July:Hot Topics

We are diving straight into another fan favorite: our July Hot Topics episode! In this episode of Oh Health Yeah, Gus and Zach hit the tablets to pull some of the biggest, fastest-growing trends currently taking over the wellness space.  
If you want to know where the industry is heading and how we process these massive shifts under the Healthy Is Wellness umbrella, this is the conversation you need to hear.  
Here is a quick look at the major concepts we are putting on the hot seat:
The Longevity Currency: Why preserving a specific physical metric is officially being recognized as a critical cornerstone for long term metabolic resilience, far beyond just how you look in the mirror.  
The Sleep Tech Boom: With the market projected to reach tens of billions of dollars, we break down why we consider this the ultimate foundation of well-being, and how to navigate the overwhelming amount of data from your devices.  
Upgrading the Annual Panel: The standard, basic health screens are starting to feel outdated, prompting a massive surge toward deeper biomarker analysis. Plus, we share an exciting update on how we are bringing these advanced insights straight to our clients.  
Tune in to Oh Health Yeah now to get ahead of the curve and learn how to put these major health shifts into action for your own life!  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome into the Oh Health Yeah podcast brought to you by Healthy is Wellness. As you all know, our mission is to empower you to take control of your health and elicit a little bit of curiosity in your life when it comes to the world of wellness. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And if you have loved ones or friends that you think would benefit from this, share it with them. Let's get this thing going. Welcome in, Healthiest Family, to another edition of the Oh Health Yeah podcast. Today we're going to be doing one of our fan favorites. We're going to be doing a hot topics episode. So Zach is going to look up a couple hot topics in the health and wellness space. We're going to buzz through them. We'll probably do like two or three topics, depending on how long it takes. The big thing behind these episodes is just to keep you guys up to date with kind of the things that are changing in the health and wellness world and then hear how we perceive or we want to talk about these things under the healthy as wellness umbrella and what our beliefs are. So Zampy's hitting it on the tablet right now. Once he has a couple topics, he'll chime in and push those through, and we'll talk through them. Two?

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Yeah, we'll do two. Muscle is a new metabolic health marker. I'm looking at a website called prenuo.com, and it has a few different exploding health topics to talk about. Muscle isn't just for looks anymore. People are learning that sarcopenia, the loss of skeletal muscle, doesn't only come with age, it's also linked to metabolic resilience. Low muscle mass can worsen insulin resistance, reduce metabolic flexibility, and impair long-term health outcomes. In fact, a meta-analysis of older adults found that sarcopenia is significantly linked to metabolic risk factors like high blood pressure and raised fasting glucose. So preserving muscle mass isn't just cosmetic anymore. It's foundational. That's why people are prioritizing lean muscle mass, grip strength, protein timing, or resistance training.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Grip strength? They have that in there? Yeah. That's pretty cool. Completely agree with everything he just said. What is her name? Gosh dang, there's a Gabrielle Lyon. She said muscle is the currency of longevity. Yeah. And I completely agree with that. The more muscle mass you have, or being able to maintain your muscle mass as you age is so beneficial, whether you're a male or a female, no matter what's going on in your life, more muscle mass you have, the higher likelihood of you being able to do the things you love long into life. And that directly plays into mental health. And that's something that I think is so important to the majority of the clients that we see is trying to help when it comes to mental health. Now, what we're talking about right now is just muscle mass itself, but muscle mass is what allows us to do a lot of the things that we love to do, like you fly fishing, me bow hunting, just being able to spend time outside. We need muscle mass to be able to do those things. So everything that you just said about muscle mass being the currency of longevity and all those different statistics, I completely agree with. It's also why we use the in-body machine. We use the in-body because it shows us how much muscle mass people have and how that thing is changing over time. If we were to just look at people's weights, it does not give us the definition of how their body is actually adapting or what their body is even made up of. So that's one of the reasons that we use the in-body. We want to know what muscle is doing. We want to know how it's trending. We also test grip strength. As the majority of people that are listening, if you guys have come in to see us before, we test grip every single time somebody comes in to be able to assess how their body is producing force and how that changes over time. Ideally, we want people to maintain strength and maintain force production as they age. But muscle being the currency of longevity, I think is a foundational pillar and it's definitely something we believe in. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02 3:58

I really, really love the quote that muscle is the currency of longevity. And I've said it quite a few times to friends, family, and clients. I think it's kind of like your savings account when things go wrong. You know, when you when you have somebody like, for example, my father-in-law, he had a hemorrhagic stroke a month ago. And I think the fact that he lost 120 pounds and had be been so active right up until is what he was able to borrow against. You know, it's just like in life, when something goes wrong, having a savings account is something that you can borrow against. And I think that your muscle mass is your savings account for when when life gets in the way of life.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

So I agree. I'm with you. I think it's huge.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Yeah. It's probably the most important metric that we could look at. I think for longevity purposes. Yep. So agreed agreed.

