The quantified self movement refers to a cultural phenomenon we’re seeing of self-tracking with technology, be it smart watches, fitness tracking apps, and more recently finger prick technology. Host Amelia Phillips and Adjunct professor Phil Hayes-St Clair discuss the best way for busy Mums to use this data to improve their health, new finger prick technology looking at multiple blood biomarkers and how to use these metrics to track and boost your health and aid longevity.
About the guest:
Phil Hayes St Clair is an entrepreneur interested in the way humans engage with their health and wellbeing. He is the Co-Founder and CEO at Drop Bio Health, the Adjunct Professor at the Australian Graduate of Management, keynote speaker in digital health, has represented Australia on the men’s triathlon team and Dad to Emily (9) Abbey (7).
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
This is Healthy Her with Amelia Phillips. Since the introduction of wearables such as smart watches, tracking apps like My Fitness Pal Rings that Measure Sleep, even clothing, there’s been an explosion of data that we can track and measure to learn more about ourselves. But considering we’re not athletes, is all this really necessary, can we actually gain real meaningful insight?
And even if we can, how do we use those consistently to help support us in the challenge of habit change? To help unpack this fascinating and exploding space, I’m joined by Phil Hayes Sinclair. Phil is an entrepreneur interested in the way humans engage with their health and wellbeing. He’s a co-founder and CEO of Drop Bio Health, the adjunct professor at the Australian graduate of.
Keynote speaker in Digital Health. He’s represented Australia on the men’s triathlon team, and he’s the dad to Emily and Abby, nine and seven. Thank you so much for joining me today, Phil. Hey Amelia. I’m super excited to be here. The quantified self movement refers to this cultural phenomenon we’re seeing with self tracking and technology, be it smart watchers tracking apps, and more recently, your finger prick te.
What made you step into the quantified self space? I think it was by accident, so my undergraduate. Training was in immunology and I, I found, this was 20 years ago, nearly 22 years ago, and it was such a fascinating area of science to think about, you know, all of these little markers, hormones and proteins and genetics, all these little bits coming together to make your body function and defend itself against threats and to grow and to age, and to do all these things.
It was really quite mind blowing, and when it came down to it, I was just fascinated by this idea that your body is looking after itself. When you are asleep, usually when you’re not thinking about it. And all of the technology that we now use today, whether it be in blood testing or genetic analysis, or even in wearables when I was doing my undergraduate doing a test, like what we would do in our lab or the kind of work that I work on now.
It was so expensive and so cutting edge, no one had access to it. And now you come, you know, 20 years forward and you see how people just want to know more about themselves. And so all of these companies have come outta the woodwork with, you know, great technology. Some of it’s really overwhelming, some of it is difficult to knit together to make sense of it.
But for me, I’d spent a lot of time in the Army. I’d spent a lot of time building businesses after that. And then I was about to go back to med school actually as a, as a mature age student only about five years ago. And my now chairman and colleague said, Look, there’s some really interesting research saying that.
We can look more deeply and more precisely into blood than we’ve ever been able to look before. And maybe there’s a way for us to unpack that knowledge and democratize it and make it just useful to people. And so we pioneered a way of doing at home blood testing to help people understand more about their health, and we’re just really excited about it.
But we’re at the beginning of that journey too. So it’s really, really fun. I mean, I think as an everyday consumer, what’s interesting is traditionally you’d go to the doctor when you’re. And they’re there to kind of fix something that you might be feeling unwell with. But for a lot of us, it’s this preventative measures that we’re wanting to take.
We’re wanting to prevent sickness or ill health or slow down aging. And I love this idea that there’s now technology available to us. I do wanna ask, why would a busy mom who’s not an athlete benefit from tracking their activity or their health metrics in general? Well, let me start by saying that. In our household where my wife has a very busy job, um, we balance a lot of bringing up our two daughters.
There is an interest by her, by many of her friends, by you. I know through the conversations we’ve had about aging well and enjoying life and having the energy that you know is there somewhere, but you forget, you, you’re putting so much energy out by loving other people, by doing all of this work, by covering all the bases, you covered all the invisible work that women unfortunately still end up doing so much of.
