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Most people don't think about their health until something goes wrong. By then, the…
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Akash Gehani shared thisRoughly 6 in 10 Indians cant fully digest milk. Yet milk is everywhere in the Indian diet. Chai. Curd. Paneer. Buttermilk. Most of our sweets. Lactose is the sugar in milk. To absorb it, the small intestine needs an enzyme called lactase. Most mammals make less of it after weaning. Undigested lactose moves on to the colon, where gut bacteria ferment it. The result is bloating, gas, and discomfort. An estimated 60–65% of Indians deal with this to some degree. But the number isnt evenly spread. A 1981 multicentre study tested people in Trivandrum, Pondicherry and New Delhi: At the two southern centres, 66.6% were lactose intolerant. In New Delhi, 27.4%. This difference is due to genetic factors. Some people carry a variant near the lactase gene that keeps it switched on into adulthood. This is called lactase persistence. In India, its more common in the north and west, likely a trace of pastoral ancestry. How do most of us tolerate dairy then? - Curd and buttermilk: bacterial cultures consume part of the lactose. The live cultures also carry their own lactase, which keeps working in the gut. - Paneer: most of the lactose drains away with the whey. - Ghee: almost none is left. - Sweets are generally of two kinds: chhena type and khoa type. The former are similar to paneer, but the latter can cause issues when consumed in higher amounts. Many traditional Indian preparations happen to contain less lactose than milk itself. Same dairy, different form. The kitchen figured it out long before the lab did.
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Akash Gehani reposted thisIndia's anaemia numbers haven't moved much in twenty years, despite decades of iron supplementation. NFHS-5 puts it at 57% of women aged 15 to 49, and two of three children under five. Our response has stayed the same: more iron. Fortified rice, salt, iron tablets in schools. Intake isn’t the only problem. Absorption is often ignored. One factor that impacts it is our chai consumption, which often happens with or right after meals. Tea carries polyphenols - tannins, theaflavins, gallate esters. Inside the gut, these bind non-heme iron into complexes the intestine can't absorb, and the iron passes straight through. Radioisotope studies since the 1970s put the loss at 60% or more for a cup of black tea with a meal. The loss becomes higher with stronger brewing, more kadak chai. Timing is the crucial factor. Polyphenols can only bind iron while it's still in the gut. Tea an hour before eating has far less effect. Tea with the meal does most damage. One of the cheapest fixes available isn't a supplement. It's moving the chai. An hour before the meal, or two hours after. Add something with vitamin C to the meal - lemon, amla, tomato, guava. It converts iron into a form polyphenols can't grab as easily. We keep pushing more iron into a system that's already refusing to let it in.
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Akash Gehani shared thisCold waves make the news. They're not where most cold-linked heart deaths happen. A 13-year national study in India found ordinary winter days, not cold waves, were linked to nearly 1 in 10 heart disease deaths. Not because they're riskier. Because there are far more of them, and nobody treats them as a risk. And the baseline is already climbing. Heart attack deaths in India went from 32,457 in 2022 to 35,715 in 2023. About 10% in a single year. Then the seasonal factors come in: Cold. The body protects core heat by activating the sympathetic nervous system. Blood vessels constrict, blood pressure rises, and blood becomes slightly more prone to clotting. Pollution. Fine particles (PM2.5) cross from the lungs into the bloodstream. They trigger inflammation, stiffen the lining of blood vessels and make platelets stickier. In much of North India, winter air traps them close to the ground. Diwali adds fireworks on top. Salt. Festive food brings a sudden sodium load. The body holds on to water to dilute it. More volume, more pressure on already narrowed vessels. Alcohol. Binge drinking at weddings can tip the heart into atrial fibrillation. Doctors call it Holiday Heart Syndrome. Sugar and sleep. Sweets, fried snacks and late nights swing blood glucose harder. Poor sleep raises cortisol, which pushes glucose and blood pressure up further. Each of these is documented on its own. What changes between October and January is the overlap. And broken routines exacerbate it. If you're managing blood pressure, cholesterol, or diabetes, the useful time to check is before the season, not during it. That's what our FOXO Primer cardiovascular assessment is built for: a deep read on where your heart and metabolism stand, while there's still time to adjust. The mild days are the ones to watch.
