Dr. Daphne Bascom earned a DPhil/PhD in physiological sciences at the University of Oxford, a medical degree at the University of Pittsburgh, and completed fellowship training in microvascular and reconstructive surgery of the head and neck at Oregon Health Sciences University. She has more than two decades of executive leadership across health systems, health technology, and community health. Most recently, she served as Vice President of Population Health at Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City.

So, how and why did she leave all of that to pursue lifestyle medicine, a “vegetable-forward” way of life, and a completely different kind of care?

As we’ve heard from many of our guests, for Dr. Bascom, it was personal. Between witnessing her mother’s long and arduous struggle with COPD and helping her father navigate the healthcare system, she recognized that despite her many years of training, her work as a surgeon, and her leadership, she still wasn’t doing the work that got her into medicine in the first place.

She wanted to help people be healthy. Period.

That deep calling led her to become the Chief Operating Officer of The Vegan Gym, a global digital health platform dedicated to plant-based performance, healthspan, and longevity. She now hosts the Thrive on Plants podcast and is the Founder of The Longevity Lab. As a lifelong believer in equity and inclusion, Dr. Bascom works hard to ensure that this information is accessible to all people, and much of the education she puts together on these topics is available for free on her YouTube channel, @TheVeganGym.

In the last decade of a person’s life, we spend 7x what we spend on taking care of them in all the years that came before.

SEVEN TIMES!

That’s not only unbelievable, it’s unsustainable, particularly as our aging population grows and life span increases. So, if it’s not just about increasing life span, or the number of years someone lives, what is it about? For Dr. Tzipi Strauss, Founder and Director of the Sheba Longevity Center, it’s about increasing health span, that is the number of years a person lives healthily, without the need for significant intervention.

The work Dr. Strauss and her team are doing focuses on longevity. It’s a step beyond lifestyle medicine in that they look across all body systems, and at the individual as a whole, to identify their biggest risk factors and what interventions they actually need, not just what the latest fad says. The emphasis on behavior change is significant, and that may be the holy grail, getting people to adopt these healthy changes permanently, but Dr. Strauss finds that when patients see their biological age and the impact of the decisions and choices they’ve been making, their motivation to change is different. It’s data driven.

Professor Strauss is a physician-scientist, pediatrician, and neonatologist, and a leading voice in the emerging field of longevity medicine. She is the Founder and Director of the Sheba Longevity Center—one of the first academic longevity centers embedded within a public healthcare system. Her work combines clinical innovation, research, and policy, aiming to transform longevity from a privilege into a scalable, evidence-based public health model.

Without intervention, in 2050, everyone in the US population will either have Alzheimer’s disease or be caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease.

That’s the state of where we’re at with cognitive decline. Right now, if you reach the age of 85, your chances of developing cognitive decline are 1 in 2. That’s right, 50%. But, BUT, new research is helping us understand the hidden drivers of cognitive decline and creating hope at the same time. Because now that we understand the origin of risk for an individual, we can prescribe specific interventions to circumvent that risk and prevent the disease altogether.

This is the amazing work of James Maskell and Dr. Kristine Burke, my guests on the show today. Dr. Burke is Co-PI of the EVANTHEA Study, a clinical trial designed to look at the impact of a precision medicine approach to Alzheimer’s disease. The initial results are astounding – with intervention, 91% of participants saw improvement in cognitive function. That’s better than any drug, lifestyle medicine, or treatment protocol we have to date by a long shot. These two join me today to talk about what those hidden drivers are, how precision medicine can help, who’s going to pay for it, and why this is so critically important to society at large.

Dr. Kristine Burke is a triple board-certified precision medicine physician and the Founder and Executive Medical Director of True Health Center for Precision Medicine in Northern California. She is also the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of TruNeura who is advancing a scalable model for brain health that integrates clinical insight, data, and AI-supported decision tools.

James Maskell has spent the past decade innovating at the cross section of functional medicine and community. To that end, he created the Functional Forum, the world’s largest integrative medicine conference with record-setting participation online and growing physician communities around the world.