I want...
October 15, 2024 By
Leanne Vogel
February 4, 2025
Angelo Keely
So there’s the biomarkers that are really experimental and people are doing studies and it’s kind of. It’s fun for that and interesting. But I think those often, maybe it’s not that useful to measure those if you’re just practically trying to get healthy. Sometimes it is. I think there’s ones like APOB, where for 20 years it’s been known that APOB is a better predictor of chronic disease than LDL. But still, if you go to your primary care doctor, they’re going to talk about your ldl. So that’s where there’s like this disconnect between what’s known. It’s already.
Angelo Keely
Well, it’s not research anymore. Like, it’s just. It’s so many studies, like everything, it’s kind of a closed book and yet it’s not being measured. So I think those are the ones that are really high leverage and the more of those you can fit in or it’s the markers that are being measured but are not being interpreted seriously.
Leanne Vogel
Hello, my friend. We are talking about my most favorite, favorite conversation, which is blood chemistry. I had no idea what this topic was until a man named Michael Rutherford came on my podcast and blew my mind. If you remember that episode about the thyroid, he was talking about things that I had never heard of before. And I said, how do I learn from you?
Leanne Vogel
And he said, I’ve started up a.
Leanne Vogel
Course on blood chemistry.
Leanne Vogel
You can learn everything I know. And I was like, where do I sign?
Leanne Vogel
This is great. And that was a couple of years ago. And now blood chemistry plays such a key role in my practice with my one on one clients, I couldn’t imagine.
Leanne Vogel
Assisting individuals without it.
Leanne Vogel
It is so cool to see the patterns that the blood work shows us inside a functional range.
Leanne Vogel
And so to kind of preface today’s.
Leanne Vogel
Conversation, it’s important for you to understand.
Leanne Vogel
When you go to the doctor who.
Leanne Vogel
Is a diagnostic individual, they are looking at your blood work diagnostically. And so if they look at your blood work and they say everything is fine, yay, congratulations. You’re not diagnostically sick. However, you might be functionally unwell. And our conversation today is that functional range, what that looks like, how we can adjust things. It’s a really good conversation with our guest, Michael Dabrowski. He’s a materials chemist, engineer and serial entrepreneur. He is the co founder and chief product officer of SCIF Health, a startup focused on on revolutionizing healthcare with next gen at home blood testing technologies.
Leanne Vogel
Backed by names like Y Combinator and Intel Capital, X Health aims to make regular blood testing affordable and accessible for everyone. If after today’s conversation you’re like, I want to give this a try, you can go to scifox health.comleanne for 20%.
Leanne Vogel
Off your first order.
Leanne Vogel
That’s S I P H O X health.comleanne we’re chatting a lot about the motivation behind SciFox, how it started, how to understand, like testing blood at home, where this is going, how the technology works, and then understanding markers and functional ranges and testing. We talk about HbA1C and insulin and other markers that we’ve seen. We chat a little bit about ferritin and inflammation. It’s really fun to kind of pick each other’s brains and the patterns that we see in the blood work. He looks at data from a database.
Leanne Vogel
Perspective, so he has a whole bunch.
Leanne Vogel
Of numbers and ranges, whereas I am working individual with clients and kind of seeing that. So it’s really fun to pick his brain of what he’s seeing and how he interprets it and all of these things. So let’s cut over to today’s conversation with Michael.
Leanne Vogel
Hey, my name is Leanne and I’m fascinated with helping women navigate how to.
Leanne Vogel
Eat, move and care for their bodies.
Leanne Vogel
This has taken me on a journey from vegan keto high protein to everything in between. I’m a small town holistic nutritionist turned three time international bestselling author turned functional medicine practitioner offering telemedicine services around the globe to women looking to better their health and stop second guessing themselves. I’m here to teach you how to wade through the wellness noise to get.
Leanne Vogel
To the good stuff that’ll help you achieve your goals.
Leanne Vogel
Whether you’re seeking relief from chronic ailments, striving for peak performance, or simply eager to live a more vibrant life, this podcast is your go to resource for actionable advice and inspiration. Together we’ll uncover the interconnectedness of nutrition, movement, sleep, stress management and mindset, empowering you to make informed choices that support your unique health journey. Think of it as quality time with your bestie mixed with a little med.
Leanne Vogel
School so you’re empowered. At your next doctor visit, get ready.
Leanne Vogel
To be challenged and encouraged while you learn about your body and how to care for it healthily. Join me as we embrace vitality, reclaim our innate potential, and discover what it truly means to pursue healthfulness.
Leanne Vogel
Hey Michael, thanks for coming on the.
Angelo Keely
Show today and thanks for having me.
Leanne Vogel
Yeah, so I’d love, you know, I just did your official bio, but I would love for you in a Couple of words. Just tell us how you got interested in this work and why it lights you up.
Angelo Keely
Sure. So originally when we started this company was not actually a blood testing company, but we were working more just purely on some optics miniaturization. Like the. Over the last 20 years the Internet has gone from using like fiber optics and lenses and lasers that are all like in large components and big boxes kind of thing to using chips. So that’s why we’re able to have like these kinds of calls and so on. Because now the same way that we do computation on chips, we’re actually controlling all the telecommunications with chips as well. So like the fiber optics between the data centers are all connected to chips at the ends. And that sped up everything and scaled it up and so on.
