hit ratios that work. And like the rough ratio for me is, I won't even give numbers. It's more so like I prioritize protein above all.

And I'll eat moderate healthy fats like a lot of avocados, a lot of cashews and almonds and other nuts that have high fats, chia seeds. And then my carbs are fairly low. I tend to keep my carbs. probably at 20% of calories or below and kind of eating them around workout times mostly. And then just a ton of green vegetables and fiber is really important. I mean, I have to imagine that you're in the top 1% of like understanding that and eating to that perspective.

I mean, what happens if they're eating wheat thins and they think they're good when, you know, it's a lot more processed, but is it really that much better than a bag of Doritos, right? And maybe it's even worse. Or like you're saying, even if you're cooking. What happens if people are using certain types of oils? Like you think everything's good, but I want to go use avocado oil instead of olive oil. What's the effect? Like that's the kind of stuff I would want to test with it.

Yeah. And right now we're measuring a specific molecule, glucose, and that is really important because it's so rampantly broken in society today. It's such a problem. Glucose metabolism and insulin resistance is a really big problem. But, you know, it's not the only molecule that matters to your point about avocado oil versus olive oil. We wouldn't be able to determine the difference or the quality of those two different.

foods or oils very effectively with just glucose i mean it could show up for example if you're having like a really bad seed oil of some kind that's causing inflammation in your body like maybe that would show up because the inflammation would induce stress and the stress would cause blood sugar to rise

But the point is just that glucose isn't everything. It's a lot, but we've got to get to the point where we can measure multiple molecules in real time to provide this same degree of insight across a number of factors. And I'm just super optimistic. Like I think we're going to be a part of that innovation and bringing that future to reality where we can understand not just sugar, but also hormones and other proteins and molecules in our bodies that really affect health.

Well, maybe that was a bad example by me, but I guess I was trying to think of something that, because both those are really good for you, it seems like, right, overall. Do you have another example where something's like good and bad? No, I think you're totally on the right, on the nose, like with the idea is just that being able to compare.

different foods to each other. I mean, the brown rice versus white rice example, or the corn versus flour tortillas, or yeah, all of these are great examples. And something that I dove deep into at the beginning, and everyone does as they come into the Levels program, we have these things called challenges in the app.

which make specific recommendations. So try a meal with red beans and then the same meal with black beans or exactly. Yeah, all of that. And then other different factors like, you know, vinegar tends to have a digestive slowing effect, it seems. which can slow the rate at which glucose makes its way into the blood. So we'll kind of recommend either try taking a shot of apple cider vinegar before you have that meal. Dude, I just bought some of that and tried that shit. It is...

Horrendous. Like I, like I bought these little detox thing. Cause again, my, my wife just recently kind of, I'm with a couple of months, my vegan. And so I've been trying to eat like better. Like, you know, again, I'm doing the spinach, whatever. Not that I ever ate that horrible, but it's like, for me, like you were saying.

I'm like, honey, I didn't get all these muscles for no reason. I'm not going to let you use protein. Like, I need more protein. Like, and I go get my own meat and sous vide and do all that. And it's just like. I need the protein, but she doesn't really care as much. But sorry, that got me out of it. I forgot where you were going. Well, the vinegar effect is like, I mean, it's tough to do. I mean, for sure. So maybe like...

make a quick dressing with apple cider vinegar and put it on, you know, Oh, apple cider vinegar. Sorry. Yeah. I remember. Cause I tried it before anybody, if you tried it before, cause it was buy one, get one free. And now I knew why, but, but it's interesting.

interesting to see that effect. Like if the difference between having, you know, vinaigrette on a salad, like a cold salad with noodles, it may affect how fast those noodles break down and make their way into your bloodstream. So you can see that and understand that like...

vinegar is a really good way that you know if you like the vinaigrette you can incorporate that into your dietary approach so yeah we have just kind of a ton of these but the walking after meals the sleep quality the effects of alcohol which are counterintuitive like all of it is

coming together into just experimentation so that each person comes away with a better understanding of not just like a very small number of things, but also the edge cases, the things they otherwise wouldn't have tried. And you can see these like new tools that that person can use.

I was going to say that eventually, I'm glad you brought it up, the alcohol thing. You know, a patch on me, I'm like, that'd make me feel way better about like, okay, if this really did make it that much worse, like... I would feel bad and then I would be like, okay, you need to stop doing that. The process you're describing though is like, that's the accountability that this.

device provides. You know, it is amazing. The reason I continue to wear it, I mean, obviously beyond the branding piece, but just like I wear it. On your forehead. Yeah. But I wear it because it is the most amazing accountability device ever. Like because...

