James Raaff
Future Of Health

I think it's the belief that I've always had that the day-to-day lifestyle patterns we end up exhibiting are the things that influence our health mostly. 

Translational genomics refers to the personalisation of lifestyle behaviours. Patterns of behaviour that can be taught or coached to a person, that speak to their specific genetics and produce healthy outcomes. There's a lot we can do in terms of lifestyle patterns related to sleep and relaxation, how you eat and drink, your exercise habits, stress management and to relationships and networks, or social factors. 

Certainly, the primary shift that has excited me is a move towards personalisation. We all understand that we are quite similar in terms of our genetics. That's a technical fact. On a genetic level, all humans that have ever existed are 99.99% identical. But it's in that small difference at a genetic level, in combination with our nurture, with our environment, that produces all the variation we can see and the variation we can't see.

It's affecting different people differently, although, on a general level, you'd have to say that movement is one of those things that we all require for health. But how much movement and how frequently do we need to move? 

Electronic health records are basically glorified billing systems, and they don't hold clinical data. They don't find what's relevant in that data. That's what I'm excited about and what we're driving to try and be a part of in terms of a solution for health, disease risk reduction, for longevity, most certainly. And for performance.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) won't ever take over completely, I don't think, in terms of being really effective. But it's a tool that we haven't used and we most certainly do need to use. It doesn't replace clinicians it's just that clinicians have to upskill into using that as a tool.

I run self-experiments all the time, which is wise for all of us. We are our own controls. If you pick your experiments and pick the methodology, how you run those experiments, in other words, pick the right questions to ask of yourself, then you're going to get valuable data.

The behaviours we are talking about that we can implement to reduce disease risk are everyday decisions. We all make them constantly. If we can help people do that one at a time, we're going to have people living much longer and being very healthy for many of those years and reduce the need for all that sick care and the massive cost associated with it.

Reward behaviours in your team that produce real health and real performance. Deadlines produce stress and anxiety in most people. 

Invest in your uniqueness, invest in what makes you unique. Find out what your mix is - it's different from somebody else's. Most certainly seek the appropriate professionals to help you to determine that because there are lots of companies that are finding quick and nasty ways of doing this.