00:17:52 · Justin Mares
[00:17:52] S1: Yeah. It's a great question. So I have gotten labs done every, like, six months for the last couple years, last five years, I would say. And I think that that is probably one of the best places to start. Like, I think that if you sort of qualitatively are tracking, how do I feel? What are areas that I feel I can improve? What are things that, like, don't feel right? That is a very interesting data point. There's a ton of experiments you can always be running in the background around, like, does x, y, and z help with my sleep? Does this, do I feel better after doing this? And so I really do think it is a very personal thing where, you know, you just look at like, what are your labs? What markers do you want to make better? And then you do like a couple interventions to try and work on them over the next six months. From a scan standpoint, about once a year for... I guess it's been like once every eighteen months. Like, my labs are very good and I'm pretty healthy, and so I don't like overly obsess about getting like an annual scan or anything like that. But about every eighteen months, I will do like a calcium test, which tests just like calcium buildup in your arteries. And then also go get like a... I did like an Ezra scan eighteen months ago that's just, like, looking for precancerous growths and things like this, which I think is smart, especially if you have risk factors or, like, a family history of these things.
00:19:14 · Daisy Wolf, Justin Mares
[00:19:14] S2: Totally. I mean, I I think what you're saying is a real thing where it's like for people who are really interested in health, are taking health into their own hands, you... Their annual physical is often, like, quite underwhelming. Totally. You're so in this every day that it's like you're already probably doing a layer beyond what what you're kind doing. [00:19:33] S1: And like the the average PCP spends something like forty minutes with a patient per year. I mean, so if you have a primary care physician, they're just not... They they don't have like the context. They often don't know or, like, have not gone deep on a lot of the chronic conditions that people are likely to work with. You know, if I if I talked to them and said, hey. I'm concerned with my, like, APOB or LPA markers. Should I go on a statin? Like, many of them would be like, I don't really know what those markers are. I'm not really not really up to date on them, but, like, probably you should go on a statin, which I just, like, clinically don't think is the right intervention for someone that is, you know, younger, healthier, and, like, has a a pretty low risk profile. So, yeah, I I generally am like... I think that the way medicine is done today is going to change a huge amount in the coming decade or so. And I think that a big piece of that is gonna be people are taking health into their own hands, and they're gonna do so armed with a bunch of information about their labs and other stuff that traditional doctor didn't get, didn't have... Didn't just historically have not cared about.
00:20:36 · Daisy Wolf
[00:20:36] S2: Talk to us about, like, the rest of your physical environment. House cleaning. Like, how do you avoid toxins? What what should we care about? I know in this... Like, we're all existing in this world, and there's only so much we can do. But what do you do? And if you're giving advice to, like, you know, an average person to make a few changes, what are the things that, you know, you would actually
00:20:59 · Justin Mares
[00:20:59] S1: Yeah. So I I think that the two highest leverage thing, like, intervention that people can make on their health day is basically like maximizing nutrient density. So making making... Like, massively improving the quality of food that you're sourcing, and then minimizing toxin exposure. And a big source of toxin exposure is in the home. And so I think that, like, if you are not installing a whole house filter or, like, you know, at least getting, like, a reverse osmosis system or, like, very high quality countertop system, that, like, drink better water is such a such a easy leverage point. And it's such... It's gonna have, like, such positive impact, on people's health. Like, if you look at tap water databases across New York, San Francisco, Austin, like, major city, it's astounding how bad, like, the chemicals are and the exposure to a bunch of things that we know, are carcinogenic. A bunch of chemicals that we know, are... Have a huge impact on your hormone. So I think that cleaning up your water is really a a big first step. And then secondly, like, putting air filters in your house, I think, is a very high leverage intervention. You can get a lot of ROI from that. It's very cheap. They just run all the time. It's easy. And then lastly, I think that using clean materials for, like, good cleaning material we buy from Branch Basics is a really easy way to do it. And then upgrading your Tupperware and making sure that you're not, like, getting Teflon, you know, chemicals in in your eggs or whatever it is on a daily basis is is a really, really smart thing to do.
00:22:34 · Daisy Wolf, Justin Mares
[00:22:34] S2: Awesome. Obviously, like, you've been able to devote, you know, your life to this. And then your, you know, every kind of... You're a serial entrepreneur, every company you've built is empowering people to live healthier lives. [00:22:48] S1: Yep. [00:22:48] S2: Do you wanna tell us a little bit more about Truemed and how it's helping with that?
00:22:53 · Justin Mares
[00:22:53] S1: For sure. Yeah. I mean, so one of the things that I think is just so broken about the American health care system today is if you look, where does spend go? 90% of health care spend goes towards treating, treating or managing chronic condition. Yet less than 3% goes towards anything resembling prevention or anything resembling lifestyle intervention. And so I think that we can argue about like what is the right amount that society should be spending on prevention. I think we can all say like 3% is not the right amount. Like, that's not like the perfect amount of prevention. And you see it in the health care outcomes. They're all bad. One of the reasons that, you know, that I believe that Americans are so sick today is because we have this very strange system where someone who is at risk of type two diabetes or obese or something like that can get sicker and sicker and sicker. And basically no one in the existing health care system is incentivized and will or will spend a single dollar helping prevent that person from getting type two diabetes. And yet the minute that they get type two diabetes, the system activates and they'll spend an average of $3,000,000 managing that person's type two diabetes for the duration of their lifetime. That is like totally crazy. And so the one area of the entire health care system where an individual has choice and they're actually incentivized to spend their own money basically on things that can treat, reverse, or prevent disease is HSA and FSA accounts. Like tax free accounts, it's your money. You can spend it how you want. And if you go through a company like Truemed, the IRS has explicitly said that things like exercise, things like food interventions, things like sleep interventions or supplements can all count for tax free HSAFSA spending if accompanied by a doctor's note. And so what we've done is we've built a platform that helps facilitate access for people that are qualified to spend their HSA and FSA dollars on things like exercise, supplements, food, healthy food, sleep aids, and the like. And our goal is basically to incentivize and make it slightly more affordable and slightly lower friction for someone like you or me to invest in preventing obesity, preventing or treating, you know, heart disease, preventing or treating, the myriad of chronic conditions that are just decimating American health.