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Akash Gehani shared thisA 1998 study from St. Johns Medical College in Bangalore confirmed something Indian kitchens figured out long before. Curcumin is the active compound in turmeric. On its own, it barely makes it into your blood. The gut absorbs very little of it. What does get through, the intestinal wall and liver quickly tag for removal. This process is called glucuronidation. It makes curcumin water-soluble so the body can flush it out. The researchers ran a simple test. Volunteers took curcumin alone, then curcumin with piperine, the compound that gives black pepper its bite. Curcumin alone was barely detectable in the blood. With piperine, bioavailability rose by roughly 2000%. Piperine slows glucuronidation. The body clears curcumin more slowly, so more of it stays in circulation. Of course the human arm of the study was small. A handful of volunteers, a single dose. But the pairing holds up. Haldi has gone into the pot with kali mirch, and usually oil, for generations. Curcumin is fat-soluble, so the oil likely helps too. Eating more of something is rarely the answer. Absorbing it is.
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Akash Gehani shared thisIndia's anaemia numbers haven't moved much in twenty years, despite decades of iron supplementation. NFHS-5 puts it at 57% of women aged 15 to 49, and two of three children under five. Our response has stayed the same: more iron. Fortified rice, salt, iron tablets in schools. Intake isn’t the only problem. Absorption is often ignored. One factor that impacts it is our chai consumption, which often happens with or right after meals. Tea carries polyphenols - tannins, theaflavins, gallate esters. Inside the gut, these bind non-heme iron into complexes the intestine can't absorb, and the iron passes straight through. Radioisotope studies since the 1970s put the loss at 60% or more for a cup of black tea with a meal. The loss becomes higher with stronger brewing, more kadak chai. Timing is the crucial factor. Polyphenols can only bind iron while it's still in the gut. Tea an hour before eating has far less effect. Tea with the meal does most damage. One of the cheapest fixes available isn't a supplement. It's moving the chai. An hour before the meal, or two hours after. Add something with vitamin C to the meal - lemon, amla, tomato, guava. It converts iron into a form polyphenols can't grab as easily. We keep pushing more iron into a system that's already refusing to let it in.
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Akash Gehani shared thisA mammogram is only as good as the eyes reading it. AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi) has built an AI model to help with exactly that. It was developed in-house by a team of doctors, radiologists and researchers. On September 16, it was handed over to BPL Technologies for further development, validation and eventual clinical use. What it does is simple. It reads a mammogram and flags areas worth a closer look. The radiologist still makes the final call. This matters because of a gap that rarely gets discussed: - Specialist breast-imaging expertise is scarce, and most of it sits in large urban centres. - Smaller hospitals may have the machine, but few people trained to read its images well. - A second review layer won't create more specialists. But it can stretch the ones we have further. We talk a lot about better cancer treatments. But in breast cancer, much of the outcome is decided earlier: at the moment someone looks at an image and either catches the change or misses it. It's early. Validation still has to show how well the tool performs outside the institution that built it. That said, this is what useful AI in healthcare looks like to me. It doesn't replace doctors. It extends expert judgment into places that don't have enough of it. Detection first. The rest follows.