Angelo Keely
So that technology is very powerful. The same way that things changed. Like everybody uses this example, but obviously the cell phone, right? Like you have a camera in your pocket that’s $2, that’s as good as a $500 camera 10 years ago or whatever. So in the same way a lot of things that contain optics can now be miniaturized. And so my co founder especially comes from this area. Like so he’s famous for designing one of the most deployed chips in telecommunications. And I’ve been working in this kind of chip for about seven years, first in academia at MIT and then later in this company. But my background is actually in chemistry.
Angelo Keely
So we kind of teamed up to miniaturize biolab instruments and we were looking at different options because in biotechnology all the instruments mostly have optics inside and they’re all very expensive. And we kind of landed on the biggest benefit being a blood testing tool. So that’s how we got into blood testing. But it wasn’t like intent. But you know, it turns out like maybe there’s something subliminal because I have a lot of doctors in my family, like all my grandparents basically. I think three out of four of my grandparents were doctors. You know, my mother is a PhD immunologist. So it’s.
Angelo Keely
I guess it’s a little bit. I’ve been exposed to it a lot and myself, I have a background in chemistry, but never expected to work in anything healthcare related. But it’s been interesting. I think the thing is in America, like you have to care about health care because it’s so bad, so you’re kind of forced to care about it. Like I would love to just not pay attention to healthcare and it’d be pretty good, right? The same way that, you know, there are many things in Society that just work and you know, people don’t like, I mean, a good example is the Internet, right? You’re not thinking about like what’s happening at, in the data center, right? You just turn on the Internet and it works great, you know, So I wish healthcare was this way, but it’s not. So it’s also kind of a rewarding place to work. So that’s kind of originally how we got into blood testing. And I think the way we got into home blood testing is we started the company right before COVID and during COVID we just really felt like, wow, you know, it’s extremely difficult to get access to testing in general.
Angelo Keely
And it makes sense that it’s all going to happen or a good portion of it will happen in the home, you know, let’s say 10 or 20 years from now. And you know, it’s one of these things like no one’s coming to save us, like somebody has to actually do it. So we decided we would build for the home instead of for the doctor’s office. And in many ways, if you’re building chips, it’s the power of chips is that you can make something really low cost, but still very complicated. So exactly like how your iPhone has the same picture quality as a camera 10 years ago, but it’s actually very small and cheap. So that scalability while remaining very accurate and high quality is why we decided it would be a great fit for the home. So we’ve been building this home blood test for years now. The company’s about five years old, but in the process we also launched what’s on the market now, which is a mail in test, which is kind of the first iteration where you put your blood on a card and you mail it in to get the results.
Angelo Keely
And that’s been quite a journey, a lot of fun. So now, you know, we’re one of the, I would say like one of the bigger mail in testing companies out there now, especially in our niche, which is more like comprehensive panels. And yeah, it’s been very fun.
Leanne Vogel
That’s really cool. So what you’re saying is when I go into the doctor and the doctor does a blood requisition for me, I then go to the lab to get my blood drawn and those little vials go off to a lab. And you’re saying that those machines have chips in them that basically determine like, help us understand.
Angelo Keely
Not yet. Those machines are now built with like normal optics, so there’s lots of like lasers and lenses inside. And so what we’re doing is Taking the those optics and putting them onto chips to make them small and cheap. That’s using kind of relatively new chip technology that lets you miniaturize optics.
Leanne Vogel
Okay, and are you saying that that will then be like blood testing in your home? You won’t need to send off a card at all. It’ll just be in your house. If you want to know your HBA1C, you could just do it in your own mini lab.
Angelo Keely
Yeah. So we, today, what we sell is much more conventional. So the blood gets separated on the card, which is actually one of the big advances for this, which seems small, but it’s much more stable as serum because you don’t get hemolysis and so on. And so that’s mailed to a lab. And we kind of squeeze as many markers as we can out of this with traditional instruments. But what we’re building in the long run is like an espresso. So there’s a cartridge you put an arm patch on. I have an example, like a patch like this, you put it on your arm and it collects a small amount of blood that goes into the.
Angelo Keely
You plug that into the cartridge that goes into the Nespresso like device, and then you walk away and you get 20 biomarkers in the dashboard, you know, two hours later. So it’s kind of like a washing machine or a coffee machine or whatever.
Leanne Vogel
But for blood work, that’s incredible. And I guess with that hemolysis, the struggle would then be with stuff like a CBC with differential, because that just has a whole bunch of complexities. Right.
Angelo Keely
Completely focused on immunoassays. So we do only immunoassays. So proteins and hormones, we’re kind of staying away from anything else right now. But for a lot of kind of preventive medicine, chronic disease, you can go a long way with immunoassays. And those are the ones that tend to be the most expensive. Expensive if you go to LabCorp or Quest. And so that’s where we’re focused.
Leanne Vogel
Yeah. And I’m so glad that you mentioned the price of things, because as a practitioner, I get to see what the lab actually charges. And it’s quite small compared to then what practitioners will charge or what insurance companies will charge. In fact, I work with a couple of providers that, let’s just say as an example, a fasting insulin test is $4 from the lab insurance will mark it up to around 150 and a practitioner might put it in the range of 125. And so this basic marker that the Lab is charging under $10 for is now astronomically more expensive just because there’s so many people involved in it all and everyone wants their pound of flesh. Have you seen that too, in your own experience?
