- Lilly Minkove
SPEAKERS
Lilly Minkove, Will Bachman
Will Bachman 00:02
Hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I am delighted to be here with my good friend Lilly Minkove, who was on episode two or three or four of this show, nine years ago, nine years ago, Lilly was one of the very first episodes that we did, and Lilly, it is wonderful to welcome you back.
Lilly Minkove 00:26
Thank you will. It’s great to be back, and I am so impressed with how this podcast has grown over the past few years and how Umbrex has evolved. So thrilled to be here.
Will Bachman 00:35
Well, I don’t know if it’s better, but is 620 something episodes more experienced, or something. So we’ve been around so, so you have tell us my tell us a little bit about your background, and then let’s get to kind of your current endeavor with HeraSphere. HeraSphere. And yeah, so just give us a quick sketch, and then let’s, let’s talk about HeraSphere?
Lilly Minkove 01:01
Sure. So my background is really the last 25 years I spent as a brand and strategy consultant in around retail, beauty and wellness. I you know, we met at McKinsey way back in the day after business school, I went to McKinsey to learn more about consumer products. I really, really was interested in kind of people and consumer insights, and why people did what they did, and specifically in the luxury sector. So after McKinsey, i i joined tapestry, working on the coach brand, and then went to Louis Vuitton. Really, kind of really measuring myself in the in the luxury world, to help these brands understand why consumers make decisions and how to grow. And for the past 14 years, I let I left the corporate world, and I’ve been running art logica group, which is a boutique consulting practice, really using customer insights to help brands develop their growth strategies.
Will Bachman 02:04
Yeah, and at one of our early events for Umbrex, I vividly recall we did this three day off site event for Umbrex members back in 2015 where 11 years ago, where you led a really great section on how to do a consumer survey. That’s was something, something I still turn to that session that you led. So let’s, let’s talk about one area that your practice has evolving into, in terms of, you know, women’s health and HeraSphere, and you have some content around that. So tell us a bit about your current focus.
Lilly Minkove 02:41
Sure, so I was, I was in the retail and luxury world for a really long time, and I still do a lot of work in that sector, but my interest in health and wellness has really kind of eclipsed that in many ways, on a personal level. And it all started kind of as a passion project. So in 2023 I went to a longevity talk by Dr Darshan Shah, who started next health, which is a longevity, a chain of longevity clinics in LA, and he came to talk to a bunch of us. And we did, we drew blood work, we got like 200 biomarkers. And then he talked to us about, here’s how you should be looking at all this data. And I was just totally shocked that as a relatively educated person who considered myself pretty healthy, I did not really know any of what he was talking about. And I started just telling my friends to be like, Michael, my college girlfriend, text chat. Be Hey guys. Like, Have you measured your you know, little LP, little a, do you know what your A POB score is? Like, these are all things we should be tracking and at the same time. So this is my consumer insights brain working. My entire network is going through perimenopause or menopause. Like every conversation goes to all the symptoms that people know or don’t know. So I kind of connected the dots of, you know, my whole life, translating customer insights into growth strategy for clients. I thought, you know, I could do the same for women’s health, except now my client is the individual. How do I take all this kind of information that is rather readily available, but to just to a few people, to women everywhere. So I basically started Harris sphere as a women’s health newsletter, translating kind of the latest innovations in healthcare, peer reviewed research, kind of what longevity doctors are doing in a lot of the like, kind of tech bro world, but making that into plain English and then distilling it into really easy actions that anyone could take. So is primarily women who are 40 plus. But I would say a lot of these principles and science obviously applies to everyone, because a lot of the. Are common in the human body. And, you know, in in for this consulting audience that is listening to this, I think we think about our businesses in much more rigorous ways than we actually think about our bodies. So I kind of, I’m drawing that analogy into what this means. What are the KPIs we should be thinking about for ourselves, and how to really kind of think about it like a business,
Will Bachman 05:27
okay, what are some of the KPIs for ourselves?
