This episode looks at Qualevita, a prevention and longevity company founded in Belgium in 2011 by Tatiana Bakunina with the support of Dr. Thierry Hertoghe. Now operating across London, Brussels, Andorra, Barcelona and the Netherlands, and working with clients from more than thirty five countries, the company builds personalised programmes around detailed analysis rather than generic advice. Markus explores their four pillar approach, why measurement has to come before any plan, and what changes when people stop guessing how they feel and start knowing where they stand.
Here is something strange about the way most of us look after ourselves. We will happily service a car every year, checking things that are not broken, precisely so they do not become broken. We will run diagnostics on a laptop. We will have a boiler inspected. And then we will go a decade without once asking a serious question about the single piece of equipment we cannot replace, which is our own body. We wait until something announces itself. And by then, we are no longer making choices, we are responding to them.
Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and this is the show where I go looking for the businesses building something genuinely different, often in corners of the world most of us never think to look at. Today we are heading into the world of prevention and longevity, and to a company called Qualevita that has spent well over a decade arguing that the most useful moment to pay attention to your health is long before anything feels wrong.
Let me start with where they came from, because the timeline here tells you something. Qualevita was established in 2011, in Belgium, by an entrepreneur named Tatiana Bakunina, with the support of Dr. Thierry Hertoghe, a specialist in preventive health. That founding date matters. In 2011 the word longevity was not a category. It was not a trend, there were no podcasts about it, no venture funds chasing it, no wearables making it fashionable. This was a company built on a conviction well before that conviction became popular, which is usually the sign of people who arrived at an idea by thinking rather than by following.
From Belgium it expanded to Barcelona in 2014, and today Qualevita operates across London, Brussels, Andorra, and the Netherlands, working with clients from more than thirty five countries. That international spread is worth pausing on, because prevention is a field where local habits vary enormously. Diets differ, sleep patterns differ, working cultures differ, and what counts as normal differs. Running the same philosophy across that many countries forces a discipline on you, because whatever you build has to work for a person in Amsterdam and a person in Andorra, and those are not the same person.
Tatiana Bakunina brings roughly twenty years in preventive health to this, and she is Harvard educated. In 2018 she went a step further and launched a separate venture called DIAGNOST, an online health analysis platform, which tells you something about how she thinks. The instinct there is not simply to build a nicer place for people to come to, it is to make the underlying analysis more accessible to people who are not standing in front of you. Her co-founder in Qualevita International, Habbo de Vaere, comes from a rather different world, with more than fifteen years in international sales, business development and private banking. I always find that combination promising. One founder who understands the substance, one who understands how to build the organisation around it, and enough respect between them to let each do their part.
So what does the company actually do? At its heart, the idea is very simple, and the simplicity is the point. Most of us have no real information about our own biology. We have a rough sense of how we feel, which is unreliable, and we may have a couple of numbers from a check up years ago, which are stale. Qualevita starts from the position that you cannot personalise anything until you have measured something, so their process begins with detailed health analysis rather than with advice.
Their approach rests on four pillars, and they are refreshingly unglamorous. First, thorough analysis, using current science and technology to build an actual picture of where a person is. Second, a consultation with specialists who can interpret that picture, because a page of numbers on its own is not insight, it is just data with a nice font. Third, a personalised programme designed around what the analysis showed, rather than a template handed to everybody who walks through the door. And fourth, continued support over time, which is the pillar most easily skipped and most likely to determine whether anything actually changes.
That fourth one deserves a moment. Anyone who has tried to change how they live knows that the hard part is never the first two weeks. It is month five, when the novelty is gone, life has become busy again, and nobody is watching. A programme with a professional relationship attached to it is a fundamentally different proposition from a programme that arrives as a document. The company clearly understands that, because they built support into the structure rather than offering it as an extra.
Around all of this sits a framework of five areas they pay attention to. Your biological markers, the measurable indicators of how things are actually running. Nutrition, which is to say what you are actually eating rather than what you intend to eat. Movement and exercise. Mental wellbeing. And sleep, which for a long time was the most neglected input in the whole conversation and is now, rightly, understood as foundational.
What I appreciate about that list is its honesty. There is nothing exotic on it. No secret. It is nutrition, movement, sleep, mind, and measurement. The proposition is not that Qualevita has found something nobody else knows, it is that they will help you understand your own numbers and then hold you to a plan built around them. That is a much harder thing to sell than a miracle, and a much more useful thing to buy.
Their own framing is that prevention is key to achieving optimal health, and that ageing involves a whole set of biological, environmental and lifestyle factors rather than a single lever. The consequence of taking that seriously is personalisation, because if the inputs are that varied then no standard programme can be right for many people. Their emphasis on evidence based, individualised programmes follows directly from that premise, which is the mark of a company that actually reasoned its way to its model rather than picking one off a shelf.
And then there is the line that I keep coming back to, which is their belief that age is not a limitation, but rather an opportunity to embrace life to the fullest. I want to be careful here, because that sentence could easily be read as marketing gloss. But sit with it for a second and there is a real argument inside it. The dominant cultural story about getting older is subtraction. Things you used to do and now cannot. A slow narrowing. Reframing those years as a period you can actively shape, given attention and information, is not a small change in perspective. It changes what a person thinks is worth doing at fifty, or sixty, or seventy.
Why does this matter beyond the individuals who walk through their doors? Because the model of health most of us grew up with is fundamentally reactive. You go when something is wrong. The entire apparatus, the appointments, the systems, the funding, is organised around responding to problems that have already arrived. That made sense in an era when the main threats were acute and sudden. It makes far less sense when so much of what shapes later life accumulates quietly over decades, invisibly, through the ordinary daily business of how we eat and move and sleep and handle pressure.
Shifting even part of that attention earlier is one of those changes that sounds modest and compounds enormously. Not because any single measurement is transformative, but because knowing your own baseline changes the questions you ask. It moves you from wondering how you feel to knowing where you stand. And companies like Qualevita, operating in that space for over a decade and across several countries, are part of how that shift stops being an idea and becomes something ordinary people can actually access.
There is one more thing I want to say about longevity as a category, because it has attracted a lot of noise lately. A great deal of what gets sold under that banner is speculation with good photography. What distinguishes an operation like this one is the boring stuff. Being founded in 2011 rather than last year. Having specialists who interpret results rather than an algorithm that emails them to you. Building an ongoing relationship rather than selling a single transaction. Expanding steadily across a handful of countries rather than everywhere at once. None of that is exciting, and all of it is the difference between a company and a campaign.
If you have been meaning for a while to understand what is actually going on inside your own body, rather than guessing from how you slept last night, this is a company worth looking into. Go and read how they work and see whether their way of thinking about prevention matches yours.
That is where I will leave it today. Thank you, as always, for spending this time with me, and if you know someone who has been putting off exactly this kind of question, pass the episode along. I am Markus J. Diplama, this has been The Next Biz Thing, and I will see you next time.