Episode 132 | May 29, 2025

The Blood Markers That Actually Matter, With David Vogel

What if your routine blood test held the key to understanding your future health? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes David Vogel—renowned data scientist, entrepreneur, and longevity researcher—for a compelling conversation about how data can transform our approach to health, prevention, and personalized care.

“Most people have never even heard of the blood markers that actually predict disease—and they’re left trying to figure it all out on their own. That’s where health coaches come in. They can help people understand their scores, make sense of the data, and take real steps toward better health.”

David Vogel

David’s unconventional journey began in the world of finance, where he built a $9 billion hedge fund by relying on data over expert opinion. But when he turned his analytical lens toward health, he noticed something eerily familiar: the same disregard for data-driven insights. That realization led him to found Volaris Health, a company applying advanced machine learning techniques to predict disease risk, optimize health scores, and drive truly personalized, proactive care. His findings challenge many of the assumptions behind today’s standard medical practices—and offer a new path forward.

In this episode, David shares why many common lab markers aren’t as useful as we think and reveals surprising predictors of chronic disease risk—from overlooked kidney markers to RDW, a red blood cell measure tied to cancer outcomes. He explains how his team has built a tool that interprets these markers into simple health scores that can be tracked over time, empowering people to test interventions and measure real impact. For David, it’s not about chasing trends—it’s about listening to what the data actually says and building systems that help people live longer, healthier lives.

David’s mission goes beyond numbers. Through VoLo Foundation, which he co-founded with his wife Thais Lopez Vogel, he supports projects that use data to improve health, longevity, and the environment. That includes FMCA’s Community Impact Scholarship program—helping aspiring health coaches bring their skills to the communities that need them most. David believes health coaches are essential partners in bringing data to life: helping people understand their health reports, interpret risks, and make lifestyle changes with confidence. This episode is packed with insights for coaches who want to stay ahead of the curve and support clients through a more personalized lens.

Watch The Episode

Listen Now

Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Why does someone go from the world of finance, specifically managing a very successful hedge fund, into the world of healthcare? What motivates you to want to truly make a difference? Well, that is who our guest today is all about. Let me tell you about our special guest, David Vogel.

David S. Vogel is a data scientist and entrepreneur recognized internationally for his exceptional accuracy in predicting modeling, establishing disruptive ventures in finance and health without any formal training in either industry. He is the founder and CEO of Voloridge Investment Management, an award-winning quantitative hedge fund, as well as Voloridge Health, where he applies his data analysis expertise to cutting-edge research that has the potential to maximize longevity, optimize health, and combat diseases of aging. He credits his success to the fact that he and his partners rely solely on what the data tells them to do when making decisions. David has been expertly quoted in Bloomberg, Barron’s, and other media on charitable and financial topics and has earned numerous accolades, including multiple victories in the KDD Cup Data Science Competition and the Heritage Health Prize in 2013.

In addition, David is the co-founder, trustee, and chief scientist of VoLo Foundation, a philanthropic organization supporting data-driven research and projects with a focus on climate change as well as health and longevity. He currently serves as a board member of Environmental Defense Fund and has served on the climate-related market risk subcommittees of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. It is with pleasure that I welcome David to the podcast. I know you are going to enjoy this interview.

It is a pleasure to have you here, David, and you have a mission to create better health. And can you start by telling us about the history of Voloridge Health and what drove you to do this?

David: Yeah, so my background is a little bit unconventional for this. I spent my whole career as a data scientist. I started my early career analyzing health claims data, mostly insurance claim data and predicting outcomes. And at the time, I didn’t feel like what I was doing was… Some of it was used for impactful outcomes. What I realized is there were not great tools in data science to do what we needed to do. So, I actually spent a lot of my time developing my own machine learning techniques.

My background was mathematics and scientific computing. So, I created new kinds of data science platforms for analyzing data better. I participated in these international data science competitions and ended up winning three KDD cups. Several years later, there was a big competition for predicting length of stay in the hospital. And this competition, it was called the Heritage Health Prize. And they put up a $500,000 prize, which attracted thousands of top data scientists. And I put together an international team of seven people, and we won that as well.

So, being a competitive person, I actually went to finance for several years. And what we saw in finance was what we were finding patterns in the data for predicting stocks. And the patterns we saw were different than what the experts were saying. And so we were, again, criticized. And I was only able to raise $50,000 initially. I think at the end of first year, we had $90,000 under management. But over time, as we kept generating returns from this, we grew into a $9 billion hedge fund. So, it was way more than I had expected. I was just expecting to generate some returns. And we had done something, we had gone against what the experts had said, gone with the data, and it turned out that we were right.

