LEVELS – A Whole New Level

Heart disease is the leading cause of death, but it’s also one of the most preventable. Decades of research have established a strong causal role for LDL and other ApoB-containing particles in atherosclerosis, and we now have multiple proven ways to lower them. The harder question is how to turn that evidence into a decision for an individual person. Mike Haney talks with Johns Hopkins cardiologis...

Most of NextLevel starts with a measurement problem: we can see more biology than ever, but we still have to figure out what to do with it. Bioelectronic medicine flips that sequence. We already know how to send electrical signals into the nervous system to change biology, including an FDA-approved vagus nerve treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, even though we still can’t map or read most of the i...

Most health decisions happen before the science is settled. A study points one way, another points somewhere else, experts disagree about what matters, and even strong population-level evidence may not tell you what will happen to you. In this episode, Mike Haney talks with physician and economist Dr. Anupam Jena about how to make decisions under that kind of uncertainty. The goal isn’t to find a...

Most medical imaging happens after a symptom, injury, or abnormal test gives a clinician a reason to look. But what changes if imaging becomes a more routine measurement, creating a record of the body before something goes wrong? In this episode of Next Level , Mike Haney talks with Dr. Daniel Durand, chief medical officer at Prenuvo, about whole-body MRI as a test case for a broader shift from ep...

Alcohol has spent the last 40 years bouncing between two health narratives: a little is good for your heart, or any amount is dangerous. The science doesn’t really support either slogan. Dr. Tim Naimi has spent decades studying the health effects of alcohol and, just as importantly, why the research is so difficult to interpret. His read of the evidence is less dramatic but more useful: there’s no...

From a single blood sample, new proteomic tools can now measure thousands of proteins at once. Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray’s lab is using that flood of data, together with machine learning, to build a much higher-resolution picture of what’s happening throughout the body and where someone’s health may be headed. The early signals are striking. In one analysis of people who appeared healthy by conventional...

Aging science has gotten much better at describing who appears to be aging faster or slower. What medicine still lacks is a reliable feedback loop: a way to tell whether something we do is actually changing the biology that drives age-related disease. Dr. Nir Barzilai argues that solving that measurement problem could turn geroscience from an interesting field of research into something doctors ca...

Medical AI is already getting good at doing things doctors do. Dr. Ziad Obermeyer thinks the bigger opportunity is using AI to discover things medicine doesn’t yet know. His work shows both sides of that future: algorithms can amplify bad assumptions when trained on the wrong targets, but they can also uncover signals in medical data that humans miss. Obermeyer argues that as more health data is c...

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

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

Is intermittent fasting biohacker wellness hype or legit health intervention? Some studies show real benefits, others find nothing, and the occasional headline calls it bad for your heart. Dr. Courtney Peterson has spent nearly two decades running some of the field's most tightly controlled feeding trials, and her data points to a clear pattern: there is a real effect to a restricted eating wi...

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 exper...

For decades, we've been told that eating less fat is one of the healthiest things we can do. That advice reshaped the foods we buy, the way we think about weight loss, and even how parents feed their children. But what if we misunderstood fat in the first place? In this episode, nutrition researcher Dr. Arne Astrup traces how the war on fat began, why many of its core assumptions haven't h...

Almost everything your doctor knows about you comes from a snapshot: a blood pressure reading, an annual lab, a handful of numbers meant to represent a constantly changing human body. That's beginning to change. New sensors promise far more continuous health data, and AI may finally give us the ability to interpret it. But medicine has been through a data revolution before, and almost none of...

Healthcare is entering a new era. AI is improving faster than our ability to measure the human body, while a new generation of sensors promises to change that. Together, they’ll reshape how we understand health, disease, and medicine itself. NextLevel is our new series inside the podcast where we try to make sense of that future through conversations with the people building it. Our first episode,...

You probably spend more time thinking about protein than friendships. According to today's guest, you’ve got it backward. In this episode of A Whole New Level , Mike Haney sits down with Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, one of the world's leading researchers on social connection and health. She explains how data now unequivocally show that social isolation drives early mortality. And why simply ...

High cholesterol. Elevated ApoB. A positive CAC score. Now what? Most people quickly find themselves trapped between two extremes: simplistic advice to “cut saturated fat” and online influencers insisting cholesterol doesn’t matter at all. In this episode of A Whole New Level , Mike Haney sits down with clinical research scientist Dr. Kevin Maki to cut through the confusion. Drawing on more than 3...

What are GLP-1 drugs actually doing in the body, who are they for, and why might some people want to think twice before treating them like a six-month shortcut? For years, obesity treatment focused largely on behavior: eat less, move more, stay motivated. Yet many people lost weight only to regain it. According to obesity medicine pioneer Dr. Robert Kushner, that wasn’t a failure of willpower. It...

Most athletes are told the same basic rule: the harder you train, the more carbs you need. But Dr. Andrew Koutnik argues the science is more complicated. In this episode, Mike Haney talks with Dr. Koutnik about how the body fuels exercise, why muscle glycogen may not explain “hitting the wall” as neatly as many people think, and why blood glucose, brain energy, insulin, and metabolic flexibility m...

We can measure more about our health than ever before. Wearables track everything from heart rhythms to glucose trends, and AI can now identify patterns clinicians might miss. But more data does not automatically mean better health outcomes. In this episode, cardiologist and digital health expert Dr. Ami Bhatt joins Mike Haney to explore why medicine still struggles with prevention, how continuous...

Metabolic health is often simplified to a matter of blood sugar, but at its root, it is a complex system of energy substrate signaling. While many view chronic disease as an inevitable part of aging, a systems-thinking approach reveals that maintaining high "flux"—the capacity to efficiently move and clear energy through the body—is the primary lever for longevity. Without the stimulus o...

Protein is often hailed as the ultimate nutrient for health and longevity, but the science suggests it is only half of the equation. While social media influencers debate the minutiae of protein grams, researchers have found that the vast majority of protein's benefits are "baked in" only when combined with physical activity. Without the stimulus of exercise, even the most optimized...

Preconception health is one of the most powerful—yet overlooked—windows for influencing a child’s lifelong wellness. While fertility is often discussed in the context of age or medical intervention, emerging research suggests that the months leading up to conception are a critical "time capsule" for epigenetic health. In this episode of A Whole New Level, Levels Founder and CEO Josh Clemente sits...

High cholesterol is one of the most widely discussed—and established—risk factors in medicine. But reams of research now show that while it is key to cardiovascular risk, it is not the whole story. In this episode of A Whole New Level , editorial director Mike Haney sits down with Dr. Ronald Krauss , one of the world’s leading lipid researchers and a pioneer in understanding how different forms of...

You can’t outrun a bad diet—but it turns out you might not even be able to outrun a good one. In this episode of A Whole New Level , evolutionary anthropologist Dr. Herman Pontzer joins Mike Haney to dismantle the "armchair view" of metabolism and explain why more exercise doesn't necessarily mean more calories burned. Drawing on his groundbreaking research with the Hadza hunter-gath...