by A deeper look at Health
Our cardiovascular system (CVS) is our life support system and our heart is the pump that drives it. It delivers oxygen and nutrient-rich blood to every organ in our body and carries waste products away. The heart works extremely hard, beating 100,000 times per day without rest. 99% of people are born with a healthy heart and only 1% of infants are born with congenital heart defects.2 Most of these defects aren’t critical and only about 0.25% of the overall population requires medical intervention.3
Years ago, a woman named Cathy approached us visibly upset. Doctors had told her that she was born with a heart problem called ventricle septal defect.1 We measured the functioning of her cardiovascular system and it seemed fine: her heart scored 68 out of 120 on the Health Index. But instead of walking on eggshells to protect her heart, Cathy started exercising with gusto. 28 years later, her heart health score is 98 and she is a spry and fit 58 year “young” woman. Her heart still has a blemish but that hasn’t prevented her from training it into a powerhouse.
While people like Cathy can overcome heart defects and lead healthy lives, far more people start off healthy & succumb to diet and lifestyle-related crises. In 2017, over 600,000 Americans born with a healthy heart died prematurely of heart disease.4
None of our organs have to be “perfect” in order to function healthily. You can be amazingly healthy and have minor blemishes all over. Conversely, you can have blemish-less organs and yet have them not be healthy. This is a disconnect between medical science and health science. Medical science only looks at defects and ways to treat them. Health science overcomes defects and leads humans to live in peak health.
Female cardiovascular system
Where Western Medicine Falls Short
The medical system is adept at diagnosing and treating heart disease. But not at improving the health of a normal heart.
The Western medical establishment tends to look at the heart as an individual organ. But we should consider the heart and the circulatory system – with its 60,000 miles of arteries and veins – as a dynamic network that supports every other organ. The CVS is susceptible to weakness, defects, clogging and disease. Tragically, most people never think about their heart until around retirement age when a serious problem gets detected. This is often 30 years too late to reverse it.
The medical establishment is extremely good at measuring the presence and absence of heart disease. They use an electrocardiogram to measure the signals triggering heart valves and beats to check if the heart has a defect. This is based on a paradigm of disease and not on a paradigm of health. In reality, there is nuanced spectrum of degrees ranging from radiantly healthy to almost dead. Heart mass, heart muscle density, volume of blood pumped in one heart squeeze, arterial elasticity, blood pressure, mitochondrial density and oxygen binding quality are all major factors that paint the overall picture of cardiovascular health.
Why Liver Health Is So Important
While the CVS transports vital nutrients to the organs, our liver is the largest solid organ in the body that carries out over 500 essential tasks. It processes the body’s waste, removes foreign toxins, synthesizes proteins, stores vitamins & minerals and produces chemicals used for digestion. The liver has also recently been defined as an important part of the immune system.5 Sadly, the liver can get “choked” with visceral fat or “clogged” with chemicals and its protective capabilities can decline.
In the ancient & pre-industrial eras that our liver evolved under, humans weren’t constantly exposed to unhealthy things like:
alcohol
prescription medications
cosmetics & toiletries made with chemicals
exhaust & pollution
plastics with harmful derivatives like BPA
ultra-processed foods
Now these toxic influences are everywhere in our environment, but we can ‘fight back’ with ongoing measurement of the CVS and the liver systems’ function. The more efficient and less clogged these two vital systems are, the more robust a person’s overall health will be.
Introducing: Accessible Smart Technology for Measuring Health
Humans have two types of sensors. Internal sensors are capable of sensing pain, feelings, balance, mood, etc. External sensors capture information extraneous to us by sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Unfortunately, our natural sensors do not give us a measure of our health and what is going on inside us. That’s why we created the Deep Health Device™ to augment our natural sensors with 16 additional artificial pressure, acoustic, bioelectrical, amperometric, temperature and electromyography sensors to capture the next level of health data beyond our human senses. The Deep Health Device™ sends mild signals through your body and measures how the CVS flows through various tissues.6 Various sensors measure the fast flow of signals through muscle and soft tissue, and slow flow through tendons and bone. By measuring exactly how much resistance it encounters and where, it can reveal an incredibly detailed ‘below the surface’ view of your body composition and function.7 It also is also simple & affordable enough that anyone with a iPhone or Android phone can use it in their home or office.
Our technology is good at measuring complex fluid flow, soft and hard tissue mass and density. It also excels at measuring dynamic mass transfer within the human body. Measuring the rate of blood flow, and capillary dilation, as blood is pumped from the left ventricle to the skeletal muscle, and the manner in which the skeletal mass responds to a unit volume of blood flow tells us a lot about a person’s heart health.8,9
Skeletal muscle mass is highly predictable in the way it interacts with blood. The quality of the blood can be determined by measuring the skeletal muscle output from a unit volume of blood or the volume of blood required for a unit of skeletal muscle output. Healthy blood has higher density of mitochondria and contains more hemoglobin that acts like a magnet to bind oxygen molecules. The quality of the blood and volume of blood pumped directly affect the health of each and every organ.
