From the Rubble | Natural Series Extensions | Part 2

TLDR: The same institutions that harvest your digital data are harvesting your health data - and the stakes are higher. Your fitness tracker reports to a corporation. Your health app sells your symptoms to insurers and data brokers. Your medical records live in systems you don’t control and can’t fully access. This article covers the sovereign health stack: tools that put your biological data in your hands, not theirs. Cronometer over MyFitnessPal. Local-first health records. At-home lab testing. The FDN methodology as a framework for data-driven sovereignty over your own biology.

The Health Data Problem Is Worse Than the Digital Data Problem

When Google harvests your browsing behavior, the worst-case outcomes are targeted ads and behavioral profiling.

When a health app harvests your symptoms, conditions, menstrual cycle, mental health disclosures, medication use, or biometric data - the worst-case outcomes include insurance discrimination, employment decisions, data broker sales to parties you’ll never identify, and a permanent record of your most intimate information in systems you don’t control and can’t delete.

The health data economy is large, poorly regulated, and growing fast. Most health apps are not covered by HIPAA - the health privacy law that governs doctors and hospitals doesn’t apply to wellness apps, fitness trackers, or the data brokers who buy from them. You have fewer legal protections for the period tracking app on your phone than you do for the records at your doctor’s office.

And your doctor’s office records aren’t actually that protected either.

The Electronic Health Records system that was supposed to give patients access to their own data has, in practice, created a fragmented infrastructure where your records live in systems controlled by healthcare institutions, accessible to you only through interfaces those institutions design and control, portable only to the degree those institutions choose to facilitate portability.

You are the subject of this data. You are rarely treated as its owner.

The Fitness and Nutrition Tracking Problem

MyFitnessPal is the dominant calorie and nutrition tracking app. It was acquired by Under Armour in 2015 for $475 million, breached in 2018 (150 million accounts), sold to Francisco Partners in 2020, and has been steadily monetizing user data throughout.

MyFitnessPal’s privacy policy permits selling and sharing your health and fitness data with third parties for research, analytics, and advertising. The data you enter - your weight, food intake, exercise, health goals - is a commodity.

Cronometer is the sovereign alternative. It’s available as a web app and mobile app, with a free tier that covers most use cases. What makes it different:

  • No advertising business model
  • No selling data to third parties
  • Significantly more detailed nutritional data (micronutrients, not just macros)
  • CSV export of all your data, any time - you own it
  • Optional account - you can use it without creating an account tied to your email

The nutritional database in Cronometer is more accurate and detailed than MyFitnessPal’s crowdsourced entries. For anyone doing functional health work - tracking micronutrients, correlating intake with lab markers, following a specific protocol - Cronometer is the better tool on the merits, independent of the privacy argument.

Fitness trackers and wearables: Here’s an honest take that most health content won’t give you - for the vast majority of people, wearables create more stress than insight. The anxiety of watching metrics, optimizing numbers, and responding to every alert is itself a stressor. From a functional health perspective, continuous tracking is a tool for the top 5% trying to squeeze out the last bit of performance optimization. For the other 95% - the people who haven’t addressed diet, sleep, or chronic stress yet - a wearable isn’t what moves the needle. The DRESS protocol does.

If you’re in the tracking camp and want to do it right, one wearable stands out: Morpheus. No ties to Apple, Google, Fitbit, or Garmin’s data ecosystem. Built specifically around HRV - heart rate variability, the most useful single metric for recovery and readiness. The methodology behind it comes from serious sports science, not consumer product marketing. Critically, it’s a once-a-day measurement, not a 24/7 surveillance device. You take your reading in the morning, get actionable guidance for the day, and put it down. That’s the right relationship with the data.

For everyone else: your subjective sense of how you feel, combined with functional lab markers, tells you more than a wristband ever will.

Your Medical Records - Getting What’s Yours

Under HIPAA, you have the right to request a complete copy of your medical records from any healthcare provider. Most people don’t exercise this right. Most providers make it mildly inconvenient to do so.

Exercise it anyway. Request your complete records from every provider you’ve seen in the last ten years. Get them on paper or as digital files (CCDs - Continuity of Care Documents - are the standard format) that you control.

Why this matters:

Continuity. You are the only consistent entity across your entire healthcare history. Providers don’t always have access to records from other providers. You may have information in your own records that’s clinically relevant but silently missing from the chart your current doctor sees.

Accuracy. Medical records contain errors. Diagnoses entered incorrectly. Medications listed that you never took. Allergies not recorded. Conditions attributed to you that belong to someone else. You cannot correct what you haven’t seen.

Sovereignty. Your health history is yours. Having a complete copy in your own possession - stored securely, encrypted, in a format you control - means you’re not dependent on institutional goodwill for access to your own story.

Where to store it: Filen encrypted storage, organized by provider and date. A local encrypted folder synced to Filen. Accessible to you from anywhere, readable only by you.

At-Home Lab Testing - The Gateway to Health Sovereignty

The standard medical model gatekeeps lab testing behind physician orders. You feel bad, you get an appointment (in six weeks), the doctor orders a limited panel based on a brief conversation, the results come back interpreted through a sick-care lens designed to rule out catastrophic disease rather than identify suboptimal function.

The functional health model runs the labs first and asks questions from the data.

