How to Use Blood Testing to Take Control of Your Health

Written by Christopher Kelly

March 30, 2015

The annual physical: no news is good news.

Or is it?

A few years back I was training 30 plus hours a week on my bike, working hard to get my pro upgrade. At the same time, I was lucky enough to have the best PPO health insurance that money could buy, and diligently I went to my doctor for an annual physical. So imagine my confusion when, without comment from my doctor, I developed pre-diabetes, with a fasting blood glucose reading of 120 mg/dL. How does this happen?

The system is flawed. Here's why.

Let's break this down: assuming no complaints, once a year you visit your doctor and he or she orders some blood work. Rarely will you get to see the results. If you're lucky, you get a rough explanation, perhaps being handed a piece of paper with some chicken scratch notes in the margin. The doctor is looking at the numbers, and they probably won't say this, but still they're thinking,

"OK that's good, he doesn't have diabetes yet".

To your doctor, this is standard operating procedure. You, as a relatively healthy adult, look ten times better than most of the overweight, diabetic, and depressed patients they see come through their door every day. Regardless of your goals, your concerns, or your idea of optimal, your doctor is comparing you to these other people. They are simply not thinking about helping you stay ahead of the curve. They are waiting for you to present to them a problem (read: disease) that they can solve with their only tool, the prescription pad.

This system isn't health care; it's disease care.

Let's assume you're a CFO of a big company. Would you wait to see your balance sheet at the end of the fiscal year to find out your once profitable company is hemorrhaging money? Wouldn’t you want lots of ongoing metrics in place to track your progress? Just like a big company with an important bottom line, your health and wellness have a lot of moving parts to keep track of. The good news? By taking interest in your health and investigating simple ways to track your progress over time, you’ll never be at the mercy of your doctor’s idea of good enough. You can take control.

Let me introduce you to a better way.

"What gets measured gets managed." -- Peter Drucker. The same is true of the inner workings of your body. Test early, test often. There's no excuse for not doing this; blood testing has gotten cheap and easy.

Define better limits by comparing yourself to healthy people. Your doctor’s standard reference ranges are averages that are clouded by millions of sick people. Healthy people go to the doctor far less often than sick ones do. You don't want to be inside the reference range; you want to be the very best version of you, right?

Track and compare against yourself. Knowing how you compare to some other person's normal is interesting, knowing how you change over time is crucial. Spotting patterns allows you to make a change before symptoms present.

Find a skilled practitioner. You wouldn't eyeball your company's financial data, so why do it with your test results? Software, when operated by a skilled practitioner, is a powerful way for spotting patterns that might remain invisible to the naked eye. These patterns may span multiple markers on a single result, and they may span multiple values in time.

Keep asking why. When you find a problem, don't ever leave it to be a mystery. Understanding the change will stop you from being bitten by it later on. Why is your fasting blood glucose rising? Are you eating too much carbohydrate? Are you not getting enough sleep? There's always a reason. Blood work is a great place to get started establishing your baseline, but consider talking to your practitioner about other types of testing that can help you fine tune even more.

With this new way of thinking and some software assistance, the basic blood chemistry becomes a powerful tool for improving your health. Let’s dive in and look at a few of the most common problems that I find. This list is just the tip of the iceberg, remember, you can only fix it once you know it’s a problem.

Adrenal Stress

The advanced testing described in my TrainingPeaks article is the best way to find out if you have a problem with stress and cortisol, but the cheaper and less specific blood chemistry can spot potential issues too. The clue comes from the connection between the glucocorticoid cortisol and its mineralocorticoid friend aldosterone that acts to control electrolyte balance. In your blood: aldosterone tells the kidneys to hang on to sodium and excrete potassium, and I can measure both with a blood test.

Low stomach acid

Hypochlorhydria is a digestive problem that occurs when the pH of the stomach rises above 3.5. The cause is insufficient production of hydrochloric acid from the parietal cells in the stomach. It's a very common problem with influences far beyond the digestive system. The causes are aging, stress, infections (especially h. pylori) over consumption of carbohydrates, low protein diets, zinc and vitamin B1 deficiency, drugs.

Maybe you have:

Adult acne
Dilated capillaries on nose and face
Dandruff
Soft, poor growth of fingernails
Brittle and splitting nails
White spots on nails (zinc deficiency)
Loss of taste and smell

In your blood: increased globulin level, increased BUN, decreased or normal total protein, albumin, decreased serum phosphorous.

Allergies

Itchy eyes, runny nose, skin rashes. I used to have allergies, and now they are gone. The solution was to remove an overgrowth of histamine-producing bacteria in my gut and to improve the biochemical pathways that degrade histamine. The world is a different place when you don't have to stick to a low histamine diet, or avoid cats, pollen, and horses. In your blood: eosinophils are a type of white blood cell that are highly granular, meaning they contain histamine. A reading above three points hints at allergies.

Bacterial Infection

It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that infections are all about being exposed to a pathogenic bacteria. That may be true, but I would urge you to keep asking why. Why was the infection possible in the first place? Could it be a food allergy? Low stomach acid? Is it a nutrient deficiency? In your blood: elevated neutrophils as these are the primary cell type for fighting bacterial infections. Lymphocytes are another type of white blood cell and will be low or normal.

$97 is all it costs.

Yes, that's how cheap a basic blood chemistry is! That price includes the cost of my time to load the data into the software, perform my analysis and spend 30 minutes going through the results with you.

Are you struggling to make sense of your blood test? Ask your questions in the comments section below.

Join the discussion on the NBT forum when you support us on Patreon.