Our Manifesto: Living Better, For Longer

We started Thriva because the tools needed to truly understand and proactively manage our health simply weren't accessible to most people. We're living in a world that's dramatically different from the one our bodies and brains evolved for – a world of abundant, often unhealthy, choices and constant comfort. Our ancient operating systems are struggling to keep up. We needed a new way, a simple, dependable compass in this dizzying reality, to tune into the wisdom of our own bodies. We believe that compass starts from within.

We've made incredible strides in extending how long we live – our lifespan. In the 1980s, your chance of reaching 84 years old was one in five. Now it's one in two. But the challenge is that our healthspan – the number of years we live in good health, free from chronic disease – hasn't kept pace. People are spending a significant portion of their later years in poor health. Our mission, our why, is to help close this gap, helping you live better now and for longer, whatever age you are today. We’re fixed on helping as many people as possible to experience as many years as possible in great health. To be thriving for as long as humanly possible.

Improving healthspan isn't about quick fixes; it's a continuous journey. It requires a few key components working together:

• Regular Measurement: Understanding what's happening inside your body right now and seeing how you’re individually changing from that baseline
• Actionable Insights: Translating that data into clear, simple steps you can take.
• Tight Feedback Loops: Seeing the impact of your actions over time to stay motivated and adjust.
• Personalisation: Recognising that your biology and your life are unique and change over time, so your path to health should be too.
• Community & Support: Connecting with experts and others on their health journey, because sustainable change thrives with proper guidance and shared experiences. And we achieve more with proper support.

It's easy to feel like you're failing at health, but the truth is, it's genuinely difficult in the modern world. We're navigating complex lives - careers, families, relationships, finances - with biology designed for a different era. We're surrounded by temptations and a whirlwind of conflicting wellness advice. Our bodies and minds are still wired with ancient urges that don't serve us well today. Understanding this can help remove the guilt. It's not a lack of willpower; it's an evolutionary mismatch and an overwhelming environment. We're here to help you cut through the noise.

We believe there is immense value in personal experimentation - citizen science if you will - and understanding what works best for your body. With the right guardrails, evidence-based guidance, and a framework for measuring impact (like regular testing), you can become a more informed participant in your own health journey. Furthermore, by contributing to aggregated, anonymised data, individuals can collectively help advance our understanding of proactive health, benefiting from the shared insights and the power of community.

This is our promise to you. To provide the tools, insights, and support you need to listen to your blood, understand your body, and take confident action to live better, now and for longer.

The NHS is a national treasure, designed to treat the sick and to help people manage chronic conditions. It does this vital work under immense pressure. However, it wasn't built for proactive, preventative health at scale. It's a reactive model, waiting for symptoms to appear before intervening. By focusing on preventative and proactive health, we’ll enable the NHS to focus on the critical care it was designed to deliver.

Imagine a world where people feel confident and empowered about their health. Individually, this means increased vitality, energy, and a profound sense of health confidence. On a population level, it unlocks incredible productivity and reduces the burden of preventable chronic disease. Our success looks like millions of individuals understanding their bodies, taking effective action, and adding healthy, vibrant years to their lives. It's a future where proactive health is the norm, not the exception.

True health optimisation must be personal. Your genetic makeup, lifestyle, environment, and preferences are unique. Personalisation with Thriva means:

• Understanding Your Baseline: Getting a clear picture of your unique health status and where you're starting from.
• Physiology-Specific Actions: Identifying what your biggest priorities are based on your body’s needs and your goals
• Lifestyle Integration: Finding actions that fit realistically into your life and are sustainable for you.
  
  We help you listen to your blood to optimise your health.

While a core part of our vision is adding healthy years to your life, Thriva is also fundamentally about feeling better today. Understanding your nutritional status, metabolic health, or hormone balance can lead to immediate, tangible improvements in energy, mood, and overall well-being. Proactive health isn't just an investment in the future; it's an investment in your present quality of life.

Equally important to what we test for is what we don't. We actively choose not to offer tests where the science is unclear, the results are difficult to interpret actionably, or where they might inadvertently cause health anxiety or promote harmful behaviours.. As Dr. Shah points out, things like broad microbiome testing or continuous glucose monitoring for non-diabetics, while interesting, often lack the robust evidence needed to provide truly actionable, outcome-driven guidance for a general population. We prioritise your well-being over generating data for its own sake.

Traditional lab ranges are based on population averages, often including people who may be on a trajectory towards poor health. What's considered "normal" isn't always optimal for you. Furthermore, a single test is just a snapshot. Your health is dynamic. At Thriva, we focus on helping you understand your trajectory over time, identifying early signals of imbalance years before traditional diagnostic thresholds are met. We provide optimal ranges and context based on the latest evidence, empowering you to intervene early and effectively.

The consumer health and wellness market can be confusing, filled with companies chasing trends and offering non-actionable information. It's hard to know who to trust. Thriva's ground truth is our unwavering commitment to testing only what is credible, actionable, and genuinely useful for improving your health. We blend rigorous scientific standards with a human-centered approach, ensuring that the insights you receive are reliable and empowering, not overwhelming or misleading. In practice, we use a combination of live interviews, surveys and product data to ensure we’re clear on how we can help our customers make progress.

Wearable technology offers valuable insights into activity, sleep, and other lifestyle factors. We value what they can deliver. However, they are blind to the crucial information circulating in your blood – the internal biomarkers that tell a deeper story about your metabolic health, inflammation, nutrient status, and more. Thriva brings this vital internal data together with your lifestyle context, providing a more complete picture. We see exciting possibilities in integrating different data streams in the future to provide even richer insights. Watch this space as Thriva evolves.

We believe that for many common health challenges, significant improvements can be made through targeted lifestyle changes – nutrition, movement, sleep, stress management, and more. You have tremendous agency in shaping your health outcomes. Equally, we recognise that there are lots of instances where the right type and the right amount of medication can play a pivotal role in promoting day-to-day wellbeing and mitigating some long-term risks. As a CQC registered organisation, we’re not restricted in what we can recommend to help our customers make progress. And whilst we’ll always start by looking at lifestyle factors, we won’t ignore medication either. Our goal is to empower you to make changes effectively.