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

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

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

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

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

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🎙️ About the Guest:

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

📍What Dr. Michael Snyder & Mike Haney discussed:

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

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

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

🔗 Helpful Links:

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

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

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

👋 Who we are:

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

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