Some wellness advice is brilliant. Some of it comes with a magic crystal.
In my job I meet a lot of people in health and wellness. Many of them use real science to help people feel better and live longer. Then there are the wild ones.
The man with the magic crystal
One man tried to sell me a crystal that he said could charge my mitochondria through my belly button. It only worked at 6:43am. On Tuesdays.
That was very specific, and I respect the confidence. I did not buy it.
The crystal is easy to laugh at. The harder cases are the ones that sound reasonable, cost real money and still do nothing for the person who buys them.
Welcome to the wellness jungle
The global wellness economy reached US$6.3 trillion in 2023, according to the Global Wellness Institute.
Fitness classes. Supplements. Keto. Cold plunges. TikTok creams. Spa rituals. Biohacks.
It is a wild buffet of advice, products and promises. Even careful people, CEOs, doctors, athletes and lawyers among them, spend money on things that sound good and do nothing for them.
Most of that advice is written for the average person. Very few of us are average in every way that matters.
Why personalise wellness?
Your genes don’t care about trends. They care about what works for you.
Two people can follow the same plan to the letter and get very different results, and genes are part of the reason. We call this the Genetic Multiplier. Your genes decide how much each choice counts. Your daily choices decide the rest.
I first wrote about it in Living with Genes, in October 2023, and it is still the idea everything we build rests on.
What the studies show
The multiplier is measurable. Four studies show it from different sides:
- Heart. Among 96,400 adults in the China Kadoorie Biobank, moving from an unhealthy lifestyle to a healthy one cut early heart disease 14.7 times as much in people at high genetic risk as in people at low risk (Nature Human Behaviour, 2024).
- Weight. People whose calorie-controlled diet was tailored to their genes had 5.7 times the odds of keeping weight off after more than 300 days: 73% of them did, against 32% on a standard plan (Nutrition Journal, 2007).
- Family. Across 22 randomised trials of parenting and social programmes, the same programme worked about four times as well for children with certain gene variants (Development and Psychopathology, 2015).
- Fitness. In the HERITAGE Family Study, 473 adults from 99 families followed the same 20-week training programme. Gains in fitness varied 2.5 times as much between families as within them, and genes explained about 47% of the difference (BMC Genomics, 2017).
The weight study was small, and a genetic tendency is one input among many. Habits, sleep, stress, health and age fill in the rest.
The pattern across all four is still clear. The same effort pays off differently for different people, and knowing your starting point helps you put yours where it counts. Our Why DNA page gathers more studies like these.
Cutting out the guesswork
That is why my team and I started ConnectingDNA. We help people live by design, not by default.
We use real science to:
- Recommend what fits your biology. The Bio-Profile turns a compatible DNA report into traits you can come back to and ask about.
- Cut out the hype. We say what a genetic result can support and where it stops, and we never treat DNA as destiny or diagnosis.
- Highlight real experts. Bio-Plans are delivered by DNA-Trained Partners, and we spend much of our week meeting wellness providers in person for the marketplace we are building.
Harder than selling a crystal
Being honest about DNA is slower than selling a miracle.
- The crystal seller needs thirty seconds and a punchline. We need a few minutes and some science.
- Most people have never heard the word DNA-Wellness.
- Every claim we make has to hold up, because genetic data deserves care.
- We are a small team in a very large jungle.
Why we keep going
If you have tried ten diets and none of them stuck, heard 200 opinions from 200 gurus, or bought the supplement everyone raved about and felt nothing, you are the reason we do this.
The best wellness hack is knowing how your body was designed in the first place.
That takes patience to explain, and we will keep explaining it for as long as it takes.
So stop following random advice, and start with how you were built.
If you run a wellness business built on real science, we would like to meet you. And I would still love to hear the weirdest health advice you have ever been given, so tell me on LinkedIn.
What DNA-Wellness means
DNA-Wellness uses insights from your DNA to help personalise how you eat, exercise, sleep, recover and live. Understand what makes your body different, make smarter wellness choices, and discover what may work better for you.
