Midlife isn't what it used to be, and that's a good thing. According to recent reports, people are changing careers more than ever before, pursuing new hobbies, and starting families later in life. For many of us, midlife is now a time of growth, achievement, and exploration. The question is: can our health keep pace?
If adulthood brought with it a downshift to your mental and physical performance, it’s not just you. Starting at age 30, muscle mass decreases as much as 3 to 5% per decade, and by 45, don’t be surprised if you experience an accelerated decline in your physical fitness, memory, and mental sharpness. And for guys in particular? Testosterone starts declining by 1 to 2% in your mid-30s, no small blow to muscle definition, energy levels, strength, focus, and more.
The good news: thanks to new approaches to personalized medicine, not all of these biological changes are inevitable.
Performance Is Personal
At Lifeforce, we believe it's possible to go from good to great — at any age — provided you have access to the right information, tools, and expertise. By integrating at-home diagnostics, clinical-grade nutraceuticals, safe and effective pharmaceuticals, and experienced functional medicine doctors, Lifeforce delivers performance plans for your biology, your goals, and your life.
“When people think about ‘performance,’ the image that usually comes to mind is 20-somethings diving into the latest fitness fad,” says Lifeforce Co-Founder Dugal Bain. “In reality, it’s people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s who have the most to gain from properly understanding and optimizing their health and, frankly, society has the most to gain from those people being at their best. These are people who are leading in their lives — at work, in their communities, in their families. Everything about our approach has been designed to help people maximize this chapter of their lives,” Bain says.
The 5 Elements of Lifeforce
Lifeforce’s mission is to improve the quality of midlife. Unlike traditional healthcare that focuses on diagnosing and treating disease, Dr. Kerri Masutto, a functional medicine expert and VP of Clinical Operations for Lifeforce, says, “this is about getting people from 'meh' to 'peak' and keeping them there safely and sustainably.” Depending on the individual, that could mean helping you to feel more energized and focused, decreasing body fat and increasing lean muscle, improving stamina and recovery, improving sexual function, supporting long-term DNA health, and more, says Dr. Masutto.
The fundamentals of any performance plan are to know how you’re doing, identify what you need, and track impact over time. Lifeforce does that through five key elements: convenient, comprehensive diagnostics, clinician-grade supplements and pharmaceuticals, curated lifestyle recommendations, and expert clinical care.
“Sounds simple, but for the average person, bringing those pieces together is overwhelming,” says Bain. “People are either paralyzed by the effort of it all, or are trying to DIY this with a computer full of spreadsheets, a cabinet overflowing with supplements, and a primary care provider who's uninterested or outright skeptical. We're delivering one integrated system on top of a digital platform that makes it easy for our members to use actual data to improve their health,” Bain says.
1. A Smarter Diagnostic
Blood is the richest source of biological information in the human body. A single blood draw can measure over 300 biomarkers revealing insights about anything from stress response to organ health to cancer risk to hormone balance. “Despite that richness of information, most people get their cars serviced more frequently than their blood tested,” Bain says. “When they do, it is for a rudimentary panel covering only a small set of biomarkers focussed on illness rather than performance.”
By contrast, the Lifeforce Diagnostic includes 30+ biomarkers selected specifically for their role in understanding performance in midlife. Results are interpreted by a team of highly trained functional medicine doctors who are experienced in helping people achieve their optimal range safely. “Most blood tests are checked against ‘normal’ levels based on the average of the people who go to that lab,” says Dr. Masutto. “Just because you’re not abnormal does not mean you're in your best zone.”
It’s also convenient: Members can either go to a nearby office or get their blood tested right at home, and results are communicated via a simple online portal along with a comprehensive clinical write-up to make it easy to digest key insights and understand next steps.
2. Clinician-Grade Nutraceuticals
Nearly three-quarters of Americans report taking dietary supplements in hopes of boosting overall health and wellness (40%), immunity support (32%), and filling nutrition gaps (25%), to name a few. Yet with more than 90,000 supplements on the market, it's getting harder to separate good quality from good marketing.
Enter Dr. Hector Lopez, Chief Research & Innovation Advisor for Lifeforce and a world-renowned expert in dietary supplement formulation and safety, who created 10 customized, clinician-grade nutraceuticals for midlife. Each formulation was built around ingredient purity and quality, state of the art validated research research, and concentrated dosages to safely drive impact that Lifeforce members can actually feel and/or measure in their bloodwork, Dr. Lopez says.
