LEVELS – A Whole New Level

Latest Episodes:

#312 - Is Moderate Drinking Actually Healthy? | Dr. Tim Naimi & Mike Haney Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

Alcohol has spent the last 40 years bouncing between two health narratives: a little is good for your heart, or any amount is dangerous. The science doesn’t really support either slogan.

Dr. Tim Naimi has spent decades studying the health effects of alcohol and, just as importantly, why the research is so difficult to interpret. His read of the evidence is less dramatic but more useful: there’s no good reason to start drinking for your health, very low intake may carry little measurable added risk, and risk rises as consumption does. Understanding why earlier studies made moderate drinking look protective helps explain a lot of the whiplashing headlines.

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What We Cover:

Why alcohol is a Group 1 carcinogen causally linked to at least seven cancers
Whether small amounts of alcohol really protect your heart
Why researchers still don’t have a definitive randomized trial of drinking and long-term health
How the “sick quitter” problem, selection bias, and confounding made moderate drinkers look healthier
Why two major recent reviews of alcohol and health produced such different headlines
How the risk changes with dose, including Naimi’s estimate of a 1 in 25 lifetime risk of an alcohol-caused death at 14 drinks per week
Why alcohol consumption is falling, and whether GLP-1 drugs could be contributing

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Tim Naimi is a physician and alcohol epidemiologist who directs the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria, where he is a professor in the Division of Medical Sciences.

📍What Dr. Tim Naimi & Mike Haney discussed:

00:45 — Why the science on alcohol is so confusing
05:48 — How alcohol damages DNA and raises cancer risk
09:43 — Is alcohol actually good for your heart?
14:22 — Why we still don't have a definitive randomized trial
20:30 — The "sick quitter" problem
24:56 — Selection bias and the problem with "healthy" moderate drinkers
29:35 — Why two major reports produced different headlines
31:37 — How alcohol risk changes as drinks per week increase
38:21 — Industry funding and conflicts of interest
46:15 — How much alcohol is too much?
49:48 — Why younger generations are drinking less
51:53 — Health consciousness, GLP-1s, and the decline in drinking

🔗 Helpful Links:

Alcohol Intake and Health Study: No Protective Effect at Low Levels, With Mortality Increasing to 1 in 25 at 14 Drinks Per Week (Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2026) Paper
Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2025) Report
Association Between Daily Alcohol Intake and Risk of All-Cause Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-analyses (JAMA Network Open, 2023) Paper
Do “Moderate” Drinkers Have Reduced Mortality Risk? (Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2016) Paper
Alcohol Abstinence in Drinkers with Atrial Fibrillation (New England Journal of Medicine, 2020) Paper
Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health (2023) Guidance and supporting research
Alcohol and Cancer (World Health Organization / IARC) WHO overview

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/8GNmcjPfg7U

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📲 Connect:

Connect with Dr. Tim Naimi at University of Victoria

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#311 - Can Your Blood Predict Your Future Health? | Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray & Mike Haney Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

From a single blood sample, new proteomic tools can now measure thousands of proteins at once. Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray’s lab is using that flood of data, together with machine learning, to build a much higher-resolution picture of what’s happening throughout the body and where someone’s health may be headed.

The early signals are striking. In one analysis of people who appeared healthy by conventional measures, every additional 4.1 years of estimated heart age was associated with nearly 2.5 times the risk of heart failure over the following 15 years. Wyss-Coray sees this kind of measurement eventually becoming a “health compass”: something that could show which parts of the body are changing fastest, then help track whether an intervention is actually moving them in the right direction.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

What We Cover:

How a drop of blood can now reveal information from thousands of proteins
Why aging appears to happen in waves rather than at a steady rate
Why one part of the body may age faster than the rest
What young-blood experiments in mice taught Wyss-Coray about proteins and brain aging
How the work is moving from whole organs down to individual cell types
Why the field’s biggest constraint may now be data collection rather than better AI

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray is the D.H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University and director of the Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience.