I know that if I'm going to eat that thing that I know I have a sensitivity to because I've tested it many times, I'm going to have to see the data and I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact like I just did a little bit of damage to myself. You know, it's like I smoked that cigarette effectively nutrition wise.

I don't know. It's just like it's the small nudge I needed to not make those little decisions that go against my goals. And everyone's different. Their goals are going to be different. The way they use the technology will be different. But the accountability piece, I think, is the same for all of us. In terms of alcohol.

So the way it kind of works is that ethanol is the molecule in most alcoholic beverages that does the work. And so your liver can only process alcohol or ethanol in one way. It has to turn it into triglycerides or turn it into fat. So ethanol can't be used by the cells for energy directly. It has to be converted into fat and then it can be used for energy. But it is also a toxin. So what seems to happen is that your body goes into like high alert when there's ethanol and it stops.

producing glucose from the liver, which is called gluconeogenesis, which is where your body's like basically constantly producing when you're not eating, it's producing new glucose from the fat and glycogen, so the stored glucose in your body, and releasing it into your bloodstream just to make sure that there's energy available for your brain and for your muscles. So when you drink alcohol, your liver stops that and starts just producing fat. It's converting the ethanol into triglycerides.

What happens is that because your liver stops producing that glucose, your blood sugar starts to drop. And this is different for different people. And I think there are kind of a bunch of different factors, like what the alcohol is mixed with, how many carbohydrates are in the beer along with the alcohol.

or if you're having a cocktail or margarita or something like that, all of that will have different effects. But for most people, if you just were to have some gin or vodka or whiskey or something like that, you would see this effect where your blood sugar will start to actually drop.

which is confusing for people because they think, huh, you know, I thought this was all carbs. I thought it was going to like put me through the roof. I don't think the effect is a good one. Meaning like, I don't think people should be like, oh, it drops my glucose. It's good for me. Because what's happening behind the scenes is that increase in fat production, and specifically triglycerides, which are not something we want in high quantities in our blood.

So I'm looking forward to being able to like obviously produce the real time triglyceride monitor that will allow us to like add that data stream. But for now, I just think it's a tool. It's got like it has alcohol is helpful for.

Definitely stress relief for some people in moderate quantities. I certainly am not a person that says never drink alcohol, but I do think that that counterintuitive piece, it's a really fascinating thing to learn about your body. And it's something that's good to know and probably... fine in moderation. Well, Josh, I got to give you some advice here then. What's up? I'm ready. Well, if you're this into nutrition, you probably should stop smoking.

No, I don't smoke. That's just an example. I think at least we all gave that up, it seems like. At least everyone in Florida. I know when I go to South Carolina and stuff, when I was in college, I think I went there.

everyone was there was smoking i guess because there's like tobacco region like they get those kids hooked and like they come down to florida and they'd ask all the kids when i was in college like y'all get cigarettes were like dude people don't smoke anymore like what are you talking about

Because there's always a balance of like, okay, are you the anal guy who's never going to have fun, right? But like, again, the main thing that you brought up, and I think that's going to be most helpful to anyone over once it's easier for everyone to get involved with, is just the accountability factor.

Yep. I think that's what it all comes down to. If anyone is interested, is the best way for them to, again, go to the website and just sign up? Yeah. So levelsouth.com, we got the wait list right there. We're still in invitation only. But we're expanding quickly, you know, and we'll ultimately be opening this up later this year. So definitely sign up, stay in the loop. Definitely check out the blog. You know, we touched on a lot of stuff here on this episode, but.

If you go to the blog, we break it all down sort of in article format to help you kind of understand these mechanisms and how they might be affecting you day by day. And if someone wanted to say thank you for doing this episode, is there a best way for them to personally reach out to you to say thank you?

Yeah, so I'm on Twitter at Joshua's Forest with two R's and also on Instagram at josh.f.clementi. So you can hit me up there. We'd love to hear from you. Well, thanks for coming on, Josh. Thanks a lot, Austin. Let's see. I'm looking at our new... What are we doing now for Patreon for our group calls? Oh, we're doing two a month? Yeah, we are. And the membership price is still the same. Unbelievable.

So if you want to become a member, join our Patreon membership by going to millionaire-interviews.com forward slash Patreon. And again, the price is still the same. I'm not going to keep it this way forever. We're now doing two group calls a month. For the price of one, you're welcome.