There is a lot of outward energy, both in terms of knowledge and intent going out into the world, but at some point we’ve found that there are many women who are just wanting to know more about how they optimize little bits of their life so they can sleep better, be stressed a little bit less. Think about how they can age maybe a little bit differently to the way that their mothers have or other women in their life have.
And also because, you know, some of us actually great, many of us are having children a little bit later in life, and we want to be athletic and active and involved when our kids are quite young. When we’re starting to get older, particularly when it’s really different to what it was like for our mums, right?
Like our mums traditionally had us quite young. They were very active because they were a lot. Many of them didn’t work and so much has changed. Like when I think about what my wife does compared to what my mom did as a parent and their lifestyle and everything else, it’s so vastly different. And I think many women are, are seeing that now and going, Well, alright if there’s all of this stuff out there.
How can I learn more about myself? How can I share more with my clinician? Other people I see osteopaths or chiros, physios, the like, How do I sort of knit all this together? So I feel as though I’ve got as much really awesome information so I can make decisions. And actually not get so hell bent on weight loss or weight gain or all these really sort of narrow points of view.
Cause I wanna live a really healthy and fun life and it’s about great balance and just knowledge. So I think from a, from a point of view of women just wanting to know more and live a healthier life, I think that’s the reason why so many of these things are so popular. And I also think that all of us, when we experience those brief but amazing moments of great health, be it we had two or three nights of uninterrupted sleep, Oh heaven.
And we recognize , what a difference that makes. We suddenly get this motivation of, okay, well I would like to do whatever I can to help improve my sleep. And if I’m tracking my sleep and I realize. I had those two glasses of wine that night. My deep sleep went from three hours to 15 minutes. Right? No wonder I feel foggy today.
I think when we’ve been able to use some of these metrics and really experience that gift of feeling well, it. Motivates us to go, Well, what else can I find out about? I mean, for me personally, I got really excited in the quantified self movement way back when Garin watchers first came out and the GPS tracking came.
Oh, mind blowing. Right. And I know I was a marathon runner at the time, and. All the technology in that improved my running so much. Yep. That it really revolutionized that small part of my health and wellbeing. Obviously now, and what I love about what you are doing is we’re not talking about elite athletes here.
We’re talking about improving. Families improving moms, which we know a happy mom makes for a happy family. And I mean, your business has gone one step further than wearables and utilized this finger prick blood technology where you literally will, you know, draw a drop of blood from your finger. But why not just go to the doctor and get a blood test?
Yeah, so it’s, it’s really interesting. I think doctors and the healthcare system that we currently know, you know, hospitals, clinic. This is all designed to help with acute or chronic care, right? So something is wrong. We need to operate, we need to prescribe, we need to fix something, and that is the specialty that doctors have.
Whether it’s a general practitioner or it’s somebody who is a, a genuine specialist. This is what they’re trained to do. They’re there to sort of problem solve and to help you get better. Again, a doctor needs to have a reason to authorize a. To prescribe a drug to put you on a certain treatment path. And if you go to a gp, the question is gonna be, Well, why do you think we need this?
Because you look fine. And you might be saying, Well, actually, but I want to know more. See, the thing is that I kind of need a reason to do that. I can do the test, but it’s probably not gonna show you anything. And so we, we’ve had that feedback. Tens of thousands of times, and it’s the right feedback because the system is built to help with acute and chronic care.
If you look at the other system, which has really come to the fore, Frank, thanks to Covid, it’s sort of the wellness system. It’s the other technologies where people. For the most part, can’t get it through Medicare, but they can pay out of pocket to get this knowledge and they can buy an Apple Watch or they can come to us and get a blood test, or they can go to another company, get a genetic screen or whatever the case is.
These kind of services allow for this to be a very different kind of world. And it’s actually kind of interesting because these two systems can talk to each other. So the best part about, and one of the things that really excites me about all the work going on inside the quantified self and in particular at Drop, is that we are in the business of early.
Right. We’re in the business of trying to help people understand things well before they become really, really bad. And it’s not about freaking people out, it’s just about empowering them with data that says, If we think you are trending in the wrong direction, here’s some stuff you can do to change that.
