Feel what nutrients are missing.

INSIGHT (what we need)

Never buy a random bottle of vitamins from a retail shelf again.

Don’t know about you – but I get cross-eyed staring at a shelf of vitamin bottles trying to guess what missing elements are finally going to give me that lasting boost that my daily coffee is only faking. With true vitamin and mineral replenishment, we should feel the difference, especially if we’ve been deficient for a long time. And most of us are.

Luckily, we are entering into an innovation revolution to get upstream on disease prevention to diagnose metabolic deficiency before it leads to pathology. Covid-era rapid testing exacerbated this shift towards at-home convenience, cutting into the wasted time and processing of unnecessary doctor visits. We now see dozens of players on the market spanning viral detection to microbial diversity to hormonal imbalance. One of the fastest growing ‘at home’ segments (expected to be worth $546M globally by 2033, growing steadily at 6.3% CAGR) is micronutrient testing.

The further upstream we go, the more it’s about optimizing how our bodies absorb micronutrients at the cellular level. Some times having a ‘healthy lifestyle’ still produces a suboptimal nutrient status – especially when we take into account other factors in one’s environment that produce a chronic stress response (environment, sleep, air quality, water pH, relationships). We are no longer getting the microbial and micronutrient exposure that would come from living off the land, playing in dirt, catching or picking our own food, pulling water from a stream, cooking off rocks, or burying our food for fermentation. With deficient inputs, we need better sources of replenishment. And the unregulated, unprescribed vitamin industry has not been that source.

It’s not uncommon to be someone who goes to the gym 4 days a week, eats a ‘balanced diet’, sleeps 7-8 hours a night and still feel incredibly fatigued, prone to mood disorders or deal with infertility issues. It’s possible (and common) to be over-nourished (with macronutrients) and undernourished (with micronutrients) at the same time. But we can also be over-nourished with excess intake of a particular micronutrient because we read it was good for us online and start taking what we don’t need. Throw in the fact that many bottled vitamins are likely to have a ~10% absorption rate and it’s really like taking a nutrient shot-in-the-dark.

The reality is: we may need to rely more on getting snapshots of our micronutrient profiles when a diverse ‘balanced diet’ direct from nutrient rich soil is becoming harder to achieve consistently. 

Hence, why it is extremely important to dig deeper into our intracellular health to get an accurate picture of how to stimulate healing. There’s the therapeutic first order of what we need to do to strengthen the foundations of health, but then there’s also a second order of identifying the suboptimal nutrient status or dormant markers that cause nutritional deficiency, hinder performance or advance aging. For that, we need accurate convenient testing, a surge of the right nutrients at the right time, and then a retesting to check our levels.

INSPIRATION (what we want)

Let’s Get Checked: at-home testing to bypass doctor office visits with sample retrieval, receiving results, and getting an online consultation with a health care provider.

Since inception in 2015, this at home series of testing kits has grown 18,000% due to the industry demand for convenient sample collection for early detection.

• More than 30 home diagnostic tests in the categories of sexual health, women’s health, men’s health, micronutrient deficiencies and viral testing (ie. Coronavirus).

• Direct access to diagnostic testing starting from at-home convenient sample collection.

• Convenient online prognosis from test results after ~ 7 days.

• Digital questionnaires to help identify the right testing kit for you.

• Account connects you to various wearable programs by Apple Health or Garmin to help track new health behaviors related to your tests.

• Free shipping on test kits lower the barrier to ordering.

INNOVATION (what we wish for)

Surge: at-home nutrient dispenser calibrated to your metabolic profile.

Move the needle on your metabolic efficiency by getting the right boost of micronutrients through supplementation through continuous testing and a prescribed ‘liquid shot’ of micronutrients in your morning glass of water.

• Replace your urge for a ‘first thing’ morning coffee buzz with a “surge” of micronutrients dispensed in a liter of water to hydrate and supplement upon waking.

• Surge Nutrient Maker is calibrated to your blood and saliva work, tested on a monthly basis through subscription test kits sent to your home via subscription.

• The Surge Lab then tests and calibrates your supplementation after receiving your results monthly with notifications when to take your surge “shots” (some daily, some weekly).

• Test for specific antioxidant deficiencies to see how your cells resist oxidative stress and free radical damage.

• Assess glucose-insulin interaction within the cells and how specific nutrients can correct glucose metabolism.

• Get a score on T-cell lymphocyte proliferation to test your immune response to exogenous threats.

• Assess fructose sensitivity to see if you are unable to metabolize excess fructose (common with various ‘health fad diets’ that don’t see the adverse metabolic effects of consuming too much fruit juice).

• Receive suggestions on what macronutrients to eat to maximize absorption with your new found micronutrient in-take (ie. soluble fats).