InsideTracker’s Jon Michaeli explains why welltech is an unlikely catalyst for a multidisciplinary approach to metabolic health.
The days of treating metabolic health as a narrow, clinical category are finally coming to an end. Thanks largely to wellness – the consumer-driven healthcare adjacent ecosystem – metabolic health is viewed as a complex, multidisciplinary target for disease prevention and longevity. Virtual care providers and consumers gravitating to the new front doors of healthcare are the ones who have largely catalyzed this transformation.
Telehealth companies and virtual clinics, food-as-medicine and nutrition startups, fitness ecosystems, and GLP-1 access programs are all starting to converge around the same idea: helping consumers continuously manage metabolic wellness through more personalized, ongoing engagement. Underpinning this shift is a growing recognition that metabolic health isn’t just about weight – it is a primary driver of biological aging, directly influencing cellular repair, systemic inflammation, and overall healthspan.
GLP-1s accelerated the conversation, but they are not the whole story
We can give much credit to the GLP-1 revolution. These medications have raised awareness, demand, and expectations around weight management and metabolic health faster than almost anyone anticipated.
But the long-term opportunity extends far beyond medication access itself. Take the virtual clinic world, for example. Leaders like Ro and hims & hers were built around access to prescriptions – including GLP-1s – then added nutrition coaching and behavioral support layers. Calibrate has followed a similar arc, starting as a GLP-1 prescriber and systematically layering in metabolic coaching, nutrition guidance, and CGM integration. Found has gone further still, positioning itself explicitly as a whole-body health company that treats medication as one tool within a broader program spanning behavioral health, nutrition, and sleep. The pattern is consistent: medication access is the entry point, but the durable business is the ecosystem built around it.
The experience layer is changing quickly
Historically, metabolic care was largely episodic. It revolved around physician visits, static nutrition plans, fragmented tracking, and reactive interventions that often occurred only after problems had already progressed.
What’s emerging now is much more continuous and consumer-oriented. Experiences are increasingly personalized, data-driven, and embedded into daily life, while also integrating more seamlessly across retail, wellness, and digital health environments.
Continuous glucose monitors are a useful illustration of this shift. Originally developed as a clinical tool to help diabetics track blood sugar, CGMs have migrated steadily into the consumer mainstream, adopted by athletes, longevity enthusiasts, and everyday health seekers who have no diabetes diagnosis at all. For this growing cohort, glucose data is not about managing a condition; it is about understanding how their body responds to food, sleep, stress, and exercise in real time. CGMs have become one of the clearest examples of how a clinical instrument can be reframed as a personalized performance and wellness tool. For the healthspan movement, managing continuous glucose dynamics isn’t merely about avoiding metabolic dysfunction – it’s about optimizing nutrient sensing, preserving mitochondrial function, and maintaining metabolic flexibility over decades.
Across the board, consumers now expect guidance that adapts over time, experiences that feel connected, and recommendations that reflect their actual behaviors, biology, and goals. The same is becoming true in the metabolic health market.
Why this matters
As metabolic wellness becomes more mainstream, the market will gravitate toward platforms that can unify fragmented health signals, personalize guidance continuously, support long-term engagement, and integrate across broader wellness ecosystems.
None of this is straightforward. Sustained behavior change remains one of the hardest problems in consumer health. Engagement drops off sharply after the initial motivation spike, and personalization at scale requires data infrastructure that most platforms are still building. The companies that figure out long-term adherence will be the ones that matter. In geroscience, consistency is everything; micro-adjustments in metabolic behavior only yield true preventive value when sustained long enough to alter long-term aging trajectories.
It is not easy infrastructure to build, and this may prove to be one of the more challenging user populations for driving sustained engagement and long-term behavior change. So companies operating in the metabolic health space will need to prioritize experiences that are approachable, accessible, and capable of delivering trustworthy individualized guidance at scale. Because ultimately, this is where a significant amount of long-term value is likely to emerge.
Looking ahead
We’re simply watching the evolution of a new weight management category; this is the early formation of a much broader metabolic wellness ecosystem that sits at the intersection of healthcare, wellness, retail, and consumer technology.
Ultimately, metabolic health is no longer a discrete clinical problem to be treated in isolated visits – it is becoming a continuous, lifelong practice. As welltech platforms mature, the market will inevitably favor ecosystems that move past episodic weight management to integrate real-time biological data, long-term behavior change, and preventive longevity. The winner of the consumer relationship won’t just be the platform with the best prescription pipeline or tracking app, but the one that successfully turns metabolic resilience into a foundation for extending healthspan.
About Jon Michaeli 
Jon Michaeli is the Senior GTM & Commercial Consultant & Advisor at InsideTracker.
He is a go-to-market and commercial operator with 25+ years turning science-backed health and wellness products into repeatable revenue. As Senior GTM & Commercial Consultant at InsideTracker, he currently leads the company’s expansion from DTC to B2B, including the launch of its Terra health AI platform for consumer health businesses. His leadership career spans senior commercial roles at Medisafe – where he grew the user base from 800K to 4M+ – Zipline, Matternet, Vista.ai and Sleep Number. An active angel investor in ~70 health and MedTech companies, Jon holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson and a BA in Economics from Tufts.