Angelo Keely
Yeah, I mean, if you look at it depends on the lab and whether of course, if it’s covered by insurance, it’s going to go through a totally different pricing scheme which isn’t always connected to the real cost of running the test. Certain tests are extremely low cost with insurance. But it depends, I think, you know, in our view, the cost of doing a test, it’s not just a cost for that one marker. It’s really the whole experience. Right. So you have to get your blood draw, deal with whatever. You know, it’s the whole stack of like, how do you get access to it, how do you get the prescription for it, where does your blood get drawn, how long does it take you to get there? You know, once you stack all of that up, even if you get relatively low cost blood work somehow so you’re able to go through a company that can give you better pricing for LabCorp or whatever, you’re still going and getting the phlebotomy draw and sitting in traffic and so on. So we kind of look at it holistically.
Angelo Keely
But for sure you can get charged any amount of it’s healthcare, right? So you can get charged any amount of money for anything. Like it’s, you know. So I think my first experience with this was at some point getting into a car accident and just looking at the bill. It’s like saline, like sodium chloride. You know, it’s like $5 for sodium for like saline that they washed the wound. I had like a cut from some glass and they washed the wound with saline and it was $500 for the saline. So I think, you know, it can just. It’s just arbitrary sometimes.
Angelo Keely
For sure.
Leanne Vogel
Yes. I bet. I know. My husband does blood donations to keep his ferritin regulated and he gets paid like what, 25. And we were looking up the average price that the blood is purchased for. And those businesses are making a good amount of money, like a really good amount of money. Okay, so it sounds like your initial process is that individuals are able to prick their finger, send the blood in from a card and you guys do the analysis and send back the results. So what would be benefited there, I guess, is not having to go, like you said, to the phlebotomist and book an appointment and all those sorts of things.
Leanne Vogel
And it’s probably a lot less blood drawn. I would imagine on a card versus a vial. And then it sounds like stage two is then having this like Nespresso type of technology where you don’t even need to send in a card. This machine will just tell you what your markers are. Did I kind of summarize that correctly?
Angelo Keely
Yeah. And I think importantly with the card, what we’ve done is I think a lot of companies in this space, you know, there are different at home testing companies. I think a lot of companies in the space. So it splits like this. Either you have your Venus Draw company. So there are companies like Inside Tracker, Functional Health, which do as many markers. You know, it’s like 100, 150 markers or whatever. And there they’re kind of maximizing because you’re going to a phlebotomist.
Angelo Keely
So they’re maximizing. Okay, if you’re already here, we’re going to take all these markers and measure them. And then there are kind of the. On the opposite spectrum is, you know, people search like cholesterol test. And so you have your let’s get checks of the world or Everlywell and so on. That will sell you the test you’re looking for. So I’m looking for a cholesterol test. You get like three markers, you know, hdl, ldl, triglycerides or whatever, Syfox.
Angelo Keely
We took a different position. Like we’re pretty opinionated. So we decided, okay, we’re going to squeeze as many markers as we can out of one collection. So this is, you know, you’re going through all the trouble of pricking your finger, whatever it is. And so we’re going to give you as many markers as we can, but we’re going to pick the ones that really have a lot of leverage. And so we group the markers along like cardiometabolic health, hormonal health, some nutritional markers slash like, you know, some of them go multiple ways, like ferritin. You can have high ferritin, right, like you mentioned with your husband, or you can have low ferritin, which more nutritional like anemia and then inflammation and so on. And then we actually basically with this card we do 17 markers.
Angelo Keely
And then there’s there we saw an extra like half card that’ll do 7 more typically for like either hormones or thyroid or metabolics. You can do add ons as well. But our whole thing is the most tests that are useful, like the most actually useful markers for the price and for the blood volume. So it’s kind of just making the experience as valuable as possible because nobody I Mean, in the end, the actual blood collection is not fun. Right. So if you’re going to do that, we really want to make it valuable for you so that it’s something you want to incorporate in your life as like a quarterly, you know, something that, that’s part of your health routine long term, like for 10 years.
Leanne Vogel
Right. For those that geek out over functional blood chemistry with me, I’m going to list off the markers able to find on your website as to what you test for just so that they have that full list. So it’s Apo B, Apo A1, HDL, LDL, HbA1c, triglycerides, HSCRP, and then we have some of the hormones, DHEAs, estradiol, cortisol. Then you have your total, your TG to HDL ratio, basically testosterone, testosterone, cortisol ratio, your FSH, TSH, vitamin D, which is your 25. Oh, your total cholesterol to HDL ratio. Homocysteine, fasting insulin, which. Oh, my goodness, no doctor will include the fasting insulin in a checkup. So that’s really good that it’s in there.
Leanne Vogel
Ferritin also is one that’s rarely tested for, that needs to be all the time. And then your apo B to apo A1 ratio and total cholesterol, that’s kind of. Is that maybe you’re able to say yes, Leanne, you got it right? You got all the markers. Did I get that right?
Angelo Keely
Mostly. So that’s, that’s kind of the core panel and then we have the expansion packs. So, like with the metabolic, you can also get your liver enzymes, creatinine and then lp, which is really important for if you’ve never had it measured for potential heart disease. And then we have extra hormones as well, like all that, like prolactin, LH and so on.
Leanne Vogel
Okay, awesome.
Angelo Keely
For men, we also do in the male hormone expansion, you get free testosterone, shbg. I’m trying to remember what else but PSA is in there. So, like for prostate cancer. So that’s good to check once in a while. So you have a baseline. And then we also have like T3, T4, TPO in the thyroid expansion panel.