📍What Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray & Mike Haney discussed:

04:03 Proteins 101: the building blocks hiding information about your health
05:09 How one blood sample can measure thousands of proteins
09:07 Using machine learning to find patterns in the proteome
12:17 Can blood reveal what’s happening inside the brain?
13:11 What happened when young blood was given to old mice
19:45 Why aging may happen in waves rather than at a steady rate
29:24 How stable are protein measurements over time?
32:37 Can proteins predict disease years before it appears?
40:35 Why one part of your body may age faster than the rest
46:31 The missing test: does an intervention actually change the measurement?
51:04 Going from whole organs to individual cell types
54:10 Why more data, not better AI, is the current bottleneck
57:18 A future “health compass” for the body

🔗 Helpful Links:

Organ aging signatures in the plasma proteome track health and disease (Nature, 2023)Paper
The foundational organ-aging work discussed in the episode, using plasma proteins to estimate aging across 11 organs.
Plasma proteomic signatures of cellular aging predict human disease (Nature Medicine, 2026)Paper
The newer study extending the approach to more than 40 cell types using over 7,000 plasma proteins.
Undulating changes in human plasma proteome profiles across the lifespan (Nature Medicine, 2019)Paper
Young blood reverses age-related impairments in cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in mice (Nature Medicine, 2014)Paper

UK Biobank Research resource
The large longitudinal cohort used for much of the disease-prediction work discussed in the episode.

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/1dfMBAZiP8o

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📲 Connect:

Connect with Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford

👋 Who we are:

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#310 - Can We Measure Aging Well Enough to Treat It? | Dr. Nir Barzilai & Mike Haney Sep 10, 2026

Show notes

Aging science has gotten much better at describing who appears to be aging faster or slower. What medicine still lacks is a reliable feedback loop: a way to tell whether something we do is actually changing the biology that drives age-related disease.

Dr. Nir Barzilai argues that solving that measurement problem could turn geroscience from an interesting field of research into something doctors can actually use: measure where you are, intervene, measure again, and learn what works.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

What We Cover:

What centenarians reveal about living longer and spending less time sick
Why changing one hallmark of aging can affect several others
How TAME was designed to test metformin as an anti-aging drug and to convince the FDA to treat aging itself as an endpoint—and why it failed to get off the ground
Why metformin, SGLT2 inhibitors, GLP-1 agonists, and some osteoporosis drugs are being studied as potential gerotherapeutics, or anti-aging drugs
How FAST is searching existing clinical trials for biomarkers that change when an intervention affects aging biology
Whether aging needs continuous monitoring or can be meaningfully tracked a few times a year

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Nir Barzilai is the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair in Aging Research and a professor of medicine and genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he directs the Institute for Geroscience.

📍What Dr. Nil Barzilai & Mike Haney discussed:

05:10 - Aging is a condition, not just a label
05:59 - Why aging is what drives disease
08:19 - Should we call aging a disease?
10:20 - Why the species may have a ceiling around 115
14:34 - Why changing one hallmark of aging changes the others
23:08 - Metformin was anti-aging before it was a diabetes drug
31:55 - Centenarians live longer and spend less time sick
40:12 - How TAME tried to make aging an FDA endpoint
48:17 - Metformin, SGLT2s, GLP-1s, and osteoporosis drugs as gerotherapeutics
52:26 - FAST: finding biomarkers that actually change with treatment
56:49 - Whether aging needs continuous monitoring, or a few checks a year
1:01:16 - Where behavior still fits once we have anti-aging drugs

🔗 Helpful Links:

Hallmarks of Aging: An Expanding Universe (Cell, 2023) Paper
Compression of Morbidity Is Observed Across Cohorts with Exceptional Longevity (JAGS, 2016) Paper
Metformin as a Tool to Target Aging (Cell Metabolism, 2016) Paper
Geroscience-Guided Repurposing of FDA-Approved Drugs to Target Aging (Aging Cell, 2022) Paper
Biomarkers of Aging for the Identification and Evaluation of Longevity Interventions (Cell, 2023) Paper
FAST: Finding Aging Biomarkers by Searching Existing Trials FAST Initiative
ARPA-H PROSPR / FAST award ARPA-H FAST project

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/HbeGjwCw6vk

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📲 Connect:

Connect with Dr. Nil Barzilai on X: https://x.com/NirBarzilaiMD

👋 Who we are:

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#309 - What AI Sees That Doctors Can’t | Dr. Ziad Obermeyer & Mike Haney Sep 03, 2026

Show notes

Medical AI is already getting good at doing things doctors do. Dr. Ziad Obermeyer thinks the bigger opportunity is using AI to discover things medicine doesn’t yet know.

His work shows both sides of that future: algorithms can amplify bad assumptions when trained on the wrong targets, but they can also uncover signals in medical data that humans miss. Obermeyer argues that as more health data is collected outside the hospital, AI could turn it into a continuous picture of health rather than a series of isolated snapshots.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

What We Cover:

Why AI should learn from patients and outcomes, not just doctors
How an ECG model found hidden risk of sudden cardiac death
Why medical data access is still a major bottleneck
How more measurement could actually mean fewer unnecessary tests
Why healthcare may be entering a “mainframe to PC” transition

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Ziad Obermeyer is an emergency medicine physician and an Associate Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He also co-founded Dandelion Health and the non-profit Nightingale Open Science.