Lilly Minkove 05:31
So I would want to start prefacing, really thinking about like, kind of our healthcare system as a disease management system. So just to take the analogy a little further, you most of us, this is what I used to do. You get 15 minutes with an annual checkup with a doctor once a year, and they’re kind of, you know, looking at some basic blood work and say, Okay, you’re fine, you’re not fine. Here’s some, some really basic information. So your doctor is essentially a parachute consultant. You know, they drop in, they take a slice of data, they give you a few recommendations, and they leave but I think the challenge is, you know, they don’t know your history. They don’t know how your your lifestyle is evolving. They don’t see the system. So if you have an ill informed consultant, the the worst case scenario is that they give you some wrong advice, and you probably just don’t work with them again. But if the doctor gives you the wrong advice or misses something systemic, you’re the person who’s living with the consequences. So it’s really about thinking about, you know, if your body is a system, how do you live by the numbers, and what is the operating system that you’re working under? So I would say like to before I jump into the KPIs, I really want to think about the framework. So based on all the research that I’ve done, obviously I’m not a physician or even a medical professional, but I thought a lot about this, and what I’ve learned from all the podcasts and doctors I’ve spoken to is that you actually don’t learn a lot about like nutrition and lifestyle and a lot of these kind of basic things in medical school. It’s a lot of a lot about the disease management of here are the symptoms. Here’s how you diagnose it. And so a lot of the doctors that I know kind of have done their own research to work to understand what are some of the latest developments, and how you really think about health as a system. So the five pillars that I’ve seen and kind of across the different ones, are really exercise and muscle and sleep. The third is thinking about nutrition. The fourth is brain health. And then I think the five is actually connection. So I’ll give you a high level on each of those, and then we can kind of talk about the KPIs that really tie together all of the systems, great. And feel free to jump in. I know, like I could talk about these things all day long. So there’s specific questions that you have, or, I guess, one question for you, like, what do you do for exercise? Like, what is your regimen?
Will Bachman 08:09
Yeah, so I have been for about 30 years. I was mainly doing just running three or four or five times a week, you know, three, three or four miles, and then probably, like a lot of people my age cohort, you hear all this stuff about strength. So I’ve started doing more strength training, and I’ve been doing the five by five strong kind of strength trainings. I’ve been going to the gym and doing some some basic strength training and adding that in so and then I’ll go on these long walks. So I walked across England last year, 100 miles, and then I’m doing another 100 mile walk in in May. And they kind of prep for those. I’ll do 10 or 12 mile walks, nothing super crazy, kind of around the city or whatever, a little swimming. So that’s kind of my routine.
Lilly Minkove 09:11
That’s pretty awesome. I would say that, you know, most people are probably like you a few years ago, where they cardio. It’s about losing weight, maintaining kind of looking good, being in shape where there’s nothing wrong with that a cardio is really important. But I think you really hit the nail on the head in terms of muscle is so important. So I think what a lot of people don’t know is that muscle is actually an anti aging metabolic organ. It’s it’s a the tissue every time you exercise, your muscles actually produce what are called mitokenes. So they’re anti inflammatory proteins that slow insulin resistance. They fight visceral fat, which is a fat within your organs that is really drives up your risk of cardiovascular disease. And they actually protect, protect bone density. Also. So, so muscle is your body’s largest endocrine organ. It actually communicates with your brain and helps you defend against Alzheimer’s. So I think especially for women and a lot of men, they focus so much on the cardio, but it’s actually really the strength training is so important of building both structural integrity in your bones and muscle, but also building up the muscle to kind of really compress combat frailty in your older age, because it really strengthens bone density. And it’s not only about being strong, but it’s also helps your neuroplasticity, which is helping your muscles actually directly communicate with your brain. So every time you are building muscle, your brain actually are is also rewiring its ability to change and adapt. And there’s a lot of cognitive benefits with strength training as well.
Will Bachman 10:58
Yeah, on the strength training, you know, I started getting into it around three or four years ago, and got more serious about it last year. I’d say it’s easy to be intimidated by it, and it’s okay to start gentle on yourself. And at least my experience was earlier. I was a little bit haphazard and just going in and, oh, I’ll just sort of just sit down today at this machine or whatever. And I’d say, for me, it’s been better doing this program. It’s like five by five. This program that is called, I use this thing called strong lifts, where, instead of trying to spend hours in the gym, you can kind of do it in a limited amount of time. And the strongest program is there’s just five exercises that you do, and each one you do alternating days, like you only have to do three days a week. And when you go you do just five or three different exercises, and it alternates. And each exercise you do only five reps, or five sets of five reps. So you’re doing five sets of five reps of three exercises. There’s 70 there’s 75 reps total in the gym takes like 40 minutes. And I’ve you know, you you finish it just feeling not the most fun doing it, but you finish it feeling like just so much more energy. For people that say, Oh, I don’t have time to go to the gym, you actually are so much more productive afterwards that it kind of your increased efficiency makes up for the cost time of it. And you can start gentle and just if you have a kind of a set program in mind, at least my experience, where it’s defined, where you can kind of measure your progress. It’s much more satisfying, and it’s rather better to do fewer exercises than more, so that you can actually see your progress over time. That’s my experience.
