Why BioType™ is a breakthrough. And why not.

We developed BioType™ after talking to women about their unresolved health problems for 25 years. We puzzled over underlying causes, condition by condition. With 7 million health quizzes to work from, it became clear there were patterns that reached far back into their lives.

It didn’t take long to realize that nearly all chronic health problems arise from dysregulation of the body’s complex processes. That there are 10 core nodes of dysregulation. That everything in the body is connected. And that BioType would help women restore strength to their body’s self-regulatory power.

In that sense, BioType is a breakthrough for women – it helps identify those underlying causes and shows them how to work with their biology to get better. Along the way it fills the gaps in health care that women find so disappointing. For women who want to take control of their health – and, we will argue, for their doctors as well – it’s a new model of health.

You may understand we were surprised to find that there’s a whole field of biology devoted to “our” idea. It’s known as “systems biology”. The idea is nearly a century old — Bertalanffy was arguing in the 1920s that living things have to be understood as whole systems. The name was coined almost 60 years ago. The field of study became a movement in 2000.[1] It’s recognized today by leading medical experts in dozens of specialties. But it still hasn’t reached the average doctor or changed the everyday practice of medicine.

So the real breakthrough of BioType™ is to bring the benefits of systems biology directly to you. The science itself is not a breakthrough – it’s been around for years. But for you to benefit from the new science, you have to unlearn the old. This won’t take long, and it will give you hope for your future.

What’s wrong with the conventional model of human biology?

In conventional medicine, the body has long been seen as a simple machine where parts fail or wear out. This oversimplification (in scientific terms, “reductive model”) creates a host of problems, especially for women.

• This reductive model is behind the concept of menopause as a problem of just falling estrogen. In this over-simplified view, you add back estrogen and everything is fine again. Except the data shows it isn’t.
• This reductive thinking is also behind the “calories in/calories out” model of weight gain. If you cut calorie intake and increase calorie burn, you’re supposed to lose weight. Except that you don’t.
• It’s why conventional doctors have regarded women’s hormones as “out of control”, “wildly fluctuating”, “unpredictable”, “volatile”, even “biologically deficient”. True, hormones don’t fit the reductive model; that doesn’t mean they aren’t natural and meaningful. In systems biology, they are a kind of language you can read; they make sense – more sense than lab tests.
• It’s behind the safety testing of toxins. If a single toxin is tested and it produces no adverse effects at a given dose, then it’s declared safe. But toxins combine with other toxins and wreak their havoc over time. So the dose that is said to be safe actually isn’t.
• In its essence, this reductive thinking breaks the body down into discrete systems and parts. So your thyroid function is assessed with a single test. You have hypothyroid symptoms but your test comes back normal. In this system your conventional doctor has nothing to offer till your thyroid is diseased.
• Perhaps most importantly, the reductive model leaves out emotions. They are only for psychology and psychotherapists, not for your doctor – except when he implies “it’s all in your head”. But systems biology shows our emotions affect how our genes function and are key drivers of our health outcomes. It’s science, not woo-woo.
• This reductive model is co-dependent with medical specialties. Your PCP sends you to a sequence of specialists, each of whom focuses on his organ or system (specialties are based on anatomy). But if everything is connected, as systems biology shows, who connects the dots? In too many cases, you have too many doctors, but only you connect the dots.
• The model is also aligned with the focus on drug therapies. Doctors are trained to match a symptom to a test, and a test result to a drug therapy. It’s almost impossible to break open and innovate that closed system.
• It’s also embedded in the system of insurance reimbursement. There are about 11,000 CPT codes, and nearly all of them are “allopathic”, or in response to an acute problem; only a few dozen are for preventive or holistic care.
• It’s behind the “gold standard” of randomized double-blind controlled trials, which test one variable at a time, baking the body-as-simple-machine concept into research and development. And the double-blind standard excludes therapies that can’t be hidden from the patient — changes in diet, exercise, sleep habits and stress management — thereby favoring the therapies that can be hidden, such as prescription drugs.
• It’s behind the thinking that we should “hack” our health, perhaps with diet secrets, peptides, miracle drugs – the fads are endless, but they all assume we can “hack” with Mother Nature.
• Finally, this reductive model views chronic illness as incurable. Treatment is oriented toward mitigating the patient’s pain or discomfort. That means managing symptoms, with no effort toward reversing the causes of the condition.

