Hacking Health Through Advanced Biomarker Analysis

Dr. Tamsin Lewis & Ben Greenfield

Dr. Tamsin Lewis (UK) Medical Doctor, Psychiatrist, Triathlete, Founder @ CuroSeven Dr Tamsin Lewis is a one of the top ranked Ironman 70.3 athletes in the world and races as a professional triathlete. During this time of racing and training as a professional athlete, Tamsin has experienced first hand, injury, overtraining, anaemia, mineral depletion and misdiagnosis by NHS services. As a result this fuelled a desire to help others overcome what she learnt the hard way. Studying for a Masters in Sports Medicine afforded the opportunity to research what is required to perform at your best. Tamsin studied Medicine & Surgery at Kings College London and also has a Bachelor of Science degree in NeuroScience and Anatomy. Post graduation she worked as hospital doctor in Medicine and Anaesthetics for two years before pursuing a post-graduate Royal College of Psychiatrists qualification and a career in psychiatry. Ben Greenfield (USA) BenGreenFieldFitness.com, Human Performance Author & Consultant, Top 100 Most Influential People in Health & Fitness Ben Greenfield is an ex-bodybuilder, Ironman triathlete, Spartan racer, coach, speaker and author of the New York Times Bestseller “Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health and Life” (http://www.BeyondTrainingBook.com). In 2008, Ben was voted as NSCA’s Personal Trainer of the year and in 2013 and 2014 was named by Greatist as one of the top 100 Most Influential People In Health And Fitness. Ben blogs and podcasts at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, and resides in Spokane, WA with his wife and twin boys.

Dr. Tamsin Lewis and Ben Greenfield unveil strategies for optimizing health and performance

I am sick of hearing people who are tired all the time and being told they are normal. There is always an answer somewhere, and I believe that we can always find something that works at some point, somewhere.

Summary

- Advanced testing like the Dutch test and blood panels offers a deeper view of health than standard exams, helping to identify hormonal and metabolic imbalances that affect performance. - Genetic insights should be balanced with lifestyle needs; high-intensity training may require nutritional strategies that differ from ancestral or genetic predispositions. - Overtraining and extreme low-carb dieting can harm female hormones. Recovery, adequate calories, and evening carbohydrate intake are often necessary to restore metabolic health and sleep. - The Dutch test provides a comprehensive 24-hour snapshot of hormone metabolites, allowing for a better understanding of cortisol patterns and detoxification than traditional blood tests. - For reliable biomarker results, remain fasted and hydrated while avoiding intense exercise, caffeine, and alcohol for at least 48 hours before a blood draw.

Article

Hacking Health Through Advanced Biomarker Analysis

At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Two Performance Evangelists Argued That The Future Of Medicine Begins Before Illness

On a Saturday in May 2016, inside the restless circuitry of the Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Dr. Tamsin Lewis and Ben Greenfield delivered a message that cut against one of modern medicine’s most stubborn habits: waiting for the body to fail before deciding it deserves attention.

Their presentation, **Hacking Health Through Advanced Biomarker Analysis**, was not a plea for hypochondria, nor an ode to gadgetry for its own sake. It was a forceful case for a different relationship with the human body, one rooted in measurement, pattern recognition and personal responsibility. In their telling, health was not the absence of disease. It was something more dynamic, more fragile and more revealing. It could be tracked in hormones, nutrient status, stress responses, sleep disruption and the subtle metabolic shifts that standard medicine too often waved away as “normal”.

Dr. Lewis, a UK medical doctor, psychiatrist, founder of CuroSeven and former professional triathlete, spoke with the authority of someone who had paid for her knowledge physically. She described years of injury, low iron, anaemia, mineral depletion and hormonal dysfunction while operating in an elite endurance world that glorified punishment and mistrusted rest. Greenfield, the American performance coach, author and former bodybuilder and Ironman triathlete, brought a more irreverent energy, but his argument landed in much the same place: if you want elite outcomes, or simply durable health, you need better data and a deeper understanding of what your body is doing when it appears, from the outside, to be coping.

The Most Important Test, They Suggested, Was The One Taken Before You Felt Unwell

The sharpest line of the session came from Dr. Lewis, who distilled preventive medicine into a sentence that felt as obvious as it was radical.

“**Don't just get tested when you're sick, get tested when you're well. You need a blood profile that shows what your markers look like when you are healthy and feeling good so you know what you are aiming to get back to.**”

It was, in essence, an argument against reactive healthcare. A conventional blood test, taken after symptoms emerge, may reveal what has already gone wrong. But a baseline, captured in a period of vitality, offers something more useful: a map of your own normal. Not population averages. Not broad laboratory ranges. Your normal.

That distinction mattered deeply to Lewis. Standard reference ranges, she suggested, often flatten complexity into a binary. Fine or not fine. Healthy or unhealthy. But health, especially in athletes, women under chronic stress, or people attempting ambitious dietary interventions, rarely fit so neatly into those categories.

Beyond “Normal”: Why Functional Testing Drew Such Attention

The session repeatedly returned to the limitations of standard medical testing. Lewis described moving from traditional blood panels into more expansive functional medicine tools, including the **Dutch urine test**, organic acids testing and comprehensive biomarker analysis covering vitamin D, active B12, DHEA, cortisol, thyroid function and broader hormonal pathways.

