When Bryan Johnson spends $2 million annually trying to reverse his biological clock, he is not indulging an expensive midlife crisis. As a wealth manager would say, he is allocating 100% of his capital to a single asset – himself. The 47-year-old technology entrepreneur now runs what amounts to a one-man clinical trial, representing the vanguard of a market that barely existed a decade ago. Johnson’s daily regimen is baroque: over a hundred supplements before noon, bi-weekly blood draws, thirty physicians tracking thousands of biomarkers, NAD+ infusions to accelerate cellular repair, hyperbaric oxygen sessions, gene therapy injections, and young blood plasma experiments. While Bryan Johnson’s experiments take biohacking to its most ambitious form, they also point to a rising trend of growing propensity among the new-age wealth creators towards getting healthier and fitter, and thus, increasing spending on health tech, wellness, and other such products & services. Closer to home, Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Eternal, was recently spotted wearing a peculiar gold device attached to his temple, which he soon announced as his new venture, quite literally, Temple, being developed under his personal research initiative, Continue Research, into which he has committed $25 million of his own capital. In December 2025, the device raised $50 million in seed funding, among the largest seed rounds for an Indian startup. Moreover, every guest on podcasts is wearing a wristband or a ring. Health metrics are household terms and not medical jargon anymore. 10,000-step trackers are constantly ticking. The Ozempic revolution is going mainstream. As the wealth manager would chime in again, this class of investors have been allocating significantly higher amounts of their portfolio to their health. The longevity market attracted $8.5 billion in venture funding last year, more than doubling from 2023. The sector is projected to grow from roughly $24 billion now to north of $100 billion within a decade. Half of that growth will come not from research labs or pharmaceutical giants but from the ultra-wealthy, a cohort for whom biological age has become the new status currency. In this edition of WInsights Digest, we explore the growing propensity towards living a healthier lifestyle and apply the wealth manager’s perspective to health capital as part of the asset allocation mix. A Generational Evolution   To understand this shift’s magnitude, let’s trace the evolution across generational cohorts within Indian wealth stewards:1. The Founding Generation: The builders of post-independence India’s industrial and trading houses, now typically in their 70s and 80s, maintained a relationship with health that was fundamentally cultural rather than clinical. Rooted in Ayurvedic tradition, seasonal rhythms, and the disciplined simplicity of an earlier era, their health practices were instinctive. Wealth provided access to the finest physicians when illness arrived. 2. The Second Generation: This generation came of age through the liberalisation of 1991 and, in many cases, returned from international education at Wharton, INSEAD or the London Business School through the 1990s and early 2000s. They brought back something that had no Hindi equivalent at the time: a wellness consciousness. They had seen the West’s gym culture, personal trainers, and annual executive health screenings. They understood, for the first time, that longevity required active effort, that health outcomes could be influenced through sustained behavioural choice. Their relationship with health became intentional. It remained, however, largely analogue.3. The Third Generation: Millennials now in their 30s and early 40s, who built careers in an era of smartphones, real-time data, and the explosion of Indian healthtech. They have crossed a different threshold entirely. For them, health is not a practice. It is a system. A wearable tracks their sleep architecture and morning HRV. A CGM tells them how a specific meal moved their glucose curve. Their annual diagnostics now include biological age markers that their fathers never heard of. Each parameter is a data point; every intervention is an experiment with a measurable outcome.What we witness today is health reconceived as an engineering challenge. The body is now understood as a complex system whose performance can be measured, modelled, and systematically improved through capital deployment. The same analytical framework that built technology companies is now applied to human physiology.Lifestyle Integration and Social SignallingThe optimization mindset has reshaped how wealthy Indians structure leisure and social interaction. ‘Fitcations’, trips explicitly organized around health optimization rather than relaxation, are proliferating. Destinations like Ananda in the Himalayas, Atmantan near Pune, and Vana in Dehradun function as clinical wellness centres offering Panchakarma treatments, naturopathy consultations, physiotherapy, customised fitness regimens, and nutritional counselling. The Indian Hotels Company’s November 2025 acquisition of a controlling stake in Atmantan signals the trend’s commercial significance. Even conventional beach vacations now incorporate optimisation as standard. Goa properties routinely offer morning spin classes on the beach, structured yoga sessions at sunrise, and cold plunge facilities. These have become integral components leisure for this demographic. Social infrastructure has adapted accordingly. Pickleball, virtually unknown in India five years ago, has become the preferred networking activity for a subset of the business elite. It functions as an entry point for health-conscious socialising, creating environments where business networking occurs alongside discussions of macronutrient ratios and wearable device data comparisons. The biohacking culture provides both the activity and the conversational framework. With every day becoming a health optimisation effort, is it time to now consider health as an asset class on par with stocks, precious metals, real estate, startups, and so on?  