Is it any wonder that in this system so many women have multiple “co-morbid” conditions, multiple drug prescriptions, high health care bills, and mystery illnesses? The reductive system is not optimized to yield health.

“Contemporary medicine is all about disease, and not about wellness.”

— Dr. Leroy Hood, co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology [2]

We need to unlearn the reductive thinking because most women have internalized it over their lifetimes.

How systems biology compares to the reductive model

Systems biology views our health as the outcome of our body’s interaction with its environment and experience. This interaction requires the body to adapt constantly – that’s what we mean by the body’s “self-regulation”: when healthy, your body is responsive, strong and resilient. It runs itself.

Preventive health should work to strengthen the body’s self-regulatory power – and so should doctors treating illness. Because nearly all negative health outcomes arise from dysregulation. These dysregulations are called “maladaptive allostatic states” by systems biologists.

That may sound woo-woo…or overly scientific. But think about how these simple truths are connected:

• The body is so complex it’s almost incomprehensible.
• Everything in the body is connected, virtually cell by cell.
• The body self-regulates this complexity, and no one organ manages that.
• The self-regulation is easily impaired, requiring maladaptations.
• Over time those maladaptations have health consequences, including almost all chronic disease, premature aging, and causes of death.

Consider this idea from Professor Daphne Koller, a thought leader in systems biology:

“Human biology is the most complex system we have ever tried to study, and intervening in it is an endeavor that must be approached with the utmost humility.”

– Prof. Daphne Koller, formerly of Stanford University[3]

Many women have had this natural view of health for a long time: they try to eat right, exercise, reduce stress, buy organic, and more. Even so, for many of us the weight stays on, we still can’t sleep, and we’re tired all the time. With systems biology – and with BioType as your guide – you’ll learn why your efforts haven’t always worked, and how to adjust your health habits to strengthen your self-regulatory power.

Let’s take an example: autoimmune disease

Autoimmune diseases are growing fast, and roughly 80% of those affected are women.[4] The list includes rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease (including Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis), Celiac disease (gluten sensitivity), Hashimoto’s and Graves, multiple sclerosis (MS), psoriasis and more.

Here’s how the views of conventional and systems medicine compare and contrast:

You can skip this paragraph if the science is too much, but we love it. Alessio Fasano, who discovered the protein that governs how tightly the gut wall is sealed, proposed that autoimmunity needs three things together: genetic susceptibility, an environmental trigger, and a gut wall that has stopped holding the line. He argued the third one is the element conventional medicine had been missing.[5] The environmental triggers can be a high-sugar diet, ultra-processed foods, synthetic toxins, latent infections (long Covid, Epstein-Barr, etc.), chronic stress and other factors; these combine to disrupt signaling networks. Their disruptions in turn create dysbiosis (imbalanced gut bacteria) and “leaky gut”, which then create a cascade of systemic inflammation that disrupts body-wide signaling networks. Let’s follow just one path out of that triad – the one called insulin resistance. Because the body’s cells are ignoring insulin, the pancreas pumps out more of it. The beta cells that make insulin are pushed into a highly-stressed state. This exhaustion creates localized inflammation, and the chemical messengers that act as first-responders (cytokines) physically alter the beta cells in an effort to “fix” the problem – but its methods are all short-term while the triggers are chronic. So the altered beta cells now spill out misfolded proteins and stress proteins in forms the immune system doesn’t recognize as its own. It treats them as a foreign threat and responds with white blood cells to destroy them. (Researchers have confirmed the immune attack and have not yet identified exactly which proteins set it off.) This begins an ongoing attack on the pancreas itself, leaving fewer functioning cells to carry the load, creating a doom loop of ever-greater stress on the pancreas…and greater cytokine rewiring…and an ever-increasing autoimmune attack.[6]

Given this mechanism, it’s clear that drugs to suppress the immune response or inflammation don’t touch the real causes. All that talk about eating organic, reducing ultra-processed foods, and reducing stress – it’s not just talk. It’s strengthening your body’s self-regulatory power.

Another example: bone loss

Conventional medicine views bone loss as an inevitable mechanical failure caused by aging and/or genetics. In systems medicine, it’s an active, whole-body survival mechanism gone wrong – an “allostatic overload”.

Your skeleton is not a scaffold that was put up once and now slowly weathers. It is living tissue, torn down and rebuilt continuously your whole life, by two crews working in balance — one that clears old bone and one that lays down new. Bone loss is what happens when that balance is lost, and the signals that unbalance it come from everywhere else in the body.