“There are so many of these supplements that, when people take them, they don't actually feel different,” says Dr. Masutto. “The products we built are not standard grocery store supplements. These are physician grade formulations. We're not having you trust that it's making a difference. You actually feel it.” And to validate that what you’re feeling is in fact real, you’ll do a follow-up diagnostic every three months so you can track improvements in your biomarkers.
Take, for example, Lifeforce Peak Rise™, an all-day energy and productivity booster which includes TeaCrine and Dynamine, ingredients proven to amplify working memory, speed, cognitive control, and reaction time. When taken with a morning coffee, Peak Rise™ also moderates jitteriness while prolonging the half-life of caffeine by up to three times.
Lifeforce’s range of supplements also includes products that address key deficiencies, like Lifeforce Vitamin D+K. Upwards of 40% of adults have insufficient levels of vitamin D, affecting bone density, immune response, mood, energy, and strength. Lifeforce members will gain access to a new form of vitamin D that’s absorbed three times faster than standard variations, according to Dr. Lopez. “Most forms of vitamin D take two to three months to raise levels. We needed to create something that helps people feel better much more quickly than that,” Dr. Lopez explains.
3. Pharmaceuticals That Give You an Edge
“Many people are somewhat intimidated by pharmaceuticals and rightly so,” says Dr. Masutto. “These are powerful tools and need to be managed in a very personalized, responsible way. However, with the right level of clinical support there are established, treatments that can be amazingly effective and improve quality of life in a pretty profound way,” says Dr. Masutto.
“We only offer medications that are well studied, well understood, and have a very strong safety to benefit profile,” Dr. Masutto says. That means fewer unwanted side effects, and more performance optimization you can see and feel.
“The stereotype about testosterone therapy being for bodybuilders is fading as more research investment and public attention is brought to the way that hormone balance affects so many other core physiological systems,” says Bain. “It is the foundation for all other male development and performance.”
That’s why Lifeforce’s hormone optimization approach is built around safety, sustainability, and moving the dial from where you are now (say, making 40% of the testosterone you made 10 years ago) to where you feel at your best, says Dr. Vinita Tandon, Lifeforce’s Medical Director and a board certified endocrinologist. “Whatever your goals are, we get you there in a responsible and effective way,” says Dr. Tandon.
4. Curated Lifestyle Recommendations
According to the WHO, 60% of factors related to individual health and quality of life are correlated to lifestyle. And while we’re more aware than ever about the importance of nutrition, movement, sleep, and emotional health, the challenge is now sorting through all of that guidance to identify the tactics that will be most impactful on our lives.
“People know they need to make improvements in all of these areas, but trying to do so all at once often results in no improvement,” says Dr. Masutto. Lifeforce uses a detailed intake assessment plus blood work results to pinpoint lifestyle changes that will have the largest impact for each person. For example, rather than a laundry list of foods to avoid, what’s more helpful to know is that concentrating meals into an eight-hour daily window has broad-spectrum benefits for obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurologic disorder, Dr. Masutto says.
5. Expert Clinical Care
Lifeforce Membership includes ongoing access to our clinical team, plus a dedicated performance guide to help members monitor progress and stay on track. Unlike other telehealth platforms, Lifeforce members have access to as much guidance as they need to best optimize their performance and health. That means a convenient and digital-first platform custom-built by functional medicine doctors, clinical and scientific researchers, and endocrinologists.
“Improving health and performance is still fundamentally a human-to-human endeavor,” says Dr. Tandon. “The way results are interpreted and the accuracy of recommendations is only as good as the doctors involved, but we use our technology to give our doctors a few superpowers.”
And those superpowers extend to Lifeforce members as well. “It might sound a bit pie in the sky right now, but how would society benefit from a hundred thousand, or a million, adults living at the top of their game doing what they love?” asks Bain. “That’s the meta question we want to answer.”
Learn more about the Lifeforce Membership here, and get one big step closer to living life at your peak.
This article was medically reviewed by:
Kerri Masutto, MD, ABIM Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner
Vinita Tandon, MD, ABIM Board Certified in Endocrinology and Metabolism