The false promise of "biology upgrades"

Biohacker Kayla Barne's unsound unscience

Self-proclaimed “biohacking expert” Kayla Barnes offers an expectable path to wellness in her bio: she discovered problems with our food system; her energy increased and cognition improved upon switching out conventional foods for organic fare, which inspired her to optimize everything.

Literally everything, as evidenced in a feverish Moon Juice-level pitch when in her recent “Wake Up With Me”-style video.

As you might surmise, the “morning routine” involves tons of products, supplements, devices, and of course, the most valuable (and rare) resource: time. The purported timeline on the YouTube card above comes nowhere close to the time it would take to achieve the endless assault of buzzy protocols in the 31-minute video.

I’m not sure how one becomes an “expert” in biohacking, but it’s not based on training. The only two credentials listed on her bio page are a certificate from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) and another from Amen Clinics.

IIN is not a nutrition-training course. It’s a “health coach” training program, which means it doesn’t have to rely on evidence-based nutrition. The program previously put diet plans like The Zone on the same level as evidence-based nutrition; the organization has been plagued with problems since its founding.

Even the marketing page for the coursework mentions very little about actual dietitian training, which is laborious and expensive. Instead, just take a six- or 12-month online course and you market yourself as nutrionish. (The organization got into hot water years back when their graduates began calling themselves nutritionists.)

Amen Clinics is even more troublesome. The “clinic” uses a real diagnostic tool, single-proton emission computed tomography (SPECT), which involves the injection of a radioactive substance followed by neural imaging of blood flow to the brain, to find supposed physical markers of depression, which actual experts say is impossible with this or any technology.

But the founder, Daniel Amen, has been featured on The Kardashians, and has become a celebrity expert of sorts to Justin Bieber, Bella Hadid, and Meghan Trainor. Unsurprisingly, he sells a line of BrainMD supplements, which are inevitably prescribed after a SPECT scan.

As clinical psychologist Jonathan Stea writes in his book, Mind the Science:

If someone were to hand me brain images derived from SPECT scanning to help me diagnose a mental disorder, I’d find it as useful as placing my ear against a 50- foot- thick brick wall and trying to hear a patient talk on the other side. Its resolution and clinical utility are that poor.

Apparently, that’s what makes you a biohacking “expert.”

But it’s not Barnes’s lack of actual training that’s the issue. We’ve seen tons of self-proclaimed coaches working in spaces they’re not qualified to touch on.

It’s what she’s selling.

Watch what they sell…

Barnes is the founder of Lyv Wellness, a Cleveland, Ohio clinic marketed like this:

We combine precision and anti-aging medicine with the most advanced regenerative and preventative therapies. We offer the most in-depth and bio-individual healthcare possible. Experience our biology upgrading therapies such as hyperbaric oxygen therapy, ozone sauna, red light, CRYO, medical grade IV's, NAD+ , PEMF, Nanovi + more.

This is followed by a list of health claims, though conveniently, none are located next to the specific therapy (as accountability would be required):

Let’s see how these “biology upgrading” claims hold up.

Hyperbaric oxygen treatment involves the medical use of increasing oxygen availability in the body. It’s part of hyperbaric medicine: increasing barometric pressure by increasing the partial pressures of all gases in the ambient atmosphere, which is accomplished in a chamber.

This procedure is clinically approved for a number of indications, including:

• Anemia

• Carbon monoxide poisoning

• Decompression sickness

• Diabetically-derived illnesses

• Skin grafts and thermal burns

That hasn’t stopped alt-med practitioners from promoting hyperbaric oxygen therapy for cancer treatment, for which there’s no proof of efficacy, and may lead people to forgo actual cancer therapeutics.

As for “biology upgrading,” given the ambiguity of the term, it’s impossible to say whether or not it’s effective, which makes you wonder why it would be applied in the first place.

Just sounds good, I guess.

Ozone sauna therapy has been trending for a while, with claims that it, from one sauna company, “detoxifies the lymphatic system, clears the skin, relaxes your muscles, accelerates blood flow and kills bacteria, viruses, and microorganisms.” To date, these are all theoretical ideas, with none of them supported by clinical evidence.

The FDA makes it clear:

Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. In order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely tolerated by man and animals.

Red light therapy is probably the most studied on this list (outside the real indications hyperbaric therapy is used for), and indeed may have some indications. Still, as most studies state, the evidence is still thin. As Jonathan Jerry wrote about research on the topic,

Reviewing the literature on each application of photobiomodulation—from smoking cessation to spinal cord injury, from wound healing to age-related degenerative conditions—would be laborious. Instead, I want to take a bird’s-eye view of the hype around photobiomodulation and point out the sobering context in which it exists: exciting findings in cells and animal models rarely lead to applications in humans, and it is all too easy for overeager scientists to fantasize about how an intervention might work before it has even been shown to work.

Cryotherapy? Are we really still on this?

Medical grade IVs are among the most egregious protocols in wellness spaces. I’ve often covered the problem with unnecessary supplementation. Super rounds of supplementations are even more dangerous, especially when untrained clinicians are performing the injections:

It’s difficult to know how many people have been injured at med spas, because the infections often are not reported to local or state health departments. But some infectious disease and emergency room doctors say they are seeing more adverse reactions associated with the facilities.

NAD+, or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, is a biohacking coenzyme du jour. It’s been studied in pharmacology for over a century, and has been used in research involving neurodegenerative diseases, tuberculosis, and certain cancers. Does it “fight aging,” as is claimed by longevity influencers? Hardly.

At this point, taking NAD-boosting supplements is a leap of faith, not a scientifically proven way to reduce disease risk or increase longevity. They’re unlikely to hurt you…but there’s no proof they will help you.

PEMF, or pulse electromagnetic fields, has been clinically studied to see if it helps heal fractures quicker—it doesn’t— as well as alleviate depression. Also, no evidence.

NanoVi is the wildest device on this list. Here’s how it’s marketed:

By targeting protein folding, NanoVi is unique and effective way to promote wellbeing, performance, and recovery. It does this by influencing the water that surrounds all proteins and enables them to fold. Our approach is to assist the full range of protein activities without overriding any of them.

So what is it? A device that pumps humid air into your nostrils. That’s it.

The company calls it “structured water vapor,” which enables them to sell machines for $5,000 up to $14,000. It’s basically a very expensive mister, which I’m sure Lyv Wellness wants to recoup the cost of.

But as with all these junk science modalities, that doesn’t give them the right to market water vapor as a biology upgrade. Or anything else on their fantastical list.