Giving Everyone Access to Pro-Level Bloodwork

Introduction

In part one of this series, Vitality Blueprint co-founder Dan Garner shared his background working with athletes and other high performers, and how context plays an important part in individualizing interventions. In this second installment, Dan’s back to share how he and Andy Galpin came up with a performance bloodwork platform, why they’re scaling pro-level testing and performance coaching to everyone, and what sets Vitality apart.

Interview

How did you come up with the Vitality Blueprint concept?

I worked with professional athletes for seven years before me and Andy teamed up. Things have taken off ever since because my strengths complement his. There are a couple of ways that you can build up a name in the industry. The first is to have an enormous marketing budget and come up with a shtick. In every city, there’s a vegan guy, a fasting guy, a carnivore guy, and he's marketing himself based upon having one answer, which is insane. 

The other way is long and slow, but as time goes on, you become impossible to ignore. That’s what Andy and I did. We went through our own education and research and created an enormous amount of free content online. And after you do that for 15 years, you're getting results for people along the way, building trust and scientific integrity, and working with athletes and high-level people. Vitality is the culmination of all that work. Everything we have learned and applied to individuals now as a scaled, science-based approach to personal health and performance.

Why did you decide to extend what you’ve learned through pro-level testing and performance coaching to everyone?

It’s about leaving a legacy in the industry. I wasn't supposed to do anything. I got terrible grades in high school and after that, worked in a machine shop. When I got laid off, I saw that as my second chance at life. I got out of that machine shop, went to college, and have worked like a lunatic ever since. I want to make a net contribution to science. 

Also, people deserve better. It's not their job to know that they could be walking around with a predisposition for Alzheimer’s, and nobody tells them. Take homocysteine for example. It’s a blood marker at 9.47 and at 10, you're at risk of a cardiovascular event, high oxidative stress, hypertension, and vitamin B deficiency. At 11.84, you have higher all-cause mortality risk and at 15, you get cognitive decline. My dad is a good man, and he would never know that, nor would my neighbor, sisters, or wife. It’s an enormous problem, and the industry will change by the time I'm done with it. 

Why is now the right time to start offering these kinds of insights to the public?

People are more in tune with the idea that they need to take control of their own health. Unless you’re in a car accident, break your leg, or have a terminal disease, everything preventative from a health perspective has to come from you. Vitality Blueprint is the perfect way to empower people to live a better life.

It’s also a great time for Vitality because longevity is more popular than ever. But some people view it in an incorrect way. Someone will be provided with a recommendation to try and get their cholesterol into the longevity range and hope that they live longer. But there’s no way to measure that. Your subjective experience of life doesn't change at all. 

With Vitality, we’ve created performance-based reference ranges. It’s more than an arbitrary number. It’s a number that is actually linked to something you are going to feel and experience. Performance-based ranges are linked to the feeling that you have more energy and clarity, being able to translate your thoughts into words, sleeping well, and exercising without being exhausted. These are the things that lead to longevity. Longevity is a byproduct of performing better. If you are performing better you are maximizing your longevity and that is felt mentally, emotionally, and physically. 

How does taking a systematic approach to performance rather than just focusing on one or two elements feed into what you just described?

The body is not just a bunch of parts working individually. It is a system of systems. Like I said [in part one], the body can only adapt to its biggest constraint. With a systems approach, an improvement in one area amplifies the progress made in another. 

This means that getting to that “feeling” I was just talking about is going to happen a lot faster. If I address one longevity marker at a time, it is going to take forever to achieve the “longevity balance” that everyone talks about. I am living right now. I want to address everything that I can to get to a better me as fast as possible. 

What else sets Vitality Blueprint apart from other offerings that include blood testing?

Every biomarker has a nutrition, lifestyle, and supplementation option to accomplish resolution, so there are toggle switches. With these different interventions, I'm able to design the program in a way that I know someone will be maximally adherent to and will improve their subjective experience of life. 

Another thing is the precision of recommendations. Some other companies’ engines are so basic that they lose meaning. They lack precision and therefore they lack adherence. Our algorithm is a difference maker. Nobody has any idea how sophisticated it is. Tens of thousands of calculations are performed the moment your bloodwork is processed through the system. 

This is far beyond human computational power. You're not looking at a page and doing over 20,000 calculations in less than one second to create recommendations or instantly grading 13 functional areas of physiology. Other companies do bloodwork and that's about it. With Vitality, you're getting the most precise, individualized platform that exists.

If you go to a health-focused service, they can kind of do their job, even if you don’t feel better. But if we fly our flag that Vitality is going to help you perform better, then that's a promise I'm making. It puts more pressure on our company. Health is a byproduct of performing better. It’s much easier to stay healthy when you feel good every day.

It seems like you’re saying that other platforms targeting longevity or health are just looking at lifespan, whereas Vitality might not just help people live longer but also have a better quality of life.

Yes. The Vitality platform allows you to be more of you. The better you can perform at life, the better you are going to be at being you. It unlocks your dormant potential. I've got this simple three-point scale: death, fake health, and vitality. Death is deceased. Fake health is where 90% of the population is. They believe that the absence of disease is the presence of health, which is untrue because they can be overweight, have low energy, have brain fog, low libido, and struggle in goal attainment, despite being “healthy” by clinical standards. 

But then you've got these people over here who vibrate at a different frequency, have high vitality, and are knocking out things on their bucket list. They are proud of their body. They have energy. They don't have brain fog. People in the middle don't have disease, but nobody really wants to be them. Everybody wants to be the guy over here. And that's what Vitality is: being able to be more of you in the years that you've got. What more could anyone ask for?

And is the Blueprint part of the company name the field manual for that?

Yes. You're looking at the blueprint of your physiology, identifying the constraints, and removing them so that you can keep moving up those rungs to higher vitality.

Check back soon for part three, in which Dan reveals why it’s important to nail the basic principles of physiology, how Vitality Blueprint complements these with personalized guidance, and more.