If we see that something has gone really out of kilter, then we are going to put you into touch with your GP or with another GP so they can do their, do their job, and they can start to work out what’s wrong. Before now, that kind of capability actually didn’t exist, so we’re, we’re kind of excited about what that means for how people can just have greater knowledge and actually make better decisions.
And I just wanna make clear here that with that drop of blood, we as a customer, we’re not gonna get. Exactly. Your thyroid TSH levels are this, your iron levels are this. You don’t get an fbc, you don’t get the full blood. That’s count that you would get from a doctor, but you get a report that puts it in a range of whether it’s normal or abnormal.
And so if you did get that trigger that it’s in an abnormal range, that’s when you would get notified. Look, you probably do need to go and seek further clarification on this. Is that right? That’s exactly right. And I guess all of the research we did with our customers and our members, It’s kind of interesting to have the numbers to see if you’re inside of a range or outside of a range.
But what it actually, what’s actually really meaningful to me is how am I trending over time as it relates to things that I understand. So people understand that they can be stressed or they can be poor in sleep, or they can drink a little bit too much, or they can have. Elevated inflammation. These, this is what people understand and we’ve done all the science in the background where to say, Well, what are the things in your blood that tell the nutrition story or the sleep story or the stress story?
And we’ll show you what those things are. But instead of just giving you numbers, we say, Well, this is what this looks like given your context, right? Because yes, because you also have a health assessment questionnaire. That customers fill out at the same time as getting the blood test. So you layer the two on top of each other to give a more complete picture of their overall health.
Exactly. And what we are here to do is to say to you, So look Amelia, this is what you think is going on. This is how you answered your habits survey, and this is what’s actually going on. And what we find is that that really makes people go, Oh, I thought I was better at this, or actually I’m beating myself up because I’m, I’m not doing a good enough job.
Actually. You’re doing a great job. My body’s telling me something else. Yeah. That reinforcement is actually the thing that enacts change and usually it’s very difficult for somebody to have a biological mirror sort of put in front of them and we enable that, which we’re really proud about. And you’ve got these seven key pillars of health, which I wanna touch on in a moment.
But before we go there, I wanna. Accuracy. Sure. You know, whether it’s gps and the accuracy of the GPS affects what your pace result looks like. For example, on your Apple Watch or your heart rate accuracy, which might affect the amount of calories burnt in a workout in your case with finger pick technology.
Most of us are aware of the Elizabeth Homes and the Theranos scandal. What a story. Oh, what a story. Huh? And I believe you launched your business at around the same time. Oh. So of course, as soon as we say a drop of blood, people are gonna think about this story of a woman that deceived hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investors.
How are companies like yours ensuring the accuracy that the data is valid and therefore, I think we had, we had only opened the doors to drop and we were still deep in r and d stage at the time. , I think we got the word drop in you and it was business. Now this is just not convenient. mean this is not helpful.
Um, what we found was that, you know, when John Kerry wrote Bad Blood, it was, I remember reading it and just going, this, this just doesn’t feel like it’s real. Like really? Yeah. But look, all things said and done, there’s a really simple anti. To this, and that’s transparency. So the technology that we use has been around for easily 25 years.
It’s been independently accredited. You know, to give you a sense of just how precise this is, imagine having a blood test for a very common molecule, let’s just say iron, and you get your iron scores. Now that’s at a particular concentration in your blood at any given point in time. The kinds of markers we look at are usually a million times lower in concentration than something like iron, and we can still see that and it’s all quality, assured and processed through a huge number of systems to make sure that what we’re seeing is real and what we tell our members is real as well.
And. We’re very open about the regulatory position that we take with this. All of the data management is all on our website. We’ve tried to learn from that historic moment. It’s now a cult classic to sort of say, Look, if, if you’re worried about it, so you should be, because we are not gonna sit here and make claims like we can diagnose a thousand conditions from a drop of blood.
That’s actually physically impossible. No, Which is what she was. Saying it’s a very different business proposition. I agree. Exactly. And so we’ve just made it so that people can live a healthier life. And of course, in the background, we do huge amounts of really exciting medical research into things like fertility and mental health, which are disconnected from the kind of services we provide to consumers.
