10X Health Sees Opportunity as Fitness & Healthcare Converge

At the 2026 ATN Summit, 10X Health CEO Brandon Dawson and President & COO Jeff Zwiefel discussed how diagnostics, genetics and personalized data could reshape healthcare

As consumers take more interest in biomarkers, wearables, longevity, peptides and personalized protocols, companies like 10X Health are betting that the next phase of wellness will be built around the individual.

During “Disrupting Healthcare: Inside 10X’s Plan To Scale Personalized Health” at the 2026 ATN Innovation Summit, Athletech News founder and CEO Edward Hertzman moderated a conversation with Brandon Dawson, founder and CEO of 10X Health and Cardone Ventures, and Jeff Zwiefel, president and chief operating officer of 10X Health.

The group discussed the shift from reactive healthcare to personalized health, the risks of consumers following generic advice and why gyms and wellness centers may have a larger role to play as healthcare and fitness continue to overlap.

Consumers Want More Control Over Their Health

Zwiefel said the broader shift is being driven by consumers who are demanding more from a healthcare system they see as fragmented and reactive.

“For us at 10X Health, it comes down to the consumer having control of their own health,” Zwiefel said. “The current healthcare system, as we know, is fragmented, reactive, it’s broken.”

Consumers, he noted, are increasingly looking for personalization, transparency, ownership and outcomes.

“They’re demanding ownership and outcomes more than ever before,” Zwiefel said. “It’s a transformative change that’s been happening in society, and it’s time for us to be able to meet the consumer where they’re at.”

Dawson noted that wearables and health platforms are useful only if the information they collect can be tied to clinically backed, personalized recommendations.

“If you use AI in a standalone environment, it will hallucinate and give you falsehood,” Dawson said. “So when you think about data and science and how it all comes together to drive individual independent solutions, this is really where this has to go.”

Dawson argued that healthcare has spent decades treating people through “the law of averages,” rather than using individual data to understand what each person actually needs.

Diagnostics Before Optimization

A major theme of the panel was that wellness interventions can become risky when consumers skip the diagnostic work and move straight to products, treatments or protocols they see online.

Dawson said 10X Health has sequenced 270,000 people over three and a half years, using science to guide individualized recommendations. He warned that consumers can put themselves at risk when they follow generalized advice without first understanding their own DNA, bloodwork, mitochondrial function, epigenetics and environment.

“If you don’t have data, and if that data doesn’t drive to clinically backed solutions, and you just do what the talking heads and the social people promote,” Dawson said, “I could be hyper accelerating disease.”

He also pushed back on how longevity is often marketed.

“Longevity actually is a false pronoun to even talk about longevity,” Dawson said. “Longevity is only going to now be known after the fact.”

The more immediate goal, he said, is bringing the body from a normal state to an optimized state and then, potentially, to a performance state.

Peptides Are a Major Opportunity, But the ‘Wild Wild West’

Zwiefel called peptides a “megatrend,” but said the market remains difficult for consumers to navigate.

“It is also the wild wild west,” Zwiefel said. “You need, of course, to find a reputable source.”

Peptides act as messengers in the body, he said, but consumers need to understand their own biology before determining which messengers their body actually needs.

“Until we understand our own body’s individual biology, we don’t know what kind of messengers our body really needs,” Zwiefel said.

Dawson said many consumers are starting with peptide stacks before they understand their biomarkers, epigenetics or broader health gaps.

“So many people are starting with peptide stack before understanding what the heck their epigenetic situation is, what their biomarkers look like, and what are their real gaps and opportunities on the overall health and wellness,” Dawson said.

10X Health Is Building Around the ‘Digital Twin’

Dawson said 10X Health is developing an app, expected to launch in beta in October, built around what he described as his own “digital twin.”

“That’s my digital twin,” Dawson said. “Everything from my blood, my genetics, my epigenetics, my mitochondria function, which is a new test, and my gut health has been factored into this, along with my lifestyle and all my daily data.”

The goal, he said, is to create a personalized system that can guide decisions in real time, from what to eat to how to understand lab updates.

“My digital twin, based on that data, will tell me all the way down to what I should eat or not eat before I put something in my mouth,” Dawson said.

Gyms Could Play a Larger Role in Healthcare

Zwiefel, who spent 25 years at Life Time, said health clubs may be well-positioned to help fill gaps left by the traditional healthcare system.

“I really believe health clubs have an opportunity to deliver what healthcare can’t give them today,” Zwiefel said. “Health clubs have the opportunity to extend their services and provide the full turnkey solutions when done right with the right partnerships, with the clinical backing, with the personal human engagement.”

He also cautioned that most fitness operators are not equipped to move into healthcare on their own.

“No, the answer is no,” Zwiefel said when asked whether most operators have the infrastructure to cross into healthcare. “They don’t have the infrastructure, the sophistication and the mind share.”

He said that is why partnerships make more sense, allowing gyms to bring new services to members without taking on clinical, operational and liability burdens they are not built to manage.

The Next Phase Is Access

Dawson said the long-term opportunity is to make personalized health information more accessible, not only available to the wealthiest consumers.

In 10 years, he said, the goal is technology that can be easily accessed by a large share of the population and that makes health decisions simpler to understand.

“I think it’s technology that’s easily accessible to at least 85% of the population,” Dawson said. “In countries where they’ll let them have access to real information, and it’s simple to understand.”