Thomas H. Nufert (known by his friends and colleagues as “Tom”) was the visionary entrepreneur behind Younger Phenotype. His unique perspectives on the relationship of insulin resistance to the loss of overall biological function lay at the foundation of the company’s Younger System™. These perspectives derive from two major themes in his life:

First, the hypothesis that insulin resistance underlies aging. Tom spent over three decades advancing this concept. In 1986, Tom founded Thomas Research Corporation (TRC), the first company to target insulin resistance. Scientific research has now clearly established insulin resistance as central to aging.

Second, the management of chronic disease and aging by the individual. For over 35 years, Tom served as a unique biomedical consultant, assisting physicians and their patients suffering from intractable diseases and conditions. These consulting services involved acquiring deep knowledge in multiple biomedical fields, sophisticated techniques of knowledge acquisition, collaborations with physicians and academic investigators, and hands-on work with patients.

Tom was motivated to pursue these two themes out of necessity: he suffered from a number of chronic health conditions (lead poisoning, insulin resistance, inflammatory bowel disease, chronic prostatitis) in his youth, and quickly discovered that the medical community was woefully unprepared to help him. Being incredibly inquisitive and determined, by nature, and possessing a nearly photographic memory, Tom set about acquiring the skills and the knowledge necessary to cure his own ailments.  

Tom was fortunate to have an unusual education. This included interdisciplinary studies (BA, The Evergreen State College), valuable informal mentoring from Nobel laureates and research-oriented physicians, and decades of self-learning as an autodidact. In addition, he studied food science and physiological psychology at University of Illinois (Springfield).

Tom was well-versed in library science, and possessed an incredible understanding about how to acquire useful scientific knowledge through research. He achieved fundamental understandings regarding his own health problems by delving into the scientific biomedical literature and applying what he learned by experimenting on himself. Through meticulous trial and error, Tom was able to reverse the effects of lead poisoning and insulin resistance. He was also able to resolve his inflammatory bowel disease, however he suffered from the lingering effects of upper G.I. inflammation for many years.

Tom’s most intractable health problem was prostatitis, which he acquired in his twenties. Although he was able to successfully manage the symptoms for many decades, he could never quite conquer it. When Tom was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer (which he ultimately succumbed to) he attributed it to his lingering prostatitis.

Tom’s biomedical consulting work with individuals was instigated, in the early 1980’s, by the late Jules Levine, M.D., Founder of the Levine Hospital of Hayward, California. He hired Tom to help devise a biochemical strategy to circumvent imminent heart failure from the cardiotoxic effects of chemotherapy used for treating Dr. Levine’s metastatic prostate cancer. Despite possessing significant resources and having access to quality medicine, he could not get the individualized help he needed to locate, review and interpret the scientific literature and to derive an appropriate course of action. Tom’s proposed solution prevented heart failure and gave Dr. Levine more than 6 months of additional quality life.

Thus began Tom’s service as an individualized biomedical consultant. The majority of Tom’s clients suffered with chronic diseases and conditions such as diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and chronic pain. Notably, many clients who benefited from his services were physicians who, like Dr. Levine, were unable to obtain satisfactory results within the framework of modern medicine.

Guided by his work in these two areas (insulin resistance and management of chronic disease), Tom formulated a comprehensive set of Health Guiding Principles™. These principles are the foundation of algorithms embedded into the Younger System, which is the culmination of Tom Nufert’s lifelong effort to help the individual manage their own health trajectory and allow them to Stay Younger Longer™.