# Tracking what your body needs  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: Tracking what your body needs - Show: TED Radio Hour - Owner / Host: NPR - Guests: [Keith Diaz](https://share.snipd.com/person/4052e4aa-bea8-4efe-994d-3eda6f90909f), [Michael Snyder](https://share.snipd.com/person/2b627f4f-6e07-4ee5-acdc-068f506e3503), [Lizzie Braicks-Rinker](https://share.snipd.com/person/34875c01-6460-4df1-81fb-36fda7e808e4) - Episode publish date: 2026-07-10 - Episode AI description: Lizzie Braicks-Rinker, a wellness writer who blends lived experience with coaching; Michael Snyder, a genomicist advancing continuous wearable monitoring; Keith Diaz, an exercise physiologist studying movement and sitting. They explore wearable sensors, continuous glucose and heart-rate tracking, movement breaks and workplace culture changes, and the balance between data-driven alerts and holistic well-being. - Duration: 50:00 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/e62350fd-bbb9-43d3-a753-3f7ab4abf4f5) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/2d26da02-6242-46a8-8cb5-c29019cf6744) - Export date: 2026-07-11T23:44:22 ## Snips ### [Five Minutes Every Half Hour Lowers Sedentary Harm](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e8424845-2749-4dde-af72-f11fe7160ce8) 🎧 00:49 - 04:26 (03:36) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/93ad60a6-b30d-4529-8a9a-a696dec3cf38" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Sitting dominates modern life and raises risks for diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and early death even for regular exercisers. - Keith Diaz's lab found contracting muscles often matters: a five-minute walk every 30 minutes (or five five-minute breaks daily) offsets much sedentary harm. #### 💬 Quote > In a single year, the average adult now spent a full 187 days, over half of the year, sitting or physically idle. > — Keith Diaz Keith Diaz on modern sedentary behavior #### 📚 Transcript **Keith Diaz:** So if you kind of map out the trajectories of our sedentary time and, you know, how much time we spend watching TV, how much time we spend sitting in a car, how much time we spend sitting at work, it's kind of been like steadily increasing across decades. This is exercise scientist Keith Diaz. And society and our cultural and societal norms are telling us you're supposed to sit in your desk. If you're not in your desk, you're not learning, you're not being productive. Keith **Manoush Zomorodi:** Diaz has spent the past 15 years researching the impacts of a sedentary lifestyle on our health and how much movement we really need to stay healthy. It all started with a headline that he desperately wanted to debunk. I came across some news **Keith Diaz:** headline, it was like in Runner's World magazine. It said something like, Sinning is the new smoking, even if you're a runner. And I was like, you know, as a runner, I tend to see exercise as the cure-all, prevent-all for everything. And so for this article to put it out there that what you do exercise-wise, you're running, that's not enough. I didn't believe it. And so I set off in my career to debunk that and show that, you know, that's not true. Exercise can overcome. That sitting isn't the kryptonite to exercise. And here we are almost 15 years later, and man, I've come to see it in a very different light. We are living in the most sedentary error in modern history. Keith Diaz continues **Manoush Zomorodi:** from **Keith Diaz:** the TED In a single year, the average adult now spent a full 187 days, over half of the year, sitting or physically idle. The bad news is that our bodies weren't designed for this. I know because I've spent my career as a scientist studying the harms of being highly sedentary. And what scientists have found is that being highly sedentary increases your risk of diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and ultimately, early death. Worse, this is true even if you exercise regularly. Exercise only makes up a tiny fraction of your day. The toxicity comes from when movement begins to disappear from your life. And this begs the question, why isn't exercise alone enough? A part of the answer lies in our muscles. Our muscles are more than just a machinery that power movement. They're also really important for regulating like our metabolism. Let's use blood sugar as an example. Our muscles are like sponges for blood sugar. When we regularly use and contract our muscles, they're like a moist sponge soaking up the sugar from the bloodstream. But when we don't regularly use and contract our muscle, like a dry and shriveled sponge, it's not good at soaking up anything. Now, here's the key. When we exercise, it rewets the sponge. But eventually, that sponge dries out if you get little to no movement the rest of your day. If our muscles need regular use to function optimally, then outside of any exercise time, we need to be contracting them frequently through movement. The question that we asked in my lab is, what's the least amount of movement breaks that we need in order to offset the harms of being highly sedentary? And the answer we found was a five-minute walk every half hour. In **Manoush Zomorodi:** 2023, as part of the Body Electric --- ### [Tie Movement Breaks To Daily Cues](https://share.snipd.com/snip/177237d9-3b44-4e75-9c8f-f06fcfef08e2) 🎧 04:46 - 12:17 (07:30) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/33d58bbf-fcb9-41fe-8264-b9e0b9d0a30e" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Tie movement breaks to daily cues rather than device pings to build lasting habits. - Keith Diaz recommends linking a break to finishing a task or meeting and aiming for about five five-minute breaks per day. #### 💬 Quote > I've just finished a work task. I'm going to go take a movement break before I go on to the next one. > — Keith Diaz Keith Diaz on building internal cues for movement #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I **Keith Diaz:** mean, we set out really to answer the question, can people do movement breaks in the real world? And **Manoush Zomorodi:** the answer was yes. It wasn't easy at first, but once people committed to taking regular breaks throughout the day, they started noticing the positive effects on their mood, productivity, fatigue levels, and more. Plus, Keith now has an update. What **Keith Diaz:** we're finding is that once people take about five movement breaks a day, you start to see diminishing returns in terms of their improvements in fatigue, right? Like after about five to six breaks a day, you don't get that much extra benefit from doing seven, eight, or nine. And so that to me seems like a little bit of a better message too, that, you know, just strive five. Would I love for it to be every half hour, every hour? That'd be great. But what we found in the real world is that people really had a hard time sticking to that regimented clock of every hour. But maybe this is a different way to think about it. Five times in your day, move for five minutes. Our body is constantly **Manoush Zomorodi:** sending us a signal about what it needs. But are we listening? What happens when we start paying closer attention, not just to how we feel, but to the patterns hidden inside our daily lives? From simple habits like taking movement breaks to cutting-edge wearables that track everything from sleep to stress, new tools are changing the way we understand our health. And so today on the show, we're exploring ways of tracking what the body needs. For exercise scientist Keith Diaz, when it comes to changing our sedentary habits, Keith says we need to deal with what we think being productive looks like. One **Keith Diaz:** of the biggest concerns I often hear from employers in schools about movement breaks is that they worry that it's disruptive. That it'll hurt productivity and performance. But movement doesn't mean you have to stop working. You can have walking meetings, pace while you're on a call, get walking pads, or somebody just move around while thinking. But the bigger idea and concept with movement breaks is that when you compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work. And that's where the real challenge lies. Productivity culture, convenience culture and technology are reengineering our lives and still removing the need for movement. We can have groceries delivered and robots vacuum our floors without ever getting off the couch. And the consequences of this re-engineering is that we now often see movement as something to avoid. So **Manoush Zomorodi:** a lot of people rely these days on their device, a smartphone, to ping them. You know, it's time to get up. You're actually not a fan, if I understand correctly, of fitness trackers, you've told me. So, like, what, how do you, how **Keith Diaz:** do you approach this? Yeah, I mean, why I'm not as much of a fan of it is that you're relying on kind of external cues still. And where I'd love to see this and what the science kind of tells us on human behavior change is that for us to build a habit, it has to be more so something internal. Right. And so when we kind of learn how to check back in with our bodies, right, and we don't have to rely on external cues to do that, right, that behavior is much more likely to stick. The example I always use is brushing teeth, is like the ultimate health behavior that since we were kids, we're taught and trained to do, but we also have tied it to cues in our day. We know that when we get ready in the morning to go and leave our house or that when we get ready for bed at night, we automatically are cued by our environment that like, oh yeah, teeth brushing, that's next up. I put my pajamas on, I go brush my teeth. Like that's just the natural part of it. And so getting to that place in our everyday lives for movement breaks or just movement in general of like, okay, I just, I've just finished a work task. I'm going to go take a movement break before I go on to the next one. I just finished a meeting before I go to the next one. I'm going to move, right? And tying it to cues in our day rather than relying on some kind of device to remind us because ultimately people at the end of the day, most people end up hating that reminder and ignore them. **Manoush Zomorodi:** Yeah, **Keith Diaz:** you know, it's annoying. **Manoush Zomorodi:** It starts to annoy you. It starts to be like, okay, good to know. Thanks, but I'm busy. So I guess my question is, what happens next? Like our relationship with technology is getting even more entangled. So are we at this point where we have to be taught, be more specific, put language around or doses, as you say, around things that like, you know, probably when I was a kid, if someone was like, did you get enough movement today? That would be kind of like, maybe not in school, but like generally we were always moving. I had to move to go to the next class. I had to move to go get a new book. **Keith Diaz:** Yeah. And maybe it's going back to that point of like harnessing like this idea or notion that like a body that moves is a more efficient and productive body as well. Like what moves the needle for employers outside of like policy changes, right, incentivizing employers to allow this to happen? I feel like I keep saying the same story again and again and again, and people want to keep talking about it, but nothing is changing. And that's where I just feel like I feel stuck because I'm like, how much do I have to keep talking about it? How much more science needs to come out before somebody **Manoush Zomorodi:** starts doing something about it? Okay, so I'm going to offer a more positive perspective, Keith. One is that we can actually change our habits pretty fast. Like I'm thinking of going to Zoom for everything during the pandemic. And also, like, I definitely heard from the people who joined our study that once they committed to taking movement breaks and they got their friends to try it, they got their office mates to try it, they realized that they wanted to keep doing it. But it starts with just getting people to try. Yeah. And **Keith Diaz:** I think what you're getting at is it's a grassroots movement, right? Like, the top ain't changing things. So we're going to have to start from a different perspective and a different And it's this trickle effect. And, you know, normalizing the behavior has to start with somebody being willing to do it and step out of that comfort zone. Like, I'm always that guy in a Zoom call who, like, is walking on a treadmill while everybody else is sitting. I know, it's weird to see you sitting right now, actually. Yeah. But, you know, then some other people start thinking, like, oh, like, I want to do that, too. So a couple of my staff members went out and got walking pads, right? And so like when you make it acceptable, like, oh, that's totally a normal thing to do. And I wouldn't even think twice about it, right? Like we have to start changing that perception and that culture. And it may have to start with just people doing it and making it normal. --- ### [Wearables Reveal Early Health Deviations](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5bb9be4f-9b70-47b8-b44b-c2a7986ca1ae) 🎧 15:34 - 21:12 (05:38) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/b5d4d678-6514-4517-94b4-f104d02ad451" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Continuous wearable monitoring transforms fitness trackers into health monitors by catching early deviations like rising resting heart rate or dropping HRV. - Michael Snyder demonstrated a lab member whose multi-device data showed changes months before a fatal event. #### 💬 Quote > It was very clear four months before he passed away, he had a significant... his resting heart rate went up, his heart rate variability dropped, his gait shifted, and his sleep also shifted. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder describing wearable signals before a colleague's death #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** He's the director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. **Michael Snyder:** I have hearing aids, which I do use for hearing, but they also do sensing as well. I have an exposometer that measures airborne exposures. And I have my iPhone that tracks a few and ends, like steps and things. Some of that's redundant with the other watches. **Manoush Zomorodi:** And how long have you been collecting all of this information? **Michael Snyder:** Well, I've been collecting deep data on me for about 16 and a half years now. The wearable part, I'd say, runs for about 11 years, 12 years. Of **Manoush Zomorodi:** course, wearables and tracking devices have been around for a long time. But the types of data they can collect is constantly getting more **Michael Snyder:** precise. Your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, your blood oxygen, something you don't get in a doctor's office called galvanic stress response. This is conductance on your skin. And it turns out that when you're stressed, you're sweating more, so your skin gets more moist. And when you're diabetic, your skin gets more dry. Some of the watches will, at least one of them, will detect blood pressure and measure that. **Manoush Zomorodi:** Michael has spent decades doing massive studies using information collected from wearables. And his research is changing our understanding of how genetic risks and personal habits combine to shape human health. And for individuals, as in what does this mean for you? Well, he believes that self-monitoring and collecting more of our own physical data will soon transform how we each stay healthy. These **Michael Snyder:** devices, they're not expensive now and they're only going to get cheaper in the future. You can keep the individual people themselves healthy by, you know, catching when they first get ill, treat them, catch heart conditions. I think there's going be a ton of stuff, catch mental health problems like depression, anxiety. We're doing a lot of research there, cardiovascular disease. You know, it's not going to be a perfect system, but even if we could catch 50% of these, it'd be amazing. I **Manoush Zomorodi:** mean, I think people have been wearing like smart watches or, you know, collecting how many steps they're walking every day. And this has been going on for a while now, as you said, like over a decade. But are we at some sort of tipping point people actually know what to do with this information? Like, for example, I've been tracking my steps for six years and I rarely even look at the data. But is something changing when it comes to collecting information about our bodies? When **Michael Snyder:** these first came out, it's, as you say, they were fitness trackers. And realistically, people put them their wrist and they would wear them for three months, say, yep, I know my pattern, I'm done. Then they throw it in a drawer and be done with it. But I think what the tipping point is that you're referring to is that they're actually health monitors. They can track a lot more than just your steps. For example, resting heart rate, heart rate variability are really good indicators of your health. We've used them to be able to pick up when you're getting a viral infection in advance of symptoms because your heart rate goes up. What's powerful about them is they're measuring you 24-7. They're always following you. We've exploited this in a way that we can actually, if your heart rate's up for too high for too long, it a red alert. And that can be indicative of a viral infection. And more recently, we've shown it's indicative of mental health stress as well. **Manoush Zomorodi:** You actually told me a story about a Stanford researcher who had a heart attack. And there was data behind that that could have predicted that he was going to? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** it's a very interesting study, you know, a little bit tragic, to say the least. There's a person working in my lab for two years, very wonderful person, high energy, you meet this guy, you assume he's in great health and in great shape. And it turns out he was very much a believer in all of the wearable things that we were doing. He had an Apple Watch and an Oura Ring. He would exercise pretty regularly on a Peloton, which also has tracking data. And basically, one day, as he was running on his Peloton, actually quite intensely, and it turns out he died right after that. It was really quite tragic. And his wife, he knew how much he liked the lab and being there and shared the data with us and asked us to take a look at it. And because he had the latest Apple Watch and also the Oura Ring, we could track what was going on. It very clear four months before he passed away, he had a significant what I like to call step function, meaning his resting heart rate went up, his heart rate variability dropped, his gait, which you can also get from a smartwatch, shifted, and his sleep also shifted. And so there was a sign something was off, yet there was no system to relay that information back to say, hey, something's off. You should go get checked out. And I think that's what we need to do next. We have this for viral infection alerting, but we don't have it for all these other things, which is what we need to. And so we're now trying to study this further, you track people's, if you will, state, and then build a real-time alerting system. We need to run proper studies first, but that is the goal, to be able to see when you see something's off, you may not always know what it is. --- ### [Use A CGM To Learn Foods That Spike You](https://share.snipd.com/snip/42e6a942-0407-48b9-9ed2-ad9756a5c9fe) 🎧 22:10 - 24:34 (02:23) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/34f8b05d-f260-4f26-ae29-30de6c8808ee" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Use continuous glucose monitors to learn personal food responses and prevent metabolic disease. - Snyder says CGMs are visual: they show which foods spike your glucose and a brisk 15-minute walk can suppress spikes. #### 💬 Quote > These continuous glucose monitors are so visual that once you wear them, you'll never eat the same again. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on the behavioral impact of continuous glucose monitors #### 📚 Transcript **Michael Snyder:** The way I see it working is you wear these devices. Right now they're on your wrist or your ring or even in your ear if they're a hearing aid. I think in the future, they may also be implantables because some people don't like to wear the stuff. And if you just put it under your skin and kind of like your pet, your pet often has GPS trackers. **Manoush Zomorodi:** So **Michael Snyder:** anyway, I'm not saying people are the same as pets, but you get the idea. They can track some useful things. And the point out of all of this is that we can track this stuff passively. Now, I do think there's enough information in these devices. You can get quite a bit of data. So for example, we can get a signal for red blood cell count because of the way the devices work. They actually look for it. They measure your oxygenated hemoglobin. So hemoglobin with oxygen, that's in your red blood cells. So they get a sense of your red blood cell count. And that's valuable for anemia and dehydration. And then there are other parameters like the conductance on your skin. That's important for dryness. I mentioned earlier that actually is a sign of diabetes. So there's enough parameters there that they can, they not only just tell you things are off, but they can give you some clues as to which direction they're off. So I think they will pull invaluable data. And they'll just, just like your car, you probably look at your speed and your, your gas tank, but otherwise you don't really look at much in your car. And so the way I see it working is that there'll be all these sensors running in the background. And then when something goes off, you'll get a red alert on your phone and you should probably go get it checked out. But yeah, people always ask me, what's the most important wearable to wear? And I always tell them a continuous glucose monitor because it's in part because we have so many people who are out of control with their glucose. These continuous glucose monitors are so visual that once you wear them, you'll never eat the same again. And I mean that in a good way, meaning you'll see exactly what spikes you. And this is very personal. Different foods spike different people. So you see what foods spike you, which ones don't. And you just gravitate towards the ones that don't and avoid the ones that do. And if you are going to eat the ones that do spike your glucose, well, go do that brisk 15-minute walk, and that'll suppress the spike. So there are things you can do to mitigate these. And in general, spiking is bad for your health. --- ### [Preventive Care Needs Financial Incentives](https://share.snipd.com/snip/294cc3c3-4649-4393-b647-26ccb6c482c0) 🎧 24:52 - 28:58 (04:06) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/8c56694a-882b-4a23-9530-b486e05ecc20" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Healthcare is reactive because incentives reward treating sickness, not preventing it; remote sensors and dashboards could shift care earlier. - Snyder argues insurers or providers must be incentivized to keep people healthy, like John Hancock's vitality program. #### 💬 Quote > There's no reason for any health plan to keep you healthy today. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on misaligned incentives in healthcare #### 📚 Transcript **Michael Snyder:** Our laboratory in the last 17 years has been trying to improve it. And along the way, I've even learned a lot of new things about my own health. It's broken because we practice sick care rather than healthcare. And even when we practice healthcare, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. You'll travel to a physician's office. That really hasn't changed much in the 40 years. When you're there, they'll take lots of blood, and from all that blood in the time you're there, they actually don't make very many measurements. And from those measurements, they'll treat you based on population averages rather than the individual. We're trying to change all those steps, and one area in particular is remote health monitoring. What if you can measure your health with sensors and a dashboard, much like your car dashboard? So **Manoush Zomorodi:** you think also that in the future, like just like we look at our car's dashboard, like, OK, are the tires inflated enough? How much gas do I have? I can check all the vital signs of my car that we'll be able to do that for our bodies too. Absolutely. **Michael Snyder:** I think we need that because I think we want, just like our car, to run well and efficiently forever, or as long as you want to live. But **Manoush Zomorodi:** how do we get to a place where we think more of healthcare as preventive, like a personal dashboard to monitor our health in a sort of more holistic way? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** well, we have to change the financial incentives. That's number one. What happens is people really only go to the doctor when they're ill. And so therefore, they only go every few years, typically. There's no reason for any health plan to keep you healthy today. And that's why we practice sick care, because that's when people get paid. And the one exception to this is this life insurance company, John Hancock. They have a vitality program that basically gives points if you wear smartwatches and do things that keep you healthy, walk your 10,000 steps, for example. And so we need more things like that because in that case, the incentives are aligned. If people live longer, John Hancock makes more money. It's a life insurance company. So they wind up making more money if you live longer and you are healthier. So that's a good thing. And so again, they've got the financial incentives aligned. We need that for our health providers as well, that they, and in the whole system, it's pretty clear if you stay healthier, you know, you'll push off having all these chronic conditions. And hopefully the idea is for us to live long, healthy and then just pass away sort of all at once, but not hang on there for the last decade of life. There are studies now that show that people live the last 11 to 15 years of their life on average with chronic conditions, meaning they're living their last decade of life unhealthy. And that's not a good situation to be in. And so I think as these technologies get cheaper and cheaper, as they get facile, like we talked about the heart attack case, if we automatically have people's information from their devices going to their doctor's office, that would actually be much more accurate because your resting heart rate first thing in the morning is way more accurate than what's in a doctor's office. And so that stuff should just be online, sitting there when you walk in. Right now, your nurse takes your blood pressure and all these things. That can just get pulled straight in and it'd be more accurate, better data. And no more of this, well, when did this seem to go off? You could actually look at someone's heart rate information and see, wow, it looks like it went off three weeks ago or whatever. You can see it because of a jump up. So I think we can pull in information a lot better. And then the physician can make better assessments and spend less time on the routine things and spend more time on more complex things. Now, of course, we're all going to have AI agents in the future, and a physician will be working with those to help better manage your health. --- ### [Pair Privacy Laws With Widely Distributed Wearables](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b128916e-d54e-4318-9736-5418a4e57737) 🎧 29:05 - 32:15 (03:10) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/42193753-d36a-4530-b683-1193c212de62" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Protect privacy and expand access: advocate laws against discrimination and provide wearables via health plans to democratize monitoring. - Snyder suggests insurers could supply smartwatches at enrollment to broaden reach. #### 💬 Quote > When you join a health plan, they should give you that smartwatch as part of the enrollment in the plan because anyone can do it. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on improving access to wearable monitoring #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I want to push back on a few of these things. Okay. So first of all, digital privacy, who's in charge of all of this data that's being collected? And if an insurance company is using it to incentivize me, couldn't they possibly also punish me or hold a pre-existing condition against me? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** well, we would hope not. You're not allowed to be discriminated against for your genome information, for health insurance. You can for life insurance, though, and employment. You're not allowed to be discriminated for that based on your genetic information. My own view is that we obviously, if people are getting discriminated against, I do think we need laws to protect that. I'm a believer that in any wealthy society, which I view the United States and most Western countries to be in, that you should have some minimal level of health care for your citizens. So, I would hope that that would be the case for everyone. Obviously, it isn't, but we need to get there. But even if it were the case where, let's say, someone was using your smartwatch, I'd rather know that something is off and catch it with a watch than not know it exists and die of a heart attack, for example. So we need to, you know, the information is still valuable, but as it moves and becomes more facile, we do need, I think, I would argue, laws that protect people then in those circumstances. **Manoush Zomorodi:** The other concern I would have is that right now this sounds like a rich person's health care system. I mean, you know, having someone to actually give your data to, a physician or a clinician, that means that you are seeing a doctor to begin with. How do we begin to make this more accessible? Right now, this is an expensive proposition. So **Michael Snyder:** you're right. The way we deep data profiling, only rich people can afford it. And getting your genome sequence and some of these other things, only people who pay out of pocket can do it. And, you know, we have a company called QBio that does whole body MRI and a pretty deep medical testing. It's $3,500. So a number of people can pay for that. But probably the average working class family cannot or they'd have to save up. I do think it would save money in the long term. But it only hits a subset of people. So I would say, yes, some people won't have access to that. But the one area where they will have access is the wearables. That's a neutralizer. So I think when you join a health plan, they should give you that smartwatch as part of the enrollment in the plan because anyone can do it. You can do it remotely too, right? You can live in the boonies and have this data transferred to your phone. Most people do have a phone, even when they live in remote parts of the world. 