Lilly Minkove 12:55
Yeah, absolutely. I think it really I think the ideal is three times a week. Obviously, you kind of have to work your way up to it, even if you’re just starting out. I think even you know body weight squats and really working your legs and glutes, the those are the largest muscles in your body, and they actually give you much more bang for your buck in terms of kind of the all the benefits of building muscle. So So I would say that the lifting heavy is a key difference, like I, you know, I used to go to the gym and lift like three cobweight, so that there, you know, there are a lot of those Jane Fonda videos, which love Jane Fonda, and she’s actually now such a proponent of women’s health as well. And she’s kind of saying, you know, that that was just back when they were selling us a lot of baloney in terms of what is actually worthwhile. But I think the lifting heavy and really trying to figure out what works for you is the best. The second pillar, I would say, that is so important, is really sleep. Yeah, and I think this is the one I’d put hardest on with a business audience, management consultants. I think these are the high performers that I used to do this all the time. Of like, sleep was the thing I would sacrifice to get whatever done, whether it’s something for my family or something work related. And you know, this is probably has the most serious consequences that I did not understand initially. So just thinking about the mechanism of sleep, sleep is effectively when your brain kind of cleans itself out and takes out the trash, and that’s when your immune system is actually hunting for cancer. So there are two things that happen in your sleep, especially during stages of deep sleep, so your your brain activates the lymphatic system, which is kind of a waste clearance system that flux flushes out all the waste throughout the day. And it’s a lot of these things. Um. That are related to Alzheimer’s disease, called Tau protein and amyloid beta. So these it’s almost it’s done exclusively during deep sleep. So if you don’t get the the quality sleep, your brain is not clearing these things out. It has a lot of long term effects. Secondly, your immune system is developing natural killer cells while you’re sleeping. So they are basically these cells that go in and identify abnormal cells that could be like pre cancer, and they kill these off. So if you think about the whole idea of like, your body is replicating cells at any trillions of cells at any one point in time, and they’re going to be mistakes, and so these natural killer cells find those mistakes and they eradicate them before they become something more dangerous. And there’s research that shows you know even one night of less than four hours of sleep can kill 70% of your natural killer cell activity in your brain or in your system. So that’s just one night of sleep deprivation. So all of this to say is that sleep is such a core part of how your body rejuvenates and restores itself, and this is one of the key levers that I had I really was not aware of before really researching all of this. It was all like, I can function, I can have some caffeine, a lot of energy. It doesn’t really matter, but obviously it’s all the things that show up over time.
Will Bachman 16:31
Now maybe we’re going to get to the actual KPIs later, but I’m curious, what are some of the recommendations, the science based recommendations, that you’ve come up with on sleep, like, you know, you hear sort of eight hours, but I understand that the science around that specific number is a bit contested. So what are some of your recommendations about sleep in terms of,
Lilly Minkove 16:57
oh, you know, I’ve done a lot of sleep research and have talked to and listened to a lot of sleep doctors. So I think the couple of things is actually one of the key metrics for sleep is actually more regularity, like going to bed at the same time every day, actually is a much more important metric than potentially even length of sleep. So just that consistency of of kind of letting your circadian rhythm run itself. So I think the optimal is seven to eight hours of sleep, but the quality also matters. So one interesting fact is I started wearing just a very basic tracker called amaze fit on my wrist, and it tracks sleep for better or for worse, how accurate it is, but it’s at least internally consistent. Yeah. And there are nights if I have a glass of wine and I go to sleep at the same time, I wake up at the same time, and I can see on my tracker that my quality of sleep is worse. Oh, yeah. So there’s, there’s obviously the consistency of sleep, and then the quality of sleep is really important. So actually, knowing how much deep sleep you’re getting is really critical. And I think there’s a lot of lot of things around sleep hygiene that the doctors talk about in terms of, like putting your phone in a different room, having the temperature be 65 or below to really, kind of effectively, your your body temperature has to drop in order for you to go to sleep, and your heart rate needs to drop below a certain rate in order to go to sleep. So all of these factors will help with the with quality of sleep, as well as consistency. It’s obviously difficult because we live our lives, and there are lots of things disrupting it, but you’re trying to optimize that. This has become one of the key areas. Dr Wendy Troxel is a sleep doctor that I’ve actually met, and I love her line of saying, treat sleep like a dear friend. I take care of it, make sure that you’re monitoring it and making sure that you’re really kind of thinking about it proactively, rather than just kind of being like a, you know, it’ll be what it’ll be.
