Does Biohacking Actually Work?
30 Jan 2026 7:40 AM IST
Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal recently went viral for wearing a device called ‘Temple', which measures blood flow.
That’s an example of ‘biohacking’.
Biohacking involves using lifestyle changes, supplements and wearables to take control of one's health.
In India, the biohacking market was worth over a billion dollars in 2024 and could triple by the end of the decade.
But, doctors are skeptical. They point to weak regulation and poor regulation in this segment.
So, why are so many Indians turning to biohacking anyway? And what exactly do doctors say?
To find out, check out the latest episode of The Signal Brief.
The Core produces The Signal Brief. Follow us wherever you get your favourite podcasts. To check out the rest of our work, go to www.thecore.in
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NOTE: A machine transcribed this episode. A human has looked at this text but there might still be errors. Please refer to the audio above, if you need to clarify something. If you want to give us feedback, please write to us at feedback@thecore.in.
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TRANSCRIPT
Kudrat (Host): Puushkar is a 26-year-old tech worker. Two years ago, he began experiencing acute stomach pain. He couldn’t sleep properly. He struggled to focus at work.
He says he went to several doctors, including gut specialists at top hospitals in the city where he lives. But none of them could give a clear diagnosis.
Then, Puushkar came across Yohan Tengra, a biohacking specialist. Yohan ordered multiple tests and prescribed him a long list of supplements. Over the past year, Puushkar says he’s spent between Rs 3 and 4 lakh trying to fix his health.
Puushkar: My lifestyle is likely to reduce down to 5% of my actual lifestyle, uh, routine, which I'm able to cope up with.
Kudrat (Host): Like Puushkar, a growing number of Indians are turning to biohacking or functional medicine to resolve their health issues or to live longer.
Those in this space use the two terms, biohacking and functional medicine, interchangeably. In practice, biohacking can include simple lifestyle and diet changes as well as things like self-directed experimentation using supplements.
Market research firm Grand View Research estimates the Indian biohacking market was worth just over $1 billion in 2024, and expects it to more than triple by 2030. That growth includes wearables, genetic testing kits, supplements, drugs, and mobile apps, all built around the promise of more personalised control over health.
Doctors, however, see biohacking differently. Some worry about safety and accountability. Others see large parts of the industry as outright quackery.
In India, biohacking sits in a grey zone. It’s not quite medicine, but it borrows medical language. It’s not wellness either, but it sells health.
Kudrat (Host): My name is Kudrat Wadhwa and you’re listening to The Signal Brief. We don’t do hot takes. Instead, we bring you deep dives into the how and why of consumer trends.
In this episode, we examine the rise of biohacking in India. Who’s doing it and why? And, why are modern medicine doctors so skeptical of this field?
Kudrat (Host): Biohacking traces its roots to Silicon Valley, among tech workers who believed that with enough data, they could solve almost any problem, including the limits of the human body.
Dave Asprey, who popularised Bulletproof coffee, which is coffee topped with butter, is one of biohacking’s earliest evangelists.
Dave argues that the fat in bulletproof coffee prevents blood sugar spikes and pushes the body into ketosis, a state where it burns more fat.
Scientific evidence for his coffee, though, is limited and mixed. One study found no difference in the cognitive performance between people who drank black coffee versus those who drank Bulletproof coffee. It did find that the latter group stayed full for longer, though.
Over the years, Dave has spent millions of dollars on anti-ageing interventions, on everything from cold exposure to stem cell treatments. He’s convinced that humans can slow ageing, and even engineer it away.
CLIP: Top Biohacks to Transform Your Life in 30 Days
Kudrat (Host): In India, biohacking became more mainstream after the pandemic, according to Sajeev Nair. His website describes him as “a Life Scientist, Serial Entrepreneur, Biohacking Evangelist, And Transformation Coach.” Sanjeev is the founder of Vieroots, a tech-based wellness company that helps clients become optimized humans.
Sajeev: This thought process, especially post COVID has made this concept of biohacking so popular, uh, in, in this part of the world.
Kudrat (Host): The pandemic intensified health anxiety. And, that’s in part why we’re seeing a rise in supplements too, a topic previously covered on The Signal Brief. I’ll link the episode in the show notes below.
That same desire to preserve health and perform better is why we’re seeing more people gravitate toward biohacking and functional medicine, according to Sajeev.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Indians are looking beyond modern medicine. Long before biohacking, many of us turned to Ayurveda, which also promises balance and root-cause healing.