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Akash Gehani shared thisA raw tomato would not have done this. Scientists picked 47 healthy adults, all between 40 and 55. For 90 days, they ate tomato paste every day, the amount based on their body weight. For another 90 days, separated by a one month break, they ate almost no tomatoes at all. Same people, both arms. Each person was their own control. During the tomato phase, their brains responded. They could focus better and tune out distractions faster. Information processing sped up. Even memory improved a little, the kind that helps you connect a face to a name. Brain scans showed something shifting too - altered connectivity in the frontoparietal and auditory networks. Why would a vegetable (or a fruit) do this? Tomatoes contain lycopene, the compound behind their red colour. Lycopene can cross into the brain, where it has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. But our gut struggles to release it from inside the tomato's cell walls: a crystalline, all-trans state. Two things about cooking the paste change that: - Heat and processing rupture the cell matrix and shift lycopene toward its cis isomers, which absorb far better. - Fat carries it. Lycopene is fat-soluble. Without oil in the meal, most of it passes straight through. Which is why paste and slow-cooked sauce deliver several times the usable lycopene of the same weight of raw fruit. Simmering tomatoes in olive oil was solving an absorption problem centuries before anyone named the molecule. Not always what you eat, but what your gut can get out of it.
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Akash Gehani shared thisMost people who sleep four hours a night aren't short sleepers. They're sleep deprived and used to it. But there is a genetic version of the trait: familial natural short sleep. A single inherited variant is enough. The people who have it run on roughly four to six hours, with none of the daytime sleepiness that short sleep produces in everyone else. The first gene found was DEC2, in 2009. DEC2 is a transcriptional repressor, and one of the things it represses is orexin - the hypothalamic neuropeptide that holds the brain in a state of arousal. Mutate DEC2 and the brake loosens. In mice engineered to carry the human mutation, orexin expression rises and total sleep drops. Other genes have turned up since - ADRB1, NPSR1, GRM1, SIK3 - and they work through different circuits entirely. SIK3 doesn't touch arousal at all; it sits in the machinery that tracks how much sleep you owe. Short sleep isn't one trick. It's several unrelated ways of building a brain that finishes its overnight work faster. Even on the most generous estimate, this covers 1 to 3% of people, and no epidemiology has confirmed that number. The rest of us sleeping five hours aren't carrying a variant. We're carrying a debt. The founder who sleeps four hours isn't running a protocol. He's either a phenotype or he's tired.
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Akash Gehani shared thisThe most useful thing on a food packet is the part nobody reads. Scroll reported last month on a loaf sold as "100% wholewheat". The ingredient list said 62.5% whole wheat flour. Under FSSAI rules, bread can only be called whole wheat at 75% or above. The regulator first flagged it in August 2023. Britannia told Scroll its cases had "all been successfully closed with full compliance". Scroll bought a packet in April 2026 and found the claim still on the front. The gap between 62.5 and 75 is the bran and the germ. Whole wheat flour keeps all three parts of the grain: bran, germ, endosperm. Refine it and you lose the first two. - The bran is where most of the fibre sits. It slows gastric emptying and flattens the glucose curve that follows. - The germ carries the B vitamins, the vitamin E, the magnesium. - The endosperm is starch. That's the part that survives refining. So the loaf behaves differently in the body than the front of the packet suggests. Same colour, same shape, faster glucose response. It’s not just the bread. Scroll reviewed FSSAI records on 139 flagged products. 120 were still being sold with the same claims. More than twenty carried vegan labels without the required approval. More than twenty made health or medical claims the regulator called misleading. You don't need to decode the whole packet. Just check whether the back supports the front. The claim is marketing. The ingredient list is the record.
Akash Gehani replied to a comment
1w
Saily Sud a lot, some of it we can shape.
Akash Gehani replied to a comment
1w
Krishna Gochhayat https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/dec2-gene-mutation-that-causes-short-sleep/
Akash Gehani replied to a comment
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Ankit mittal oh absolutely not contesting that. The average lighting used in our cities and homes is a big culprit.