We’re scientists by trading, we abide by all the things that make scientific ethics really important, and we just love it. So there’s no point in trying to convince people that we do something differently when actually what we do is just really solid science.
What I find really fascinating in my two odd decades in being in health is how much more broad the attitude towards wellbeing is compared to when I first start, where it was around, you know, weight loss specifically, which I think you touched on earlier. What I’ve realized as time goes on, Health is a balance of so many different factors, and you’ve essentially identified seven pillars of health.
It really resonates with me and I think with lots of moms out there where we are not just this single faceted person that’s just gonna focus on weight loss, but at the cost of everything else. So for you, the seven pillars are nutrition, fitness, stress. Energy and inflammation, and essentially your business has managed to find an accurate way to measure how optimum each of these pillars are.
So I wanna focus on the inflammation pillar first. Sure. Why is this so important for us to track and measure? So inflammation has two major types and everybody tends to refer to inflammation. As you know, you have an injury of some kind and you bang, or your injure, say a knee, for example, and it becomes inflamed as we know it.
So it’s swells up, it swells up, it goes warm. It’s very uncomfortable, and that’s the acute inflammation, which is super important for a pair of tissue and muscle. When you. We refer to as chronic inflammation. It’s made up of all of these beautiful little proteins and hormones that fly around your body at huge speeds, and you never know that they’re there.
And that is like your protective layer. It is like the sentinel that is forever just keeping an eye on you to make sure that you’re healthy and what we know from the literature dating. Easily three decades is that when chronic inflammation becomes dysregulated, in other words, it starts to move out of its normal bounds.
It’s giving you sort of a smoke signal to something that is not right. While the body might be trying to repair that issue, if that continuation of that inflammation continues to get out of control, it becomes even more targeted to where there is an issue and it sort of draws you to that particular place.
And so when we started to look at inflammation, we looked at this idea of is inflammation. Sort of the smoke to the body’s early warning system that says, Look over here because there’s something wrong. And it’s not usually a body site, it’s usually a systems based issue. Something like, is there an early onset of diabetes or is there an early onset of a cancer of some kind?
And these are all conditions, these chronic inflammations. Sorry. Chronic conditions are things that give off a very specific signal, and we’ve made it our life’s work to try and work out what those specific Rubik’s cube signals are for a particular condition. Because at the moment, if you find, for example, a lump in your breast and you are trying to work out, Actually, should I get that checked or not?
Let’s imagine that we are able to see a change in your inflammatory markers four or five years before a physical symptom or a sign was actually present. That kind of early warning in time, we think, and all the data that we generate and the the kind of studies we do is pointing towards making sense of if that change looks like that in a particular woman at a particular age, given her background, then we can give that information to her and she can then take that to a clinician and say, I think there’s something that I should be concerned about.
The clinician might actually say to you, Look, there’s nothing we can do for you right now, but we can catch it a lot sooner than what we ordinarily would because it could be too. And certainly with cancers, early detection is always the goal. Yeah. Okay. So how do you measure inflammation? So we do it from finger pick blood samples.
So when we look at all of these markers, So you measure 36 biomarkers. That’s right. Can you just explain to our audience what biomarkers are? Yeah. So a biomarker is any kind of substance that is naturally occurring inside your body. So for example, Is a biomarker. Hemoglobin is a biomarker and it’s a very broad term.
It can be misinterpreted sometimes, but essentially anything that is of naturally occurring in in your body we refer to as a biomarker. And we look at these, we look at measuring 36 of these, six of which are hormones, and the rest of them are protein based. Substances. And we measure those with a really high degree of precision.
And what we do in wellbeing is that we measure them over time. So we don’t just measure them once. We measure them maybe every six months, every year, or if somebody really wants to learn more about themselves four times a year. And so that allows us to put together those really interesting patterns and we translate that.
To make sense for you to make actions, to improve whatever those markers are telling us. And sometimes people just wanna know if they’re doing well, and if they’re doing well, we just say, Hey, keep going. You’re doing a great job. So if you’ve got a mum listening that says, Oh look, I’ve been giving it a bit of a nudge lately.