What’s different today though, is the framing. Biohacking speaks the language of data, lab tests, and optimisation. For a younger, urban audience, that can feel more scientific and more credible, even when the evidence is still evolving.
Sajeev confirmed to The Signal Brief that indeed, health-obsessed millennials are his key demographic.
Kudrat (Host): Sajeev is also critical of modern medicine. He argues that doctors are trained to treat diseases. But when it comes to unexplained symptoms or the desire to live longer, he says that modern medicine has little to offer beyond general advice.
Sajeev: So if you go to a doctor and ask, “Hey doctor, I want to live longer and stay younger. I don’t want to have any diseases. What should I do?”
He may tell you to eat well, relax, sleep well, and exercise. But what does that mean? These are all very general statements. Anyone could give this advice, and it remains largely abstract.
Kudrat (Host): Many doctors, though, are deeply sceptical of biohacking and functional medicine. They point to weak evidence, exaggerated claims, and a lack of regulation in the field. Some go further, calling large parts of the industry outright quackery.
The Signal Brief spoke to one such critic, Dr. Sudhir Kumar. He’s the head of the department of neurology at Apollo Hospital Hyderabad.
Dr. Sudhir: Coming to biohacking and functional medicine, there is no specialised training in any medical college in India, and it is not currently recognised by the National Medical Commission or the Medical Council of India. As a trained medical doctor, I cannot recommend that patients go straight to functional medicine.
Kudrat (Host): Dr Sudhir says that in modern medicine, symptoms are starting points, not diagnoses.
Dr. Sudhir: What happens in the kind of medicine we practise is that we correlate the patient’s history, clinical findings and investigations, and then treat the patient. Everything has to line up.
With biohackers or functional medicine practitioners, the approach is often different. They may order 20 tests, looking at vitamins, minerals and other markers. A patient may present with fatigue or weakness, and they find that one vitamin is deficient. They then conclude that this deficiency is the cause.
That approach is often myopic. Because they are not trained doctors, they do not look at the full range of possibilities. As a neurologist, if a patient presents with weakness, I know there can be 25 or 30 possible causes. Because of my training and experience, I can narrow it down and identify the exact cause.
Kudrat (Host): The potential risks of choosing functional medicine, he says, are serious.
Dr. Sudhir: As I said earlier, if a disease is not properly diagnosed and the diagnosis is missed, by the time it is recognised, it may be too late. When patients eventually come to doctors trained in modern medicine, the disease may already have advanced.
Kudrat (Host): There’s also the question of accountability.
Dr. Sudhir: If a qualified medical doctor, someone with an MS or MD, prescribes the wrong medicine and something happens to the patient, there are legal consequences. There are checks and balances at the hospital level, and action can be taken by regulators. A doctor’s licence can even be suspended.
With biohackers and practitioners of alternative or functional medicine, there is often no such regulation. There are no clear checks and balances. If something goes wrong, there is usually no accountability, because they do not fall under the purview of any recognised regulatory body.
Kudrat (Host): Even people in the biohacking space agree there’s a problem. I spoke to Yohan Tengra, who’s 29 and founded Biohacking India, which he describes as an ‘evidence-driven functional medicine venture.’
Yohan: A lot of people who brand themselves as biohackers or functional medicine experts end up dabbling heavily in pseudoscience. They often lack research training, which means they do not know how to critically review medical literature.
As a result, many of their claims are based on anecdotes. They might say, “I gave this to X, Y or Z and this happened,” or rely on storytelling, explaining how a compound will supposedly travel through the gut and act on cells in the body.
This is a very shallow level of evidence. It does not really mean anything in a scientific sense, and relying on it to make health recommendations ends up misleading people.
Kudrat (Host): Yohan is also critical of modern medicine, but for a different reason.
Yohan: I think this is one of the biggest problems with conventional medicine. The time you get with a doctor is usually just 10 or 15 minutes, which limits what they can do. As a result, the focus often stays on medication, with only brief comments about eating well, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, or exercising.
What I have seen through coaching is that people rarely make those kinds of changes on their own. For that to happen, patients need to develop deep trust in their provider. That is when they start taking advice seriously and making real changes, and it is difficult to build that kind of trust in a 10 or 15 minute consultation.
Kudrat (Host): Puushkar, whom we heard from at the beginning of this episode, said something similar. He told me most of his appointments with medical doctors lasted just above five minutes.