What excited her was not merely the volume of data, but its texture. The Dutch test, she explained, offered a 24-hour view of hormone metabolites rather than the “one-second snapshot” of blood. That broader lens could reveal cortisol rhythms, detoxification pathways and the direction in which sex hormones were being metabolised.

For women in particular, this appeared to be one of the session’s most urgent themes. Too many, Lewis suggested, were told they were normal while living with exhaustion, missing periods, low bone density, poor sleep, weight changes and declining resilience. In those cases, the issue was not that the body was silent. It was that nobody had been listening carefully enough.

“**Fertility is health. Whether you want to have children or not, your fertility is a fundamental measure of your overall physiological well-being and a sign that your body is functioning correctly.**”

The line landed as more than a comment on reproduction. It reframed hormonal function as a broader marker of systemic integrity.

The Cost Of Endurance, And The Myth That More Training Always Means Better Health

Both speakers were unsparing about the physiological price of extreme endurance sport. Greenfield, with characteristic bluntness, called Ironman racing an “unnatural” demand on the body, one that could accelerate wear even as it built psychological toughness.

“**Sometimes you have to use an unnatural means to achieve an unnatural end. It all comes down to sport specificity and understanding exactly what situation your body is going to be in during your performance.**”

That line captured a central tension in the presentation. Genetics matter, they argued. So do ancestral patterns. But lifestyle can override both. A person may be genetically inclined toward one nutritional pattern, yet the demands of intense training, obstacle racing or long-course triathlon may require a very different metabolic strategy.

In other words, purity was not the point. Adaptation was.

Lewis gave the issue sharper clinical edges when discussing women who had embraced extreme low-carb dieting while maintaining high training loads. In that combination, she said, she often saw the same pattern: inadequate calorie intake, elevated cortisol, downregulated thyroid function, poor sleep and stubborn fat retention. In place of metabolic freedom, many had achieved metabolic distress.

For some, the answer was not stricter control but more fuel, more rest and carbohydrates timed to support hormonal recovery, particularly in the evening.

The Return Of Carbohydrates, The Return Of Sleep

If the language of biohacking can sometimes drift toward austerity, this session pushed back. Lewis described her own experience with a high-fat, low-carb approach that still required carbohydrates at night to preserve sleep. If blood glucose dropped too sharply overnight, she said, stress hormones could rise and wake the body in the early hours.

The broader point was clear: metabolic flexibility is not ideological. It is practical. A diet that appears optimal on paper may fail in the body if it does not support sleep, reproductive hormones, training demands and nervous system recovery.

Greenfield extended that pragmatism into race nutrition, workplace habits and day-to-day living. He advocated adjusting carbohydrate intake to output, using ketosis strategically during sedentary periods or travel, while increasing fuel on hard training days. It was less doctrine than calibration.

Science Was Becoming Personal, And Rapidly

At several moments, the presentation widened from present-day testing to the near future of self-monitoring. Lewis spoke with excitement about “lab on a chip” technologies and the growing likelihood that consumers would soon be able to measure a sweeping range of biomarkers quickly and routinely.

“**Within a decade, you are going to be able to measure quantitative analysis of anything. We need to make science accessible and show people what is healthy for them specifically, because not everyone is the same.**”

That vision carried both promise and challenge. More data would not automatically mean more wisdom. But both speakers seemed convinced that healthcare was shifting away from paternalism and toward a model in which individuals had greater access to their own biological information.

Greenfield embraced that democratisation plainly. “**I am excited about people taking their own healthcare into their own hands. The best thing we can do is spread the word about the difference this data makes when it comes to health, longevity, and performance.**”

This was perhaps the summit’s most politically resonant idea. To “turn the clipboard around”, as Lewis put it, was not just to improve athletic performance. It was to challenge an older medical hierarchy in which patients were passive recipients of judgments they were not equipped to interrogate.

Recovery, Not Obsession, Was The Missing Piece

Yet for all the enthusiasm for testing, the session was not an argument that every problem required another panel, another dashboard or another supplement stack. Some of the most memorable advice cut in the opposite direction.

Nine times out of ten, Greenfield suggested, people hunting for answers might need less intervention and more recovery: a beach, nutrient-dense food, a break from chronic cardio, a reduction in sympathetic overdrive. Lewis echoed that sentiment through the language of heart rate variability, central nervous system regulation and progesterone support. Data mattered, but only if it led to wiser behaviour.

This was the paradox at the heart of the talk. The future they envisioned was intensely quantified, yet its goal was not mechanical perfection. It was resilience. Better sleep. Hormonal steadiness. Fewer silent deficiencies. More intelligent training. Less breakdown disguised as discipline.

A New Kind Of Baseline

At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, **Dr. Tamsin Lewis and Ben Greenfield** did more than promote advanced biomarker testing. They sketched a philosophy of health in which performance and prevention were inseparable. Blood panels, Dutch testing, genetic interpretation and metabolic tracking were not framed as luxuries for the obsessive, but as tools for building a more intimate and accurate understanding of the body before crisis struck.

The deepest challenge of the session was not technical. It was cultural. It asked people to stop treating wellness as a vague feeling and start treating it as something that could be observed, protected and, when necessary, restored.

In a medical culture still too willing to reassure exhausted people that they are within range, that challenge felt less like a trend than a warning. The body had always been speaking. What Lewis and Greenfield insisted, on that day in London, was that the technology was finally catching up with the need to hear it.

Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 London