Leanne Vogel
Awesome. And if people are familiar to the NMR profile, which is a cholesterol panel is quite popular among individuals wanting to know their cardiovascular health. But things like the APOB, the APO1LP, like you mentioned, all those are part of the NMR and are really challenging to get your doctor to pull them for you. And so oftentimes, if A client comes to me and is concerned about cardiovascular health or really wanting to understand their cholesterol. Those markers are essential to understanding the big picture. And so I love that those pieces were included in the testing that you’re doing. Are you finding, like, do you get to interact with the customers that you’re serving and what sorts of feedback have you had from them in regards to the results that they’re getting?
Angelo Keely
Yeah, so we, you know, originally two years ago when we started this, selling the test kits, we were more like, okay, meat and potatoes. Like you get your results and we display them in a dashboard, but that’s it. Since then we’ve evolved a lot and we have a decent sized team that’s working on insights and action items for people based on their blood work and just educational materials and so on so you can more take control of the situation once you have the data. And we also provide people tools like we make it easy to get a continuous glucose monitor if you want one based on your blood work, or even like, we suggest supplements that can help and so on. So we do try to at least offer, I mean, a lot of people that take these kinds of tests have their own kind of plans, right? So they’re not necessarily, they’re already like very educated, but some people are not. And so especially if you, let’s say you buy this for your parents or something and you know, they need, they need it to be digested. So we’ve done a lot of that. I think that’s had really good feedback.
Angelo Keely
Like, I personally, I give a simple, funny example, like we give these insights with the biomarkers and I’m a big sauna guy, I’ve just always been because my family’s from Russia. And I wrote all these, I wrote these myself because I don’t think the clinical team would have done this. So I wrote all these insights about how like, you know, sauna reduces inflammation and so on. And that’s one of the, you know, people can vote like, is this insight helpful? That’s one of the ones that gets a lot of helpful clicks, you know, because it’s something that you can do that’s not a drug, it’s not a diet change, which is difficult. It’s actually something you can like add to your life. And it, you know, has all these benefits and they’re pretty proven. I mean, we put references and so on. That’s a funny one.
Angelo Keely
But it actually gets a lot of good feedback. But I think the main thing that people like about the service is that it’s just the simple aspects of it. It’s like easy, low cost and convenience. Right. And I think that we treat you. I think like, we treat people with respect. Like, respect their intelligence in a way. So we, we don’t.
Angelo Keely
Like, we’re not like, oh, here’s some random markers, like, you know, random test for like, some food sensitivity or whatever, like just some kind of thing that’s not necessarily. It’s not even clear what it is. And maybe it’s like more of like a toy test. It’s more, you know, okay, these are tests that really serious. The medical community knows that these are useful. If you’re getting concierge medicine, probably you’re getting these tested and we’re making them available, you know, kind of to the general public in an easy way. So I think we’ve had a lot of great feedback from that. And I think basically because honestly, I think a lot of it is podcasts, but it’s.
Angelo Keely
There’s just more and more knowledge out there about biomarkers. And so we are kind of. We don’t create that. Like, we’re just at the. We’re kind of downstream of it. So as people learn more about biomarkers and preventing chronic disease versus, you know, waiting for symptoms and so on, I think we’re downstream of that. And then they’re like, okay, what’s a good service to start tracking this? And so on.
Leanne Vogel
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Leanne Vogel
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Leanne Vogel
Absolutely. So many questions stem from this, I think one being, are you using more functional ranges for the blood work or using more diagnostic ranges? Because if you’re waiting for the fasting insulin to be sky high, what’s the point in getting the test? Or can you go through that a little bit more?
Angelo Keely
So for certain things, we kind of have a mix. So for certain things, we use kind of the standard range. For certain things, we override the standard range. And we do put a warning there, but we override it because we just don’t think it’s fair to show the standard range because it’s unreasonable. Like, I think a simple one is CRP. The standard range goes up to 3, but you’re very sick if you have a CRP of 3 consistently. Like, that’s, that’s a really, you know, that’s something that should be addressed ideally. And that’s all.
Angelo Keely
I mean, it’s not. I’m not making this up. It’s just all. It’s. If you. It’s in the literature, it’s accepted by the medical community, but because the average American has a CRP of 2.5, you know, they just set the range near, you know, near the average. And that’s just how the system works right now. But we also have a toggle that’s called, like, biohacker ranges that kind of squeezes all the ranges into optimal, you know, more optimal, like, ideal ranges.
Angelo Keely
And then all the scores kind of get worse because you’re not in these ideal ranges. So for people that are adventurous, they can, like, toggle the biohacker ranges. But we try to, you know, the product is meant to be generally applicable, so we try not to scare people too much with, like, the ideal ranges. Right. But. But we strike a balance, I would say.
Leanne Vogel
So what you’re saying is when I get a card, I drop my blood on the card, I send it back to you guys, then you give me access to some online portal, and I’m able to kind of see those results and then toggle. Do I want it to be super biohacker nerdy, like, tight or do I want it like more open range and you can kind of just see what those numbers would look like. Did I get that right?
Angelo Keely
Yeah, exactly. And it’s. I think it’s helpful to have a dashboard where you can track your data. We also allow you to upload third party results. So, like, if you have a LabCorp test, you can actually upload and it’ll show up in your graphs and that allows you to track over time. So if you’re getting your yearly blood test, you can bring that data into your. Into your dashboard.