Had a tough few months, I’ve been eating lots of junk food. I’ve been hitting the bottle at nighttime. I get my biomarkers tested. I do my finger prick, my drop bio, and I come back and I might have stress and inflammation markers that are suggesting that my inflammation levels are a little high. And then I go, Now I’m gonna go on a 12 week.
Health kick and I’m cutting the alcohol down and I’m eating more antioxidant rich fruits and veggies, which all have anti-inflammatory properties in them. Mm-hmm. would then, the hypothesis be that in 12 weeks when I redo this, I’m gonna see that biomarker range drop on my results. So, Providing that there’s no underlying existing health condition that is, that we don’t already know about, that we can’t take into account.
The answer is yes, and I can tell you that because over the last sort of 12 weeks, a number of us in our team have done exactly that as have a number of our members, and we see those changes and they, they’re quite marked and it’s actually a really. Positive thing to see, you know, the change that I made or actually having a difference.
I mean, that is the game changer right there to my marathon example earlier. But on a much more important scale of your overall health if having that feedback is so motivating for us. Yep. You guys are measuring this over seven really key core pillars. I think stress is a really interesting one as well.
That’s a big one. What. , the sleep marker. How do you measure sleep? Yeah, so we look at a couple of different markers for sleep, and it’s interesting because you know, you can sometimes see people say, Well just go and get X measured because that will tell you about. Sleep or stress or whatever else. And cortisol is the classic hormone that often gets thrown around, is the key thing to measure.
And it’s really, really important, but it’s not the only thing to measure. And so when we look at the combination of markers that go into our, our sleep or our stress score, of course cortisol plays a role, but we also measure other markers that we know play really important roles. Preparing for a good night’s sleep or what happens when you are having a good night’s sleep, or what happens if you’ve not got good sleep over, say a week or two week or three weeks?
This combination of markers gives us a really nicely triangulated view that goes, Actually, you knew that you weren’t doing a great job of your sleep. It wasn’t just because you had a bad night’s sleep last night. It’s because it’s been brewing and it’s been happening over time, and so we are here to help you understand that that’s the case.
If we put that mirror in front of you and you go, Actually no, I get that. I’m gonna make some changes. We’ll give you all the suggestions that you could make to improve the sleep score, and that will be seen weeks and months later, which is really important, but it’s, it’s also important to note that you might have.
Really low inflammation scores, but you might have really high sleep related scores. In other words, sleep is not great and inflammation can stay low. We’re trying to help you understand that as a system in your body, some things can be working well, but just because they’re working well doesn’t mean there’s not another part that can be improved, and that holistic perspective and the happiness that comes with living a really happy and healthy life, it’s about that well-rounded knowledge, which we’re just trying to help put in as many people’s hands as.
I also love the reduction in guilt factor cuz let’s say nighttime, I’m sitting there probably doing five or six things that I shouldn’t be in relation to getting a good night’s sleep. Got my phone in front of my face. I’m eating high sugary food, late night snack, and I’m feeling really guilty about it.
But I go and get my scores tested and I come back that my sleep scores are actually quite healthy. Then I don’t feel so guilty at night as well, so it can work in the other direction. What we’re trying to work out is you. If over time there’s a change, can we help you understand that change more? I mean, we were all during lockdowns, we were all red wine twisties.
Do whatever you had to do to sort of look after yourself was sort of the key. And people are coming out of that now and just going, All right. So yes, we did it hard. We’re coming out of it. If I have to go into that kind of environment again, and I’ve gotta really look after myself, what are the tools I can use to develop that knowledge and to make those good decisions?
Because as parents, we’re trying to play the long game and we’re kind of in the memory creation game, right? So we’ve gotta be around long enough in order to create those great memories. Why not invest time in looking after yourself? And I really love that these scores are not aesthetic, not like the scales that you’re standing on cuz you’re trying to fit into your skinny genes.
These are true deep, long lasting health metrics, which I think psychologically are so much better than physiological. Although, having said that, if we’re nailing those seven core pillars, we are gonna have brighter skin, we are gonna have less damage on our skin, less wrinkles. Uh, we are gonna have a healthier.