Will Bachman 19:09
Yeah, I, I read one piece that was a bit of a critique of some of the sleep research, you know, like you read, okay, eight hours is the then I saw one thing, like, really diving into, okay. What’s the research behind that? And it was a little bit thin, I guess, in my own experience, just experimenting on myself, I found Yes, to your point, you bring up alcohol, I find that I was finding that alcohol with like, you know, having a glass of wine or something in the evening would result in, like, worse sleep. So that was one of the reasons I cut out alcohol six years ago, just completely 100% like a lot of people, I guess more and more people are doing that, but I cut out alcohol, and I’ve also found, at least for me, I. That the timing of sleep matters a lot. Like for me, I found that six hours is feels about right to me for most nights, sometimes you need, like a long one, but I find that I find function very well in about six hours and but the timing of it matters a lot. Like if I go to bed at 10pm and wake up at 4am usually, that’s perfect, right? Feel great. Get up at 4am feel great. Whereas, if I go to bed at 12 and get up at six in the morning, I feel like junk. So it’s like a little bit about the timing of it. You’re pointing consistency, and it’s also just maybe your own rhythm, as opposed, you know, against the clock. Some people are larks, some people are night owls.
Lilly Minkove 20:43
Yes, definitely different sleep archetypes. And to your point about sleeping earlier the I think it definitely varies by individual, but research shows a lot of the deep sleep happens earlier in the evening for whatever reason. So that, really, I mean, supports your your experience. The earlier the 10pm gets you probably higher quality deep sleep than the 12pm even though the hours are the same.
Will Bachman 21:08
Yeah. And it also feels a little bit like sort of how anxious and stressed out you are. If you don’t have a ton of things kind of stressing you out that much, and you just have this nice, calm, interrupted baby sleep. It does seem more restorative than if you have, like, some deliverable do the next day at 8am and you’re stressing about it all night long and kind of waking up and thinking about, like, oh my god, I gotta get up at 6am and finish this, like, email or something. Yeah. So there
Lilly Minkove 21:35
are actually two things related to that. One is, there’s actually a lot of research that if you kind of write down the things that you’re thinking about and put, like, physically write them down, your brain kind of is able to let them go and kind of say it’s parked somewhere. I don’t have to carry it in kind of my memory anymore. I like that tip, yeah, that actually helps a lot. And then the other thing I would say, related to that is the, I actually lost my train of thought. The, I think the in terms of the sleep that is kind of interrupted often happens more often than we like in, you know, as we get older, you’re getting up to go to the bathroom. And one of the tricks that Dr Trostle Troxel shared is to not look at the clock, because there is something about looking at the clock and doing the calculation of, oh my god, I have this many hours left. So ideally, she she said, you know, don’t go to the bathroom if you can. But if you wake up, don’t look at the clock and just kind of try to get back without and that, that’s something that I’ve tried to do. And I would say the last thing is, I actually now set like a sleep alarm not to go to sleep, but like an hour before I go to sleep to kind of try to calm down, yeah, and kind of let go like you, let your brain, kind of Yeah, decompress out of all the things that happened in the day. And I also now take magnesium at night, because a lot of people are magnesium deficient, and I found that when I do the magnesium, I get a better quality sleep, because magnesium does calm the brain. It helps stimulate, kind of calming hormones in your brain. And so if you take it about an hour or 30 minutes before bed, that does help with the quality of sleep.