Leanne Vogel
And since you mentioned ALT and I think AST also as being markers that you add, do you have a biohacker range for that one too? Being liver, like, oftentimes doctors won’t act on things until it’s, oh my goodness, I’ve seen 80s where they’re like, oh, yeah, maybe we should address this now. Whereas my range is 10 to 20. Do you have more of a tighter range on that too?
Angelo Keely
Yeah, yeah. So for one of the liver enzymes, I’m just. Because this happened to me personally. So I had just slightly elevated. I forget if it was AST or alt, but the last time I measured was slightly elevated. And I happened to get a Prinovo body mri, like full body mri.
Leanne Vogel
Vaughn, I just got one of those. Aren’t they the coolest thing? Yeah.
Angelo Keely
You know, I don’t know if I can recommend it necessarily because it’s just expensive, but I got it. Like, this is just my line of work, right. So I have to try all the products. But it was cool. But the one thing that came up on that was that I had like very early beginnings of liver, like fatty liver or whatever. Right. And it’s correlated to this marker. So now I’m like, oh, man.
Angelo Keely
Okay, I have to eat less sugar. But anyway, that’s the insight that I got from the blood test and it was just verified by the mri. So it’s definitely very powerful to not ignore because it’s only slight. I think it’s so close to the normal range that it probably would be ignored normally. So it’s like what you’re saying?
Leanne Vogel
Yes, exactly. For men, I like the AST alt to be like 10 to 26. It’s a little bit higher for men, but the same thing happened to my husband. Husband. His ALTST was just a little bit elevated, like 28. And I was like, babe, I think there’s probably something going on with your liver. And he was like, no, no, no, it’s fine. I’m like, okay, let’s Just get you a pranobo scan and sure enough, the beginnings of fatty liver.
Leanne Vogel
So, yes, of course, with a slight elevation also in triglycerides, it’s just such a great sign that we need to cut the carbs and move our body a little bit more. So that’s really cool that you can kind of see the two side by side and really good markers. And oftentimes what I see when you go in for your yearly checkup, the doctors will usually only do ALT or ast, or just skip it all together and maybe just do bilirubin. And if bilirubin is elevated, then maybe they’ll dig a little bit deeper. Do you find, like, it’s just my thought on blood work is that the more markers you have, especially these comprehensive markers, the better able. You’re able to tell kind of the big picture of what’s going on. Like, if I just have bilirubin, I don’t know if the elevation is because of the gallbladder. I don’t know if maybe there’s sluggish conjugation, which I could tell if there were more data sets.
Leanne Vogel
Do you find that too, is just like if the more data you have, the clearer the picture is or not?
Angelo Keely
I think the not so. So there’s kind of this hierarchy of markers. I would say there are some because I come, you know, from more maybe like a little bit of an academic background of this because we’re based in Boston and there’s so much biotech here, and I have a lot of friends working biotech. So there’s the biomarkers that are really experimental and people are doing studies and it’s kind of. It’s fun for. For that and interesting. But I think those often. Maybe it’s not that useful to measure those if you’re just practically trying to get healthy.
Angelo Keely
Sometimes it is. I think there’s ones like APOB, where for 20 years it’s been known that APOB is a better predictor of chronic disease than LDL. But still, if you go to your primary care doctor, they’re going to talk about your ldl. So that’s where there’s like this disconnect between what’s known. It’s already. Well, it’s not research anymore. Like, it’s just. It’s so many studies, like, everything, it’s kind of a closed book, and yet it’s not being measured.
Angelo Keely
So I think those are the ones that are really high leverage and the more of those you can fit in, or it’s the markers that are being measured but are not being interpreted seriously. So, like, you’re saying they’ll wait until they’re very elevated or like crp, it’ll be so elevated before there’s really a discussion. So I think that’s where there’s a lot of leverage. And the more of those you can get into a panel, the more likely you are to, you know, kind of make. Make a good decision. Also, the other thing is that some of these things are a little bit overdetermined. So you might see the same information in multiple markers. Like HDL and home IR might both tell you that you have insulin resistance.
Angelo Keely
But if it also helps you, like, lab tests aren’t always, like 100% accurate. You can have some variability. It depends on whatever happened to you that day and so on. But if both of them are bad, that’s a consistent story. So if you have more markers, you can be more sure. Like, okay, there’s really an issue here versus, oh, this is a blip something. Because for sure, I think having a blood test once a year, like the typical. Or sometimes people wait every two years or whatever, and then who knows what happened that day.
Angelo Keely
Like, you might have been at poor sleep or whatever it is. And. Or, you know, when they were stabbing you, the phlebotomist was stabbing you, they had to prick, you know, try three times. And so you were, like, very stressed out. And so it started. I think doing the blood test more often and having more markers makes a story more, you know, it’s like more clues and you’re more likely to have the right interpretation.
Leanne Vogel
Yes. I couldn’t agree with you more. I know that things like hemoglobin and even some of your cholesterol markers can be elevated if you. You go for a workout before. And so even the factors contributing leading up to the testing can affect the markers a little bit. Just kind of talking about markers and their validity. How do you feel about HBA1C and kind of the stuff like, do you feel like this is a valid marker that we’re going to be using in years to come, like. Or not? Because I don’t really use HBA1C anymore.