Do you see any downsides to all this tracking? I mean, is there an obsessive compulsive element that if someone is that way inclined, they could kind of fall down this trap of becoming obsessive compulsive about their health? Look, I’m sure that is a risk. I mean, we have a segment that we refer to as Garmen guys, and I’m sure there’s, there’s a, a female equivalent of this, but they’re people who.
They want all the data. They wanna know everything they possibly can, and they have spreadsheets and devices everywhere, and they’re measuring everything and they’re trying to make sense of it all. And if you are that kind of person, then more power to you. But I think you also just wanna look up once in a while and sort of go, well, Did I breathe in and see that gr, that beautiful blue sky?
Have I had a chance to go and just enjoy life and just go all this work and all this knowledge I’ve sort of put into place has actually just made me go, I actually kind of love life like this is, this is turning out to be pretty good. So I think it’s just all a matter of perspective, but there are certainly many people who come to us going, I’m just, I have this insatiable appetite for data.
And we go, Well, that’s great. We can help you. And it’s really up for every individual to make the call about how far it can go. I think one thing to keep in mind is that when you look. Or the genetic analysis you could do, or the blood-based testing you could do, or the saliva testing you could do, you’ll find that there is variability in all of this, and it’s variable because every day that you do something different, whether you’ve kept everything as firm and as stable as possible, the reality is, There are just things that will change that you won’t know what those changes relate to.
And the inputs don’t equal the outputs. Yeah. Our bodies aren’t computers. They’re not one plus one, plus two, That’s, And so you’ve just gotta be good for that. That’s kind of the mystery of humans. And sometimes that happens and that’s just the way it goes. And I guess if you are gonna track anything, tracking fundamental health markers as opposed to other factors, such as your weight, is a much healthier approach.
I think so. And at the end of the day, we’re trying to stay healthy usually for other people. So, Go and spend more time with those people. Oh, those little people. Well, finally, on that note, Phil, for someone who struggles with motivation, who wants to be healthier, they wanna do the exercise, they wanna eat well, but they just get to Friday and kind of, it all falls by the wayside, what’s one way that they can capitalize on this quantified self movement to help keep them motivated and achieve their goals?
So I really like the idea of thinking about the kind of, Person I want to be not next week or not the week after, but at a very significant milestone. So I’m 44 years old, I’m gonna be 50 in, you know, five years time. And I have a sort of a view in my mind about the kind of person I wanna be at that point in my life to sort of literally set myself up for a great second innings.
Could I be in better shape? You bet. Could I sleep better? Absolutely. Could I focus more on things that are really important to me? Yes, I could, but I’m in motion. Right. Like I’m, I’m making gradual steps and sometimes it’s like, you know what? This week has been absolutely shit. Mm. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna have a bottle of wine with my wife.
We’re gonna sit and laugh and just enjoy that time knowing that the other sort of little disciplines I have trying to go to bed at the same time every night, trying to not drink caffeine after 3:00 PM or whatever the case is. Just trying to do those little things every day. Are gonna amount to a really good outcome at the time that I’m gonna turn 50.
And just having that just sort of zooming out a little bit, I think is really, really important. Yeah. Because it’s not about holding on so tight that you are going to make it all work. It’s the fact that you’re on a journey and that you, if you’re aware of it, you can course correct for it. And you don’t have to be a superhero or an elite athlete to make that work.
Like you can just give yourself a break and go. Life is hard. Right. So I’m gonna do this, but I’m gonna know that in order to recover from this, I’ve gotta do X, Y, and Z as well. And that awareness I think is like 90% of the game. Oh, that is such a great message to leave on. I love this idea and I go a step further and I will think of someone I know that’s 50.
80. For example, I interviewed Wendy McCarthy last week, and she’s my new kind of 80 year old squad goal. I heard that. I was blown away by that conversation. Isn’t she amazing? Such a great interview, Wendy McCarthy. But I actually think to myself, what would Wendy do right now? What would Wendy have done?
What would 43 year old Wendy have done in that moment? And that just helps to kind of steer me on that part. Phil, thank you so much. You bet.
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