Putting My Blood Metrics in Context
Project Infobox 
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| Self researcher(s) | Gil Blander |
| Related tools | Innerage |
| Related topics | Diet and weight loss, Food tracking, Cognition, Stress, Blood tests and blood pressure, Blood glucose tracking, Activity tracking |
Builds on project(s) |
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| Has inspired | Projects (0) |
| Show and Tell Talk Infobox | |
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| Featured image | 
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| Date | 2015/06/19 |
| Event name | 2015 QS Global Conference |
| Slides | Putting-my-blood-metrics-in-context.pdf |
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Putting My Blood Metrics in Context is a Show & Tell talk by Gil Blander that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2015/06/19 and is about Diet and weight loss, Food tracking, Cognition, Stress, Blood tests and blood pressure, Blood glucose tracking, and Activity tracking.
Description[edit | edit source]
A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:
Gil Blander discusses InsideTracker's Innerage score and the effect nutrition and exercise have on physiomarkers, biomarkers, and performance. He shares the tracking of his weight, activity, heart rate variability, blood tests, and genetic data during the last year.
Video and transcript[edit | edit source]
A transcript of this talk is below:
Gil Blander Putting My Blood Metrics in Context
This is me at the age of 12 and you can see I was young but I was sad, and the question is why was I sad. The reason is at that age that I’m not immortal, so I wanted to slow the clock and I decided to commit my life to aging research. Fast forward to 2015 you will see that actually we made some progress because CNN said it’s the best blood test you will ever take, so definitely I did something right. And the question is what as the journey? How did I make it from the age of 12 to today that I did something right? So let’s try to understand my journey. So I graduated from the Wiezmann Institute with a P.HD., in aging research. I spent five years at MIT as a post doc to All Fellows studying aging. I worked in several biotech companies, and in 2009 I founded Inside Tracker. I’m the Chief Scientific Officer and the creator of Innerage, the product that we’ll discuss with you today. So what is Innerage? Innerage is the cutting edge new product that helps you to find what is your physiological age based on only five key biomarkers, and you can see it here. It’s based on glucose, vitamin D, testosterone, hsCRP, which is an inflammation marker and ALT which is a liver health biomarker. As you can see on the right hand panel, my glucose was making me be older while the rest of the biomarkers made me to be younger. So I decided to focus on glucose in this part of the talk. So let’s try to understand why glucose is so important for me, and why it’s important for all of us. So if you can take a look at (Excy? 02:00) you can see glucose in the level of 80 in a relatively young age will allow you to live to around 95. When this glucose will increase slightly more and be around 85, your lifespan might be only 75. So glucose is really the elephant in the room. So after understanding that, the question was okay, what should I do or what can I do in order to decrease my glucose. So I decided again to go to Inside Tracker and try to find intervention that will help me to decrease the glucose. And so I looked at the blood group page, and I found that activity will allow me to decrease it. Also if I shed some weight, it will help me to decrease my inner age. And last but not least, consuming more fiber will help me to decrease my glucose and hopefully decrease my inner age. So that’s basically my QS quest for longevity, take those interventions and see what is the effect of my inner age, and glucose and then hopefully on my longevity. So the first intervention that I would like to present to you is activity. So in the summer of 2013, I started this quest, and my average steps per day was around 5,000 steps. You can see that very quickly I increase it to around 11,000 steps a day and I’m continuing to maintain it right now. And if you look at the glucose, you can see that my glucose decreased from around the 90s to around 80. So that was very good and very encouraging. In other another intervention that I decided to do is decrease my weight. Again I used a Withing’s scale, measure myself everyday like most of you and again, there is a nice correlation between my glucose level and my weight. I decrease my weight, my glucose went down. As I said before I also consumed more fiber, so I decided to consume more oatmeal, flax seed, raspberries and chia seed and I’m doing it every day. So the question is okay, how does that affect my glucose and later on the inner age. You can see that this graph showed the level of my glucose before the intervention, and then my glucose after the intervention. And I called it Mid Term Report because later on we’ll see it’s not as simple, and I’ve seen a nice result. My glucose went down, and actually if you look at my inner age comparing to my chronological age, you can see that from the first time that I decided to measure my inner age was younger than my chronological age and I felt like I might live forever which was a very good feeling at that time. You can see also the overlay of my glucose activity weight with my inner age and you can see there is a nice correlation; lower weight, increased activity, lower glucose make a lower inner age. Again, I felt I was immortal and it was great. But then I tested again, and it told me it’s time for a change again. Your inner age is 55 you’re 45, and I couldn’t complain because I am the creator of Inner Age so it was very frustrating but that’s life. More than that, when you look at the progress you can see it wasn’t a fluke in the red; it’s happened again. So basically it’s not like okay, something wrong happened for a moment, it’s happened again. So the question is let’s try to drill down and understand what’s happening. So here you can see my weight in the Inner health and you can see some downs and some ups, and another up and another down and I see that all of you have seen the same pattern and it’s not easy to maintain your weight all the time, and let’s see what I’ve done. What were the interventions that I used. So the first intervention to decrease my weight was a food journal, using Myfitnesspal. And I did it and it’s working and I see a lot of you have seen it, but after a month it starts to be boring and hard and I couldn’t maintain it. So I decided to try another intervention that was skipping breakfast or intermittent fasting, basically eat the last meal at 7 PM and the first meal at around 11 AM, and you can see a very nice effect. My weight definitely decreased and I’m still doing it. If you overlay my glucose you can see that when my weight went up, my glucose went up. But when I did the intermittent fasting, it wasn’t as good as Myfitnesspal intervention. So basically, biology is more complex that what we think and there are a lot of different interactions there. So what is the next step? Luckily I have a team of scientist so I told them hey, you have to help me to try to find better interventions. So the scientists went into the journal, PubMed research and they found a few interventions and I would like to show you two of them. One of them is garlic and actually they found a lot of information, that when you consume garlic supplementation you can decrease your glucose so I’m starting to do that. And also another interesting supplement called Berberine which also have shown some very promising results, so I’m trying those interventions now and hopefully next year I will present to you a better outcome of my longevity quest. So just to summarize, dreams do come true if you work hard it’s not easy and N=1 is fascinating, especially when it’s you, so please go in and have fun. And N=big or N=1, science is very complex and it’s very hard to explain it. And last but not least, your life and happiness are at stake, so you are your best investment and try to invest as much as you can.
Thank you.
About the presenter[edit | edit source]
Gil Blander gave this talk.