Leanne Vogel
I find C peptide and fasting insulin to be a better understanding, and even triglycerides a better understanding of overall blood sugar regulation. Are you finding that too? With some of the recent data that’s coming out, the HBA1C might not be around for much longer. There’s that discrepancy between what doctors are using and what is actually happening right.
Angelo Keely
Now, Yeah, I think, you know, my take is, again, it’s like the more information you have, the better. So HbA1c definitely correlates to the other metabolic markers really strongly in our data sets, at least. So if you have dysregulated HBA1C, you know, there’s a good chance, like your trig HDL is high and all these things. But I will say that it’s definitely not a, it’s not a leading indicator. So it’s just, it’s maybe one of the last things to change. So from that perspective, you know, it might still be worth measuring because it’s a low cost test and you can always keep track of it. And you want, you want all these things to be telling a consistent story, ideally so that there’s nothing going on. That again, like you said, if your lipids are off because of something, then your HBA1C is independent of that.
Angelo Keely
And so your TRIG HDL and HBA1C might disagree or something like that. Like, if you see a person with an HBA1C of 4.9, but they have a trig HDL of 3, you might want to measure them again because that’s like, in our data set, that would be very atypical. Yes, you have a high trig HDL. You’ll also have a HBA1C above 5.5 or something. But I think anecdotally I know someone who had a high HBA1C and he noticed that like, after a lot of binge drinking, he was able, his HBA1C dropped, which doesn’t seem like, doesn’t seem like actually an improvement in his blood sugar. Probably it might be something else, but I don’t know if that’s been found in the literature that like, that will cause alcoholism, will cause HBO and C to go down. But that’s another thing where, like, it’s not a super specific marker. So that’s another issue that you might have with it, that other things might affect it besides your blood sugar.
Leanne Vogel
So HbA1c requires hemoglobin. Like it’s a measurement of indirect measurement of hemoglobin. And if you just think about your friend with the hemoglobin, when there’s inflammation in the gut, hemoglobin will go down, which will cause the hemoglobin to live longer, which will increase the HbA1c. So I could see how binge drinking could actually affect the HBA1C. Yeah, so that is not me saying if you want to lower your HBA1C go for a binge drink? Not at all. Not at all. But the reason I ask about HBA1C specifically is because many of the ladies listening are not eating enough and many of them are nutrient deficient. And when we’re nutrient deficient, our hemoglobin will live longer, which means that the HBA1C will be higher.
Leanne Vogel
And I see this pattern time and time again with ladies around 40 to 45 years old where their ferritin is lower, their hemoglobin is lower, and the HbA1c is more elevated. And so I’m always curious on the HBA1C piece because, gosh, I get so many contacts from ladies saying my doctor’s saying my HBA1C is elevated, but I eat a low carb diet. I don’t understand what’s going on. And so I’m always curious what other people are seeing in this space.
Angelo Keely
Yeah, yeah, I think definitely. You know, I’m just trying to think back to our data set, like what we actually see in our data. We definitely see more low ferritin in women than you would think because it’s kind of a popular topic, but still it’s not really well addressed. I also think, I don’t know what your take is on the best way to resolve it, but I’m, I’m like very biased towards these like organ meat pills. I think those are really great because my wife used them and had, like, there’s just anecdotal, but she preferred it to like every other. She tried everything.
Leanne Vogel
Yeah. So I love organ based capsules and things when ferritin is low. But generally what I see functionally is when ferritin is kind of sitting around the 30 mark, it can be infection based. And so infection will cause the ferritin to be a little bit lower, which will then when you’re giving the infection iron, it can actually make the infection worse. So usually before I recommend, hey, just go on a whole bunch of organ capsules, we figure out whether or not there’s parasites or H. Pylori or Sibo, because especially in the case of parasites, it can actually make the problem worse because the ferritin acts like parasite food and it causes a whole mess. A whole mess. Really fun stuff.
Leanne Vogel
But yeah, if the hemoglobin is low and there’s an overall nutrient deficiency, even if it’s just slight, I totally agree with you. Organ capsules, I personally take them and I notice a huge difference in my energy. Like it’s incredible. So I agree, absolutely. So earlier you were talking about. You mentioned toy tests. Can you explain what you meant by that?
Angelo Keely
I think the worst example I’ve ever seen of this was there’s, like, a test for your dog to see, like, what allergies your dog has, but it uses dog hair, so, like, it’s super convenient, right? You just cut a piece of your dog hair off, and you mail it to them, and they tell you, like, what your dog’s allergies are. But, I mean, at that point, you can send it to, like, a fortune teller, you know, because there’s just no way. There’s just no way. There’s just no way that’s. They. There’s no scientific basis on which they can figure out your dog’s allergies from that. Right. And so I think there’s a.
Angelo Keely
That’s the worst. Right? And I think, you know, the most scientific would be, yeah, just getting, like, an apob or something like that. And then there’s the range of everything in between, I would say. So I think it’s. I think probably in the midpoint would be, like, the aging tests, which we actually. I mean, there’s a lot of demand for them. So we sell one that I think. I think they’re legitimate.
Angelo Keely
Like the DNA methylation. The thing is just. There’s not a lot of action. Like, okay, you get your DNA methylation. It’s like you’re 40 years old or whatever. And then there’s not a lot of action you can take based on. It doesn’t change very quickly. But I think that’s probably.
Angelo Keely
I would call that, like, the neutral point. So it’s neither toy nor that useful. And then you have things on either side of it.