Why Heart Strength and Mass Matter
On the most basic level, the heart is a muscle. A strong, fit person can walk up several flights of stairs with little effort. But someone with poor health will have to make a significant effort, breathing heavily and stopping to rest. A professional athlete may pump up to 65 ml/m2 of blood per “squeeze,” but in an unhealthy person perhaps only 13 ml/m2 gets pumped. The less healthy person’s heart has to work 5x harder, straining to keep pumping enough blood into the muscle. The problem is compounded because the quality of blood of the unhealthy person is worse than the healthy person. A healthy person’s blood contains twice the oxygen concentration of an unhealthy person. This would put 10x greater load on the unhealthy person in our example.
How can we gauge how healthy your heart is? The power behind the Deep Health Device™ lies in its database of over 58,000 individuals’ measurements that it compares your measurements with using artificial intelligence (AI). This shows exactly where you fall on the health spectrum.
This data, sorted by our scientists, is extremely revealing. The Deep Health Device’s™ AI algorithm has been fine-tuned to help doctors detect all 31 known heart defects. It sends this sensitive diagnostically information directly & confidentially to healthcare providers on the back end. On the front-end iPhone app, it provides patients with instant feedback in the form of an overall health score (ranging from 0 to 120) that measures and motivates them to improve their health.
The Deep Health Device™ also looks at how physical activity affects the heart rate to gauge heart health. We also look at the mitochondrial density of the blood to see how much energy it can generate.
How Hardened Arteries Harm Your Health
The healthier your cardiovascular system is, the more flexible it is. Think of a steel pipe that brings water into a house. It is not compressible. When you start pumping fluid into the pipe, the water pressure is low. If you pump more fluid the pressure inside the pipe will increase.
In contrast, a healthy artery and vein system is like a balloon. It expands and contracts easily. The more flexible your arteries and veins are, the healthier you are overall. Plaque hardens an artery and makes it behave more like a pipe. A strong and muscular heart pumps a high volume of blood forcefully with every squeeze. The artery receiving the blood expands and swells. The more it swells, the lower your blood pressure is.
When a very healthy person exercises, the heart pumps blood into a flexible artery that ‘goes with the flow’ and receives all their blood with elasticity. Their blood is dense with healthy mitochondria to carry oxygen and blood pressure hardly increases because their arteries are flexible.
Our arteries start from the heart and branch out into progressively smaller vessels, like river tributaries. When you get down to the 4th or 5th branch, in your fingers and toes, the arteries become extremely fine and delicate tendrils. But when these fine arteries become hardened with plaque, blood can stop flowing to parts of them, entirely. You can lose sensitivity in your extremities and develop neuropathy. If your heart is pumping with healthy force, the brittle infrastructure of arteries and veins can cause aneurisms which break and cause hemorrhagic stroke.
Exercise Frequently for Maximum Benefits
If you only have a few hours a week to exercise, many people are tempted to squeeze it into one or two big sessions. But the heart has evolved over millions of years as a muscle that thrives on frequent activity throughout the day. The modern lifestyle of sitting at a desk or couch all day, taking an Uber to a restaurant and ordering fried food is both alien and unhealthy to our heart. The heart is a high-performance muscle that is strengthened and sustained by frequent activity. This means taking three 10-minute jogs per day is far better for the heart than one ‘marathon’ session per week.
Women’s Health Requires Extra Care
The Deep Health Device™ measures your overall physical health (heart, blood, liver, bones, fat and muscle status) and assigns a score that falls into 3 zones: healthy, average or poor. Women and men have significant anatomical differences. Women have overall less muscle tissue than men; their heart mass is relatively smaller and pumps less blood than a man’s. Women also have a naturally higher amount of fat. These factors mean that there is less of a ‘safety net’ net for women. It is much easier for a woman to slide from a healthy state into a poor state, than for a man. A woman’s average zone is half the size of the average male zone. We calculate women’s health scores according to their anatomical differences and provide them with ample feedback and insight to improve their health.
Our Goal: Keeping You Out of the Hospital
If you walk into the gates of a hospital, you are examined for a disease, not trained to improve health. Our focus is on keeping people outside of the hospital gates. We give you early feedback so you can improve your health. We never want to walk into a hospital due to a health crisis.
A conventional doctor:
Treats disease
Works with pharmaceutical companies
Charges exorbitant fees
Our method and goals are obvious, yet quite quite different from conventional medicine. You could almost think of us as the anti-doctor. Our passion and focus is to:
Improve your health
Work with nature
Keep you out of the hospital and free from medical bills
By combining AI smart scale technology, contemporary exercise and dietary wisdom, and ancient plant knowledge… the entire paradigm of health is shifting from the emergency room to your living room. You can stay connected to your health through your smartphone and make simple, positive changes in your daily life. Anyone who is willing to listen can improve their health and longevity. We sincerely hope the Deep Health Device™ can help you, your clients and loved ones, too!
References
“Data and Statistics on Congenital Heart Defects.” Center for Disease Control, https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/heartdefects/data.html. Accessed 12 September, 2019.
J Am Coll Cardiol. 2002;39(12):1890-1900.
Pediatrics. 2013 May;131(5):e1502-8.
“What are the leading causes of death in the US?” Medical News Today, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php. Accessed 12 September, 2019.
World J Hepatol. 2017 Jun 18; 9(17): 757–770.
Eur J Clin Nutr. 2013 Jan;67 Suppl 1:S1
Clin Nutr. 2004 Dec;23(6):1430-53.
Am J Emerg Med. 2015 Aug;33(8):1025-9.
Ann Noninvasive Electrocardiol. 2018 May;23(3):e12490.