Will Bachman 23:36
Alright, exercise and sleep. Okay, nutrition. So the next
Lilly Minkove 23:41
is nutrition. And I think, you know, we’ve all seen so many things about Ultra Plus less food and all the things that our culture is on. So I think one thing that I learned that was really, like, kind of jarring to me, was the fact that, you know, sugar is so terrible for your body, it’s not just about the weight gain. It ages your cells and it feeds the metabolic environment for disease. So sugar, when it goes into a system, converts into glucose, and glucose attaches to all the all your proteins and your blood vessels. It’s kind of like a sticky coating all over your blood, so that that also creates compounds that trigger inflammation in your body. And that is actually the the mechanism behind cardiovascular disease and heart disease. It also trigger, potentially could trigger diabetes and cellular aging. And increasingly, you know, they kind of talk about Alzheimer’s and dementia as type three diabetes triggered, really, by too much sugar and glucose and the management system behind it. So there’s a doctor called Dr William Lee, who is a Harvard trained physician who does a lot. Cancer work, and what he has shown is that cancer cells preferentially run on glucose. So if you have a lot of sugar in your diet, it doesn’t cause cancer, per se, but it keeps that door open. There’s a lot of glucose in your system, there’s a lot of fuel for whatever cancer cells might be there. So it is a similar and it’s obviously a similar lifestyle that protects your heart and your brain, because nutrition is really the key lever to help your metabolism. There’s, you know, I think, I’m not sure the exact statistic, but some crazy amount of Americans are actually metabolically unhealthy, whether they’re overweight or not. It’s more about their metabolic health is out of control, and it is a lot due to the ultra processed foods and high sugar diets that a lot of us consume.
Will Bachman 25:51
Yeah, yeah, that makes total sense to me. I i cut out sugar like six years ago as well, and it’s actually harder than cutting out alcohol.
Lilly Minkove 26:04
Like, amazing. What’s hidden in sugar? What hidden is hidden in I should say, there’s so many that you’re like, oh, wow, this is actually high sugar.
Will Bachman 26:14
Yeah. What beyond? Beyond eliminating sugar? What are some of the other nutrition tips?
Lilly Minkove 26:22
So there is, actually, I would say there are two things. One is, it’s not all about eliminating sugar, per se. It’s also about the sequence in which you eat your food that helps control the glucose in your system. So the principle, there’s a doctor called Jesse inches pay, who is called the glucose Goddess, and she has a book called The glucose revolution, and this is why I learned from her, is you eat fiber. First you eat the vegetables, and that actually kind of forms like a protective coating in your gut that kind of protects against the absorption of some of the sugar. And then you eat the protein and then the fat, and then the carbohydrates and sugar last so that same meal, just in different sequence, could have a 75% lower glucose spike in your blood sugar. And so because the fiber is like kind of coating your intestines in this gel type solution that then absorb, that slows and decreases the glucose absorption. So, you know, we’re, we’re going to eat sugar lots of times. There’s kind of in our lives as celebrations, and so I think there’s a way of, kind of tempering the impact, even if you have those enjoyable meals. The second thing I will say is it’s really about eating the diversity of plants and plant based vegetables. So the standard is actually eating 30 different types of plants and vegetables in a week.
Will Bachman 28:00
Oh, wow, there it is pretty, pretty high number.
Lilly Minkove 28:02
Um, it is a very high number. So the idea is that the different foods feed your gut microbiome in different ways. So they’re about your gut contains all this bacteria, and that is actually kind of what keeps your system running. So all the different foods and the diversity of foods actually feed your gut in a in a very different way, and help build the good bacteria that keep you healthy. So I was actually at a talk last night with Dr Mary Claire haver, who is a pretty renowned menopause doctor, at her book talk in DC, and she talked about, like a, almost like gamifying it, so, having a list of what 30 spots and so throughout the week, filling in, like, how many of the 30 different vegetables and fruits have I eaten this week? And it’s actually been a fun thing I’ve done with my kids. There was a period where they’re like, Okay, mom, here’s how many I ate at school today for lunch. And really kind of getting them into the conversation earlier. Because, you know, there’s, there’s some kids who are and I have one who just take vegetables and kind of, that makes it a little bit more interactive. But the diversity really does matter. So I actually also do a lot of shopping, like agent grocery stores, which have so many more vegetables then, then, then, kind of your typical, like, American giant or Safeway type of grocery store, and just trying to sample different ones and creating that diversity,