Leanne Vogel
Yeah. It’s funny. I mean, I’ve been in functional medicine since 2007, and so much has changed, but so little has changed. Like, a new test will come out, and I’ll be like, okay, I’m gonna try this with a couple of clients and just see how it goes. And I’m like, no, that’s trash. I’m going back to what I used before. And so there are. There’s so many things out there that it’s usually.
Leanne Vogel
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Like the dog hair. I’ve never even heard of the dog hair allergy thing. That is absolutely ridiculous. Earlier, you talked about how if somebody were to do a test with you guys and determine probably through HbA1c or fasting insulin, that they needed a CGM, that your team can get them a CGM is that, can you go into more detail on that?
Angelo Keely
We have kind of like a tools section for members where they can, we don’t make money from these things, we just kind of offer them as a membership benefit. So you can get a CGM from us at cost. So that just shipped to your house. And then it’s an Abbott Libre 3. So we just charge what it costs us. And then we also sell a three point cortisol saliva test for people that come up with either like you can connect your wearable device and we can track your sleep and so on in the same dashboard. And if we see that there is a reason to do a three point cortisol test, we’ll suggest that as well. And then we partnered with a company called Founts that does basically like these supplement stacks, like very conveniently packaged supplements.
Angelo Keely
And so we offer, we suggest some standard kind of stacks based on the biomarker profile. But also, I mean we encourage people to buy their supplements wherever, but it’s just for convenience, like actually having them in a daily packet, I find for me I’m much more likely to take them. So that’s why we offer that. So our thing is like always, what can we do to help people decrease or improve rather their biomarkers so that when they test again they see, okay, I’m actually getting value out of these tests because I can improve this. And so that’s kind of our philosophy in general in terms of like what do we put out there?
Leanne Vogel
I agree with you on the packets. I make a batch of packets every month and it takes me so long to do it myself. But I’m very picky about the supplements that I use. And so having those packets, it really does make a difference. Like I will not take them if they’re not in packets. I’ll just forget them. So I can totally agree with you on that one. Who’s putting together the supplement recommendations? Like, are you using, how did you kind of determine, I don’t know as an example, if ALT and ASD are elevated and fasting insulin is elevated, what supplements are we recommending? And how did you determine that?
Angelo Keely
We have some advisors, like clinical advisors. And also just internally we did. I mean there’s 15 PhDs at SciFox because we have the whole science team working on the device and so on. So and we have, we have an MD that’s kind of a product. He’s like a product manager for this product line. And you know, we basically just tried to say, okay, what’s the conservatively right so we don’t want to be that innovative in terms of supplements. It’s just not our area. So just conservatively, what are the things that are really well understood that, you know, like magnesium glycinate is a good example.
Angelo Keely
That one’s like very popular, very well understood. So we’re not very adventurous in terms of supplements, but it’s just okay if you’re not taking anything and you have this marker out of range like this, is this a good place to start? And that’s kind of where we like to play in terms of that, because it’s not our main thing, but it’s like, okay, if you just want the standard thing that everybody generally agrees does help most people, then you can try it. And if it improves your biomarkers, you know, you can continue taking it. That’s.
Leanne Vogel
That’s our tip, right? Yeah, I totally agree with you on that one.
Leanne Vogel
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Leanne Vogel
Now can customers kind of. It sounds like they can act on their results not only from a supplement standpoint, but also you gave the example of the sauna on things to add because I agree with you. I know that my clients, when I’m saying remove XYZ and cut out this and cut out that, it’s A real negative, it’s more challenging. But if you say add this and bring this in and fold this in, it’s a lot more, I feel like, easy to implement. So it sounds like when you get a report back, it’s not just, here are a couple of supplements that could help based on these patterns, but also here are a couple things to add and think about when it comes to markers that you’re testing high or low for. And I would imagine that that would change if you change the toggles at the top to be tighter or not.
Angelo Keely
Yeah, I mean, we don’t really change the recommendations based on the toggles, but some of the recommendations are more stronger. Like you definitely should consider this versus some are. Well, some people will do this, but you know, it depends how out of range you are. Right. So our recommendations get more extreme as you get more out of range. And I mean, probably the most, the, the most sophisticated thing we do is we’ll actually, we have a program where if you really want to, you know, improve your heart disease risk, will titrate medication for you, like via telemedicine. So either ezetimibe or statins, but going on like the lowest effective dose versus if you go to your primary care, often they’ll just say, here’s a standard dose of statins, like, come back in a year. So we actually track like the side effects through biomarkers and also start with the lowest dose versus starting on, you know, the average dose.
Angelo Keely
And so that we’re just beta testing that. So we have 100 people in that program, but it’s. Yeah, we think there’s some value potentially in that type of thing.
Leanne Vogel
And how often, like you mentioned, when you go on a statin with your pcp, oftentimes they’ll put you on that. They’ll say, come back in a year with this beta test that you’re doing. How often are you retesting to kind of see their, how they’re handling the protocol you’ve put them on?
Angelo Keely
So they can test up to every six weeks. Just it’s like a subscription. And so they can test kind of as often as they want, up to every six weeks. So initially we recommended they test every six weeks and then they can slow down once they’re in more of like a maintenance mode.