So, then we got to a certain point, a level of success where I said, “Okay, maybe we can do something actually impactful with our data science team and expertise.” And so I got really attracted to the health field. And originally, I’d say about five years ago, I got very interested. And we were doing grants for the foundation and studying some of the health patterns. We downloaded the UK Biobank dataset, analyzed half a million people and their outcomes.

And that’s when we realized that it was like deja vu. What was in finance was happening in health, that people were not following the data. So, that’s when I realized, okay, I could sit in the foundation, pump out research papers. But we have this big data science team, corporate background that we could actually, through a company, change the health system to actually incorporate data into our practice and be more impactful.

Again, people have been saying for years that we need to be proactive, not reactive with our health. But although we’ve been saying that has become cliche, it hasn’t really happened yet. What we realized is in order to be proactive, you need a measure of your health. And we say you can’t improve what you can’t measure. And that’s where all the confusion comes from. That’s why it’s so hard to be proactive about your health. So, with a set of health scores based on actual machine learning models, we can actually measure your health. You can try things. Again, it can lead to very personalized medicine or personalized methods to take care of your health. And you can be proactive knowing that what you’re doing is either helping or not.

Dr. Sandi: This is so, so fascinating. So, can you share what were some of your early observations in the data?

David: Well, analyzing the actual data, the very first thing we found was, okay, let’s look at some of the accepted patterns. We always look first at our LDL cholesterol, right? That’s the one thing people look at on their blood test. And you always hear the same thing from everybody. Like, how’d your blood test go? And everybody says, “Well, everything was pretty much okay except my cholesterol was high.”

Dr. Sandi: Of course.

David: And so we thought that was a little suspicious that everybody said the same thing. As it turns out LDL cholesterol is not a top predictor of a cardiac event. It is a predictor. Research does not contradict what was found. There is a 30% or 40% increase in risk if you have a 180 or above. But then the assumption was made… I think the way the guidelines were set, the assumption was made because of that research that lower is better. So, people are all trying to get their cholesterol under 100. And what we realized is that the least healthiest people are the highest mortality rate of people with LDL under 100, because only 4% of people are naturally there. We’re not naturally designed to be under that level. So, people don’t realize only 4% of the population is naturally without cholesterol meds under 100. So, it’s not a natural math.

And furthermore, for heart disease, it’s just not a top predictor. We said, okay, the data science approach is let’s come in with no bias, no hypothesis. Let’s take everything on the blood test correlated against future cardiac events. And what we came up with, the top two were A1c and Cystatin C. And they’re pretty much one and two pretty tied for top. A1c is basically a measure of your average blood sugar. A lot of cardiologists, I know, don’t even measure it. They’ll just take a lipid panel. But it is known in literature that A1c is correlated to heart disease and pretty significantly correlated. Cystatin C is a measure of kidney health. Most doctors don’t know what it is and yet it’s available. West LabCorp, it’s about a $20 add-on to the blood test. And there’s really nothing in our current blood test that measures kidney health sufficiently. We use a much cheaper marker, creatinine, which turns out to be a very weak predictor. And it’s basically a two-tail risk, very hard to interpret. Like, white blood cell count, which has been on our CBC for many years, is, like, number five or six predictor of heart disease. And yet the reference range is from all the way from 3.8 to 10.8, which is 97% of the population. But if you’re at a 10 versus a 4, basically higher is much, much higher risk of heart disease.

So, these are things we just need to educate people to look at. The other thing… Our other findings were that cardiac health shouldn’t be the only thing we look at. There’s a lot of other things that can kill us. For example, RDW on our red blood cell distribution width, sits there on our CBC, been on for years. It is the top predictor of cancer death of everything in the blood test. People don’t really pay attention to it. So, there are indicators of cancer risk and just all-cause mortality in general in the blood test. We also predicted kidney health and kidney failure. And it turns out that your kidney score is more indicative of whether you’ll survive more years than actually your cardiac score. We took 70-year-olds in the database, people with the very top cardiac risk score and compared them against people with the very top kidney health scores. And the people with the top kidney health scores were 15% more likely to survive till 85.

So, again, this is all education. It’s there in our data. We can collect more data, but we’re just finding so many findings. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg with the current blood test. We’ve dug into genetics. We can combine genetics into a risk score. We can combine the proteins that we can measure now with a single vial of blood versus multiple vials. We discovered 101 proteins that predict seven of our disease groups more than a basic blood test. And then I think in the future, there’ll be epigenetics. We actually do have the world’s most accurate epigenetic clock. We can predict age within 1.5 years. It’s a nice little stat and it’s something we can publish, but I think we’re at least five years away from something actionable there because the interpretability of the epigenetics clock is what will hold back it being actually applicable to human health.