Will Bachman 29:34
yeah, all the Asian greens you can get at the Asian, Asian grocers. Or if you go to, like the Farmers Market Union Square of New York City. There’s all these more vegetables off the beaten path a little bit. Okay? So we talked about exercise, sleep and nutrition. What was next? So the
Lilly Minkove 29:54
next is brain health. And this is, I think this was a big aha for me. Yeah, and like, the brain is probably the, the most important organ in your body in terms of your health. And I think it’s, you know, it’s it takes, it’s, I think, a three or four pound organ, but it takes about 20% of your daily caloric intake to run your brain. And so thinking about fueling our brain and keeping our brains healthy is so important, and I think it’s also about, you know, the way you’re wiring your brain to create new habits and create new pathways. So just as a very basic example, I’m actually doing a cardio dance performance with some friends. Oh, nice. And this is a totally new muscle for me, because I, I mean, I like to, it’s a fun way. It started out as a fun way to exercise, but all we have, like, seven songs that they’re all choreographed with different steps. So I was like, I, for the life of me, I could not remember how the sequencing and what, what to do when. And the teacher was like, just go home and do it 100 times. Like, each step, like, you know, just do it. And then once you hear the music, your your muscle memory will just kick in. And it actually is. It’s not happening, or not totally there yet, but it’s happening. And I kind of like, it’s my brain actually, just like taking over. So think about all the good habits and all the good things you want to be doing, there’s a way to actually train our brain into thinking more positively and more kind of constructive ways. But I think that the really big thing I came away with, I went to a recent talk where I’ve discovered that actually only three to 4% of Alzheimer’s cases are genetic, and the majority of cases can be prevented. And it’s actually, I mean, this was the fact that the decisions you make in your 40s and 50s are the most powerful predictors of cognitive outcomes in later years, because it is actually Alzheimer’s disease of midlife decisions. It’s really about, how do you protect your brain with exercise, nutrition and waiting, not waiting, to kind of see what the outcome is, because it’s primarily within our control with a lot of the lifestyle measures that we can take.
Will Bachman 32:26
Okay, so I’m not super sure I understand about the brain health. Is this, are we talking about like, keeping your brain active and continuing to like learn new things, or is it more something about like mindfulness and or is it continuing to like to challenge yourself with new skills? Or what is brain health?
Lilly Minkove 32:46
So I think that there’s those. There are probably the three key areas. One is keeping your brain active in through exercise. So what we talked about in terms of the mitochondria before that are helping form new pathways in your brain when you exercise. So strength training is a critical way to keep your brain healthy, and I think that is not necessarily intuitive for a lot of us. I think two is continue to keep your brain active and doing things that are kind of learning new things, and continue to keep it like learning new languages is one of the best things you can do for your brain to active, activate new pathways. Playing Mahjong, actually, is something I’ve been doing. It’s been really heating up in my social circles. And the fun part is that you’re looking at this group of tiles, and you’re trying to form, there’s, you know, the American style of mahjong. There’s something like 50 different hands you could make. And so you get these cards or tiles, and you’re trying to figure out, Okay, which one of these 50 am I most likely to be able to make? And a little bit of, you know, and I, sometimes I wish I had an AI to help me figure this out. That’s the workout for my brain of figuring it on my own and then kind of making trade offs, of saying, well, I could go this way or I could go that way. And so that is a key thing. And then actually another key thing to keep your brain healthy, especially for women, is actually ensuring that you have enough estrogen in your system. So brain loss is actually the brain loses access to a primary fuel source of glucose when estrogen drops in your in your system during menopause. So a lot of people actually have the brain fog, the memory lapses. It’s because your blood isn’t getting enough your your brain is not getting enough energy to function. So this is a lot of women happening at the peak of their careers. And you know, for the leaders and business leaders out there, as well as for the people who have partners who are. Mothers or relatives and loved ones who are who may be experiencing this. Estrogen is such, so important for your brain, which is why there’s, it’s really important for women to think about ways to explore