Dr. Sara Szal Gottfried joins Levels as advisor
World-renowned physician-scientist partners with Levels to solve metabolic health crisis
Levels, a biowearable system that gives real-time biofeedback on nutrition and lifestyle, today announced that Dr. Sara Szal Gottfried has joined as a Research Advisor. Dr. Szal Gottfried is a Board-Certified Physician, a three-time New York Times best-selling author, and Director of Precision Medicine at the Marcus Institute at Thomas Jefferson University. She joins current Levels Advisors including Ben Bikman, Ph.D.; Dom D’Agostino, Ph.D.; Molly Maloof, MD; and David Perlmutter, MD.
Dr. GSzalottfried has been at the forefront of innovative thinking about how to optimize health, focusing on the body as a complex unified system and creating a model that incorporates all aspects of a patient’s life that affect metabolic function, including sleep, stress, physical activity, diet, nutrients, environmental toxins, hormones, and more. Her science-based, holistic approach supports foundational and sustainable health while championing N-of-1 experimentation and advanced diagnostic testing for understanding and optimizing metabolic health. Through her research in association with Levels, the partnership seeks to better understand the physiology that drives metabolic health and metabolic dysfunction in nondiabetic individuals, and understand how unique signatures of continuous glucose monitoring data and different “metabolic phenotypes” map onto underlying health.
“Dr. Szal Gottfried’s metabolic research, writing, and speaking have modernized the medical community’s understanding of strategies to approach metabolic health from a root cause perspective, as well as understanding the biomarkers that are most relevant to metabolism,” said Dr. Casey Means, co-founder of Levels. “The mission at Levels is to reverse the metabolic disease epidemic. Our work together will pave the way for a better understanding of how metabolic disease develops, how to appropriately track metabolism and early metabolic dysfunction, and opportunities for optimizing current and future metabolic health.”
Dr. Szal Gottfried agrees: “The metabolic crisis affecting 70 percent or more of our population is a solvable problem yet most physicians lack the education, incentives, and support to provide the personalized nutrition, lifestyle, and behavioral counseling that our patients most need. A systems biology approach direct to consumers can bridge the gap. Our research at Thomas Jefferson University, sponsored by Levels, will help us define the critical transition from health to prediabetes with multi-omic phenotyping, including dense continuous glucose data, which we know will more comprehensively identify the people at greatest risk, and potentially allow us to intervene before insulin resistance is more difficult to reverse. In our initial pilot study at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Medicine, we expect to identify the signature of multiple metabolic phenotypes along the spectrum from health to predisease (i.e., prediabetes), so that in the years to come we can rigorously assess the most effective ways to address the root cause of metabolic dysregulation and improve insulin and glucose pathways with a precision framework that is personalized to the individual using N-of-1 trials. We are tremendously grateful to Levels for their bold vision and leadership in metabolic health.”
About Dr. Sara Gottfried
Sara Szal Gottfried, MD, is a physician-scientist who graduated from Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and completed residency at the University of California at San Francisco. Over the past two decades, Dr. Gottfried has seen more than 25,000 patients and specializes in identifying the underlying cause of her patients’ conditions to achieve true and lasting health transformations, not just symptom management. She is more likely to assess a patient’s multi-omic profile together with next-generation biomarkers, and then prescribe a personalized protocol, using primarily nutrition and lifestyle (occasionally drugs) plus other proven interventions to optimize the gene/environment interface. Her focus is executive health and elite athlete care. For nearly every patient, she designs an N-of-1 trial to provide rapid information on whether the personalized plan will improve outcomes. It’s not one-method-fits-all. It’s not disease-centered. It’s a mission to transform healthcare, one patient at a time.
Dr. Szal Gottfried is a global keynote speaker who practices evidence-based integrative, precision, and functional medicine. She is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University, and Director of Precision Medicine at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health. Dr. Szal Gottfried’s clinical research focus is metabolic phenotyping. Her three New York Times bestselling books include The Hormone Cure, The Hormone Reset Diet, and Younger. Her new book, Women, Food and Hormones, is now available for preorder. Learn more at marcusinstitute.jeffersonhealth.org.
