“I’M TRYING TO help you optimize yourself to live longer,” says Gil Blander, founder of Inside Tracker, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that uses lab work to analyze athletes’ nutritional blind spots. Send him $299 and a few vials of blood, the Israel-born biologist says, and he can show you how to enhance your performance, raise your metabolism, reduce pain, improve sleep, boost energy, and optimize mood. It might sound like a slick sales pitch, but Blander is on the forefront of what could be the next great leap in health and fitness. InsideTracker is one of at least a dozen startups that have appeared in the past few years, including Talking20 and WellnessFX, hoping to bring blood-based analytics into the mainstream.
The science they’re marketing is sound. In the past…