supplementation of estrogen during menopause. Oh, okay, so that’s, I think that’s something kind of counterintuitive to what you’re thinking about in terms of, like, what is that? What does menopause have to do with brain health? It’s actually really very much linked to it, and it is one of the reasons why some of these brain fog, a lot of women develop, like, ADHD, type of symptoms, and it’s because the estrogen is actually impacting how their brain can use energy sources of glucose, okay, I think brain, brain help feel it is also downstream of a lot of different metrics. So the one of the things that is not apparent, is in terms of like blood pressure and blood vessels and inflammation, all of those things actually also trigger inflammation in your brain. So all of the other things we talked about also tied together in the system. Okay, and what’s the last area? Um, the last one is actually connection, and that’s what one of the things that I love about the umbrex gatherings that you’ve been making, because as an independent consultant, I spend a lot of time, you know, virtually on Zoom calls and working remotely for clients. So there was actually a Harvard study that found social isolation carries a greater mortality risk for women than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
Lilly Minkove 36:45
And so it is. You know, back in the caveman days, we lived together in groups of, you know, 100 to 300 individuals, and we helped each other. And so loneliness actually drives cortisol, which is a hormone in your system. It suppresses immune function. It accelerates a lot of inflammation pathways that we’re trying to manage. So, you know, for women and for men, I think the infrastructure of connection is actually kind of collapsing for lots of us, like when you’re in school, you have this system. Once you leave the system and you go into a workplace, you you have some, you know, kind of workplace connections. But I think as a lot of us have developed families that the nuclear family is much stronger now than the extended, multi generational households we used to have. So on the surface and systemically, we just don’t have the same type of connection. So we see that, you know, obviously you have your partner and friends, but sometimes make making that meaningful time to stay connected with people around you, and even small connections with like the cashier at the coffee shop and people that you see on the street like those all kind of feed and help our health, because that helps us feel our bodies feel less lonely. And then there’s also the benefits of having that support system in place so that you don’t feel like you’re alone,
Will Bachman 38:20
so you’ve talked to us about these areas, and you are writing about them with your with your blog, and we’ll include that newsletter blog link in the show notes. Tell us a bit about your sort of services that you’re offering that that sort of tie to all of this. Or are you more, is it like a one on one coaching or you’re aiming to work with kind of companies to put wellness programs in place? Or what, tell us a little bit about your your kind of service offering?
Lilly Minkove 38:53
Um, sure, there’s. So I, my objectives are actually twofold. One on the consumer. On the consumer side, it really is kind of a Passion Driven like, I want to share all this great knowledge with the women out there. I also see it as like an amazing consumer insights tool to help me understand what kind of women in my target audience are feeling, and what kind of, really to kind of help identify, you know, what are some potential white space options? So I’m kind of using it as almost like a as a benefit to them, but also as a kind of continual consumer insight research project. And so for my clients, what I’m offering is, you know, I’ve been in retail, luxury, kind of consumer facing brands for 25 years. I know, kind of this female consumer in many different aspects. And so this is adding wellness to that. The wellness industry is kind of the Wild West. There’s anything from supplements. To to a boutique fitness, to all sorts of trackers, and there’s, it’s, it’s really overwhelming from a consumer perspective. So for for brands and companies, what I’m offering is, look, I can help you distill what do your customers actually want, and how can you best convey share offer value to them and also, obviously, grow your business or service at the same time?
Will Bachman 40:28
Okay, fantastic. So why don’t you just mention the the the links, where can people who want to learn more about what you’re writing about? Where can they find you online?
Lilly Minkove 40:41
Um, sure. So my my website is on on the beehive platform. So it’s HeraSpher, H, E R, A, S, P, H, E r, E, dot. B, hi, B, E, h, i, i v.com, um, and I also publish on LinkedIn, because I really feel like it’s this professional audience that is often neglecting their health and focusing on their on their businesses. But really the two need to go hand in hand and for the long term. So maybe at the end, we could talk about the KPIs.
Will Bachman 41:20
Oh, yes, yeah, go. Let’s go through them.
