What Are Biomarkers, and Why Do They Matter?

It seems like with each passing year, we become more and more concerned and stressed out about our own wellbeing. Whether it has to do with our weight, our mental state, or a nagging condition that has us feeling hopeless, technology and “answers” on the internet largely seem to do more harm than good. Often riddled with ostensibly simple solutions, social media and search engine results never seem to pan out, and hiring a professional for help is prohibitively expensive. Our own unique system requires a specific plan that’s right for us and only us, but finding such a plan can sometimes feel impossible.

You may have been hearing a lot lately about biomarkers when it comes to your own health and wellbeing. And while defining these metrics is a fairly simple task, understanding how they can help is a far more daunting one, mostly because the answer is about as sprawling as you’d expect, with applications that are too vast to list. That’s why we’ve done our best to explain to you what exactly biomarkers are and why they matter.

Biomarkers are biological molecules found throughout your system, including your bloodstream and genetic makeup, that give information about you and your body. They won’t reveal how you feel or function, per se, but can be indicative of such. Examples of biomarkers are your metabolic rate, resting heart rate, blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar, and can go as deep as genetic findings. They can be used to accurately predict diseases or conditions, but can also identify opportunities for change.

Essentially, biomarkers are a measurable way of reading what your body is doing and tends to do. Access to this information is immeasurable when it comes to figuring out what’s best for us and recognizing our own personal needs — needs that nobody else in the world has. Understanding our biomarkers can lead to us living longer, healthier, and happier lives.

While biomarkers can track something as minor as speech, blood and DNA are arguably the two most important keepers of information in our system. As far as reading our blood, we’re able to gain insight into vitals as mercurial as our blood pressure and heart rate, or as gradual as cholesterol and kidney function. For heart attack sufferers, biomarkers can accurately predict when the heart attack occurred and how severe it was. Blood pressure can tell us if we’re at risk of having a stroke, but there are other factors involved that won’t wind up on a simple blood pressure machine. Viewing your metrics from all angles will help provide a more accurate readout and, therefore, more valuable predictions.

On the other side of the same coin are diet and exercise. Living a healthy lifestyle is easier said than done. What works for one person might be totally wrong for another. Understanding who we are and how our unique body handles our habits or lack thereof is key to maximizing our body’s potential. Do certain “unhealthy foods” affect us the same way they do for other people? The best way to know is to look at these highly specific real-time biomarkers for our blood system.

Where blood biomarkers paint a more transitory picture of your health and its needs, goals, and tendencies, DNA-related biomarkers give more of an evergreen profile of you as an individual. While DNA can change and adapt as we age, the sequence of our genetic makeup stays the same; there are certain aspects that remain fixed and are part of who we are as an individual. Those aspects can be telling of our needs and tendencies when it comes to our health.

Reading your DNA biomarkers can help you personalize medicine to maximize results — optimizing which drugs to use and at what dosage — while also allowing you to see which diseases and conditions you’re susceptible to and which vitamins to take to help prevent them. This can be used on a more immediate level as well. Tumor patients, for example, can better predict how long to safely delay treatment so doctors can wait and watch if that tumor will remain stable, possibly for years, without needing to rush into surgery or radiotherapy. You can receive unbelievable benefits simply by knowing how your individualized system adapts or responds to medicine and habits.

We are living in the technological age, and reading and utilizing biometrics and data to help us reach our goals and maximize our health potential for a longer, more productive life is now on the table. Each person responds to diet, exercise, and medicine differently, but the key is figuring out how your one-of-a-kind biological system does so, and to what degree.

The only way is to look at your bloodwork and DNA, informed by and paired with your habits, and figure out what needs to be done differently or the same in order to achieve your personal goals. When used together, blood and DNA biomarkers can create an accurate profile about, not only where you are right now, but your potential trajectory parameters; where your potential lies and how you can maximize it, but also what your health risks can be.

InsideTracker

Combining both blood and DNA biomarkers helps paint a fuller picture of who you are and where your individual needs lie, which is invaluable when trying to maximize your body’s potential. But that’s easier said than done. We can’t just simply know how to utilize this information. After all, biomarkers have always existed, but the technology needed to read and interpret them is cutting edge. It takes a lot of expensive technology and smart minds to figure out how we can apply those metrics to a usable system from which we can benefit.

Biomarkers are at the crux of InsideTracker, a lifestyle app that allows users to give their bodies the best chance at reaching their potential by tracking both blood and DNA markers, offering nutrition, supplement, exercise and lifestyle recommendations along the way. The app evades the trial and error of workouts and diet regimens to get to the bottom line so we can get results quicker and more efficiently while eliminating the guesswork. There’s a lot of noise out there on social media and the like, but those “solutions” are built for specific biological systems and they’re not for everybody. InsideTracker provides specific answers through a system that adapts to each person, with honest numbers and science that are straightforward and usable. Never before has achieving optimal health been so easy and accessible.

InsideTracker is compatible with any smartphone, FitBit, and Apple Watch, and their most comprehensive blood plan, the Ultimate Plan, is $589.

Purchase: $589