• The Upstream Influx: The dysregulation commonly begins far upstream with some combination of chronic stress, environmental toxins, and a diet high in ultra-processed foods. These push the stress axis into a state where cortisol stays high when it should have subsided, while degrading the gut microbiome and inducing a “leaky gut.”
• The Inflammatory Signal: Because the gut barrier is breached, a continuous stream of inflammatory messengers enters the bloodstream — and bone listens to those messengers. Several of them, including TNF-alpha and IL-6, directly recruit and activate osteoclasts, the cells whose job is to clear old bone. The clearing crew is called out and kept out, not because the skeleton needs remodeling but because the body is carrying an inflammatory signal it can’t switch off.
• The Remodeling Stop-Work Order: At the same time, the compromised gut means the body absorbs less of the cofactors bone-building depends on, including vitamin K2 and magnesium. Compounding this, sustained high cortisol acts as a cellular stop-work order to the osteoblasts — the bone builders — slowing the repair of the tissue that has just been cleared. This one is not controversial: it is why long-term steroid treatment is a recognized cause of osteoporosis.[7]
• The Maladaptive Lock-In: Clearing without rebuilding is a one-way street, and the structural architecture of the bone degrades. When conventional medicine intervenes with drugs that suppress the clearing, it leaves older bone in place that would normally have been replaced — improving the density number on a scan while doing less for the bone’s flexibility and resilience, which is what actually resists a fracture. The frame can’t be properly repaired while the signal that started all this is still running.

If this is so clear, why is conventional medicine resistant to change?

Systems medicine — the field that studies the body as a network rather than a collection of parts — has been producing insight like this for twenty years. It lives in journals and academic conferences. It does not live in your doctor’s office, and it is not going to, because a fifteen-minute appointment is built to test, diagnose, prescribe and follow up. What systems biology requires is a process that runs over months: read the pattern, pick the part to work on, change several things, see what moves, adjust.

Resistance to systems biology is baked in. We can’t expect a specialist like a cardiologist to suddenly master “systems multi-omics”. Having specialists coordinate to provide cross-disciplinary care is hopelessly complex. Malpractice insurance requires doctors to follow approved standards of care, which are slow to change. And nobody is paid to do it: the reimbursement system has no code for the hour a systems approach requires, which is more or less why “concierge doctors” sell the systems approach to people who can pay for it out of pocket. The simple reality is that the current medical system can’t pivot to systems medicine.

We don’t see this as reason to despair. Most of the effort required here is best done by you, anyway. And there is plenty of science in systems medicine that shows your symptoms point the way.

Why do so many alternative practitioners also use the “reductive model”?

It’s human nature to simplify problems and seek quick solutions. Sometimes that’s a brilliant instinct. But that’s not how our biology works. So it’s disappointing that so many alternative medical doctors – and supplement marketers — still rely upon the same reductive thinking in conventional medicine.

Think about these examples:

• Recommending “peptides” to use as drugs; to function they must override the body’s self-regulatory functions.
• Recommending red yeast rice as a single therapy to bring down high cholesterol.
• Saying that “adrenal fatigue” can be fixed with glandular extracts and licorice root.
• Saying that hypothyroidism can be remedied with raw iodine alone.

The consumer ends up taking an endless series of supplements without correcting the dysregulation that is the underlying cause of her symptoms. It’s made many women skeptical about alternative medicine. The problem is known among functional medicine practitioners as “Green Allopathy”.

BioType™ Zero: much bigger than peri/menopause

WHN is developing the BioType™ approach one condition at a time. There are three reasons for that.

First, that’s how most women search for health care solutions.

Second, you are searching on that condition because it’s what’s bothering you the most, and in a meaningful way, your body is telling you the dysregulation to fix first.

And third, you won’t shift from “allostasis” back to “homeostasis” overnight. Your body didn’t dysregulate overnight, and it takes time to re-regulate.

Having shed the “reductive model”, you can see where this is going. Your goal is always to support your body’s self-regulatory power. When it’s optimized, you are as strong and resilient as you can be. We call this state BioType™ Zero. Your work then is to keep that state going as you age gracefully and your body’s needs change over time.

So BioType is much bigger than peri/menopause – your current health priority. The side effects of moving back toward BioType Zero over time are all good for you: better sleep, easy weight loss, more energy, robust digestion, strong immune function. As we’ve said at WHN for decades: “health is your natural state”.

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