60% of the world has a phone, believe it or not, of adults. And so even in these remote places, they have a phone, all I have to do is link it to a smartwatch and you've got a health tracking system can track a fair number of things. Again, resting heart rate, heart rate variability. --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts # Snips updated after 2026-07-11T23:12:47 ### [Five Minutes Every Half Hour Lowers Sedentary Harm](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e8424845-2749-4dde-af72-f11fe7160ce8) 🎧 00:49 - 04:26 (03:36) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/93ad60a6-b30d-4529-8a9a-a696dec3cf38" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Sitting dominates modern life and raises risks for diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and early death even for regular exercisers. - Keith Diaz's lab found contracting muscles often matters: a five-minute walk every 30 minutes (or five five-minute breaks daily) offsets much sedentary harm. #### 💬 Quote > In a single year, the average adult now spent a full 187 days, over half of the year, sitting or physically idle. > — Keith Diaz Keith Diaz on modern sedentary behavior #### 📚 Transcript **Keith Diaz:** So if you kind of map out the trajectories of our sedentary time and, you know, how much time we spend watching TV, how much time we spend sitting in a car, how much time we spend sitting at work, it's kind of been like steadily increasing across decades. This is exercise scientist Keith Diaz. And society and our cultural and societal norms are telling us you're supposed to sit in your desk. If you're not in your desk, you're not learning, you're not being productive. Keith **Manoush Zomorodi:** Diaz has spent the past 15 years researching the impacts of a sedentary lifestyle on our health and how much movement we really need to stay healthy. It all started with a headline that he desperately wanted to debunk. I came across some news **Keith Diaz:** headline, it was like in Runner's World magazine. It said something like, Sinning is the new smoking, even if you're a runner. And I was like, you know, as a runner, I tend to see exercise as the cure-all, prevent-all for everything. And so for this article to put it out there that what you do exercise-wise, you're running, that's not enough. I didn't believe it. And so I set off in my career to debunk that and show that, you know, that's not true. Exercise can overcome. That sitting isn't the kryptonite to exercise. And here we are almost 15 years later, and man, I've come to see it in a very different light. We are living in the most sedentary error in modern history. Keith Diaz continues **Manoush Zomorodi:** from **Keith Diaz:** the stage. In a single year, the average adult now spent a full 187 days, over half of the year, sitting or physically idle. The bad news is that our bodies weren't designed for this. I know because I've spent my career as a scientist studying the harms of being highly sedentary. And what scientists have found is that being highly sedentary increases your risk of diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and ultimately, early death. Worse, this is true even if you exercise regularly. Exercise only makes up a tiny fraction of your day. The toxicity comes from when movement begins to disappear from your life. And this begs the question, why isn't exercise alone enough? A part of the answer lies in our muscles. Our muscles are more than just a machinery that power movement. They're also really important for regulating things our metabolism. Let's use blood sugar as an example. Our muscles are like sponges for blood sugar. When we regularly use and contract our muscles, they're like a moist sponge soaking up the sugar from the bloodstream. But when we don't regularly use and contract our muscle, like a dry and shriveled sponge, it's not good at soaking up anything. Now, here's the key. When we exercise, it rewets the sponge. But eventually, that sponge dries out if you get little to no movement the rest of your day. If our muscles need regular use to function optimally, then outside of any exercise time, we need to be contracting them frequently through movement. The question that we asked in my lab is, what's the least amount of movement breaks that we need in order to offset the harms of being highly sedentary? And the answer we found was a five-minute walk every half hour. In **Manoush Zomorodi:** 2023, as part of the Body Electric --- ### [Tie Movement Breaks To Daily Cues](https://share.snipd.com/snip/177237d9-3b44-4e75-9c8f-f06fcfef08e2) 🎧 04:46 - 12:17 (07:30) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/33d58bbf-fcb9-41fe-8264-b9e0b9d0a30e" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Tie movement breaks to daily cues rather than device pings to build lasting habits. - Keith Diaz recommends linking a break to finishing a task or meeting and aiming for about five five-minute breaks per day. #### 💬 Quote > I've just finished a work task. I'm going to go take a movement break before I go on to the next one. > — Keith Diaz Keith Diaz on building internal cues for movement #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I **Keith Diaz:** mean, we set out really to answer the question, can people do movement breaks in the real world? And **Manoush Zomorodi:** the answer was yes. It wasn't easy at first, but once people committed to taking regular breaks throughout the day, they started noticing the positive effects on their mood, productivity, fatigue levels, and more. Plus, Keith now has an exciting What **Keith Diaz:** we're finding is that once people take about five movement breaks a day, you start to see diminishing returns in terms of their improvements in fatigue, right? Like after about five to six breaks a day, you don't get that much extra benefit from doing seven, eight, or nine. And so that to me seems like a little bit of a better message too, that, you know, just strive five. Would I love for it to be every half hour, every hour? That'd be great. But what we found in the real world is that people really had a hard time sticking to that regimented clock of every hour. But maybe this is a different way to think about it. Five times in your day, move for five minutes. Our body is constantly **Manoush Zomorodi:** sending us a signal about what it needs. But are we listening? What happens when we start paying closer attention, not just to how we feel, but to the patterns hidden inside our daily lives? From simple habits like taking movement breaks to cutting-edge wearables that track everything from sleep to stress, new tools are changing the way we understand our health. And so today on the show, we're exploring ways of tracking what the body needs. For exercise scientist Keith Diaz, when it comes to changing our sedentary habits, Keith says we need to deal with what we think being productive looks like. One **Keith Diaz:** of the biggest concerns I often hear from employers in schools about movement breaks is that they worry that it's disruptive. That it'll hurt productivity and performance. But movement doesn't mean you have to stop working. You can have walking meetings, around while you're on a call, get walking pads, or somebody just move around while thinking. But the bigger idea and concept with movement breaks is that when you compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work. And that's where the real challenge lies. Productivity culture, convenience culture and technology are reengineering our lives and still removing the need for movement. We can have groceries delivered and robots vacuum our floors without ever getting off the couch. And the consequences of this re-engineering is that we now often see movement as something to avoid. So **Manoush Zomorodi:** a lot of people rely these days on their device, a smartphone, to ping them. You know, it's time to get up. You're actually not a fan, if I understand correctly, of fitness trackers, you've told me. So, like, what, how do you, how **Keith Diaz:** do you approach this? Yeah, I mean, why I'm not as much of a fan of it is that you're relying on kind of external cues still. And where I'd love to see this and what the science kind of tells us on human behavior change is that for us to build a habit, it has to be more so something internal. Right. And so when we kind of learn how to check back in with our bodies, right, and we don't have to rely on external cues to do that, right, that behavior is much more likely to stick. The example I always use is brushing teeth, is like the ultimate health behavior that since we were kids, we're taught and trained to do, but we also have tied it to cues in our day. We know that when we get ready in the morning to go and leave our house or that when we get ready for bed at night, we automatically are cued by our environment that like, oh yeah, teeth brushing, that's next up. I put my pajamas on, I go brush my teeth. Like that's just the natural part of it. And so getting to that place in our everyday lives for movement breaks or just movement in general of like, okay, I just, I've just finished a work task. I'm going to go take a movement break before I go on to the next one. I just finished a meeting before I go to the next one. I'm going to move, right? And tying it to cues in our day rather than relying on some kind of device to remind us because ultimately people at the end of the day, most people end up hating that reminder and ignore them. **Manoush Zomorodi:** Yeah, **Keith Diaz:** you know, it's annoying. **Manoush Zomorodi:** It starts to annoy you. It starts to be like, okay, good to know. Thanks, but I'm busy. So I guess my question is, what happens next? Like our relationship with technology is getting even more entangled. So are we at this point where we have to be taught, be more specific, put language around or doses, as you say, around things that like, you know, probably when I was a kid, if someone was like, did you get enough movement today? That would be kind of like, maybe not in school, but like generally we were always moving. I had to move to go to the next class. I had to move to go get a new book. **Keith Diaz:** Yeah. And maybe it's going back to that point of like harnessing like this idea or notion that like a body that moves is a more efficient and productive body as well. Like what moves the needle for employers outside of like policy changes, right, incentivizing employers to allow this to happen? I feel like I keep saying the same story again and again and again, and people want to keep talking about it, but nothing is changing. And that's where I just feel like I feel stuck because I'm like, how much do I have to keep talking about it? How much more science needs to come out before somebody **Manoush Zomorodi:** starts doing something about it? Okay, so I'm going to offer a more positive perspective, Keith. One is that we can actually change our habits pretty fast. Like I'm thinking of going to Zoom for everything during the pandemic. And also, like, I definitely heard from the people who joined our study that once they committed to taking movement breaks and they got their friends to try it, they got their office mates to try it, they realized that they wanted to keep doing it. But it starts with just getting people to try. Yeah. And **Keith Diaz:** I think what you're getting at is it's a grassroots movement, right? Like, the top ain't changing things. So we're going to have to start from a different perspective and a approach. And it's this trickle effect. And, you know, normalizing the behavior has to start with somebody being willing to do it and step out of that comfort zone. Like, I'm always that guy in a Zoom call who, like, is walking on a treadmill while everybody else is sitting. I know, it's weird to see you sitting right now, actually. Yeah. But, you know, then some other people start thinking, like, oh, like, I want to do that, too. So a couple of my staff members went out and got walking pads, right? And so like when you make it acceptable, like, oh, that's totally a normal thing to do. And I wouldn't even think twice about it, right? Like we have to start changing that perception and that culture. And it may have to start with just people doing it and making it normal. --- ### [Wearables Reveal Early Health Deviations](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5bb9be4f-9b70-47b8-b44b-c2a7986ca1ae) 🎧 15:34 - 21:12 (05:38) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/b5d4d678-6514-4517-94b4-f104d02ad451" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Continuous wearable monitoring transforms fitness trackers into health monitors by catching early deviations like rising resting heart rate or dropping HRV. - Michael Snyder demonstrated a lab member whose multi-device data showed changes months before a fatal event. #### 💬 Quote > It was very clear four months before he passed away, he had a significant... his resting heart rate went up, his heart rate variability dropped, his gait shifted, and his sleep also shifted. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder describing wearable signals before a colleague's death #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** He's the director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. **Michael Snyder:** I have hearing aids, which I do use for hearing, but they also do sensing as well. I have an exposometer that measures airborne exposures. And I have my iPhone that tracks a few and ends, like steps and things. Some of that's redundant with the other watches. **Manoush Zomorodi:** And how long have you been collecting all of this information? **Michael Snyder:** Well, I've been collecting deep data on me for about 16 and a half years now. The wearable part, I'd say, runs for about 11 years, 12 years. Of **Manoush Zomorodi:** course, wearables and tracking devices have been around for a long time. But the types of data they can collect is constantly getting more **Michael Snyder:** precise. Your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, your blood oxygen, something you don't get in a doctor's office called galvanic stress response. This is conductance on your skin. And it turns out that when you're stressed, you're sweating more, so your skin gets more moist. And when you're diabetic, your skin gets more dry. Some of the watches will, at least one of them, will detect blood pressure and measure that. **Manoush Zomorodi:** Michael has spent decades doing massive studies using information collected from wearables. And his research is changing our understanding of how genetic risks and personal habits combine to shape human health. And for individuals, as in what does this mean for you? Well, he believes that self-monitoring and collecting more of our own physical data will soon transform how we each stay healthy. These **Michael Snyder:** devices, they're not expensive now and they're only going to get cheaper in the future. You can keep the individual people themselves healthy by, you know, catching when they first get ill, treat them, catch heart conditions. I think there's going to a ton of stuff, catch mental health problems like depression, anxiety. We're doing a lot of research there, cardiovascular disease. You know, it's not going to be a perfect system, but even if we could catch 50% of these, it'd be amazing. I **Manoush Zomorodi:** mean, I think people have been wearing like smart watches or, you know, collecting how many steps they're walking every day. And this has been going on for a while now, as you said, like over a decade. But are we at some sort of tipping point people actually know what to do with this information? Like, for example, I've been tracking my steps for six years and I rarely even look at the data. But is something changing when it comes to collecting information about our bodies? When **Michael Snyder:** these first came out, it's, as you say, they were fitness trackers. And realistically, people put them their wrist and they would wear them for three months, say, yep, I know my pattern, I'm done. Then they throw it in a drawer and be done with it. But I think what the tipping point is that you're referring to is that they're actually health monitors. They can track a lot more than just your steps. For example, resting heart rate, heart rate variability are really good indicators of your health. We've used them to be able to pick up when you're getting a viral infection in advance of symptoms because your heart rate goes up. What's powerful about them is they're measuring you 24-7. They're always following you. We've exploited this in a way that we can actually, if your heart rate's up for too high for too long, it a red alert. And that can be indicative of a viral infection. And more recently, we've shown it's indicative of mental health stress as well. **Manoush Zomorodi:** You actually told me a story about a Stanford researcher who had a heart attack. And there was data behind that that could have predicted that he was going to? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** it's a very interesting study, you know, a little bit tragic, to say the least. There's a person working in my lab for two years, very wonderful person, high energy, you meet this guy, you assume he's in great health and in great shape. And it turns out he was very much a believer in all of the wearable things that we were doing. He had an Apple Watch and an Oura Ring. He would exercise pretty regularly on a Peloton, which also has tracking data. And basically, one day, as he was running on his Peloton, actually quite intensely, and it turns out he died right after that. It was really quite tragic. And his wife, he knew how much he liked the lab and being there and shared the data with us and asked us to take a look at it. And because he had the latest Apple Watch and also the Oura Ring, we could track what was going on. It very clear four months before he passed away, he had a significant what I like to call step function, meaning his resting heart rate went up, his heart rate variability dropped, his gait, which you can also get from a smartwatch, shifted, and his sleep also shifted. And so there was a sign something was off, yet there was no system to relay that information back to say, hey, something's off. You should go get checked out. And I think that's what we need to do next. We have this for viral infection alerting, but we don't have it for all these other things, which is what we need to. And so we're now trying to study this further, you track people's, if you will, cardiovascular and then build a real-time alerting system. We need to run proper studies first, but that is the goal, to be able to see when you see something's off, you may not always know what it is. --- ### [Use A CGM To Learn Foods That Spike You](https://share.snipd.com/snip/42e6a942-0407-48b9-9ed2-ad9756a5c9fe) 🎧 22:10 - 24:34 (02:23) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/34f8b05d-f260-4f26-ae29-30de6c8808ee" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Use continuous glucose monitors to learn personal food responses and prevent metabolic disease. - Snyder says CGMs are visual: they show which foods spike your glucose and a brisk 15-minute walk can suppress spikes. #### 💬 Quote > These continuous glucose monitors are so visual that once you wear them, you'll never eat the same again. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on the behavioral impact of continuous glucose monitors #### 📚 Transcript **Michael Snyder:** The way I see it working is you wear these devices. Right now they're on your wrist or your ring or even in your ear if they're a hearing aid. I think in the future, they may also be implantables because some people don't like to wear the stuff. And if you just put it under your skin and kind of like your pet, your pet often has GPS trackers. **Manoush Zomorodi:** So **Michael Snyder:** anyway, I'm not saying people are the same as pets, but you get the idea. They can track some useful things. And the point out of all of this is that we can track this stuff passively. Now, I do think there's enough information in these devices. You can get quite a bit of data. So for example, we can get a signal for red blood cell count because of the way the devices work. They actually look for it. They measure your oxygenated hemoglobin. So hemoglobin with oxygen, that's in your red blood cells. So they get a sense of your red blood cell count. And that's valuable for anemia and dehydration. And then there are other parameters like the conductance on your skin. That's important for dryness. I mentioned earlier that actually is a sign of diabetes. So there's enough parameters there that they can, they not only just tell you things are off, but they can give you some clues as to which direction they're off. So I think they will pull invaluable data. And they'll just, just like your car, you probably look at your speed and your, your gas tank, but otherwise you don't really look at much in your car. And so the way I see it working is that there'll be all these sensors running in the background. And then when something goes off, you'll get a red alert on your phone and you should probably go get it checked out. But yeah, people always ask me, what's the most important wearable to wear? And I always tell them a continuous glucose monitor because it's in part because we have so many people who are out of control with their glucose. These continuous glucose monitors are so visual that once you wear them, you'll never eat the same again. And I mean that in a good way, meaning you'll see exactly what spikes you. And this is very personal. Different foods spike different people. So you see what foods spike you, which ones don't. And you just gravitate towards the ones that don't and avoid the ones that do. And if you are going to eat the ones that do spike your glucose, well, go do that brisk 15-minute walk, and that'll suppress the spike. So there are things you can do to mitigate these. And in general, spiking is bad for your health. --- ### [Preventive Care Needs Financial Incentives](https://share.snipd.com/snip/294cc3c3-4649-4393-b647-26ccb6c482c0) 🎧 24:52 - 28:58 (04:06) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/8c56694a-882b-4a23-9530-b486e05ecc20" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Healthcare is reactive because incentives reward treating sickness, not preventing it; remote sensors and dashboards could shift care earlier. - Snyder argues insurers or providers must be incentivized to keep people healthy, like John Hancock's vitality program. #### 💬 Quote > There's no reason for any health plan to keep you healthy today. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on misaligned incentives in healthcare #### 📚 Transcript **Michael Snyder:** Our laboratory in the last 17 years has been trying to improve it. And along the way, I've even learned a lot of new things about my own health. It's broken because we practice sick care rather than healthcare. And even when we practice healthcare, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. You'll travel to a physician's office. That really hasn't changed much in the 40 years. When you're there, they'll take lots of blood, and from all that blood in the time you're there, they actually don't make very many measurements. And from those measurements, they'll treat you based on population averages rather than the individual. We're trying to change all those steps, and one area in particular is remote health monitoring. What if you can measure your health with sensors and a dashboard, much like your car dashboard? So **Manoush Zomorodi:** you think also that in the future, like just like we look at our car's dashboard, like, OK, are the tires inflated enough? How much gas do I have? I can check all the vital signs of my car that we'll be able to do that for our bodies too. Absolutely. **Michael Snyder:** I think we need that because I think we want, just like our car, to run well and efficiently forever, or as long as you want to live. But **Manoush Zomorodi:** how do we get to a place where we think more of healthcare as preventive, like a personal dashboard to monitor our health in a sort of more holistic way? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** well, we have to change the financial incentives. That's number one. What happens is people really only go to the doctor when they're ill. And so therefore, they only go every few years, typically. There's no reason for any health plan to keep you healthy today. And that's why we practice sick care, because that's when people get paid. And the one exception to this is this life insurance company, John Hancock. They have a vitality program that basically gives points if you wear smartwatches and do things that keep you healthy, walk your 10,000 steps, for example. And so we need more things like that because in that case, the incentives are aligned. If people live longer, John Hancock makes more money. It's a life insurance company. So they wind up making more money if you live longer and you are healthier. So that's a good thing. And so again, they've got the financial incentives aligned. We need that for our health providers as well, that they, and in the whole system, it's pretty clear if you stay healthier, you know, you'll push off having all these chronic conditions. And hopefully the idea is for us to live long, healthy and then just pass away sort of all at once, but not hang on there for the last decade of life. There are studies now that show that people live the last 11 to 15 years of their life on average with chronic conditions, meaning they're living their last decade of life unhealthy. And that's not a good situation to be in. And so I think as these technologies get cheaper and cheaper, as they get facile, like we talked about the heart attack case, if we automatically have people's information from their devices going to their doctor's office, that would actually be much more accurate because your resting heart rate first thing in the morning is way more accurate than what's in a doctor's office. And so that stuff should just be online, sitting there when you walk in. Right now, your nurse takes your blood pressure and all these things. That can just get pulled straight in and it'd be more accurate, better data. And no more of this, well, when did this seem to go off? You could actually look at someone's heart rate information and see, wow, it looks like it went off three weeks ago or whatever. You can see it because of a jump up. So I think we can pull in information a lot better. And then the physician can make better assessments and spend less time on the routine things and spend more time on more complex things. Now, of course, we're all going to have AI agents in the future, and a physician will be working with those to help better manage your health. --- ### [Pair Privacy Laws With Widely Distributed Wearables](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b128916e-d54e-4318-9736-5418a4e57737) 🎧 29:05 - 32:15 (03:10) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/42193753-d36a-4530-b683-1193c212de62" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Protect privacy and expand access: advocate laws against discrimination and provide wearables via health plans to democratize monitoring. - Snyder suggests insurers could supply smartwatches at enrollment to broaden reach. #### 💬 Quote > When you join a health plan, they should give you that smartwatch as part of the enrollment in the plan because anyone can do it. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on improving access to wearable monitoring #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I want to push back on a few of these things. Okay. So first of all, digital privacy, who's in charge of all of this data that's being collected? And if an insurance company is using it to incentivize me, couldn't they possibly also punish me or hold a pre-existing condition against me? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** well, we would hope not. You're not allowed to be discriminated against for your genome information, for health insurance. You can for life insurance, though, and employment. You're not allowed to be discriminated for that based on your genetic information. My own view is that we obviously, if people are getting discriminated against, I do think we need laws to protect that. I'm a believer that in any wealthy society, which I view the United States and most Western countries to be in, that you should have some minimal level of health care for your citizens. So, I would hope that that would be the case for everyone. Obviously, it isn't, but we need to get there. But even if it were the case where, let's say, someone was using your smartwatch, I'd rather know that something is off and catch it with a watch than not know it exists and die of a heart attack, for example. So we need to, you know, the information is still valuable, but as it moves and becomes more facile, we do need, I think, I would argue, laws that protect people then in those circumstances. **Manoush Zomorodi:** The other concern I would have is that right now this sounds like a rich person's health care system. I mean, you know, having someone to actually give your data to, a physician or a clinician, that means that you are seeing a doctor to begin with. How do we begin to make this more accessible? Right now, this is an expensive proposition. So **Michael Snyder:** you're right. The way we deep data profiling, only rich people can afford it. And getting your genome sequence and some of these other things, only people who pay out of pocket can do it. And, you know, we have a company called QBio that does whole body MRI and a pretty deep medical testing. It's $3,500. So a number of people can pay for that. But probably the average working class family cannot or they'd have to save up. I do think it would save money in the long term. But it only hits a subset of people. So I would say, yes, some people won't have access to that. But the one area where they will have access is the wearables. That's a neutralizer. So I think when you join a health plan, they should give you that smartwatch as part of the enrollment in the plan because anyone can do it. You can do it remotely too, right? You can live in the boonies and have this data transferred to your phone. Most people do have a phone, even when they live in remote parts of the world. 60% of the world has a phone, believe it or not, of adults. And so even in these remote places, they have a phone, all I have to do is link it to a smartwatch and you've got a health tracking system can track a fair number of things. Again, resting heart rate, heart rate variability. --- ### [Individual Baselines Trump Population Averages](https://share.snipd.com/snip/57c74d7d-582f-448a-8d33-06123a99f391) 🎧 37:19 - 38:43 (01:23) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/c73b353c-228f-47f6-a8b7-ae6ddfa32a6a" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Baseline shifts in an individual matter more than population averages for early detection. - Snyder emphasizes tracking personal trajectories (resting heart rate, skin temp, HRV) to spot change even within 'normal' population ranges. #### 💬 Quote > One is your shift from your normal baseline, and the other is population average out of range. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on clinical use of personal baselines #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I guess most doctors anyway. They rely on averages, right? So for example, I just got blood work done, and as long as each thing that they tested for was in the green zone, it came back as normal. **Michael Snyder:** Do you take issue with that approach? Population measurements, they are important. Don't get me wrong. If you're out of, you know, an individual range and you're very high on certain things, it is worth looking into. But equally important is knowing your baseline because we all have very different baselines for heart rate, for skin temperature, for all these different things. And when you go off from your health, you'll get a jump up in that. But if you're by today's world, if you're still in a normal range, nobody says anything to you. And a good example is, say your heart rate is normally 60, and suddenly your resting heart rate goes to 75, something's off with you. Whereas 75 could be very normal for other people and probably wouldn't be flagged on a population average. And I think we need to get this into medicine. There's two things that count. One is your shift from your normal baseline, and the other is population average out of range. Both of those are important, and I would argue the first one's even more important, shift from your baseline. And we can pick this up with wearables. --- ### [Interpret Device Scores Carefully To Avoid Nocebo Effects](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e0cff238-2add-45bd-8fec-f8e95c6f46f4) 🎧 40:57 - 42:39 (01:41) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/3f4f6357-18d0-4732-a7a7-06202bafea69" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Use wearables selectively: they excel at detecting infections, arrhythmias, and transplant risks, but scores (like sleep) can alter perception. - Snyder notes a study where telling someone they slept well improved their daytime function regardless of actual sleep metrics. #### 💬 Quote > Depending on what you tell people determines how they feel. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on psychological influence of wearable feedback #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I've been learning about this concept of interoception over the last year, this idea of the body sort of indicating to the brain what it needs. I mean, I hear people who are like, I don't even know if I sleep well anymore. I look at my device and it tells me. And sometimes I'm like, really? That's all I slept? I thought I well. Do we start to lose touch with our embodied sense of self when we start outsourcing all of our functions to being collected and tabulated by wearables? I **Michael Snyder:** would argue wearables for certain kinds of things like infectious disease, AFib. Those are really, really valuable, right? It's hard to argue with that. We have some studies running now on transplant families. There's individuals with transplants who are trying to see if anyone in the family gets ill. And if that happens, they get a red alert and they can isolate and not ideally infect the person who had the transplant. And this has worked, actually. So it's alerted people who could die if they actually got one of these respiratory virals. I think there are situations where it's good. Now, you picked the example of sleep, which I think is one of the more interesting ones. One of my colleagues here at Stanford has run a study that shows that depending on what you tell people determines how they feel. So regardless of what the value is on their sleep device, if you tell them they had a good night's sleep from their score, even if they didn't, they actually wind up functioning very well that day. They do well. If you tell them they had a bad night's sleep, they actually don't function so well. So I think there people are very influenced psychologically by the score. --- ### [Athlete Looked Healthy But Felt Terrible](https://share.snipd.com/snip/190cebf6-ee4d-4d66-a67e-69b6ca5bf55b) 🎧 46:31 - 52:11 (05:39) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ea946338-c7a5-45ca-9c3b-1531cddd97b2" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Lizzie Braicks-Rinker felt physically 'healthy' as a college athlete yet suffered panic attacks, chronic pain, and amenorrhea. - Her mother died of cancer, exposing that outward health metrics don't equal holistic wellness. #### 💬 Quote > I was arguably at my physical peak. I was obviously working out all the time, but I also was a really hardcore vegan... I felt terrible, my friends. > — Lizzie Braicks-Rinker Lizzie Braicks-Rinker recounting her contradictory health experience #### 📚 Transcript **Lizzie Braicks-Rinker:** When you hear the term healthy, what comes to mind? What do you think of as health? So when I was in college, I was a rower, and it was my entire life. Everything that I did revolved around being healthy and being an athlete. I was arguably at my physical peak. I was obviously working out all the time, but I also was a really hardcore vegan. I had this elaborate regimen of vitamins and supplements that I took every day. I carried my emotional support water bottle with me wherever I went, and I was a cliche of a healthy person. However, the reason that I started really thinking about what it means to be well is that despite being super healthy on paper, being an athlete, I felt terrible, my friends. I was having panic attacks almost every week. I had this really weird chronic pain that no one could quite figure out, and I wasn't getting my periods. I just felt off, but I was really healthy, right? I kept saying something doesn't feel right, and I couldn't really articulate what it was. So this is a picture of me from the of college, and nine days before my dad took this picture, moving me into my apartment, our mom, Becky, died after a really long and hard-fought battle with cancer. And let me tell you, it kind of sucked. It is incredibly disorienting to watch somebody that you love be sick and die. It was incredibly disorienting to be going through that experience as I was a college athlete because one part of my life was completely revolved around optimizing my body and health and wellness. And I was seeing evidence every single day of that working. However, on the other side of my life, my mom did everything right. She was healthy, she was active, and she still got sick. And there was nothing that we could do about it. So because of my mom's illness and because of my experience as an athlete, I went on to make an entire career out of really exploring what it means to be healthy. So I'm going to throw some definitions at you. Okay, the first one is health. The World Health Organization defines health as not having disease in your body. So in that instance, I was healthy. Nary A toxin was getting near this. I was obsessed with being clean and, you know, doing all the right workouts, but I couldn't really articulate what was going on. And what I found in my work is that what I didn't have while I was healthy is I did not have any wellness. So holistic wellness is a trend that gets thrown around a lot, and it's rooted in this idea that we are a whole person, not just our bodies. So rather than putting all of the eggs into the physical basket, we start to look at our lives from the health of our environment. It looks at all of our circumstances, all of our lived experiences, and really takes those things into account to consider what we need. I've been working in wellness for 10 years, and I have coached hundreds of athletes, and I have seen a couple things to always, always be true. The first, from an athletic standpoint, is that if an athlete does not have a holistic, balanced life, their performance will fail. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. It is incredibly hard to keep it together and to care about, I don't know, going a little faster on the rowing machine if you are waiting to find out if your mom has made it out of surgery. If you don't have a safe home life, it's really hard to perform. The other thing that I see is that we're all shitting on ourselves. I'm talking about all the things that we're like, I really should do more of XYZ. And it might not even be a thing that you like. This happens to me a lot. I am really into running and people will find out this about me and come up to me and say, I should really get back into running. I used to be a big runner. And I'm like, oh, what happened? Did you get injured? And they're like, no, I hate running. I just really hate running. And I'm like, well, then why do you think you should be doing it? There are literally so many other ways that you can exercise, but this is what we do to ourselves. We tell ourselves we should be doing all of these things. We should be learning how to listen to our bodies. Like, what's the purpose of wellness? Is it just to lose weight? Is it just to look a certain way or to be able to go a little bit faster on the water? Or is the purpose of wellness and the balance of all of these different things to maybe, I don't know, make your life a little bit better instead of just your body? The last couple months of my mom's life, she was very frail. She'd lost a lot of weight and she couldn't drive. So I had to drive her to the grocery store. And this woman saw her from across the way and ran up to her and was like, Becky, I haven't seen you in years. You look amazing. You look so good. You're so healthy. My mom was like, I am literally dying. But this is what we do to ourselves and to each other. We assume if you look a certain way that you must be having a certain experience. And that is just not true. You cannot really tell anything about somebody's wellness or their lived experiences and their circumstances by the way that they look. And this is why we have to consider holistic wellness. And we have to start looking at our health as more than just our bodies, but everything that we experience. Those are the things that make a life. I'm going to leave you today with a quote from my favorite poem. And I said to my body softly, I want to be your friend. It took a long and replied, I have been waiting my whole life for this. --- # Snips updated after 2026-07-11T23:42:33 ### [Individual Baselines Trump Population Averages](https://share.snipd.com/snip/57c74d7d-582f-448a-8d33-06123a99f391) 🎧 37:19 - 38:43 (01:23) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/c73b353c-228f-47f6-a8b7-ae6ddfa32a6a" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Baseline shifts in an individual matter more than population averages for early detection. - Snyder emphasizes tracking personal trajectories (resting heart rate, skin temp, HRV) to spot change even within 'normal' population ranges. #### 💬 Quote > One is your shift from your normal baseline, and the other is population average out of range. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on clinical use of personal baselines #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I guess most doctors anyway. They rely on averages, right? So for example, I just got blood work done, and as long as each thing that they tested for was in the green zone, it came back as normal. **Michael Snyder:** Do you take issue with that approach? Population measurements, they are important. Don't get me wrong. If you're out of, you know, an individual range and you're very high on certain things, it is worth looking into. But equally important is knowing your baseline because we all have very different baselines for heart rate, for skin temperature, for all these different things. And when you go off from your health, you'll get a jump up in that. But if you're by today's world, if you're still in a normal range, nobody says anything to you. And a good example is, say your heart rate is normally 60, and suddenly your resting heart rate goes to 75, something's off with you. Whereas 75 could be very normal for other people and probably wouldn't be flagged on a population average. And I think we need to get this into medicine. There's two things that count. One is your shift from your normal baseline, and the other is population average out of range. Both of those are important, and I would argue the first one's even more important, shift from your baseline. And we can pick this up with wearables. --- ### [Interpret Device Scores Carefully To Avoid Nocebo Effects](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e0cff238-2add-45bd-8fec-f8e95c6f46f4) 🎧 40:57 - 42:39 (01:41) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/3f4f6357-18d0-4732-a7a7-06202bafea69" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Use wearables selectively: they excel at detecting infections, arrhythmias, and transplant risks, but scores (like sleep) can alter perception. - Snyder notes a study where telling someone they slept well improved their daytime function regardless of actual sleep metrics. #### 💬 Quote > Depending on what you tell people determines how they feel. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on psychological influence of wearable feedback #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I've been learning about this concept of interoception over the last year, this idea of the body sort of indicating to the brain what it needs. I mean, I hear people who are like, I don't even know if I sleep well anymore. I look at my device and it tells me. And sometimes I'm like, really? That's all I slept? I thought I slept Do we start to lose touch with our embodied sense of self when we start outsourcing all of our functions to being collected and tabulated by wearables? I **Michael Snyder:** would argue wearables for certain kinds of things like infectious disease, AFib. Those are really, really valuable, right? It's hard to argue with that. We have some studies running now on transplant families. There's individuals with transplants who are trying to see if anyone in the family gets ill. And if that happens, they get a red alert and they can isolate and not ideally infect the person who had the transplant. And this has worked, actually. So it's alerted people who could die if they actually got one of these respiratory virals. I think there are situations where it's good. Now, you picked the example of sleep, which I think is one of the more interesting ones. One of my colleagues here at Stanford has run a study that shows that depending on what you tell people determines how they feel. So regardless of what the value is on their sleep device, if you tell them they had a good night's sleep from their score, even if they didn't, they actually wind up functioning very well that day. They do well. If you tell them they had a bad night's sleep, they actually don't function so well. So I think there people are very influenced psychologically by the score. --- ### [Athlete Looked Healthy But Felt Terrible](https://share.snipd.com/snip/190cebf6-ee4d-4d66-a67e-69b6ca5bf55b) 🎧 46:31 - 52:11 (05:39) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ea946338-c7a5-45ca-9c3b-1531cddd97b2" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Lizzie Braicks-Rinker felt physically 'healthy' as a college athlete yet suffered panic attacks, chronic pain, and amenorrhea. - Her mother died of cancer, exposing that outward health metrics don't equal holistic wellness. #### 💬 Quote > I was arguably at my physical peak. I was obviously working out all the time, but I also was a really hardcore vegan... I felt terrible, my