Dr. Sandi: Wow, this is groundbreaking. And as you were speaking, I thought about how health coaches really perfectly suited as those educators. They can help people create awareness. For example, that kidney health marker. That is something that most people don’t know about. And so they can get that education if they had a health coach. So, that is wonderful. So, David, how do you plan to integrate these findings into the healthcare system? Because right now, we’re not there yet, but how would you like to integrate them or what’s your proposal or plan to do that?

David: There’s about a hundred steps to this, but I could actually summarize in two major categories.

Dr. Sandi: Okay.

David: First is integration of health scores into the system. Going back to you can’t improve what you can’t measure. We plan to make our health scores broadly accessible. Right now it’s actually free to the consumer. We have our biomarker reference guide out on our website. We’ve got actually a simulator where you can actually plug in your bloodwork and get health scores. But we really do want to integrate this into other platforms. Even though we do have our own platform, the Volo platform, we want all platforms to have access to our health scores, and we want doctors to have a prototype health report that a doctor could walk through with their patient, very small amount of time. It also helps the doctor save time in this day and age where average doctor only has five minutes to spend with a patient. It takes 30 seconds if you have the right report to identify the areas where a person can work and be proactive.

If you have these scores, you know what scores is lacking the most. And you have the influencers of that score right there on the report. It just makes it easy for the doctor and much easier for the patient to understand. Really we want to empower the patients. We want them to not be in this situation where one doctor says do one thing and another doctor says to do one thing. It’s actually a report that the doctor walks through, says, “Look, here’s your data.” And that patient can then also see the report from the doctor, but then they can log into our platform and see the report on their end, review it and see interventions and be proactive about that. So, I’d say accessibility of the health scores is the first major category. And then second major category is just education. We just need to educate people on the scores. And that’s why we put out a lot of materials. We’re going to start putting out more YouTube videos on findings. And this is what the data says, and this is how it helps you to actually listen to the data.

Dr. Sandi: So, education is so critical in helping people to become empowered to be their own health advocates and get this report. So, how do you plan… You mentioned interventions. Will there be something like, okay, this is your pattern and these are the dietary recommendations or exercise recommendations? Anything like that in the works?

David: Absolutely. So, now that we know which biomarkers are most predicted, we’ve then realized that there’s almost no literature on how to improve that.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah.

David: So, now we know RDW is a big predictor of cancer, but there’s no studies. I guess people didn’t know that the studies don’t analyze RDW. Most of the studies are on LDL cholesterol and a little bit on A1c, right? So, we actually plan to do several forms of studies going forward, where we actually do our full blood test and some internally and some we’re sponsoring and before and after these different interventions. But we also do what we call a back test of our study, which is existing studies that are already out there where we can get the data and the bloodwork. And again, if there’s any listeners out there who have data that they’d like us to analyze, one of the most difficult things is contacting the researcher and getting access to that data. But we can actually score our scores before and after the intervention. And what that gives you, it’s a more accurate measure of whether that intervention helped.

So, there might be studies out there where it was inconclusive, right, or maybe like they measured all the bloodwork and they said, “Well, maybe the LDL didn’t move significantly because they thought that was the target.” If there’s researchers out there that… And then we’re going to be searching and finding these that have the bloodwork before and after, and you instinctively think that intervention might have helped, let’s throw them through our health scores. And again, we’ve got scores before and after of seven different diseases. So, we’re talking heart disease, diabetes, all-cause mortality. So, we have cancer lumped in there. We haven’t done enough work to weed out cancer, kidney disease, liver disease, dementia, and COPD. Hopefully I said all seven. And we’ll know based on the scores before and after, if any or multiple of those disease risk scores have improved.

Dr. Sandi: So, just to be real clear for the listener, what I’m hearing is that you get a score and these number of factors, but then you can track that over time and you can see change. So, let’s say you eat differently, you exercise differently, your sleep changes, and then you can see the impact on these various scores that you’re getting.

David: Absolutely. And I think that’s where the whole personalization comes into play. So, the studies, again, they’re statistics, right? It turns out for some people, certain states that low carb diet is healthy. And maybe for some people heart high carb diet is healthy. So, whatever the study says, if you want to find out what works for you, then try the intervention, what you think might work, have your health score before and after, and then you’ll see. So, I do think it really leads to the ability for people to be empowered and personalized with their health plan.

Dr. Sandi: So, there’s so many, almost every day I see another direct to consumer lab test is available and they promise all sorts of things. So, can you talk about how this approach is different and what, let’s say there’s a health coach who is working with a client and they say, “Oh, I want to do this first.” So, how could they distinguish the difference between your model, what’s out there currently?

David: The difference it’s data driven and what it’s important to test. So, before I analyze this dataset, again, this was just in the past couple of years that we obtained this data and had these conclusions. And three years before that, I was very into health. So, I was trying all these fancy tests and they were expensive. I’d get all the ApoB and all these lipid particle sizes and fancy stuff like that and spend a thousand dollars on tests. And none of those tests measured Cystatin C.