Health as a Part of the Portfolio Mix 1.. The Investments into the Health Stack : Here’s a health stack that comprises the most popular cost centres across Foundation, Diagnostics, Active wellness, and Mind, and the costs associated with each.   2. The Return on Health Investments The goal is no longer merely living longer but compressing morbidity, dying at ninety with the function of someone twenty years younger, avoiding the prolonged decline that characterises modern ageing. The goal, in a word, is youth. Not its aesthetics alone, though that matters, but youth as capacity, as optionality, as something money has never quite been able to purchase until perhaps now. And youth gives several fascinating returns: More Time: If systematic intervention maintains the physical capacity, cognitive clarity, and recovery speed characteristic of someone fifteen years younger, that advantage translates directly into sustained professional effectiveness. A 55-year-old UHNI who invests INR 50 lakhs over five years in preventive care and emerges functionally a decade younger has generated returns that no asset class can replicate.Reduced Concentration Risk: Family business owners, senior professionals, and founders carry concentrated business risk. Their greatest single point of failure is not market exposure, but their own physical and cognitive capital. Health allocation is hedging the most concentrated position they hold.The alpha of early entry: The $147 billion personalised medicine market is projected to grow at 9.3% annually through 2029, as longevity-seeking consumers rush to pay for diagnostic services and more sophisticated concierge medical-wellness solutions. Being early as a consumer and potentially as an investor mirrors the pattern of UHNIs who entered alternatives before the institutional herd arrived.3. The Ecosystem The global wellness economy reached a record $6.8 trillion in 2024, growing at 7.9% year-on-year and is forecast to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029. Wellness real estate, the #1 growth sector, is expanding at 19.5% annually; mental wellness at 12.4%. For Indian UHNIs specifically, this translates into a whole new category of decisions:Concierge and executive medicine: annual retainers with multi-speciality panels, direct physician access, genomic risk profilingLongevity clinics: not spas, but clinical environments with biological age diagnostics, metabolic panels, VO₂ max testing, DEXA scanningWellness real estate: homes designed around circadian lighting, air quality, and acoustic environments; a growing factor in second-home and farmhouse decisionsHealth tech as a personal investment thesis: many UHNIs now investing in digital health startups, not just as financial bets, but as ecosystem builders, they personally believe in.The Nuances of Health CapitalWhile overall greater awareness around healthcare and a conscious choice of living healthier is a great trend, the optimisation of health can cost beyond financial expenditures. It is prudent to balance out new-age ideas with past generations’ philosophies:Cultural Aspects of Food: The previous generation’s relationship with food encompassed dimensions beyond nutrition: meals as social rituals, recipes carrying familial memory, flavours connecting to identity and place. The optimisation framework regards food primarily in terms of macronutrient composition, diminishing the cultural and emotional dimensions of eating. Unhealthy Competition: When every social gathering includes implicit competition around health metrics, anxiety and performance pressure emerge that not everyone welcomes. Growing Inequality: Health optimisation at such levels requires capital that is inaccessible to the vast majority. As the wealthy extend healthspan through technology and capital, the gap in health outcomes between economic classes may widen substantially. This is not entirely novel because wealth has always purchased better healthcare. But the magnitude of the differential may be increasing with significant implications for social cohesion and intergenerational equality of opportunity.  The Wealth Advisor’s LensHealth optimisation has become a legitimate component of a comprehensive wealth strategy, requiring a deep understanding of how clients allocate capital toward longevity and biological performance. Some allocations represent legitimate healthcare investments; others may be expensive experiments with uncertain returns. A few dimensions worth exploring:Succession planning and longevity: If the patriarch or matriarch is investing in extending their functional years, does the succession plan reflect that extended timeline? Health allocation changes the actuarial assumptions embedded in governance structures. Health as part of philanthropy and impact: Several UHNIs are moving toward funding preventive health infrastructure, not just as charity, but as a legacy. The line between personal health investment and impact capital is blurring. Investment opportunities: AIFs and co-investment opportunities in healthcare and healthtech are increasingly on UHNI radars.What we observe represents an early phase in what will likely prove to be a prolonged cultural transformation in how Indian wealth relates to health, ageing, and the body. India’s healthtech sector will likely continue attracting significant capital as UHNW demand drives innovation in diagnostics, personalised medicine, fitness platforms, and nutrition services. Companies that succeed will combine clinical credibility with consumer-friendly interfaces, making optimisation accessible without requiring clients to become amateur health scientists. What happens over the next decade depends substantially on whether these interventions demonstrate effectiveness at scale. Specific interventions may change as evidence accumulates, but the underlying conceptual framework, treating health as an engineering problem addressable through capital, data, and disciplined experimentation, may very well persist. After wrist bands, will a mind button become a popular public aesthetic? Will wellness become a mandatory part of leisure? Will pickleball continue finding more takers? We can’t precisely predict the specifics, but investments in healthcare are certainly going to grow manifold and reach a scale and impact that demands meaningful addition to the wealth management dictionary.  |