Several legitimate pathways exist for ordering your own labs without a physician intermediary:

Direct-to-consumer lab testing:

  • Ulta Lab Tests - wide panel selection, physician authorization included in the service, competitive pricing
  • Any Lab Test Now - physical locations, walk-in testing, results to you directly
  • LabCorp Patient - direct access to LabCorp’s network in most states

These are real options and worth knowing about. You can get labs, you can read reference ranges, and you can start asking better questions. That’s meaningful.

Here’s the honest caveat though: knowing what to order matters as much as being able to order it. The standard consumer panels miss a lot. Functional practitioners work with clinical lab networks - like Designs for Health - that offer more targeted, cost-effective panels than anything available direct-to-consumer, ordered based on your specific symptom picture and history rather than a generic starter panel. The self-directed route gets you data. The practitioner-guided route gets you the right data, interpreted correctly, at a cost that’s often lower than cobbling together a consumer panel.

Both paths beat doing nothing. The self-directed path is the gateway. Working with someone trained to use functional labs is where the real picture emerges.

What to start with if you’re running labs independently for the first time:

A comprehensive metabolic panel, complete blood count, thyroid panel (TSH, Free T3, Free T4, Reverse T3), fasting insulin (not just glucose - fasting insulin reveals insulin resistance years before glucose does), Vitamin D (25-OH), magnesium RBC (not serum - serum magnesium is almost always “normal” even when you’re depleted), and a full lipid panel with particle size if available.

These are not exotic tests. Most cost less than a co-pay. None require a doctor’s permission in most US states.

The FDN Framework - Data-Driven Biology

Functional Diagnostic Nutrition is the methodology that ties the health sovereignty stack together.

The conventional medical model starts with symptoms and works backward to a diagnosis. The FDN model starts with functional lab data and works forward to a protocol. The difference matters because the conventional model is optimized for identifying pathology - disease that’s advanced enough to treat. The functional model is optimized for identifying dysfunction - patterns in lab markers that indicate the body isn’t working at full capacity, before those patterns become diagnosable disease.

Most people who feel chronically unwell have lab results that are “normal” by conventional standards. That’s because conventional reference ranges are established by population averages - the average includes a lot of people who are also chronically unwell. Normal doesn’t mean optimal. Normal means average.

The DRESS protocol - Diet, Rest, Exercise, Stress Reduction, Supplementation - is the implementation framework. Every pillar is addressed simultaneously, because the body’s systems are interconnected. You can’t optimize sleep while ignoring cortisol. You can’t optimize gut health while ignoring diet quality. The protocol is holistic not because of philosophy but because the biology demands it.

The data-sovereignty parallel is exact:

In digital sovereignty, you audit your system - what’s running, what’s collecting data, what’s exposed - before building the secure stack. In health sovereignty, you audit your biology - run the labs, understand the markers, identify the dysfunction - before building the protocol.

Test, don’t guess. In both domains.

The Health Data Sovereignty Stack

Tool / ApproachReplacesWhy It Made the Cut
CronometerMyFitnessPalNo data selling, better data, full export, micronutrient detail
Filen encrypted storageGoogle Health / Apple Health cloudYour records, your keys, zero-knowledge
Direct lab testingInsurance-mediated panelsData goes to you, not to insurers and data brokers
Personal health records (local)EHR portal dependencyYou own the complete picture, providers don’t
FDN methodologySymptom-chasing medicineData-driven, root cause, your protocol not their template

The Insurance Problem

A note on what you do with your lab data and who gets access to it.

Health insurance in the US uses medical records to make coverage and pricing decisions. Pre-existing conditions, diagnoses, treatments - all of it can affect insurability depending on the policy type and regulatory context.

Direct-to-consumer lab testing, paid out of pocket and not run through insurance, does not generate an insurance billing record. The results go to you. Not to your insurer. Not to a data broker that sells to insurers. Not to anyone except you.

This is not about hiding health information from your doctor. It’s about understanding what information flows where and making deliberate decisions about which channels you use for which purposes. Your doctor can see results you bring to them. Your insurer doesn’t need to see everything your doctor sees.

This is health sovereignty in practice: understanding the data flows, controlling what goes where, and making decisions based on your actual interests rather than institutional default.

The Overlap Is the Point

The audience for digital sovereignty and the audience for health sovereignty are the same people.

Someone who has decided to run their own Ghost server rather than trust Substack with their content is the same person who should be running their own labs rather than trusting the VA - or any medical institution - to find what’s wrong.

Someone who switched from MyFitnessPal to Cronometer because they read the privacy policy is ready to hear why functional lab panels tell a different story than standard blood work.

Someone who encrypted their cloud storage because they understand what zero-knowledge means is ready to understand what it means when a health app’s privacy policy says “we may share de-identified data with partners.”

De-identified data is not as de-identified as they tell you. Re-identification from health data is a documented, non-theoretical risk. Your age, sex, zip code, and three conditions narrows the field fast.

The throughline is sovereignty. Ownership of your systems. Ownership of your data. Ownership of your biology.

All three are the same fight.

Resources

From the Rubble is written by Kala - veteran, 30-year conspiracy realist. Digital sovereignty, health sovereignty, and the overlap between them. No corporate funding. No ads. No permission required.