These doctors either diagnosed him with IBS and prescribed generic medication, or said they couldn’t identify what was really going on.
With Yohan, Puushkar says the process looked very different.
Puushkar: It took around seven to fifteen days. From our meetings, I could see that he had spent a good four to eight hours researching the case. He took a lot of time to understand what was going on in the blood reports, the nutrient deficiencies, and the patient’s past symptoms.
Kudrat (Host): It makes sense, right? When we’re sick, we need a cure, yes. And, we also just want our health provider to listen to us. After all, everyone’s body is unique. And in a rushed medical system, very few get that kind of time.
Dr. Sudhir too agrees that a paucity of time is a real problem in modern medicine.
Dr. Sudhir: I agree with you. The time spent by doctors trained in modern medicine is limited, and that is one of the reasons people are turning towards alternative and traditional forms of medicine.
Kudrat (Host): Earlier, that tilt meant going to an ayurvedic or homeopathy specialist. Today, and especially for a younger demographic, it could mean going to a functional medicine practitioner.
Dr Sudhir says biohacking also offers something else: certainty.
Dr. Sudhir: One important thing to understand is that many chronic conditions cannot be cured. Diabetes cannot be cured. Hypertension cannot be cured. So I am not sure what some practitioners are telling patients when they claim that supplements or alternative treatments can cure these conditions.
That promise itself becomes a big attraction. Take advanced cancer, for instance. In stage four cancer, most patients do not survive long. But if a functional medicine practitioner says, “Just do intermittent fasting and the cancer will be cured,” people will obviously be drawn to that. These kinds of false promises are a major issue. In modern medicine, we are trained to tell patients the truth.
A lot of reassurance is offered, and everyone wants reassurance. Nobody likes negative news. If doctors trained in modern medicine say there is no cure and that lifelong medication is required, and someone else says, “Just take these ten supplements and fast for six months and you’ll be cured,” people will naturally gravitate towards the latter.
Kudrat (Host): In a stretched medical system and an uncertain world, biohacking offers time, attention, and the feeling of being heard.
Doctors manage uncertainty by slowing down, waiting for evidence, and speaking in probabilities.
Biohackers, though, manage uncertainty by acting. Ordering tests, prescribing supplements, and offering clear explanations. Sometimes those interventions help. Other times they don’t.
The danger is that action without rigorous diagnosis can delay real treatment, as Dr. Sudhir said. And, unlike modern medicine, functional medicine and biohacking lack formal regulatory oversight under Indian medical bodies. Meaning accountability is thin.
Does that mean there’s no space for biohacking?
Dr Sudhir said otherwise, saying people should listen to basic lifestyle advice, regardless of who delivers it.
Dr. Sudhir: That said, there are many things that are genuinely evidence based, and we practise them as well. Sleep seven to nine hours a night. Exercise regularly, whether that is walking, running, cycling or strength training. Reduce carbohydrates, consume adequate protein. Do not smoke. Avoid alcohol, ultra processed foods and excess sugar. On all of these, there is no debate. Whether the advice comes from a biohacker, a functional medicine practitioner or a modern medicine doctor, it is correct.
Kudrat (Host): He warned that consumers should watch out for people who claim to promise too much.
Dr. Sudhir: For patients trying to figure out what to trust, there are some clear red flags. If someone begins by saying, “Doctors don’t want you to know this,” or talks about a pharmaceutical conspiracy, or claims their method works for everyone with zero risk and a hundred percent guarantee, that is a marketing gimmick. Claims about reversing ageing or turning a 60 year old into a 20 year old should immediately raise suspicion.
On the other hand, if someone says they can help an overweight or obese patient manage weight through diet and exercise, that is reasonable and likely genuine. People do not need to reject everything outright. They need to pay attention to what is being promised.
Finally, if someone is prescribing supplements worth thousands of rupees at every visit, it is worth being cautious. Supplements are meant to correct deficiencies. If there is no deficiency, there is no reason to take them. In those cases, it is likely that the person is being treated more as a customer than as a patient.
Outro: That's all for today. You just heard The Signal Brief. We don't do hot takes. Instead, we bring you deep dives into the how and why of consumer trends. The Core produces The Signal Brief. Follow us wherever you get your favourite podcasts.
To check out the rest of our work, go to www.thecore.in.
If you have feedback, we'd love to hear from you. Write to us at feedback@thecore.in or you can write to me personally at kudrat@thecore.in.
Thank you for listening.