They’re all just trying to compete with each other and be the fancier sounding test. And so you could look at it as just another blood test, but it is actually driven by the data. We’re willing to say, “Okay, we’re not necessarily doing what everybody else is doing and we’re not measuring all those other fancy biomarkers, but we have a top 10 for every disease and assign our blood tests around that.” And that’s what we recommend doing. And again, we don’t have the logistics to do everybody’s blood test. So, we’ll more be behind the scenes advising partners and platforms how to design their tests to get our scores as accurate as possible.

Dr. Sandi: This is so fascinating and so necessary because we’re facing a broken healthcare system. There’s a growing doctor shortage. Good luck trying to find a new primary care doctor. And if you’ve got one, you get 7 minutes, 10 minutes at most. And it’s very cursory. They’re just focused on refilling your prescriptions and looking at those standard labs. And half the time, you leave there feeling like, “Oh, my questions weren’t answered. I don’t feel heard,” and lost in this system, which is basically a pill for every ill. And so what you are offering is an opportunity to really be the CEO of your own health and to take charge and to get this information and then take steps to make lifestyle changes.

David: I love that expression. I use the same expression, but independently, be the CEO of your own health. Exactly. Really we’re about empowerment. That’s in our mission.

Dr. Sandi: And you’re finding really surprising things in this test that most people say, “We’re not aware of that.” So, I know I’m going to go after. I’m going to go get that test done because I’m curious and look at my RDW results and see where that stands.

David: That’s another observation. I notice it not in the data but just how it’s affected people. Now that we’ve had our small cohort, maybe 60 or so early adopters trying this for a few years… A lot of people were scared to get the test. They’re like, “Oh my God, what is it going to predict in me?” But once they did it, they said they felt so empowered, so motivated. Even without any interventions, earlier, we had people going and losing 20 pounds because they were just so motivated by seeing health scores and seeing the feedback and feeling empowered by something driven by data. So, we’ve actually seen already some extraordinary transformations just in our small test group.

Dr. Sandi: And someone who works with a health coach, that coach can help them to feel empowered and not a victim and not it’s their destiny. So, when you get a result, help talk them off the ledge, because they’re going to be Googling what this means and go beyond and really scared and panicking sometimes. So, having that hope that, well, you can take charge of this. This is something that you can change. We can monitor this data, and you can see those scores change.

I would be remiss if I didn’t talk to you about our profound thanks at Functional Medicine Coaching Academy for your support of scholarships for people wanting to become health coaches so that they can serve underserved communities. So, I just want to take this time to extend thanks to that and anything that you would care to comment about the importance of health coaching and your support for granting scholarships.

David: Yeah, this is something we’re very happy to support because that’s what we’re all about. We’re really about accessibility. Well, first of all, education on how to coach people on their health. And we think that’s critical, but we also want more people to have access to health coaching. We don’t think all of this has to be in the hands of the limited number of MDs out there. I think, with the right education, there are a lot of people who want to help. Actually, we’re just so appreciative that there are so many people who want to be health coaches. And so we’re just providing a little funding for that impetus to do that.

Dr. Sandi: Well, we are extremely grateful. This last go-around, we had 700 applicants for our scholarship slots, and I was in tears as I was reading those applications. It was a gut-wrenching choice, and they come from just so, so many areas in need of this. And as we said earlier, I think health coaches are the perfect person to guide people, create awareness of what you’re doing and how they can get involved. So, speaking of getting involved, if somebody is listening and they say, “I want this. I want this analysis, my blood work,” what should they do? Where are you in terms of making this available?

David: So, right now, the resource available is if you go to www.voloridgehealth.com, in the upper right corner, there are links to our resources. I’d say the Biomarker Reference Guide might be the first one to start browsing through because it educates on the top 10 predictors of every disease. So, you can actually see, okay, what does the data say in general at a population level? And then the second resource is what we’re calling a simulator, the Volo Simulator, where you can actually plug in your blood work and see what your scores are. And there are actually little dials on there where you can say, “Okay, my weight went down 20 points, what would my score increase to? If my HDL increased a little bit, what would my score increase?” And it will show you the probability of various diseases relative to people in your age group.

Dr. Sandi: Wow. Well, this is something that I know there’ll be a lot of interest in doing this. And I just can’t thank you enough for, again, your generosity from your foundation for providing scholarships, as well as this conversation today. You are truly on the cutting edge of healthcare. And we talk a lot about making a difference and you are really making a difference. This is going to impact so many lives for the better. You’re creating health.

David: And I appreciate everything you do as well, so it’s mutual.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you.