Wearables, DNA tests and biomarkers promise health insights, but turning those numbers into lasting behavior change remains a real challenge.
We’re living through an era where our bodies are constantly talking to us. Our smartwatches tell us how we slept. Apps congratulate us for walking 10,000 steps or more. Blood tests promise to reveal hidden risks. DNA reports hint at how our genes might influence everything from caffeine metabolism to muscle recovery. In theory, we should be healthier than ever. However, there’s an uncomfortable truth buried beneath all those colourful dashboards: information doesn’t automatically become action.
Most of us have experienced it. We download a health app with good intentions, obsess over the numbers for a week, then quietly stop checking because life gets in the way. The problem is that we often lack direction. That issue is at the front of the latest episode of Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED, where hosts Phil Newman and Dr Nina Patrick speak with Andrew Steele, founder and CEO of Stride. A former Olympic sprinter turned entrepreneur, Steele has spent years thinking about why even people with access to the best science still struggle to make lasting changes. His conclusion is surprisingly simple: better health isn’t about measuring more, but about deciding better.
Elite athletes are often imagined as having all the answers. In reality, Steele describes a world overflowing with expertise. During his competitive career, he worked with physiotherapists, nutritionists, psychologists, biomechanists and strength coaches. Each specialist offered valuable advice. The challenge wasn’t finding information, but knowing which advice mattered most. That experience shaped how he thinks about consumer health today.
If you’ve ever spent five minutes scrolling through health advice on social media, you’ll recognize the problem. One expert tells you to fast; another insists breakfast is essential. One praises cold plunges, another questions whether they’re worth it. Somewhere in between, someone is recommending supplements you’ve never heard of.
Trying to follow everything quickly becomes impossible. As Steele puts it, “A great coach… understands that you can’t give too many cues. You can’t tell someone to do 20 things at once. They won’t get done.”
It’s an idea that sounds almost obvious, yet it quietly challenges much of today’s wellness industry, where more data is often presented as inherently better. In reality, more information without prioritisation can become another form of overwhelm. Sometimes the smartest health advice is simply deciding what not to worry about yet.
Even athletes can get swept up by trends
Steele is also refreshingly honest about how easy it is to mistake popularity for evidence. Reflecting on his years in elite sport, he laughs about one recovery ritual he wishes he’d skipped.
“I still regret almost every ice bath I’ve ever taken in my life,” he says.
At the time, cold plunges had become almost a rite of passage. The longer you could endure freezing water, the tougher you were perceived to be. Only later did evidence begin suggesting that repeatedly suppressing inflammation after training could actually reduce some of the body’s natural adaptation to exercise.
It’s a reminder that health trends often move faster than health science. That doesn’t mean cold exposure has no place. Context matters. Using it strategically after competition is different from treating it as a daily badge of discipline. The nuance is easy to lose online, where algorithms reward certainty far more than they reward caveats.
Your body is more like a movie than a photograph
Stride combines genetics, microbiome analysis, blood biomarkers and wearable data into a single membership. On paper, it sounds like another platform collecting hundreds of health measurements. But Steele argues the value isn’t in any single test. Instead, it comes from watching how those measurements change together over time.
Think of it this way: a single photograph tells you where someone was standing. A movie tells you where they’re heading. The same applies to health. A cholesterol result that falls within the normal range today may not look concerning in isolation, but if it has been steadily climbing across several tests, the story changes. Looking only at whether someone sits inside a population average can sometimes miss the bigger picture.
Steele says Stride is interested in those trajectories because they may eventually allow clinicians to identify risk before it becomes disease. It’s a subtle shift in thinking, but an important one. Prevention isn’t simply catching illness earlier; it’s recognizing patterns before they become problems.
Personalized health should be personal
Perhaps Steele’s most persuasive point has nothing to do with technology. The word optimization has become synonymous with highly disciplined biohackers chasing perfect routines, immaculate sleep scores and meticulously timed supplements. Yet real life rarely behaves so neatly.
For Steele, who launched a company while moving countries and raising two young children, health looked very different.
“Optimal is contextual, it’s personal,” he explains.
Sometimes success is about remembering to eat something nutritious instead of surviving on biscuits at three in the morning because your toddler hasn’t slept. That perspective feels quietly radical.
Health advice often assumes everyone has equal time, money and emotional bandwidth. In reality, our biology is only one part of the equation. Family responsibilities, work, stress and environment shape our health just as much as any biomarker ever could.
Technology that ignores those realities risks becoming another source of guilt rather than another source of support.
One of the most hopeful moments in the conversation comes when Steele reflects on younger generations. Not long ago, tracking sleep stages or heart rate variability required specialised laboratories and expensive equipment reserved for elite athletes. Today, many teenagers casually compare sleep scores before comparing weekend plans. Steele sees something meaningful in that cultural shift.
“Deciding to pay your own money to take better care of your own health is very normal,” he says.
There are legitimate concerns about wellness becoming another consumer marketplace, where every new metric creates another product to buy. But there’s also something encouraging about prevention becoming part of everyday conversation rather than something people only think about after receiving a diagnosis.
Ultimately, this episode is about the difference between knowing and doing. The future of personalized health won’t be decided by whichever company measures the most data. It will belong to those that can help people make one meaningful decision today and another tomorrow – because the healthiest life isn’t built inside a dashboard; it’s built one choice at a time.
Want to hear the full conversation? Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED publishes a new interview every Monday, followed by a Friday roundup of the week’s biggest longevity stories. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.