Lilly Minkove 41:22
I started with the KPIs, and I felt like we kind of needed to understand the whole system. And then, so, you know, think about the KPIs. I’ll do it in kind of easy to more, more challenging. So the first free, easy, immediate is blood pressure. That’s basically kind of circulatory load. How hard is your heart working? So normal is 18, over 20, if you have to, if it’s over 130 you need to start having a conversation. A lot of physicians will start recommending medication at 140 there are lots of different ways to lower your blood pressure through lifestyle and exercise as well. But that’s one of the easiest ones, because you can do this for free, like most pharmacies, or buy a cuff on Amazon for $30 okay, the second one I would say, is hemoglobin, hemoglobin, a, 1c, and what that measures is your three month average blood sugar. So that measure is a signal of your metabolic efficiency. So how well is your body converting fuel into energy without wasting and that normal is below 5.7 so pre diabetes is 5.7 to 6.4 so when I first got tested with that test, with next health in 2023 I realized I was pre diabetic, and I was shocked. Like, I feel like I’m really healthy. I’m I’m not overweight, but somehow for some so that was one of the shockers that feel like, how did this happen? So this is not necessary. It’s included in a lot of blood work panels, but not always by all doctors. So add ask. It’s easy to ask your doctor to add that if it’s not included, it’s also a cardiovascular risk marker and a brain health risk marker. The other one, I would say, is interesting, especially if there is potential inflammation in your system, is C reactive protein, CRP, this is another one I learned about in my blood panel. So this basically measures systemic inflammation. So how much inflammation is in your system, you know, based on how you’re exercising and eating? Well, I assume yours would be fairly low, but you know, there you’re kind of below one milligram per liter is low, one to three is moderate, through over three is high. And so this is actually relatively easy to also request on a blood work panel. But a lot of people don’t know about this. And elevated CRP is associated with cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, but about follicle syndrome, a lot of the inflammation, inflammatory things that are not good for us. The other one is fasting insulin. So that’s the it’s basically requires fasting. And then you you do the blood work on a fasted basis. So that measures insulin resistance. A lot of people who are prebiotic have insulin resistance, and so it’s really, how hard is your body working to process the glucose in your system? And this should be this, typically, is not related, it’s not on a regular blood work panel, and does require, like asking, and I think that’s one of the challenges in our healthcare system that a lot of doctors don’t measure all of these. And sometimes if I I’ve asked my regular doctors to add some of this to my blood work, and they’re like, I don’t think you need it. It’s okay. So you know that is just something about our our system. The other thing I would look at is. Is LDL cholesterol, specifically so the low density cholesterol is the bad cholesterol, which tends to rise, especially for women during menopause. It actually increases during this time because your body is not able to process your liver isn’t able to process it as well during menopause. And also related to that is a P O B, which is a very specific request. A p O b is, think of it as like a, almost like a cash flow metric. It gives you a standard of the the types of risk factors that you have for heart disease. So a lot of cardio cardiologists require this, this panel of LDL specifically, and a POB in order to know kind of what your range is. And below, typically below 90 milligrams per liter is where you want to be.
Lilly Minkove 45:58
And the last one, I would say, is a DEXA scan to really understand kind of your bone density and your body composition. A lot of scales now have the body composition, but what they don’t have is the bone density. And so it’s really to measure, do you have osteopenia or osteoporosis? And you know, where are you in terms of how, how strong your bones are, especially for women, a lot of women lose 15 to 20% of their bone density through the first couple years of menopause. And so if you the risk is that your muscles Your bones are more likely to fracture if you have lowered bone density. So this is actually super easy to get. It’s like $99 you do need a prescription, but you need to request it and get this done.
Will Bachman 46:48
How do they measure your bone density? Is that they just draw blood? Or do you get on some kind of scale scan?
Lilly Minkove 46:55
And I actually haven’t done it yet. I’m scheduled to get one, and I I think a lot of like fitness locations will do it, or long longevity clinics will do it. I think MRI locations probably offer this as well. So I haven’t experienced it myself, but I will let you know once I again, it’s definitely recommended. And then I think the the last one a lot of people talk about is VO two max. And so that’s really kind of how hard your your body, you can use oxygen during exercise, and your cardiovascular capacity. And it’s actually a lot of people say that’s the best measure of longevity. And that is actually kind of hard to measure, because you need to, like, run with a mask on. So it’s a lot of sports medicine clinics or high end gyms or physicians will do it, but it is supposed to be the strongest predictor of longevity. And so there are a lot of approximations of estimated VO, two, Max like on your Apple Watch or Garmin or group, they will estimate what it is. But the real way to do it is actually by going to a clinic or a gym,
Will Bachman 48:11
all right, any other KPIs, I think those
Lilly Minkove 48:15
are the key ones. There are lots of things to track. I personally do twice a year, a function health panel of about 100 biomarkers just to kind of check on where it is. And that’s, that’s what I got my parents for the holidays last year to make sure that they’re kind of also on the right track. Because I think, you know, to your point, if we think about this like a business, you don’t only look at your PNL once a year. It’s about how you’re actually trending, and where are all the places that you could be improving your performance.
Will Bachman 48:49
Fantastic. Well, Lilly, thank you for coming on today and for sharing what you’ve been learning and great discussion around like, you know wellness across board, certainly, you know, it’s a growing area in terms of business and best wishes on you know, as you build your your wellness focused consulting
Lilly Minkove 49:10
practice, thank you. I really appreciate you having me. It’s been fun talking with you and learning about your own wellness routine. Alright, thanks. Bye.