SPEAKER_02 4:53

Okay. Sleep optimization takes center stage. It's no longer considered admirable to stay up late, getting things done, or sneaking into another streaming episode past bedtime. Optimizing sleep has become a priority, not a luxury. Enter the era of wearables and apps to track sleep stages, HRV and recovery, turning sleep into actionable actionable data-driven health metrics. In fact, the global sleep tech market, including wearables, apps, and connected devices, is expected to grow from 26.6 billion in 2023 to 58.2 billion by 2030. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Sleep tracking devices. So overall, optimization of sleep is important. Yeah. I completely agree with that. I think sleep is beneficial for almost every aspect of the body and high-quality sleep. How people optimize sleep is really dependent on their relationship with it. So just like we've talked about in prior episodes, similar to how like somebody tracking their macros may not be beneficial to them achieving their goal. They might get hyperfixated on it. I think sleep's the same way. So if you're somebody, you're somebody that thrives with data, heck yeah, go with it. But if you're somebody that you feel like it's going to actually agitate you and make you go in an opposite direction, don't feel like you have to. But I think sleep is honestly the foundation of wellness and well-being. I remember when I first got in to healthy is eight years ago, I thought so much of wellness was activity and nutrition. And what I've found out over the course of eight years is that sleep is actually more foundational than both of those things. Because when you sleep poorly, you oftentimes make poor nutrition choices and you don't want to exercise, you don't want to move at all. So sleep to me is a foundation, but the way that you optimize it is very dependent on your relationship with tech and devices.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

What do you got? Sleep. The analogy that I always tell people is kids grow when they're sleeping out, when they're awake. And that's your body's time to nurture itself and recover. And if you're not sleeping enough, you're not recovering enough. So I think it's a mental reset, a physical reset. Your brain needs it just as much as your muscle does.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Well, and what's interesting too is when you're under-sleeping, your body will actually hold on to or store body fat and pair down muscle. So if you can sleep and optimize your sleep, it's gonna help the body to maintain or gain muscle as well as decrease body fat. So, and sleep, poor sleep quality increases cortisol levels, which is gonna increase visceral fat. So sleep optimization is huge, but the biggest thing with it is figuring out what works best for you to actually optimize that sleep. Absolutely agree. Sweet. Do you want to do one more? Good. Yeah, we can do one more. One more.

SPEAKER_02 7:35

Let's go. Your annual blood work gets an upgrade. Routine physicals typically include a basic metabolic panel, vitamin D levels, and annual cholesterol check, but these labs will only tell a part of the picture when it comes to health. As the standard blood panel begins to feel updated, people are seeking advanced or specialty blood tests that dig deeper, looking at everything from insulin resistance and inflammation to hormone balance metabolomics. Whoa, sounds like a baloney sandwich. And even genetic risk. The global market for blood-based biomarkers was estimated at 7.85 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach 11.58 billion by 2030, with all signs pointing to the fact that advanced blood work will continue to surge in popularity. I think that's very directly applicable to our company as we are also upgrading our biomarker testing.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

We are currently, yeah. And it's due to the fact that I think the world of blood metrics is changing, but also like our mission is to empower people to take control of their health. We have clients that we see on a monthly basis that might be doing a lot of the things that we're talking about. They might have already taken on some of these actionable items and they're not seeing a ton of change. And it might be due to underlying causes. Maybe it's hormone stuff, maybe it's another blood metric. So we're looking into ways that we can optimize blood testing in-house for the clients that we already see. Right now, we do finger pokes for A1C, lipid, vitamin D. But going forward, we're going to start to do a lot more invasive blood panels. Things like hormones are going to be on their liver function, kidney function, all sorts of different metrics that we can look at and APOB. Help people to optimize their health moving forward because as science advances, we want to be able to take advantage of that and in turn help you guys in a more meaningful way. So blood metrics are definitely changing. And I guess not the metric itself, but the way that we're analyzing it is changing and advancing, and we're moving forward with that too as we speak. So if you're one of our clients, expect to see some exciting news soon. Absolutely. Sweetness. Cool. Thank you all so much for tuning in today. If you like the episode, feel free to leave us comments, ratings, reviews. We appreciate you all tuning in so much, and we'll be back chatting with you next week.