How AI, new drugs, and your DNA will help us live better for longer
What wellness — physical, mental, and otherwise — looks like matters for all of us, as individuals and as consumers. Matt Carmichael, editor of What the Future, looks at what the future could hold.
Imagine it’s 2034 and America has lost its collective weight. Not because we learned anything new, exactly, but because we learned how to apply what we know and treat diseases as diseases, not as personal failings.
Ditch carbs and sugars, eat lean protein and veggies — and exercise. This was the advice given to those who picked up the first issue of Reader’s Digest more than a century ago. Sounds just like what your doctor told you at your last physical, doesn’t it? But it’s worth noting that around that same period, many still considered cocaine a “universal panacea” and leeches had just finally fallen out of favor. So, we’ve learned some additional things along the way.
Today, technology has overtaken every aspect of our lives and vastly improved what we know about health and wellness. We have more ways of preventing and treating disease. We have earlier disease detection. We can monitor vital signs in real time and use artificial intelligence to determine patterns and predict what will happen if we eat that burger, or if we don’t exercise afterwards. And then there are GLP-1 drugs, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Yet, as Buddy Miller, one of the training staff for the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals says, “the basics are basic for a reason.”
Or take Maddy Dychtwald, author of the forthcoming “Ageless Aging: A Woman’s Guide to Increasing Healthspan, Brainspan, and Lifespan.”
She paints a simple picture of wellness to help you live longer, healthier: Eat well, and mostly plants, get enough sleep and water, and exercise with a shifting focus as you get older. For instance, since so many injuries in older people are caused by falls, balance is a critical focus of fitness as we age.
Mental health and wellness is something we’re still learning about, but it’s increasingly clear there is a direct tie to our physical health. Keeping our mental health strong as we age is another focus for Dychtwald. “There are things that we don't think about all the time as related to living a longer life; having a sense of purpose,” she told me. “Studies have shown a direct link between having a sense of purpose and living longer. That's pretty dramatic. A sense of purpose doesn't have to be something big.”
Much that we know about health is within our control. But a lot isn’t. Such as the mess that is the U.S. health insurance system. The biggest worries Americans have about their health are access and affordability. Those who are employed are much more likely to be insured and to say they are in good health than those who aren’t working.
The problem isn’t that we don’t know what it takes to be healthy. The problem is that it’s world around us makes it so much easier to be unhealthy.
It’s easier not to go to the doctor and deal with waiting rooms, paperwork and cost. It’s easier to eat the cheap, abundant carbs around us. It’s easier to scroll your phone or drive than to walk and exercise.
That’s why we have trends toward being vegetarian or working out or improving mental health. But simultaneously, we have epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Enter GLP-1 drugs
American’s use of this class of drugs is, among other things, floating the entire economy of Denmark based on sales by the Danish biomed firm Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy. That’s not an exaggeration.
We know how to live healthily. We now have a greater understanding of how to control weight and reduce obesity as a disease, rather than as a lifestyle choice. We have medications to help with that, and technology to help us monitor, measure and nudge ourselves to better choices.
So, let’s go back to our initial prompt.
What if America lost its weight?
You’d see a future with less reliance on the healthcare system to help us deal with all the related conditions like diabetes and heart disease —conditions that draw an enormous cost on our lives, but also our care system.
You’d see a future where the grocery aisles and restaurant drive-thrus look very different. You’d see even more discussion about what healthy body images look like, and representation in the media, and maybe even improved mental health among teens and others.
You’d still see a world where money can buy you better care. Dychtwald was quick to point out that her recipe for health was one for “non-billionaires.”
You’d see a world where technology, especially the development of AI, continues to help us understand our health. That includes more widespread genetic testing and therapies.
We may or may not see a future where access to reproductive care is limited or where life is sanctified at creation, depending on your point of view. But we’ll likely see a future where this is still a concern and debate.
Americans are worried that costs will get higher, and access won’t improve. That’s one reason almost one in three people are using various services like GoodRx to save on prescription costs.
What if we never gained weight in the first place?
That’s an even more provocative question, isn’t it? It came up when Kate MacArthur talked to Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, medical director from WeightWatchers. Will more widespread use of weight-loss medications and other tools and technologies, including genetics, keep us from gaining weight in the first place? Can we prevent obesity? It’s usually easier to prevent something than to walk it back or break a cycle.
Not one but two new life stages?
But what if there’s also a demographic shift in the future? Already, we have big shifts on the younger end of the spectrum. Over decades, we have seen conjoined and compounded trends. More of us are getting a college education. We are getting married later in life. We are having kids later in life, well into our 30s and 40s. We are also having fewer kids early in life as teen pregnancies have plummeted. We’re having fewer kids overall.
That has led, essentially, to an entirely new life stage of being a 20-something. Not all do it by choice. The economics of being young and single are not great for many, hence about three in ten people in that age range are living with their parents. But many also enjoy having a few years to be young and single.
Now say we live longer, and our lifespans continue to grow (after a brief pandemic blip). Say all these trends and technologies continue to allow us to live longer, healthier. The retirement age will likely continue to creep up. But many of us will find a future with a much longer period of employment or “retirement.”
Could that develop into an entirely new, or at least improved and prolonged, life stage? And what would that look like?
All these shifts have profound implications for:
- Financial services, as the math on how we afford retirement shifts. We’re not doing a great job as a nation saving for retirement, and Social Security is teetering;
- Health and pharmaceuticals, as many of the medications that prolong our health span, like GLP-1 and statins, are “lifetime” medicines;
- Food manufacturers, as appetites and diets shift;
- Customer experiences, as we think about the needs of a broad range of, mostly healthy, consumers;
- Any employer, as we come to terms with an aging, and smaller workforce;
Clearly wellness is a big topic and even as we just scratch the surface, we find no shortage of Big Questions to guide our thinking, and yes, our research. But despite our present, there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful about in this future.
| ← Read previous How AI, new drugs and DNA will unlock future growth for wellness and related industries | Read next → |