friends. > — Lizzie Braicks-Rinker Lizzie Braicks-Rinker recounting her contradictory health experience #### 📚 Transcript **Lizzie Braicks-Rinker:** When you hear the term healthy, what comes to mind? What do you think of as health? So when I was in college, I was a rower, and it was my entire life. Everything that I did revolved around being healthy and being an athlete. I was arguably at my physical peak. I was obviously working out all the time, but I also was a really hardcore vegan. I had this elaborate regimen of vitamins and supplements that I took every day. I carried my emotional support water bottle with me wherever I went, and I was a cliche of a healthy person. However, the reason that I started really thinking about what it means to be well is that despite being super healthy on paper, being an athlete, I felt terrible, my friends. I was having panic attacks almost every week. I had this really weird chronic pain that no one could quite figure out, and I wasn't getting my periods. I just felt off, but I was really healthy, right? I kept saying something doesn't feel right, and I couldn't really articulate what it was. So this is a picture of me from the middle college, and nine days before my dad took this picture, moving me into my apartment, our mom, Becky, died after a really long and hard-fought battle with cancer. And let me tell you, it kind of sucked. It is incredibly disorienting to watch somebody that you love be sick and die. It was incredibly disorienting to be going through that experience as I was a college athlete because one part of my life was completely revolved around optimizing my body and health and wellness. And I was seeing evidence every single day of that working. However, on the other side of my life, my mom did everything right. She was healthy, she was active, and she still got sick. And there was nothing that we could do about it. So because of my mom's illness and because of my experience as an athlete, I went on to make an entire career out of really exploring what it means to be healthy. So I'm going to throw some definitions at you. Okay, the first one is health. The World Health Organization defines health as not having disease in your body. So in that instance, I was healthy. Nary A toxin was getting near this. I was obsessed with being clean and, you know, doing all the right workouts, but I couldn't really articulate what was going on. And what I found in my work is that what I didn't have while I was healthy is I did not have any wellness. So holistic wellness is a trend that gets thrown around a lot, and it's rooted in this idea that we are a whole person, not just our bodies. So rather than putting all of the eggs into the physical basket, we start to look at our lives from the health of our environment. It looks at all of our circumstances, all of our lived experiences, and really takes those things into account to consider what we need. I've been working in wellness for 10 years, and I have coached hundreds of athletes, and I have seen a couple things to always, always be true. The first, from an athletic standpoint, is that if an athlete does not have a holistic, balanced life, their performance will fail. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. It is incredibly hard to keep it together and to care about, I don't know, going a little faster on the rowing machine if you are waiting to find out if your mom has made it out of surgery. If you don't have a safe home life, it's really hard to perform. The other thing that I see is that we're all shitting on ourselves. I'm talking about all the things that we're like, I really should do more of XYZ. And it might not even be a thing that you like. This happens to me a lot. I am really into running and people will find out this about me and come up to me and say, I should really get back into running. I used to be a big runner. And I'm like, oh, what happened? Did you get injured? And they're like, no, I hate running. I just really hate running. And I'm like, well, then why do you think you should be doing it? There are literally so many other ways that you can exercise, but this is what we do to ourselves. We tell ourselves we should be doing all of these things. We should be learning how to listen to our bodies. Like, what's the purpose of wellness? Is it just to lose weight? Is it just to look a certain way or to be able to go a little bit faster on the water? Or is the purpose of wellness and the balance of all of these different things to maybe, I don't know, make your life a little bit better instead of just your body? The last couple months of my mom's life, she was very frail. She'd lost a lot of weight and she couldn't drive. So I had to drive her to the grocery store. And this woman saw her from across the way and ran up to her and was like, Becky, I haven't seen you in years. You look amazing. You look so good. You're so healthy. My mom was like, I am literally dying. But this is what we do to ourselves and to each other. We assume if you look a certain way that you must be having a certain experience. And that is just not true. You cannot really tell anything about somebody's wellness or their lived experiences and their circumstances by the way that they look. And this is why we have to consider holistic wellness. And we have to start looking at our health as more than just our bodies, but everything that we experience. Those are the things that make a life. I'm going to leave you today with a quote from my favorite poem. And I said to my body softly, I want to be your friend. It took a long and replied, I have been waiting my whole life for this. --- # Snips updated after 2026-07-09T23:47:49 ### [Five Minutes Every Half Hour Lowers Sedentary Harm](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e8424845-2749-4dde-af72-f11fe7160ce8) 🎧 00:49 - 04:26 (03:36) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/93ad60a6-b30d-4529-8a9a-a696dec3cf38" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Sitting dominates modern life and raises risks for diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and early death even for regular exercisers. - Keith Diaz's lab found contracting muscles often matters: a five-minute walk every 30 minutes (or five five-minute breaks daily) offsets much sedentary harm. #### 💬 Quote > In a single year, the average adult now spent a full 187 days, over half of the year, sitting or physically idle. > — Keith Diaz Keith Diaz on modern sedentary behavior #### 📚 Transcript **Keith Diaz:** So if you kind of map out the trajectories of our sedentary time and, you know, how much time we spend watching TV, how much time we spend sitting in a car, how much time we spend sitting at work, it's kind of been like steadily increasing across decades. This is exercise scientist Keith Diaz. And society and our cultural and societal norms are telling us you're supposed to sit in your desk. If you're not in your desk, you're not learning, you're not being productive. Keith **Manoush Zomorodi:** Diaz has spent the past 15 years researching the impacts of a sedentary lifestyle on our health and how much movement we really need to stay healthy. It all started with a headline that he desperately wanted to debunk. I came across some news **Keith Diaz:** headline, it was like in Runner's World magazine. It said something like, Sinning is the new smoking, even if you're a runner. And I was like, you know, as a runner, I tend to see exercise as the cure-all, prevent-all for everything. And so for this article to put it out there that what you do exercise-wise, you're running, that's not enough. I didn't believe it. And so I set off in my career to debunk that and show that, you know, that's not true. Exercise can overcome. That sitting isn't the kryptonite to exercise. And here we are almost 15 years later, and man, I've come to see it in a very different light. We are living in the most sedentary error in modern history. Keith Diaz continues **Manoush Zomorodi:** from **Keith Diaz:** the stage. In a single year, the average adult now spent a full 187 days, over half of the year, sitting or physically idle. The bad news is that our bodies weren't designed for this. I know because I've spent my career as a scientist studying the harms of being highly sedentary. And what scientists have found is that being highly sedentary increases your risk of diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and ultimately, early death. Worse, this is true even if you exercise regularly. Exercise only makes up a tiny fraction of your day. The toxicity comes from when movement begins to disappear from your life. And this begs the question, why isn't exercise alone enough? A part of the answer lies in our muscles. Our muscles are more than just a machinery that power movement. They're also really important for regulating things our metabolism. Let's use blood sugar as an example. Our muscles are like sponges for blood sugar. When we regularly use and contract our muscles, they're like a moist sponge soaking up the sugar from the bloodstream. But when we don't regularly use and contract our muscle, like a dry and shriveled sponge, it's really good at soaking up anything. Now, here's the key. When we exercise, it rewets the sponge. But eventually, that sponge dries out if you get little to no movement the rest of your day. If our muscles need regular use to function optimally, then outside of any exercise time, we need to be contracting them frequently through movement. The question that we asked in my lab is, what's the least amount of movement breaks that we need in order to offset the harms of being highly sedentary? And the answer we found was a five-minute walk every half hour. In **Manoush Zomorodi:** 2023, as part of the Body Electric --- ### [Tie Movement Breaks To Daily Cues](https://share.snipd.com/snip/177237d9-3b44-4e75-9c8f-f06fcfef08e2) 🎧 04:46 - 12:17 (07:30) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/33d58bbf-fcb9-41fe-8264-b9e0b9d0a30e" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Tie movement breaks to daily cues rather than device pings to build lasting habits. - Keith Diaz recommends linking a break to finishing a task or meeting and aiming for about five five-minute breaks per day. #### 💬 Quote > I've just finished a work task. I'm going to go take a movement break before I go on to the next one. > — Keith Diaz Keith Diaz on building internal cues for movement #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I **Keith Diaz:** mean, we set out really to answer the question, can people do movement breaks in the real world? And **Manoush Zomorodi:** the answer was yes. It wasn't easy at first, but once people committed to taking regular breaks throughout the day, they started noticing the positive effects on their mood, productivity, fatigue levels, and more. Plus, Keith now has an exciting What **Keith Diaz:** we're finding is that once people take about five movement breaks a day, you start to see diminishing returns in terms of their improvements in fatigue, right? Like after about five to six breaks a day, you don't get that much extra benefit from doing seven, eight, or nine. And so that to me seems like a little bit of a better message too, that, you know, just strive five. Would I love for it to be every half hour, every hour? That'd be great. But what we found in the real world is that people really had a hard time sticking to that regimented clock of every hour. But maybe this is a different way to think about it. Five times in your day, move for five minutes. Our body is constantly **Manoush Zomorodi:** sending us a signal about what it needs. But are we listening? What happens when we start paying closer attention, not just to how we feel, but to the patterns hidden inside our daily lives? From simple habits like taking movement breaks to cutting-edge wearables that track everything from sleep to stress, new tools are changing the way we understand our health. And so today on the show, we're exploring ways of tracking what the body needs. For exercise scientist Keith Diaz, when it comes to changing our sedentary habits, Keith says we need to deal with what we think being productive looks like. One **Keith Diaz:** of the biggest concerns I often hear from employers in schools about movement breaks is that they worry that it's disruptive. That it'll hurt productivity and performance. But movement doesn't mean you have to stop working. You can have walking meetings, around while you're on a call, get walking pads, or somebody just move around while thinking. But the bigger idea and concept with movement breaks is that when you compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work. And that's where the real challenge lies. Productivity culture, convenience culture and technology are reengineering our lives and still removing the need for movement. We can have groceries delivered and robots vacuum our floors without ever getting off the couch. And the consequences of this re-engineering is that we now often see movement as something to avoid. So **Manoush Zomorodi:** a lot of people rely these days on their device, a smartphone, to ping them. You know, it's time to get up. You're actually not a fan, if I understand correctly, of fitness trackers, you've told me. So, like, what, how do you, how **Keith Diaz:** do you approach this? Yeah, I mean, why I'm not as much of a fan of it is that you're relying on kind of external cues still. And where I'd love to see this and what the science kind of tells us on human behavior change is that for us to build a habit, it has to be more so something internal. Right. And so when we kind of learn how to check back in with our bodies, right, and we don't have to rely on external cues to do that, right, that behavior is much more likely to stick. The example I always use is brushing teeth, is like the ultimate health behavior that since we were kids, we're taught and trained to do, but we also have tied it to cues in our day. We know that when we get ready in the morning to go and leave our house or that when we get ready for bed at night, we automatically are cued by our environment that like, oh yeah, teeth brushing, that's next up. I put my pajamas on, I go brush my teeth. Like that's just the natural part of it. And so getting to that place in our everyday lives for movement breaks or just movement in general of like, okay, I just, I've just finished a work task. I'm going to go take a movement break before I go on to the next one. I just finished a meeting before I go to the next one. I'm going to move, right? And tying it to cues in our day rather than relying on some kind of device to remind us because ultimately people at the end of the day, most people end up hating that reminder and ignore them. **Manoush Zomorodi:** Yeah, **Keith Diaz:** you know, it's annoying. **Manoush Zomorodi:** It starts to annoy you. It starts to be like, okay, good to know. Thanks, but I'm busy. So I guess my question is, what happens next? Like our relationship with technology is getting even more entangled. So are we at this point where we have to be taught, be more specific, put language around or doses, as you say, around things that like, you know, probably when I was a kid, if someone was like, did you get enough movement today? That would be kind of like, maybe not in school, but like generally we were always moving. I had to move to go to the next class. I had to move to go get a new book. **Keith Diaz:** Yeah. And maybe it's going back to that point of like harnessing like this idea or notion that like a body that moves is a more efficient and productive body as