From the CEO: June 2026
Hero-dosing protein for back pain, intrinsic capacity as an aging marker, and a mouth tape recommendation.
Three things on my mind this month
1. Hero-dosing protein and creatine for back pain
I've mentioned persistent back and neck issues from bulging and degenerated discs caused by sports injuries, accidents, and plain old aging. For years I'd be sidelined for months at a time with flare-ups that had me struggling to get dressed. The pattern was always the same: injury → immobility → appetite drops → protein intake slips to 110-120g/day → delayed recovery. It's a sequence that's common in sports medicine.
This past fall, things reached a really difficult point and after making no progress with rest and mobility work, I decided to test something new: a daily goal of 1g/lb of protein (165-200g most days) regardless of exercise and 10-20g of creatine each morning. The effects were very surprising. Within a week, pain settled enough to start calisthenics. A few weeks later, I was doing dumbbell work. My symptoms have been significantly improved since.
My read is that flooding my system with raw materials for muscle and connective tissue repair gave the structures around the injury what they needed to recover faster. The research agrees: protein needs climb during injury, supplementing it after orthopedic surgery blunts atrophy and speeds recovery, and the data converge on ~1.6g/kg/day and above. If a nagging injury is keeping you out of the gym, this is the first experiment I'd run (yes, even before BPC-157 😁). Use a complete protein source like whey or beef isolate for best results. This is another reason to log food in detail, and why I consider nutrition records a significant part of a person's medical history (try Levels food logging; no CGM necessary!).
2. Intrinsic capacity and a new marker for aging
A concept gaining steam in aging research is intrinsic capacity, the WHO's term for the composite of physical and mental capacities you can draw on at any point in life: how well you move, think, see, hear, and recover. I like this concept because it reframes healthcare around preserving function rather than waiting to treat disease.
What has me genuinely excited is that ARPA-H just funded teams under its program called Proactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience (PROSPR) to build tools that can read out age-related outcomes in three years instead of decades. One Stanford-led team is planning research to develop the first FDA-grade Intrinsic Capacity Score, combining surveys, functional tests, continuous wearable data, and blood biomarkers into a single score that can predict health trajectory decades into the future. Think of it as a simple, repeatable way to measure aging that actually responds to the things you do (very similar to Levels' mission!).
Pair it with the NIH's MoTrPAC consortium, which is building a molecular map of exactly how exercise changes the body tissue by tissue, and you can see the future taking shape. Understand what the mechanisms and molecular markers of health (not disease) are, measure them consistently, target with lifestyle first, and watch the number move. I could even see the FDA eventually making this composite score an approval endpoint.
3. Product recommendation: Mouth tape
I've battled snoring and mild sleep apnea for years. It wrecks my own sleep, carries real long-term risk for cognitive health, and (no small thing) makes life miserable for my wife. I've tried plenty of interventions with little to show for it, but the best bang for the buck by far has been mouth tape. I'll admit it feels strange the first few nights to go to sleep looking like a hostage. Once I found the right product, my snoring dropped noticeably, as measured by my Eight Sleep and verified by my wife. The one I use is super soft and conformal, leaves the least residue of any I tried, tears easily, and costs less than the dedicated mouth tape strips you'll find elsewhere.
Follow me on X here. Other than Levels, I have no affiliation with any of the products mentioned or linked above—I'm just a satisfied customer.
—Josh
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