Leanne Vogel
That’s so cool. Like it, I don’t know, as a practitioner, just hearing that people are interested in this kind of stuff and seeing the really cool thing about testing your blood is you’re testing your cells and your cells respond. So Quickly. And so it’s a really fun way to see, you know, if is what I’m doing making an impact. And you should see changes pretty quickly on many of the markers. So I think that that’s really neat that there are people that are interested in that sort of thing. I know I have some clients that are like, okay, can we test again? I want to see. It’s like Christmas morning.
Leanne Vogel
Like, what changed, what shifted? And that’s so fun. When we’re thinking about the future, you kind of talked about that kind of Nespresso machine wearable device. Can you talk to us a little bit more about, like, timeline on that, the challenges that you’ve had, kind of what your vision is?
Angelo Keely
Yeah, I think, you know, vision is very simple. You know, we think this is just like the coffee machine or a printer or something. This is just going to be a standard thing that’s in every home, or at least, you know, 20, 30% of homes or something like that. I think in terms of timeline, it’s hardware, so it’s definitely not. Not super quick. We’ve already done a lot of demos where we go out to conferences and, you know, test people’s blood, like that kind of thing with our device. But it’s, you know, we’re a couple years away from FDA clearance, but we will probably do a large investigational study where if you sign up as, like, a study participant, you can get a device in your home before it’s FDA cleared. But then you’ll have to, like, basically, you know, be available to help us, help us, like, give us feedback on the user experience and things like that.
Angelo Keely
But that can go up to. Potentially up to, like, 10,000 users. So it can be pretty significant. Pretty significant study. And that’s something we’re planning hopefully for 2026.
Leanne Vogel
That’s so exciting. That’s so exciting. Do you feel like there are any pieces that I left out, pieces that you want to cover, areas that you feel like our listeners could benefit from that maybe we didn’t touch on today?
Angelo Keely
Yeah, I think there’s one thing. So we’re planning to come out with a version of the test that’s a little bit fewer biomarkers because of just the way it’s done. But it’s. You don’t have to prick your finger. It’s actually one of these arm patches, so you collect blood through the arm. So I think definitely, if you’re the. I think I used to be very scared of pricking my finger, but I had to do it so many times. For, you know, after the first couple of times, I was like, okay, it’s not too bad.
Angelo Keely
But it’s, we also have this device that we send to every new customer, which is like a vacuum pump. You put on your finger and you, it’s. You squeeze this bulb and it, it helps people that don’t bleed. Well, to be frank, like for women, this is usually not a problem, but it’s more of a problem for men. But it can be sometimes, but it really helps because some people just cannot bleed out of their finger and so they have a bad experience otherwise. So I think that’s really helped us. We have a much higher success rate than typical home testing company. But for if you’re really scared to prick your finger or you done it before, and I’m never doing this again, first of all, I encourage you to do it.
Angelo Keely
But, but also will definitely I would just throw your email into like our whatever, like newsletter thing. And when we come out with the arm collector test, that’s really, you know, an alternative that works well for people that don’t like to prick their finger. And so I think that’s, that’s a couple of months away probably.
Leanne Vogel
That’s really exciting. I know that there when I started peptides, which are like multi injections in a day, I was like, no way I’m going to be able to do this. No way. And now the needle goes in. I don’t even think about it.
Leanne Vogel
Same with the cgm. I remember being so nervous, I let.
Leanne Vogel
That thing sit there for way too long, being like, I don’t think I could do this. So it’s always worth a couple of tries to be like, okay, it’s actually, it’s actually not that bad. I can do this. But for those who have tried it multiple times and there’s just, it’s not happening. I love that you have another solution. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This is a blast to pick your brain and hear more about your product. This is just awesome.
Angelo Keely
Yeah, thanks. Thanks. This was really fun.
Leanne Vogel
I hope you enjoyed our time with Michael again. If you love what you’re hearing, you can go to psypoxhealth.comleanne that’s S I P H O X health.comleanne for 20% off your order. Okay, I’ll see you back here next week. Another episode. Can’t wait for it. Hope you have a great rest of the week and we will chat then.
Leanne Vogel
Bye.
Leanne Vogel
Thanks for listening to the helpful Pursuit podcast. Join us next Tuesday for another episode. Of the show. If you’re looking for free resources, there are a couple of places you can go. The first to my blog, healthfulpursuit.com where you’re going to find loads of recipes. The second is a free parasite protocol that I’ve put together for you that outlines symptoms, testing and resources to determine whether or not you have a parasite, plus a full protocol to follow to eradicate them from your life if you need to. That’s available@healthfulpersuit.com parasites and last but certainly not least, a full list of blood.
Leanne Vogel
Work markers to ask your doctor for.
Leanne Vogel
So that you can get a full.
Leanne Vogel
Picture of your health. You can grab that free resource by going to healthfulpursuit.com labs the helpful pursuit Pursuit Podcast, including show notes and links, provides information in respect to healthy living recipes, nutrition and diet and is intended for informational purposes only. The information provided is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor is it to be construed as such. We cannot guarantee that the information provided on the Helpful Pursuit Podcast reflects the most up to date medical research. Information is provided without any representation or warranties of any kind. Please consult a qualified health practitioner with any questions you may have regarding your.
Leanne Vogel
Health and nutrition program.
Hi! I'm Leanne (RHN FBCS)
a Functional Medicine Practitioner, host of the Healthful Pursuit Podcast, and best-selling author of The Keto Diet & Keto for Women. I want to live in a world where every woman has access to knowledge to better her health.