well. Like what moves the needle for employers outside of like policy changes, right, incentivizing employers to allow this to happen? I feel like I keep saying the same story again and again and again, and people want to keep talking about it, but nothing is changing. And that's where I just feel like I feel stuck because I'm like, how much do I have to keep talking about it? How much more science needs to come out before somebody **Manoush Zomorodi:** starts doing something about it? Okay, so I'm going to offer a more positive perspective, Keith. One is that we can actually change our habits pretty fast. Like I'm thinking of going to Zoom for everything during the pandemic. And also, like, I definitely heard from the people who joined our study that once they committed to taking movement breaks and they got their friends to try it, they got their office mates to try it, they realized that they wanted to keep doing it. But it starts with just getting people to try. Yeah. And **Keith Diaz:** I think what you're getting at is it's a grassroots movement, right? Like, the top ain't changing things. So we're going to have to start from a different perspective and a approach. And it's this trickle effect. And, you know, normalizing the behavior has to start with somebody being willing to do it and step out of that comfort zone. Like, I'm always that guy in a Zoom call who, like, is walking on a treadmill while everybody else is sitting. I know, it's weird to see you sitting right now, actually. Yeah. But, you know, then some other people start thinking, like, oh, like, I want to do that, too. So a couple of my staff members went out and got walking pads, right? And so like when you make it acceptable, like, oh, that's totally a normal thing to do. And I wouldn't even think twice about it, right? Like we have to start changing that perception and that culture. And it may have to start with just people doing it and making it normal. --- ### [Wearables Reveal Early Health Deviations](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5bb9be4f-9b70-47b8-b44b-c2a7986ca1ae) 🎧 15:34 - 21:12 (05:38) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/b5d4d678-6514-4517-94b4-f104d02ad451" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Continuous wearable monitoring transforms fitness trackers into health monitors by catching early deviations like rising resting heart rate or dropping HRV. - Michael Snyder demonstrated a lab member whose multi-device data showed changes months before a fatal event. #### 💬 Quote > It was very clear four months before he passed away, he had a significant... his resting heart rate went up, his heart rate variability dropped, his gait shifted, and his sleep also shifted. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder describing wearable signals before a colleague's death #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** He's the director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. **Michael Snyder:** I have hearing aids, which I do use for hearing, but they also do sensing as well. I have an exposometer that measures airborne exposures. And I have my iPhone that tracks a few and ends, like steps and things. Some of that's redundant with the other watches. **Manoush Zomorodi:** And how long have you been collecting all of this information? **Michael Snyder:** Well, I've been collecting deep data on me for about 16 and a half years now. The wearable part, I'd say, runs for about 11 years, 12 years. Of **Manoush Zomorodi:** course, wearables and tracking devices have been around for a long time. But the types of data they can collect is constantly getting more **Michael Snyder:** precise. Your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, your blood oxygen, something you don't get in a doctor's office called galvanic stress response. This is conductance on your skin. And it turns out that when you're stressed, you're sweating more, so your skin gets more moist. And when you're diabetic, your skin gets more dry. Some of the watches will, at least one of them, will detect blood pressure and measure that. **Manoush Zomorodi:** Michael has spent decades doing massive studies using information collected from wearables. And his research is changing our understanding of how genetic risks and personal habits combine to shape human health. And for individuals, as in what does this mean for you? Well, he believes that self-monitoring and collecting more of our own physical data will soon transform how we each stay healthy. These **Michael Snyder:** devices, they're not expensive now and they're only going to get cheaper in the future. You can keep the individual people themselves healthy by, you know, catching when they first get ill, treat them, catch heart conditions. I think there's going to a ton of stuff, catch mental health problems like depression, anxiety. We're doing a lot of research there, cardiovascular disease. You know, it's not going to be a perfect system, but even if we could catch 50% of these, it'd be amazing. I **Manoush Zomorodi:** mean, I think people have been wearing like smart watches or, you know, collecting how many steps they're walking every day. And this has been going on for a while now, as you said, like over a decade. But are we at some sort of tipping point people actually know what to do with this information? Like, for example, I've been tracking my steps for six years and I rarely even look at the data. But is something changing when it comes to collecting information about our bodies? When **Michael Snyder:** these first came out, it's, as you say, they were fitness trackers. And realistically, people put them their wrist and they would wear them for three months, say, yep, I know my pattern, I'm done. Then they throw it in a drawer and be done with it. But I think what the tipping point is that you're referring to is that they're actually health monitors. They can track a lot more than just your steps. For example, resting heart rate, heart rate variability are really good indicators of your health. We've used them to be able to pick up when you're getting a viral infection in advance of symptoms because your heart rate goes up. What's powerful about them is they're measuring you 24-7. They're always following you. We've exploited this in a way that we can actually, if your heart rate's up for too high for too long, triggers a red alert. And that can be indicative of a viral infection. And more recently, we've shown it's indicative of mental health stress as well. **Manoush Zomorodi:** You actually told me a story about a Stanford researcher who had a heart attack. And there was data behind that that could have predicted that he was going to? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** it's a very interesting study, you know, a little bit tragic, to say the least. There's a person working in my lab for two years, very wonderful person, high energy, you meet this guy, you assume he's in great health and in great shape. And it turns out he was very much a believer in all of the wearable things that we were doing. He had an Apple Watch and an Oura Ring. He would exercise pretty regularly on a Peloton, which also has tracking data. And basically, one day, as he was running on his Peloton, actually quite intensely, and it turns out he died right after that. It was really quite tragic. And his wife, he knew how much he liked the lab and being there and shared the data with us and asked us to take a look at it. And because he had the latest Apple Watch and also the Oura Ring, we could track what was going on. was very clear four months before he passed away, he had a significant what I like to call step function, meaning his resting heart rate went up, his heart rate variability dropped, his gait, which you can also get from a smartwatch, shifted, and his sleep also shifted. And so there was a sign something was off, yet there was no system to relay that information back to say, hey, something's off. You should go get checked out. And I think that's what we need to do next. We have this for viral infection alerting, but we don't have it for all these other things, which is what we need to. And so we're now trying to study this further, know, track people's, if you will, state, and then build a real-time alerting system. We need to run proper studies first, but that is the goal, to be able to see when you see something's off, you may not always know what it is. --- ### [Use A CGM To Learn Foods That Spike You](https://share.snipd.com/snip/42e6a942-0407-48b9-9ed2-ad9756a5c9fe) 🎧 22:10 - 24:34 (02:23) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/34f8b05d-f260-4f26-ae29-30de6c8808ee" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Use continuous glucose monitors to learn personal food responses and prevent metabolic disease. - Snyder says CGMs are visual: they show which foods spike your glucose and a brisk 15-minute walk can suppress spikes. #### 💬 Quote > These continuous glucose monitors are so visual that once you wear them, you'll never eat the same again. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on the behavioral impact of continuous glucose monitors #### 📚 Transcript **Michael Snyder:** The way I see it working is you wear these devices. Right now they're on your wrist or your ring or even in your ear if they're a hearing aid. I think in the future, they may also be implantables because some people don't like to wear the stuff. And if you just put it under your skin and kind of like your pet, your pet often has GPS trackers. **Manoush Zomorodi:** So **Michael Snyder:** anyway, I'm not saying people are the same as pets, but you get the idea. They can track some useful things. And the point out of all of this is that we can track this stuff passively. Now, I do think there's enough information in these devices. You can get quite a bit of data. So for example, we can get a signal for red blood cell count because of the way the devices work. They actually look for it. They measure your oxygenated hemoglobin. So hemoglobin with oxygen, that's in your red blood cells. So they get a sense of your red blood cell count. And that's valuable for anemia and dehydration. And then there are other parameters like the conductance on your skin. That's important for dryness. I mentioned earlier that actually is a sign of diabetes. So there's enough parameters there that they can, they not only just tell you things are off, but they can give you some clues as to which direction they're off. So I think they will pull invaluable data. And they'll just, just like your car, you probably look at your speed and your, your gas tank, but otherwise you don't really look at much in your car. And so the way I see it working is that there'll be all these sensors running in the background. And then when something goes off, you'll get a red alert on your phone and you should probably go get it checked out. But yeah, people always ask me, what's the most important wearable to wear? And I always tell them a continuous glucose monitor because it's in part because we have so many people who are out of control with their glucose. These continuous glucose monitors are so visual that once you wear them, you'll never eat the same again. And I mean that in a good way, meaning you'll see exactly what spikes you. And this is very personal. Different foods spike different people. So you see what foods spike you, which ones don't. And you just gravitate towards the ones that don't and avoid the ones that do. And if you are going to eat the ones that do spike your glucose, well, go do that brisk 15-minute walk, and that'll suppress the spike. So there are things you can do to mitigate these. And in general, spiking is bad for your health. --- ### [Preventive Care Needs Financial Incentives](https://share.snipd.com/snip/294cc3c3-4649-4393-b647-26ccb6c482c0) 🎧 24:52 - 28:58 (04:06) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/8c56694a-882b-4a23-9530-b486e05ecc20" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Healthcare is reactive because incentives reward treating sickness, not preventing it; remote sensors and dashboards could shift care earlier. - Snyder argues insurers or providers must be incentivized to keep people healthy, like John Hancock's vitality program. #### 💬 Quote > There's no reason for any health plan to keep you healthy today. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on misaligned incentives in healthcare #### 📚 Transcript **Michael Snyder:** Our laboratory in the last 17 years has been trying to improve it. And along the way, I've even learned a lot of new things about my own health. It's broken because we practice sick care rather than healthcare. And even when we practice healthcare, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. You'll travel to a physician's office. That really hasn't changed much in the last years. When you're there, they'll take lots of blood, and from all that blood in the time you're there, they actually don't make very many measurements. And from those measurements, they'll treat you based on population averages rather than the individual. We're trying to change all those steps, and one area in particular is remote health monitoring. What if you can measure your health with sensors and a dashboard, much like your car dashboard? So **Manoush Zomorodi:** you think also that in the future, like just like we look at our car's dashboard, like, OK, are the tires inflated enough? How much gas do I have? I can check all the vital signs of my car that we'll be able to do that for our bodies too. Absolutely. **Michael Snyder:** I think we need that because I think we want, just like our car, to run well and efficiently forever, or as long as you want to live. But **Manoush Zomorodi:** how do we get to a place where we think more of healthcare as preventive, like a personal dashboard to monitor our health in a sort of more holistic way? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** well, we have to change the financial incentives. That's number one. What happens is people really only go to the doctor when they're ill. And so therefore, they only go every few years, typically. There's no reason for any health plan to keep you healthy today. And that's why we practice sick care, because that's when people get paid. And the one exception to this is this life insurance company, John Hancock. They have a vitality program that basically gives points if you wear smartwatches and do things that keep you healthy, walk your 10,000 steps, for example. And so we need more things like that because in that case, the incentives are aligned. If people live longer, John Hancock makes more money. It's a life insurance company. So they wind up making more money if you live longer and you are healthier. So that's a good thing. And so again, they've got the financial incentives aligned. We need that for our health providers as well, that they, and in the whole system, it's pretty clear if you stay healthier, you know, you'll push off having all these chronic conditions. And hopefully the idea is for us to live long, healthy and then just pass away sort of all at once, but not hang on there for the last decade of life. There are studies now that show that people live the last 11 to 15 years of their life on average with chronic conditions, meaning they're living their last decade of life unhealthy. And that's not a good situation to be in. And so I think as these technologies get cheaper and cheaper, as they get facile, like we talked about the heart attack case, if we automatically have people's information from their devices going to their doctor's office, that would actually be much more accurate because your resting heart rate first thing in the morning is way more accurate than what's in a doctor's office. And so that stuff should just be online, sitting there when you walk in. Right now, your nurse takes your blood pressure and all these things. That can just get pulled straight in and it'd be more accurate, better data. And no more of this, well, when did this seem to go off? You could actually look at someone's heart rate information and see, wow, it looks like it went off three weeks ago or whatever. You can see it because of a jump up. So I think we can pull in information a lot better. And then the physician can make better assessments and spend less time on the routine things and spend more time on more complex things. Now, of course, we're all going to have AI agents in the future, and a physician will be working with those to help better manage your health. --- ### [Pair Privacy Laws With Widely Distributed Wearables](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b128916e-d54e-4318-9736-5418a4e57737) 🎧 29:05 - 32:15 (03:10) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/42193753-d36a-4530-b683-1193c212de62" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Protect privacy and expand access: advocate laws against discrimination and provide wearables via health plans to democratize monitoring. - Snyder suggests insurers could supply smartwatches at enrollment to broaden reach. #### 💬 Quote > When you join a health plan, they should give you that smartwatch as part of the enrollment in the plan because anyone can do it. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on improving access to wearable monitoring #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I want to push back on a few of these things. Okay. So first of all, digital privacy, who's in charge of all of this data that's being collected? And if an insurance company is using it to incentivize me, couldn't they possibly also punish me or hold a pre-existing condition against me? Yeah, **Michael Snyder:** well, we would hope not. You're not allowed to be discriminated against for your genome information, for health insurance. You can for life insurance, though, and employment. You're not allowed to be discriminated for that based on your genetic information. My own view is that we obviously, if people are getting discriminated against, I do think we need laws to protect that. I'm a believer that in any wealthy society, which I view the United States and most Western countries to be in, that you should have some minimal level of health care for your citizens. So, I would hope that that would be the case for everyone. Obviously, it isn't, but we need to get there. But even if it were the case where, let's say, someone was using your smartwatch, I'd rather know that something is off and catch it with a watch than not know it exists and die of a heart attack, for example. So we need to, you know, the information is still valuable, but as it moves and becomes more facile, we do need, I think, I would argue, laws that protect people then in those circumstances. **Manoush Zomorodi:** The other concern I would have is that right now this sounds like a rich person's health care system. I mean, you know, having someone to actually give your data to, a physician or a clinician, that means that you are seeing a doctor to begin with. How do we begin to make this more accessible? Right now, this is an expensive proposition. So **Michael Snyder:** you're right. The way do deep data profiling, only rich people can afford it. And getting your genome sequence and some of these other things, only people who pay out of pocket can do it. And, you know, we have a company called QBio that does whole body MRI and a pretty deep medical testing. It's $3,500. So a number of people can pay for that. But probably the average working class family cannot or they'd have to save up. I do think it would save money in the long term. But it only hits a subset of people. So I would say, yes, some people won't have access to that. But the one area where they will have access is the wearables. That's a neutralizer. So I think when you join a health plan, they should give you that smartwatch as part of the enrollment in the plan because anyone can do it. You can do it remotely too, right? You can live in the boonies and have this data transferred to your phone. Most people do have a phone, even when they live in remote parts of the world. 60% of the world has a phone, believe it or not, of adults. And so even in these remote places, they have a phone, all I have to do is link it to a smartwatch and you've got a health tracking system can track a fair number of things. Again, resting heart rate, heart rate variability. --- ### [Individual Baselines Trump Population Averages](https://share.snipd.com/snip/57c74d7d-582f-448a-8d33-06123a99f391) 🎧 37:19 - 38:43 (01:23) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/c73b353c-228f-47f6-a8b7-ae6ddfa32a6a" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Baseline shifts in an individual matter more than population averages for early detection. - Snyder emphasizes tracking personal trajectories (resting heart rate, skin temp, HRV) to spot change even within 'normal' population ranges. #### 💬 Quote > One is your shift from your normal baseline, and the other is population average out of range. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on clinical use of personal baselines #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I guess most doctors anyway. They rely on averages, right? So for example, I just got blood work done, and as long as each thing that they tested for was in the green zone, it came back as normal. **Michael Snyder:** Do you take issue with that approach? Population measurements, they are important. Don't get me wrong. If you're out of, you know, an individual range and you're very high on certain things, it is worth looking into. But equally important is knowing your baseline because we all have very different baselines for heart rate, for skin temperature, for all these different things. And when you go off from your health, you'll get a jump up in that. But if you're by today's world, if you're still in a normal range, nobody says anything to you. And a good example is, say your heart rate is normally 60, and suddenly your resting heart rate goes to 75, something's off with you. Whereas 75 could be very normal for other people and probably wouldn't be flagged on a population average. And I think we need to get this into medicine. There's two things that count. One is your shift from your normal baseline, and the other is population average out of range. Both of those are important, and I would argue the first one's even more important, shift from your baseline. And we can pick this up with wearables. --- ### [Interpret Device Scores Carefully To Avoid Nocebo Effects](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e0cff238-2add-45bd-8fec-f8e95c6f46f4) 🎧 40:57 - 42:39 (01:41) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/3f4f6357-18d0-4732-a7a7-06202bafea69" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Use wearables selectively: they excel at detecting infections, arrhythmias, and transplant risks, but scores (like sleep) can alter perception. - Snyder notes a study where telling someone they slept well improved their daytime function regardless of actual sleep metrics. #### 💬 Quote > Depending on what you tell people determines how they feel. > — Michael Snyder Michael Snyder on psychological influence of wearable feedback #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** I've been learning about this concept of interoception over the last year, this idea of the body sort of indicating to the brain what it needs. I mean, I hear people who are like, I don't even know if I sleep well anymore. I look at my device and it tells me. And sometimes I'm like, really? That's all I slept? I thought I well. Do we start to lose touch with our embodied sense of self when we start outsourcing all of our functions to being collected and tabulated by wearables? I **Michael Snyder:** would argue wearables for certain kinds of things like infectious disease, AFib. Those are really, really valuable, right? It's hard to argue with that. We have some studies running now on transplant families. There's individuals with transplants who are trying to see if anyone in the family gets ill. And if that happens, they get a red alert and they can isolate and not ideally infect the person who had the transplant. And this has worked, actually. So it's alerted people who could die if they actually got one of these respiratory virals. So think there are situations where it's good. Now, you picked the example of sleep, which I think is one of the more interesting ones. One of my colleagues here at Stanford has run a study that shows that depending on what you tell people determines how they feel. So regardless of what the value is on their sleep device, if you tell them they had a good night's sleep from their score, even if they didn't, they actually wind up functioning very well that day. They do well. If you tell them they had a bad night's sleep, they actually don't function so well. So I think there people are very influenced psychologically by the score. --- ### [Athlete Looked Healthy But Felt Terrible](https://share.snipd.com/snip/190cebf6-ee4d-4d66-a67e-69b6ca5bf55b) 🎧 46:31 - 52:11 (05:39) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ea946338-c7a5-45ca-9c3b-1531cddd97b2" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Lizzie Braicks-Rinker felt physically 'healthy' as a college athlete yet suffered panic attacks, chronic pain, and amenorrhea. - Her mother died of cancer, exposing that outward health metrics don't equal holistic wellness. #### 💬 Quote > I was arguably at my physical peak. I was obviously working out all the time, but I also was a really hardcore vegan... I felt terrible, my friends. > — Lizzie Braicks-Rinker Lizzie Braicks-Rinker recounting her contradictory health experience #### 📚 Transcript **Lizzie Braicks-Rinker:** When you hear the term healthy, what comes to mind? What do you think of as health? So when I was in college, I was a rower, and it was my entire life. Everything that I did revolved around being healthy and being an athlete. I was arguably at my physical peak. I was obviously working out all the time, but I also was a really hardcore vegan. I had this elaborate regimen of vitamins and supplements that I took every day. I carried my emotional support water bottle with me wherever I went, and I was a cliche of a healthy person. However, the reason that I started really thinking about what it means to be well is that despite being super healthy on paper, being an athlete, I felt terrible, my friends. I was having panic attacks almost every week. I had this really weird chronic pain that no one could quite figure out, and I wasn't getting my periods. I just felt off, but I was really healthy, right? I kept saying something doesn't feel right, and I couldn't really articulate what it was. So this is a picture of me from the of college, and nine days before my dad took this picture, moving me into my apartment, our mom, Becky, died after a really long and hard-fought battle with cancer. And let me tell you, it kind of sucked. It is incredibly disorienting to watch somebody that you love be sick and die. It was incredibly disorienting to be going through that experience as I was a college athlete because one part of my life was completely revolved around optimizing my body and health and wellness. And And was seeing evidence every single day of that working. However, on the other side of my life, my mom did everything right. She was healthy, she was active, and she still got sick. And there was nothing that we could do about it. So because of my mom's illness and because of my experience as an athlete, I went on to make an entire career out of really exploring what it means to be healthy. So I'm going to throw some definitions at you. Okay, the first one is health. The World Health Organization defines health as not having disease in your body. So in that instance, I was healthy. Nary A toxin was getting near this. I was obsessed with being clean and, you know, doing all the right workouts, but I couldn't really articulate what was going on. And what I found in my work is that what I didn't have while I was healthy is I did not have any wellness. So holistic wellness is a trend that gets thrown around a lot, and it's rooted in this idea that we are a whole person, not just our bodies. So rather than putting all of the eggs into the physical basket, we start to look at our lives from the health of our environment. It looks at all of our circumstances, all of our lived experiences, and really takes those things into account to consider what we need. I've been working in wellness for 10 years, and I have coached hundreds of athletes, and I have seen a couple things to always, always be true. The first, from an athletic standpoint, is that if an athlete does not have a holistic, balanced life, their performance will fail. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. It is incredibly hard to keep it together and to care about, I don't know, going a little faster on the rowing machine if you are waiting to find out if your mom has made it out of surgery. If you don't have a safe home life, it's really hard to perform. The other thing that I see is that we're all shitting on ourselves. I'm talking about all the things that we're like, I really should do more of XYZ. And it might not even be a thing that you like. This happens to me a lot. I am really into running and people will find out this about me and come up to me and say, I should really get back into running. I used to be a big runner. And I'm like, oh, what happened? Did you get injured? And they're like, no, I hate running. I just really hate running. And I'm like, well, then why do you think you should be doing it? There are literally so many other ways that you can exercise, but this is what we do to ourselves. We tell ourselves we should be doing all of these things. We should be learning how to listen to our bodies. Like, what's the purpose of wellness? Is it just to lose weight? Is it just to look a certain way or to be able to go a little bit faster on the water? Or is the purpose of wellness and the balance of all of these different things to maybe, I don't know, make your life a little bit better instead of just your body? The last couple months of my mom's life, she was very frail. She'd lost a lot of weight and she couldn't drive. So I had to drive her to the grocery store. And this woman saw her from across the way and ran up to her and was like, Becky, I haven't seen you in years. You look amazing. You look so good. You're so healthy. My mom was like, I am literally dying. But this is what we do to ourselves and to each other. We assume if you look a certain way that you must be having a certain experience. And that is just not true. You cannot really tell anything about somebody's wellness or their lived experiences and their circumstances by the way that they look. And this is why we have to consider holistic wellness. And we have to start looking at our health as more than just our bodies, but everything that we experience. Those are the things that make a life. I'm going to leave you today with a quote from my favorite poem. And I said to my body softly, I want to be your friend. It took a long and replied, I have been waiting my whole life for this. ---