📍What Dr. Ziad Obermeyer & Mike Haney discussed:

02:43 Why better data is fundamental to medical AI
05:54 The problem: There’s no variable called “get sick”
09:27 Algorithms optimize exactly what you tell them to
23:03 Why teaching AI to copy doctors limits what it can discover
26:28 How AI could create a new science of medicine
28:40 Could AI predict sudden cardiac death before it happens?
34:14 Can an algorithm teach us what it sees?
36:50 Medicine’s biggest AI bottleneck: access to data
49:00 Healthcare’s “mainframe to PC” transition
55:08 Why more measurement could actually mean fewer tests
58:46 Why medical AI is aiming too low
1:02:13 What the next generation of wearables needs to measure

🔗 Helpful Links:

Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations (Science, 2019)https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax2342
An Algorithmic Approach to Reducing Unexplained Pain Disparities in Underserved Populations (Nature Medicine, 2021)https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01192-7
An ECG Biomarker for Sudden Cardiac Death Discovered with Deep Learning (Nature, 2026)https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10674-6
Predicting the Future — Big Data, Machine Learning, and Clinical Medicine (NEJM, 2016)https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1606181
Nightingale Open Sciencehttps://www.nightingalescience.org/
Dandelion Healthhttps://dandelionhealth.ai/

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/WDo-iL6O5nU

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📲 Connect:

Connect with Dr. Ziad Obermeyer on https://ziadobermeyer.com/

👋 Who we are:

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#308 - Why Some Foods Are So Hard to Stop Eating | Dr. Dana Small & Mike Haney Aug 27, 2026

Show notes

Why do we crave some foods the more often we eat them? Are we addicted?

Dr. Dana Small’s research suggests that food craving reaches far beyond taste or willpower, and that “addiction” isn’t a helpful descriptor. Every time we eat, unconscious signals from the body teach the brain which foods deliver useful nutrients, and train us to want more of those. In other words, we don’t eat crave foods because they taste good; foods taste good because our body craves them.

Understanding that means we can rethink overeating. It’s not a matter of addiction or self-control; it’s our body behaving the way nature intended it to, but in the setting of foods not found in the wild, like those high in both fat and carbohydrates. But we may also be able to train our brain away from these cravings.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

What We Cover

Taste vs. flavor, pleasure, motivation, and food reward
How gut nutrient signals teach the brain which foods to seek
Why fat + carbs produce an unusually strong reward response
What eight weeks of high-fat, high-sugar snacks did to the brain
How GLP-1s may cut food wanting while preserving pleasure

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Dana Small is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Metabolism and the Brain and a professor at McGill University, with appointments in Neurology and Neurosurgery and Medicine. She directs the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center, and her research examines how sensory, metabolic, and neural signals interact to shape food reward, eating behavior, and metabolic health.

📍What Dr. Dana Small & Mike Haney discussed:

02:44 - Is food actually addictive?
05:02 - Taste and flavor are different senses
08:21 - Why “hedonic” vs. “homeostatic” eating is misleading
10:42 - The reward from sugar begins after you swallow it
22:32 - The “high road” and “low road” of food reward
27:41 - How scientists teach the brain to associate a flavor with calories
38:30 - Why combining fat and carbohydrates produces more reward
47:34 - How beliefs about food can change physiological responses
50:02 - Eight weeks of snacks changes how the brain responds to food
57:51 - What this science means for people trying to eat differently
1:03:50 - How GLP-1 drugs may change food wanting
1:07:30 - Can GLP-1s help retrain eating behavior for the long term?

🔗 Helpful Links:

Habitual Daily Intake of a Sweet and Fatty Snack Modulates Reward Processing in Humans (Cell Metabolism, 2023)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36958330/
Supra-Additive Effects of Combining Fat and Carbohydrate on Food Reward (Cell Metabolism, 2018)https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(18)30325-5
Integration of Sweet Taste and Metabolism Determines Carbohydrate Reward (Current Biology, 2017)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28803868/
Rethinking Food Reward (Annual Review of Psychology, 2020)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31561741/
In Defense of Pleasure: We Need to Rethink Food Reward and Obesity (PLOS Biology, 2025)https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003497
Mind Over Milkshakes: Mindsets, Not Just Nutrients, Determine Ghrelin Response (Health Psychology, 2011)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21574706/

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

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#307 - It Took Months to Interpret His Genome. Claude Did It in 30 Minutes. | Dr. Euan Ashley + Mike Haney Aug 20, 2026

Show notes

Twenty-five years ago, sequencing the human genome seemed poised to usher in an era of personalized medicine. Dr. Euan Ashley helped turn that promise into an actual clinical experiment, leading one of the first efforts to interpret an entire human genome in the context of a real patient’s health. The challenge quickly became apparent: medicine could suddenly generate billions of data points about one person, but making sense of them was painfully slow.