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Akash Gehani liked thisAkash Gehani liked thisCustomer data living in different systems isn’t necessarily the problem. AI can now connect to those systems and pull the relevant information together when you need it. Your CRM has the commercial history. Support has the tickets. Product has usage. CS has meeting notes and account context. The bigger question is whether the information itself is reliable. If the CRM is outdated, usage data is incomplete, or different teams define “at risk” differently, AI can pull everything together perfectly and still give you the wrong picture. So I think the next challenge isn’t just connecting more systems, it’s making sure the information inside them is accurate and standard.
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Akash Gehani liked thisAkash Gehani liked thisIf you have to explain it twice, it’s probably not a prompt anymore. It’s a process. AI is very useful until you find yourself arguing with it about something it already knows it can do. At some point I was like: why am I wasting credits repeating the same instructions? That’s probably the most practical reason I’ve found to start building Skills around my own workflows. Not fancy, yet. Just less irritating. #chatgpt #skills
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Akash Gehani liked thisAkash Gehani liked thisMost dietary fibre advice focuses on digestion. The more interesting story is what fibre does for the trillions of bacteria living in your gut. Dietary fibres are complex carbohydrates your own digestive enzymes can't break down. They pass into the colon largely intact, where gut bacteria ferment them into short-chain fatty acids, compounds that support gut barrier health and are linked to lower risk of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Despite this, current research suggests most people consume roughly half the recommended daily fibre intake of around 30 grams, a gap that's widened with the rise of ultra-processed food. Here's what's actually happening at the mechanism level, and it's more specific than "fibre is good for you": a 17-week Stanford trial comparing high-fibre and high-fermented-food diets found the high-fibre diet increased the gut microbiome's fibre-digesting enzyme activity, but didn't measurably increase overall microbial diversity in this particular study. A high-fermented-food diet, run in the same trial, did increase diversity. This suggests fibre feeds the bacteria that are already present more effectively, rather than necessarily adding new species, a different mechanism than fermented foods work through. The shift: Add one deliberate fibre source to a meal, a tablespoon of ground flaxseed, an extra vegetable, or a swap to whole grain. Get insights like this - personalised to your health - with FOXO Primer's 12-week playbook. DM for details. 📩
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Akash Gehani liked thisAkash Gehani liked thisFor many adults, the ferritin threshold for iron deficiency just doubled, from 15 to 30. On September 16, a new guidance with higher ferritin thresholds for diagnosing iron deficiency raised the numbers doctors have used for decades. ASH now suggests a threshold of ≤30 ng/mL for general adults, menstruating individuals and pregnant individuals; its recommendations compare this with 15 ng/mL thresholds in different ways. ASH's new guidance proposes < 30 ng/mL, doubling the suggested clinical decision limit for these groups. For children between 9 months and 4 years, the cutoff moved from around 12 to 20. For adults with anemia of inflammation specifically, ASH suggests interpreting ferritin alongside transferrin saturation, because inflammation can raise ferritin and mask genuinely low iron. At FOXO, we believe in two things : Normal is not optimal and the new guideline shows that the bands would be tighter and stricter Second don't look at numbers in isolation A ferritin result marked "normal" does not always rule out iron deficiency, since ASH now distinguishes a lab's statistical reference range from its own evidence-based clinical decision limits. One potential cost of an outdated threshold is a missed or delayed diagnosis, not necessarily a wrong test result. What it means for you: → A "normal" ferritin result does not rule out iron deficiency. → If fatigue persists, it is worth discussing with a clinician whether ferritin, and where appropriate transferrin saturation, should be checked. One marker seldom tells the full story on its own. ASH's 2026 guidance suggests that adults evaluated under the old threshold may be more likely to be recognized as iron deficient under the new one. Have you ever been told your iron is fine, but the tiredness never went away?
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Akash Gehani liked thisAkash Gehani liked thisHuman-led, AI-powered TO AI-led, Human-verified This is a transition that we are seeing becoming more and more real as models, computer use and overall agent accuracy keeps going up. Pick a large TAM, find a burning problem and deliver a 10x experience with the above. Increasingly, it feels like many teams with deep domain expertise will unlock this in their verticals.
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