I’m not the biggest fan of numbers; just ask my accountant. I’d rather not convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, and when my flight to Rome is listed as 21:10, I panic a little, fairly certain I’ll miss it. But I found a number I could love, and it’s the one that Function Health delivered to me with a whole pile of data after I opened a vein and filled 20 vials of blood for testing. My biological age is 10 years younger than my chronological one. That’s a hot number!
It didn’t take me long to stop gloating. Dr. Mark Hyman, the functional medicine doctor who co-founded Function Health and wrote 10 books, including Live Forever, told me that when he was 62, his biological age was 43. And when he turned 64, his body registered only 39. Oh, also, insult to injury? He was speaking to me from Ibiza. You win, Benjamin Button.
That said, who among us doesn’t want to age backward, just like Dr. Hyman? I’ll have what he’s having.
In many ways, that’s the goal of Function Health, a two-year-old company—chronologically speaking—that offers access to detailed, comprehensive biomarker testing for $499 a year to its 200,000 members. This is not concierge medicine with its cozy doctor chats in expensively decorated suites. Function is a website for people who want a different kind of cozy, with numbers, data, and AI. Embrace all this, and Function dangles the ultimate carrot all over its website: Live 100 healthy years.
Who could resist? Even those who run screaming from data are going to have to accept that this is the new reality. “We’re moving into a data-driven healthcare era where your history, your medical records, your blood testing, your imaging, your wearables are all sorted with technology to help you understand what’s going on,” Dr. Hyman explains.
I refuse to let my unease with all this alter my cortisol levels, which, at the moment, are delightfully in range.
The take-charge approach to health is coming just in the nick of time. The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy, 78.4 years, of countries similar in size and wealth, even though it spends more on healthcare. “We’re not going to get better with better drugs and surgery,” says Dr. Hyman. “Most of the diseases people are suffering are lifestyle diseases, which they can be empowered to learn about and take control of on their own.”
Control is the come-on, the seductive proposition. “You can actually have agency and can be the CEO of your health,” says Dr. Hyman.
After getting my blood drawn at a Quest Lab over two sessions (Function needs so much blood, a representative told me, that it can’t be extracted in one sitting), my dashboard on the website delivers a welcome, “Long live Linda.” The extensive but digestible results are broken down into subsets. Each item has a green bar for numbers that fall within the recommended range and a brown one for those that are problematically low or high. When I click on a category (autoimmunity, environmental toxins, heart, nutrients, female health, metabolic, and so on), I can read an explanation, evaluation, and recommended action plan.
Most of my news is positive, with a few boarderline concerns that the chart says need further evaluation by a clinician. My action plan essentially comes down to two foods: cranberries and mung beans. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a mung bean, so eating more than zero shouldn’t be a problem. “Does that mean one in a lifetime?” asked my internist, Dr. Amy Bleyer, as she studied my results. Sounds doable.
The majority of Function’s members need far more than a stray mung bean. In fact, Dr. Hyman found that a full 70 percent have nutritional deficiencies. “And that’s a lot. It’s even scarier because the people doing Function are probably healthier than the population.”
I signed up for the basic blood test but was tempted by one for Alzheimer’s genetic risk, at an additional $195, and the Galleri test, which detects early signs of 50 different types of cancer, for $899. Dr. Bleyer believes the latter is among the most valuable on Function’s menu. “With the Galleri Test, we can pretty much make dying of cancer a historical footnote,” Dr. Hyman says. “You pick stuff up in Stage I, rather than Stage II, or III, or IV, where there’s 95 percent survival rates of five years.” The test is not as definitive as that yet, but many doctors have hope. Dr. Bleyer believes, if nothing else, that it relieves a certain degree of cancer anxiety. “It’s the power of the pertinent negative,” she says.
Everywhere you go, someone seems to want to size you up. Equinox offers a $40,000 longevity program that relies on a battery of tests. When I visited the Sha Wellness Clinic in Spain two years ago, I began my stay with a series of evaluations to determine my muscle mass, visceral fat, bone density, cellular-water ratio, and glyco-oxidation. At the Canyon Ranch spa, in Lenox, MA, where Dr. Hyman was a medical director, “basically, I had an incubator where I could test my crazy ideas” on the guests. Tally Health, co-founded by David Sinclair, the Harvard geneticist, relies on a cheek swab to determine biological age, which he describes as “a credit score for your body.”
Not everyone wants their body to be graded so dispassionately. “Some patients just want to know what their blood pressure, weight, and cholesterol are, and as long as all those boxes are checked, they’re happy,” says Dr. Bleyer. “But most of my patients want to share their experience of their health and how it affects their day-to-day life. The way to optimize that is not with a gajillion blood tests. You have to listen to their story. You have to hear what they’re concerned about, and how that manifests in their daily lives.”
To Dr. Bleyer, this is the distinction between “the science of medicine and the art of practicing medicine and treating individual patients.”
Both doctors have similar aims: to help patients reach old age in robust health, “so you can actually do things you love to do and be the person you want to be and have a life you want to have,” says Dr. Hyman. Meanwhile, do you know where I can find some mung beans?
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look