That history feels newly relevant. Ashley recently gave an AI system his own 15-year-old genome data and watched it reproduce most of an analysis that had originally required months of work by a team, in about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, genomics is being joined by wearables, multi-omics, and other technologies capable of tracking far more of our biology over time.

In this episode of NextLevel, we use the genome revolution as a case study for what happens when our ability to measure the body advances faster than our ability to interpret and use the information. The next leap in personalized medicine may depend less on collecting another mountain of data than on building the tools, reference datasets, and healthcare systems capable of turning that information into decisions.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Euan Ashley is Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University and the Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor of Genomics and Precision Health, with appointments in medicine, genetics, and biomedical data science. He’s also the author of The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them.

📍What Dr. Euan Ashley & Mike Haney discussed:

03:33 What happened to the promise of personalized medicine?
06:33 The first clinical interpretation of a human genome
11:26 AI interprets in 30 minutes what once took months
21:25 Why genomics still needs better, more diverse reference data
27:41 Building a molecular map of exercise with MoTrPAC
32:01 Exercise changed nearly every organ researchers measured
39:05 Why your personal baseline can matter more than a "normal" range
42:46 How wearables opened a new era of longitudinal health data
47:48 The biggest barrier to continuous, personalized healthcare
51:39 What medical AI needs to become genuinely useful
57:05 How AI can ace medical benchmarks for the wrong reasons
58:20 The heart measurement Ashley considers a medical "holy grail"

🔗 Helpful Links:

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

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

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#306 - Does Intermittent Fasting Actually Work? | Dr. Courtney Peterson & Mike Haney Aug 13, 2026

Show notes

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

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

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

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

📍What Dr. Courtney Peterson & Mike Haney discussed:

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

🔗 Helpful Links:

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

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

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#305 - What You Can Learn from Measuring Everything | Dr. Michael Snyder & Mike Haney Aug 06, 2026

Show notes

What if we could measure the human body the way engineers monitor a jet engine?

For nearly two decades, Stanford geneticist Dr. Michael Snyder has been trying exactly that. By continuously tracking everything he could possibly track in his body—genome sequencing, metabolites, wearable data, whole-body imaging—he has turned himself (and ~100 study subjects) into one of the world's largest experiments in continuous health measurement.

The point wasn’t mindless biohacking. It was to answer a question: Are there clinically useful signals in all that data?

This conversation suggests the answer is yes. Snyder’s experience and that of dozens of his study subjects offer some of the first real evidence that continuous measurement intelligently analyzed can reveal that you’re getting sick before you have symptoms, help find solutions to medical conditions that work for your unique biology, and help you refocus on prevention of disease rather than management.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Michael Snyder is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Genetics and director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, where he previously chaired the Department of Genetics for 15 years.

📍What Dr. Michael Snyder & Mike Haney discussed:

03:10 Why Dr. Snyder started measuring healthy people instead of waiting for disease
09:18 Living in the future: tracking his own biology for nearly two decades
15:02 Why "normal" isn't enough: the importance of personal baselines
22:48 Discovering his own genetically unique form of type 2 diabetes
32:06 How wearables detected illness before symptoms appeared
39:18 Whole-body MRIs, incidental findings, and why change over time matters
46:55 Why everyone has abnormalities, but not everyone has disease
55:41 The promise of metabolomics, proteomics, and continuous biological sensing
1:06:52 Why AI is essential for interpreting thousands of health signals

1:15:34 What continuous measurement could mean for preventive medicine

1:23:10 The next decade of personalized health and what's still missing

🔗 Helpful Links:

Personal Omics Profiling Reveals Dynamic Molecular and Medical Phenotypes (Chen et al., Cell, 2012)
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(12)00965-3
Longitudinal Multi-omics Profiling Reveals Dynamic Personal Health Status (Price et al., Nature Biotechnology, 2017)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3695
The Integrative Personal Omics Profile (iPOP): A Decade of Progress in Precision Health (Snyder lab review)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-021-00409-3
Wearable Sensor Data and Self-reported Symptoms for COVID-19 Detection (Mishra et al., Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2020)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6
All of Us Research Program
https://allofus.nih.gov/
Connect with Dr Michael Snyder: https://med.stanford.edu/snyderlab.html

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/eUEYmLC1CcE

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#304 - Did Low-Fat Diets Drive the Obesity Epidemic? | Dr. Arne Astrup & Mike Haney Jul 30, 2026

Show notes

For decades, we've been told that eating less fat is one of the healthiest things we can do. That advice reshaped the foods we buy, the way we think about weight loss, and even how parents feed their children.

But what if we misunderstood fat in the first place?

In this episode, nutrition researcher Dr. Arne Astrup traces how the war on fat began, why many of its core assumptions haven't held up under decades of research, and what we've learned instead. Rather than asking whether fat is "good" or "bad," he argues that the more useful questions are: What foods actually keep us healthy? Why do some people gain weight more easily than others? And what happens when we reduce nutrition to single nutrients instead of whole foods?

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Arne Astrup is a physician, nutrition researcher, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Copenhagen whose research focuses on obesity, appetite regulation, dietary fats, and cardiometabolic health. He previously chaired the Danish Nutrition Council and helped lead Denmark's landmark ban on industrial trans fats.

📍What Dr. Arne Astrup & Mike Haney discussed:

00:00 Introduction
01:03 How fear of fat became public health policy
07:40 Did low-fat advice help create today's processed foods?
10:20 Denmark's trans fat ban and one lesson nutrition got right
14:00 "I was wrong." Why dietary fat isn't the main driver of obesity
18:45 Why your body fat isn't simply the fat you eat
27:00 Why fat can help you eat fewer calories
32:00 Are nuts actually easy to overeat?
36:00 Cheese, yogurt, and why whole foods don't behave like nutrients
41:00 Why insulin resistance changes carbohydrate tolerance
55:00 The LDL debate: what saturated fat actually changes
1:01:00 Why it's time to stop talking about "saturated fat" as a single thing

🔗 Helpful Links:

Diets with High or Low Protein Content and Glycemic Index for Weight-Loss Maintenance (DIOGENES Trial): Landmark randomized trial led by Dr. Astrup examining protein, glycemic index, and long-term weight maintenance. New England Journal of Medicine
Weight Loss Maintenance in Overweight Subjects on Ad Libitum Diets with High or Low Protein Content and Glycemic Index: The DIOGENES Trial (12-Month Results). One-year follow-up of the DIOGENES study. International Journal of Obesity
Dietary Saturated Fats and Health: Are the U.S. Guidelines Evidence-Based? (Astrup et al., 2021): Consensus review arguing that current saturated fat recommendations should place greater emphasis on whole foods and dietary patterns than saturated fat alone. Nutrients (2021)
Walter Willett's research on industrial trans fats and cardiovascular disease: Early epidemiologic work that helped establish the harms of industrial trans fats and ultimately informed policy changes worldwide. PubMed search for Walter Willett trans fat publications
World Health Organization: REPLACE Trans Fat Initiative: Background on the global effort to eliminate industrially produced trans fats from the food supply. World Health Organization REPLACE Initiative

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/ajqg7LdM0PM

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👋 Who we are:

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

#303 - Why Healthcare Needs an Intelligence Layer | Dr. Robert Wachter & Mike Haney Jul 15, 2026

Show notes

Almost everything your doctor knows about you comes from a snapshot: a blood pressure reading, an annual lab, a handful of numbers meant to represent a constantly changing human body.

That's beginning to change. New sensors promise far more continuous health data, and AI may finally give us the ability to interpret it. But medicine has been through a data revolution before, and almost none of what people initially promised actually happened.

In the first episode of NextLevel, Mike Haney sits down with Dr. Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF and one of medicine's leading thinkers on technological change, to ask what healthcare's messy transition from paper to electronic records can teach us about the AI era.

Wachter explains why digitizing medicine didn't transform care on its own, why your doctor is already overwhelmed by data, and why simply sending them continuous feeds from your watch, ring, or future sensors would make the problem worse.

The missing piece is an intelligence layer: a system capable of deciding what matters, helping patients act when they can, and pulling clinicians in when they're actually needed.

They also explore how AI is changing the balance of knowledge between doctors and patients, the danger of trusting systems that are usually right, what healthcare can learn from airplane cockpits, and why collecting more health data may be much easier than figuring out what any of it means.

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🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Robert M. Wachter is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He’s also the author of six books, including the 2015 bestseller The Digital Doctor, which examined medicine's transition from paper to electronic health records, and 2026’s A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future, his examination of generative AI's arrival in medicine.

📍What Dr.Robert Watcher & Mike Haney discussed: