A Deep Dive Into How To Interpret The Results Of Your Blood Testing - Ben Greenfield Reveals & Walk

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. I need to give you a medical disclaimer because what you are about to hear is a pretty deep dive into my own blood work and biomarkers. And I like to reveal these to you so that you can see and understand what happens when you test your blood and what's going on with my data so that you can learn a little bit more about how to optimize your own blood and biomarkers. But I'm not a doctor. I don't want you to misconstrue this as medical advice. I'm not a physician. I am a.

Well, I'm an exercise physiologist and I've got a degree in human nutrition, biomechanics and exercise physiology. Master's degree in that. I've got a degree in nutrition. I have a personal training and a strength condition coach certification. I've spent a couple of decades taking deep dives into biology and biomarkers and took a lot of 400 level classes in university on microbiology and biochemistry and everything necessary to kind of interpret what you're about to hear. But I'm not a doctor, so don't take anything that you're about to hear as medical advice because you may die. As they said once when I signed up for a Spartan race, that was what it actually said, you may die. And I signed anyways and I did it. So anyways.

That is all I wanted to tell you before. I also give you a couple of other things prior to jumping into today's show. First of all, I was traveling. I was in California last week and I had alcohol. I didn't have a lot of alcohol. I had a couple glasses of wine with dinner, but I wasn't sure of the source of the wine. So what I did was I ate my toothpaste, I ate my toothpaste. I'm not kidding. I travel with this toothpaste that is comprised of calcium bentonite, among other things. It's calcium bentonite, a little bit of essential oils like peppermint and cacao, some MCT oils actually, which can do a pretty good job at cleaning your mouth because they're derived from coconut and then a bit of stevia for flavoring. And I did not have my charcoal coconut capsules with me. So I instead ate a dab of my toothpaste and it worked really well. I woke up feeling pretty good. I also dab this stuff on insect bites and it sucks the toxins out of insect bites. It's incredibly versatile. Or you could just freaking brush your teeth with it. It is the MCT oil toothpaste made by my friends over at onnit. They do a ton of really cool personal care products. They have wonderful supplements, they have functional foods, they have really cool fitness apparel. But the toothpaste may I recommend you purchase and travel with primarily to brush your teeth, but secondarily if you need a desperate detoxification compound, you get 10% off of anything on it. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com onnit that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com o n n I T this podcast is also brought to you by one of the best ways to give the middle finger to aging. I spent two years designing an anti aging skin serum. A lot of people don't realize that I actually make beauty products and this one has aloe vera, amla, triphala, lavender, oregano, geranium, turmeric, patchouli. Not enough to make you smell like a hippie. Don't worry. Lemon, which is very interesting. Lemon has some really interesting research behind it for both the hair and also for keeping the skin clear of blemishes. I've thrown a few other oils in there that have been studied for their ability to be able to reduce wrinkles to serve as antioxidants for the skin. And what I do is I put a dab of this stuff on my skin in the morning and in the evening and I also apply it to my hair a few times a week. It is called Kion Serum. Kion Serum. It is featured along with all the other supplements and products that I design and feature over at getkion.com that's getk I-O-N.com the one I just told you about is called Serum and it would be a wonderful addition to your shopping cart if you want to battle skin aging and get ahead of the clock. So check it out. Getkeon.com get K-I-O-N.com he's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power.

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Welcome. This is awkward. This is a solo sode. I think I just coined that term, a solo sod. It's been a very long time since I, and this has been Greenfield, by the way, have done an episode all by my lonesome. This is the way that I used to do the podcast every single frigging week, starting 10 years ago when I was a young personal trainer operating out of a gym in Spokane, Washington. I would sit down at the end of the day and I would go through the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research and the Journal of the American Medical association and Research from the Institute of Sports Nutrition, and all of these different scientific articles and research resources and journals that I was going through, along with my own forays into exercise and nutrition and even some of my early fledgling biohacking tactics. And I would talk about all this on a podcast, just me, all by my lonesome. It was actually the first two that I did. The first two that I did were video. And then I realized that I didn't actually have to put on a shirt or do my hair or look nice for a video. So I instead began to do audio podcasts. It was one of the only audio podcasts on itunes at the time, and I had to code my own RSS feed. And it was just fraught with frustration and errors way back in the wild, wild west days of podcasting. But coming full circle, it was just me, all by myself. I eventually picked up a sidekick. I eventually began to interview others on the show rather than just having me talk incessantly into the microphone. And it's obviously, if you are a regular podcast listener, as you know, come a long ways. However, today is a solo sode for a couple of reasons. First of all, the topic of today's podcasts are my lab results, blood testing, how to interpret your own blood testing, how to go through it intelligently, and how to make educated supplementation and diet and fitness and lifestyle decisions based on what you see. And so, since I tend to just go through my own labs on my own by myself, I figured why not just let you be the fly on the wall who listens in during the process with the hopes that this will help you with your own decisions. When you, for example, get a big blood test and you want to maybe look beyond what your doctor or your health practitioner might be telling you and instead be able to intelligently interpret and make sense of some of your own results. Because I think you'll learn some things in today's show that might maybe your doctor isn't telling you when it comes to your blood testing particularly. The other reason that I wanted to Record this as a solo sod, and I promise not to use that word too much during today's show, is because I wanted to feel out whether or not you're okay with me occasionally doing this, occasionally having a show where it's just me talking. Why? Well, I want to continue as I have been doing again for the better part of the past decade, pushing out to you a good two podcast episodes per week that educate and inform you on all things health, fitness, nutrition, longevity, biohacking, et cetera. And sometimes it's difficult from a scheduling and a scalability and sustainability standpoint to do that. When you need to schedule another person or two other people and match up schedules and calendars, it's very simple for me to really, at the drop of a hat, duck away and record a podcast like this in my office, which is where I'm at right now in Spokane, Washington, or elsewhere. You know, such as when I'm traveling and I'm in a hotel room and I've come across some interesting things that I want to share with you, but don't necessarily have a guest or someone to interview or even a sidekick lined up, per se, you know, like my. My trusty Q and A podcast sidekick, Brock. So if you're okay with me doing a solo sode every once in a while, it's not boring for you to listen to one person talk. If it is boring for you, you probably haven't made it this far into the show anyways. Then let me know in the comments section of this show so that I can kind of give myself permission, so to speak, to record a solo episode for you. I mean, a solo. So for you, when I have something that I want to tell you that I think is important and contains enough voluminous information where it could actually fill an episode, because frankly, we're probably going to spend about the next hour or so of this podcast geeking out on my blood results. So the URL where you can go to comment and also the URL where you can go to download the actual lab results that I'll be going through, should you care to print them off or view them in real time, should you care to give them to a close friend at a cocktail party or perhaps my health insurance adjuster, God forbid, then as you'll learn during this episode, there are some things modern medicine considers to be risk factors that I don't, and vice versa. Then you can access all those show notes over@bengreenfieldfitness.com DeepDiveBlood that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com DeepDiveBlood and when you go to that URL, leave a comment. If you're cool with me doing a solo sode, and if it drives you absolutely bat crazy to sit there and listen to me talk all by myself, let me know that too. And also, of course, ask any questions that you have about blood testing and any of the things discussed in today's show. So again, that URL is BenGreenfieldFitness.com Deep DiveBlood to paint a visual for you before we jump in, I am at my standup desk. I use this standup desk called a Rebel. It's a crank desk rather than it being a motorized desk because I like to keep anything electronic as much as possible out of my office just so there's less electrical pollution floating around. So I'm standing at my glass Rebel desk and I am leaning right now against a stool. I'm not walking on my manual treadmill. I'm instead leaning against a stool. This little two pound stool that allows you to kind of be in a standing position but rest your tired ass a little bit. It's called the Mogo Upright stool or the Mogo Stool made by Focal Upright. Aside from that, I'm just at a standing desk with a stool. I haven't turned on any of my crazy little biohacks because I don't want to be distracted while I'm recording this episode for you. But I like this 1, 2 combo when I'm just kind of chatting at my desk for a long period of time. This little upright stool combined with the Rebel desk. So there you have it. If you want to upgrade your office in the same fashion as I have. Okay, so about three weeks ago I drove to my local Safeway grocery store and I ducked into the Quest laboratories that are located there at the grocery store and I had them draw my blood. 19 tubes of blood, which seems like a lot, but it really comes out to about a sixth of the pint of blood that you would give if you were to, say, donate blood. It's really not that much blood because these tubes are incredibly thin. The reason though, that it was 19 tubes, and to put that into perspective for you, a typical blood evaluation, a basic blood evaluation that your doctor might do, you might have two to five tubes of blood. The reason for that is because what I was running on myself and what I'll be talking about today was a pretty comprehensive panel that I actually advised and worked with WellnessFX to design. With the question that I asked in designing this Blood testing panel being, what if you wanted to get the same type of blood test that say, would normally cost you tens of thousand dollars as part of a longevity package at a fancy longevity institute like Princeton or Duke or the Human Longevity Project or something like that? Or even just an executive CEO health panel and screening. What if you wanted to take a look at a whole bunch of different blood variables that the average test that your doctor runs, such as a complete blood count or what's called a comprehensive metabolic panel, is not looking at? And what if you want to be able to advise yourself on what you see on your results with a little bit more precision? Meaning rather than just looking at, let's use a very simple example, tsh, thyroid stimulating hormone marker, to see if your thyroid is functioning properly. Properly. Actually looking at some of the upstream and downstream metabolites of that. You know, things like T3 total and free, T4 total and free reverse T3 thyroxine. I realize a lot of these terms I'm throwing out could be foreign concepts to you. Don't worry, I will explain during today's show. So what if you could do all that but just do it all in one fell swoop? And so I designed this package with Wellness fx. I designed one for men and then a separate one for women. Because there are some things, as you would probably guess specifically in the hormone department that are different on a women's test versus a man's test. So ultimately what Wellness FX designed for me was a longevity blood testing panel for men and a longevity blood testing panel for women. I personally do this panel on a quarterly basis. I do not recommend necessarily, just from a pure pocketbook and budgeting standpoint that you go out, unless you just like to do this and have deep pockets, you go out and do this on a quarterly basis. But even just once a year, or even really, I mean, if you just wanted at least once in a lifetime take a look at what's going on with your blood. This is something that I think is prudent to do. Most of my clients I have complete this blood test along with some type of a gut test, some type of a DNA evaluation and some type of a 24 hour urine evaluation of hormones when they come to me for coaching or consulting. And typically I repeat a blood test like this once a year in my clients, repeat a gut test at least once a year, or if any symptoms arise, repeat a hormonal evaluation about once a year. The DNA test is about once in a lifetime. And then any other test that I use on myself or that I use on clients or folks who I work with to quantify blood biomarkers or other variables. It's on a case by case basis, right? Let's say that you do everything that has been advised to you on a basic blood panel, gut test, DNA test and hormone panel, and you're still having energy issues or sleep issues or you want to optimize even more just from a, let's say a longevity standpoint than you would do, for example, a micronutrient analysis, like what would be called a metametrics ion panel. And I recently wrote a pretty big article@BenGreenfieldFitness.com that outlines what I just explained to you in much more nitty gritty detail. And I will be sure to link to that in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Deep Dive Blood if you want to go and read that article. It's kind of long, but that's how I tend to write, so my apologies in advance. I just know my readers are smart cookies and you can handle it. Okay, so admittedly that was a very long intro and I think we should just dive straight into the good stuff. So like I mentioned, the entire PDF printout of my lab results from WellnessFX to accompany this episode are something that you can grab@BenGreenfieldFitness.com deep diveblood but I will do my best to explain to you should you be out cycling or hiking or cleaning the garage or at the zoo or whatever else it is that you do when you listen to a podcast. So what you'll see at the very top of a blood panel like this is cardiovascular health. All the parameters that influence cardiovascular health, which would essentially just be your heart, your blood vessels, everything responsible for transporting oxygen, nutrients, hormones and waste products through your body. So of course, one of the first things that you see associated with cardiovascular health is a basic lipid panel. And you can see there on my lipid panel that there are colors associated that are considered to be risk factors. Red would be Pay attention to this. This is a big deal. And this would be the equivalent of like the H or the L that you would see on a typical blood panel from your physician, which would mean respectively, high or low. And WellnessFX has just color coded their results on this panel. What I tell people is if your panel is lit up like a Christmas tree with reds, fret not. And you're gonna learn why. In this episode, orange is kind of like a pay attention. This could be a risk factor in the future or is something you should mitigate before it becomes an issue. And then green is, hey, you're just fine. And same thing. If you look at your results and they're all green or you get your blood results from your doctor and there's no H's and no L's and nothing scribbled on there and nothing in bold font, that does not mean everything is good. Remember, we are going after not just the absence of disease, but we are going after longevity and dare I say going from good to great, not from bad to good. When many of us are looking at these type of panels.

I really don't feel this podcast is necessarily for a predominantly sick and diseased audience, but more for healthy people who want to become even healthier. That's not to say everybody, including myself, doesn't have some kind of a health issue they want to take care of, but it really comes down to the fact that you want to pay attention to optimizing variables and not just fixing stuff that's really f ed up, so to speak. So let's start off with the basic lipid panel. You can see the red value there at the top. Total cholesterol. My total cholesterol flags as red. It's at 267. And the low risk category would be anything below 200. So my cholesterol is concerningly high. If a health insurance adjuster were to see this cholesterol, they would charge me more for a health insurance premium based on that cholesterol. However, when you actually look at what that cholesterol is made up of, you need to pay close attention, because high cholesterol in and of itself is not a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And study after study has shown us this. What is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease is when that cholesterol becomes oxidized, such as can be the case when your inflammation markers are high or your blood glucose is dysregulated, or even when you have a very high amount of triglycerides or what would be deemed an unfavorable triglyceride to HDL ratio. So I don't just look at cholesterol. I look at all the other components that accompany that cholesterol to see whether or not high cholesterol is actually putting me or someone I'm working with at risk for some type of cardiovascular disease or incident in the future. Now, in this case, you will note that below that total cholesterol number is my LDL. My LDL is at 102. Considering that a low risk for LDL is considered by modern medicine to be 100 or below. My LDL is actually not that high. Now, granted, and I'll get to this in a moment, I'm a bigger fan of looking at proteins associated with LDL and the LDL particle size rather than the LDL itself. But you'll note that really, the reason my cholesterol is, is so high is because my HDL levels are through the fricking roof. They're at 151. Now, HDL cholesterol is a scavenger of excess cholesterol. It brings extra cholesterol from arteries and from your body back to your liver to be metabolized. It's transporting cholesterols. This means that in most cases, a relatively high level of HDL is assisting with cholesterol. And research has shown that an HDL cholesterol greater than 60, what would be called milligrams per deciliter, milligrams per DL, can indeed help to protect against heart disease. Although I should throw in there the caveat that there is some pretty compelling research that has emerged over the past two years showing that more HDL is not necessarily better. And the reason for this increased risk of mortality and cardiovascular disease associated with with very high HDL levels is because a high level of HDL could mean that your body is having to carry a lot of metabolites back to the liver due to a state of constant inflammation. And so this leads to one of the rabbit holes that inevitably arise when you're looking over your labs. And that would be, well, my HDL is through the roof. What the heck is going on with my inflammation? Do I need to be concerned from an inflammatory standpoint? If you scroll down just a little bit, you'll see on the panel that I ran that I did indeed test all my inflammatory markers, which would be hscrp, homocysteine and fibrinogen. I will get to those in a moment. But the long story short is they're all rock bottom. I have very low levels of inflammation. So the next question with the high HDL becomes are you a lean mass hyper responder? And this is very fascinating. This is based off of Dave Feldman's protocol and writings. Dave Feldman has a website called the Cholesterol Code. I will link to it in the show notes. And he has found, after pouring over data from thousands of folks, specifically their cholesterol data, that there is a certain subset of the population, particularly lean or athletic folks who eat a low carb diet, who tend to have three Things in common, they have low adipose stores, they have low glycogen stores because they're eating a lower carbohydrate diet. And they have high energy demands because they are exercising or moving with frequency intensity or both or volume frequency intensity, volume or all three. So what happens is your body seeks to keep your glycogen stores in your liver and your muscles reasonably well stocked. Even if you're on a low carbohydrate diet, the body gets very good at sparing fuel in order to keep glycogen fuel tanks elevated. So if you think about this, you have a low adipose fuel tank, you have a low glycogen or storage carbohydrate fuel tank, and you have high energy demands. So it would make perfect sense that the body will desire to mobilize more fat based energy to meet those needs. And that will ultimately mean that you're going to have a few things happen. First of all, you're going to have a higher amount of vldlp. Vldlp. That would be your LDL particle count. It's going to be higher because your body has to move more triglycerides to the cells. And so a lean mass hyper responder could have a higher particle count, specifically a higher LDLP particle count. So when I see high HDL and inflammation is low, I'm not necessarily concerned. When I see high HDL and LDL particle count is elevated, I'm often also not concerned if that person is a lean, low carb, heavily exercising or moderately exercising athlete. Now this explains why both LDL P and total LDL are higher in lean folks with low glycogen stores who exercise a lot. It also explains why triglyceride levels would be so enormously low because the triglycerides are getting depleted, they're getting depleted from use. And there are more of these, you could think of them as boats that carry these triglycerides around throughout the the ocean, that is your bloodstream. These LDL particles, they actually are going to be higher while triglycerides are lower. So ultimately what you see in a lean mass hyper responder is high ldl, often a high HDL and then very low triglycerides. And I fall into that category quite nicely. So what this all means is that when you're looking at the basic lipid panel, you don't necessarily need to be concerned if total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol is high. You also don't necessarily need to be concerned if the LDL particle count is up if you fall into that category of being a lean mass hyper responder. Now, are there certain issues that you do need to pay attention to? If cholesterol is high, sure. If cholesterol is high and inflammation is high, that's bad news Bears. Same goes for if cholesterol is high and blood glucose is high. The same would go for if cholesterol is high. And I'm talking very high in this case, like a case of familial hypercholesteremia, in which case a lot of that elevated cholesterol can indeed become inflammatory. And that would indicate typically a total cholesterol that's well in excess of 400. You'll see a very high cholesterol in that case. And so there are certain subsets of the population. 4 for womb, high cholesterol would be concerning. But high cholesterol always needs to be considered in the presence of some other factors. Now below that basic lipid panel, you will also see the LDL particles. Now one of the first things that you see there is APO B. Now APO B is the protein in LDL cholesterol that helps these particles bind to and clog or coagulate blood vessels. And because APO B can increase this clogging potential, it is likely a better measure of cardiovascular risk than say LDL cholesterol is. High levels of APO B have been shown in research to potentially increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. And APO B would ideally, according to most research, be lower than 80. And you'll see that my APO B is about 85. Now like I mentioned, my body is going to need a higher number of of particles to carry triglycerides to cells. But when the apple B is elevated, sometimes that can be concerning. And it's certainly something that I pay attention to because Apple B is a protein involved in the metabolism of lipids, particularly ldl. Now here's the deal though. My LDL is elevated for the reasons I described earlier. Me being a lean mass hyper responder and a mildly elevated APOB in a lean mass hyper responder is once again not a huge cause for concern to me. Now would there be ways that one could naturally lower APO B if it were high? Yes. There are certain supplements and lifestyle parameters that have been shown to safely lower apob. For example, exercise training is one of the biggest factors that just frequent physical activity. And especially in what I found to be the most significant study when it came to Apple B, folks were doing endurance exercise three times a week and they had also increased their fish intake. And it's true that fish and or fish oil can do a good job at lowering APO B. There are some other things too that can lower APO B that are quite interesting. One is called pantethene. Pantethine is just a derivative of vitamin B.

And consuming just for general mitochondrial health a full vitamin B complex is a very good idea. You know I like for example the Thorn brand multivitamin due to its pretty high levels of vitamin B from a high quality standpoint. That's a perfect example of. Well that's the multi that I use, you know, when I travel. I don't use it when I'm at home because I eat a very nutrient dense diet when I'm at home. I just don't, I don't consume a multivitamin when I'm home but when I travel I use this Thorne multivitamin. And one of the reasons for that is it has this really good B complex in it. But there are a couple other things that could be helpful as well for Apple B in addition to endurance exercise in moderation of course and pantethene. And one in particular that's quite interesting is.

The chlorogenic acid that you find in artichokes leaf extract. Consumption of artichokes or consumption of some type of supplement that contains artichoke extract appears to have a beneficial effect on apple B. So that's another one that you should pay attention to would be some type of artichoke leaf extract for lowering Apple B that seemed to have a pretty good effect as well in addition to that vitamin B complex. And the last one that I would look into, that's just fantastic. In general, general for mitochondrial health and also for cardiovascular health, particularly on people who are on statins. But in the general population as a whole, I'm a fan of this. And that would be Coenzyme Q10. Coenzyme Q10. Currently myself and my children all take Coenzyme Q10. We get it from a supplement called Alms Bio which is the glutathione that we use. And I will certainly, anytime I mentioned mention something like the Thorne multivitamin or the, the alms bio glutathione with the, with the CoQ10. I'll link to these things in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com deep diveblood so that's the deal with the APO B on the lipid panel. A couple other things that you'll see on there. LDL size. So LDL particles tend to vary in size and density. So the smaller LDL particles have been shown to to cause a higher risk of heart disease. And that's because those smaller sized particles can more easily penetrate blood vessels and leave deposits that could contribute to atherosclerosis, which would lead to heart attack or stroke. And the peak size of your LDL particles in most cases should be larger. They should be of as you'll hear many physicians or health practitioners refer to, to them to. They should be the large fluffy variety of LDL. And you can see that WellnessFX gives me a running tally of all of my lab results over the past several years. I've been running tests like this for the past six years and you'll see many of the results for the past two years, particularly on the screen that you're looking at. I switched accounts about halfway through testing and never actually updated and transferred over all my old data into my new account. But you can see at least the past two years worth of data and you can see that my LDL particles have been getting larger and larger, oddly enough, and I'll allude to this later on, trust me, since I began to live a more natural lifestyle, pay attention to air, light, water and electricity, do less chronic cardio, engage in less inflammatory activities, and just live more naturally. As a whole, my peak LDL size has simply been climbing since that point started off at 210. Now it's at 213, it's at 220. I'd like to get it above at least 222.5, which is considered to be getting up into the very large and fluffy variety. And it appears that my body is responding quite well to what I've been doing to increase the size of my LDL particles. So that's great. Another couple things that you'll see on here is the number of the LDL particles. So not only is the size important, but the number is important because the more LDL particles that you have, the more there are to potentially contribute to plaques on blood vessels that cause cardiovascular disease. And it's quite interesting that even though my LDL is very high, and it's likely due to my high levels of physical activity, my attention to things like fasting and some amount of carbohydrate restriction, my LDL particle count is pretty low and it's in a very low risk category. So LDL is high, right? And all the healthcare practitioners and the health insurance adjusters and everybody freaks out, but LDL particle count is low. HDL is High triglycerides are low, inflammation is low, blood glucose is low. And so when you begin to look at cholesterol in light of all these other parameters, you're far more well informed about what is going on. One of the last things I wanted to mention when it comes to cardiovascular health is the small, low density lipoprotein. And again, LDL particles come in a variety of sizes and densities. You want these smaller, denser particles to preferably be minimized. And you'll note that my small LDL is also pretty low in addition to my total LDL count and my peak LDL size. So ultimately I'm pretty dang happy from a cardiovascular race risk disease standpoint. About the only thing that I would like to see is continued increases in the size of my LDL particles. And aside from that, I simply kind of keep my eye on inflammation. A couple other things you'll see on this panel that are interesting that I didn't refer to yet. One would be the APOA1 is similar to APO B being the protein that's associated with LDL particles. APOA1 helps HDL particles bind to blood vessels and carry material away from your arteries. So APOA1 helps HDL clear blood vessels. So you wouldn't want low levels of APOA1, you would want high levels of APOA1. And as you would expect, due to my through the roof HDL levels, my APOA1 lipoprotein particles are very high. In addition, the actual size of those particles because very similar to LDL particles. Large HDL particles are known to be more protective than small HDL particles. The size of my HDL particles are also very high as well. So I am quite happy with my cardiovascular risk disease results. Now, I did mention inflammation and that does appear underneath my cardiovascular health values here on the Wellness FX panel. HSCRP is a general inflammatory marker. I did exercise pretty hard the day prior to this test and I actually expected it to be more elevated than it actually is. It's at 0.5. Technically, all things being perfect, I like it to be below or at 0.2. But even 0.5 is considered very low risk for HSCRP. So this high sensitive C reactive protein or HSCRP method measures inflammation, the body's response to internal damage. And again, if you've exercised prior to your test, and this is something important to know, a doc might tell you, hey, your HSCRP is high. We need to look at whether or not you're about to have a heart attack or you've got too much inflammation going on, but it tends to be mildly elevated if you had exercised in the 24 to 48 hours leading up to that test. Especially eccentric exercise like a run or weight training versus say swimming or riding a bike. And that's just a little tip for you. I didn't take my own advice obviously, but if you're going to exercise the day prior to a blood panel, try and choose something lower intensity. You know, yoga, sauna, biking, swimming, etc. Or just that lovely full body elliptical trainer at the gym. I like to work out on that one and drink my Jamba juice, then go stand on a vibration platform for a little while. That's my idea of a perfect workout. But we digress. Hey, by the way, I wanted to mention as you're listening into all of this blood work and biomarker data and you just want somebody to interpret your own genetic data or blood work or saliva, stool, urine, anything like that. Again, I am not a doctor but I do go through this stuff for people and go through your results with you on the phone sometimes I'll do pre recorded screenshots for you. If you don't want to wait to schedule with me and you just want me to go over any PDFs or labs that you send me, very simple. You just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comcoaching that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com coaching usually it takes me about an hour to go over someone's results with them. So get an hour long consult over there and I'm happy to help you out. This podcast is brought to you by Aptiv aaptiv. It rhymes with active with a P. Isn't that cute? Aptiv. Now what Aptiv does is it's like having a personal trainer in your pocket. They have an Apple app and it's jam packed with running workouts, indoor treadmill workouts, cycling workouts, elliptical workouts if you're one of those people, and also strength training, yoga, pretty much any type of fitness workout that you want, you can pick your poison on the app. They're all led by a personal trainer, music driven. So they're cued with music that actually moves you. Like inspiring music. You've got an inspiring trainer who helps you out through the entire workout. And it's kind of like the last app you'd ever need for fitness because you just open it up, you choose what workout you want to do. A personal trainer leads you through it. It's slick and it just works. It takes all the guesswork out of training. 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Yes, icing your balls. You can get cold packs for your nut sacks. Now here's why you may be interested in that. So your body is adapted to deal with the cold. But modern comforts like heated buildings and layers of clothing and underwear, they keep your balls from getting as cold as they actually need to get to produce adequate testosterone. So what they found is that when you chill your balls, you can actually amp up your testosterone production. This is a very simple way to do it. They've actually designed a special non toxic FDA registered gel pack handmade in North America. It's important to put anything on your balls or to avoid putting anything on your balls that's not handmade. These are handmade and it's called the jet pack. You can ice your balls with this thing. I have one up in my freezer. I have used it. It's a little bit invigorating too. It's kind of like a cup of coffee for your crotch. So anyways, I, I guess I would warn you, don't do it right before sex because we all know what happens with shrinkage and blood flow. But you do it in the morning, before, like a hot date night, or before you plan on having sex. And it amps up your performance in the bedroom as well as increasing your testosterone. Cool little biohack. So if you want to use this little cold secret weapon, go to primalcold.com just like it sounds. Primalcold.com, enter code BEN at checkout. That'll get you 15% off. So Primal cold.

Code Ben. So homocysteine is another inflammatory marker that was tested. Unlike crp, homocysteine is more associated with inflammatory changes to cells or to blood vessels. And so a high homocysteine can be present even if crp, a marker more of general inflammatory damage or muscle damage, is low. Homocysteine in my case, is low. That marker of vascular inflammatory inflammation is low and CRP is also low. I would want homocysteine to be at least below 11. And it actually is. And that's picomols per liter, I believe, is the value for homocysteine. Even though, honestly, units are not that important to me, at least. I just like to look at the numbers because units just make you sound smart. And maybe it's a form of mental masturbation to feel as though you know every single unit out there. But I. I don't pay attention to units as much because, like Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's books, I like to keep my head clear of any data that's going to clutter it up that might not be beneficial. And I'm more interested, again, in numbers and values than I am in actual units in most cases, unless someone asks me how far away my hometown is from the, say, airport, in which case 20 miles would be a better way to say things than, say, 20 inches or 20 milliliters. Or just 20. Okay, another pretty intense digression there. The last inflammatory marker is fibrinogen. Fibrinogen is a protein that's important in clot formation, and elevated fibrinogen has been associated with inflammation. Elevated levels are a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. My fibrinogen is very low, despite the fact that I worked out the day prior. Well, shameless plug. I consume a pretty large amount of what are called proteolytic enzymes to keep inflammation at bay. And I consume those along with things like turmeric and glucosamine, chondroitin and acetylmere stoliate, and a whole host of different nutrients that have been shown to really control inflammation levels extremely significantly. My company actually produces a supplement for this, like a shotgun supplement for inflammation called Kion Flex. Kion Flex. And I take eight. Eight of those per day. I take 12 if I'm injured. And it's obviously doing something to keep my inflammation low. Obviously, my lifestyle is helping out with that as well. But fibrinogen, which I would have expected to be elevated the day after I worked out, is pretty rock bottom. And so I'm happy with my inflammatory markers as well. After the cardiovascular health section of the blood panel, you'll then see that we get into fatty acids, which are the oily substances that primarily help to build cell membranes, but in excess can increase deposition of fatty acids in blood vessels, particularly certain forms of fatty acids. The first number there, you see is just the amount of free fatty acids. Free fatty acids are fatty acids that get released in the bloodstream and fat tissue breaks down but they don't circulate independently, which is ironic because they're called called free fatty acids. They tend to be bound to a protein called albumin. And a high amount of free fatty acids has been associated with diabetes and heart disease. My free fatty acids are rock bottom, but it's certainly something to pay attention to as part of that cardiovascular index, in my opinion. I didn't mention it earlier, but again, if cholesterol is high and free fatty acids are very high, I get concerned. You would tend to see that in someone who is simply overeating, for example, or under moving. The next thing you see is the Omega index. The omega 3 index is an indicator of the amount of two different fatty acids in your red blood cells, EPA and DHA. So a lower index means you have less EPA and DHA in your red blood cells compared to other fatty acids. And lower omega 3 index values based on studies can be linked to a higher risk of cell sudden cardiac death. My omega index is through the roof. I'm very happy about my omega index. It means that I have a large amount of DHA and epa. And underneath that value you can actually see the amount of EPA and DHA that I have and the ratio between those. So EPA, that first one, that's an essential omega 3 fatty acid, and high EPA is associated with decreased risk for cardiovascular disease. This is one reason why fish and fish oil are something that can be protective from a cardiovascular standpoint. The Same goes for DHA. That's an essential omega 3 polyunsaturated fatty acid. And high levels of DHA in research has been shown to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases. Both my DHA and my EPA are high. As a matter of fact, my EPA is so high that it flags as high risk. I'm not concerned that I have high levels of omega 3 fatty acids. I need those for my joints, I need those for my cell membranes. I would expect for my fatty acids to be high based on what my cholesterol count is and just based on the fact overall that I eat a relatively high intake of Mediterranean style fats. I go through bottles of extra virgin olive oil like most rednecks around my section of the woods go through beer. But anyways, the EPA in the DHA is high and that's a good thing. The arachidonic acid below that is a measurement of the omega 6 fatty acids, which are also essential fatty acids, meaning your body needs them, but it can't make them. Anytime you see that word essential thrown around, that's what that means. So omega 6 fatty acids come from the diet and when eaten in moderation, they can actually control LDL particle count. And you need a certain amount for, for example, the cardiolipin in mitochondrial membranes. And there are a lot of really good functions of omega 6 fatty acids. There's actually a really good new book out. Mild Segue here or Mild Rabbit hole. I don't know why I get those two phrases mixed. Ann Louise Gittleman just wrote a book called Radical Metabolism. I'm going to have her on the show, but I'll link to the book over in the show Notes for Today's show, in which she outlines how we may be doing our stuff a disservice by throwing omega 6 fatty acids like arachidonic acid under the bus too much. Getting to the point where a lot of these oils, which are also called parent essential oils, are too low in the body, meaning that you do need a certain amount of seeds and nuts and some of these seed and nut based oils and some of these non omega 3 fatty acids, omega 6 fatty acids, which sometimes we are told to completely avoid in order to have normal cellular metabolism. So my arachidonic acid levels are just fine. You can see if you're looking at the panel, I'm in a very low risk category. I have enough of them to go around, but I'm definitely not into the high risk category or anywhere near it when it comes to my arachidonic acid levels. If anything, one could argue that I could probably step up my seed and nut consumption because they're a little bit borderline low, my omega 6, my essential omega 6, 6 fatty acid levels, leading me to have an extremely low omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acid ratio. One of the things that I would like to do in addition to getting larger fluffy LDL particles, is I want to get a better omega 6 through omega 3 fatty acid ratio, not by lowering my omega 3s because I'm very happy with my omega 3 values, but by possibly increasing, increasing my omega 6s. For example, one of the very simple ways to do that that Dr. Gittleman talks about in her book is the consumption of borage oil, flax oil or flax seeds, and hemp seeds or hemp oil. So I actually have all three of those in the pantry upstairs. And I've been beginning to sprinkle more hemp seeds in particular on my salads. So I'm getting a little bit more of these omega 6, these healthy omega 6 fatty acids. Okay, Then we get down after the omega fatty acids and after the cardiovascular health parameters to metabolic health. And this refers to anything that's involved with chemically processing sugar and fat for use throughout the body as energy. You'll see there that we begin with risk factors for diabetes and insulin resistance. The first being inside insulin, which is the blood sugar hormone that pushes blood sugar or glucose from your blood into your cells. And we know that the most common form of diabetes, type 2 diabetes, that's due to insulin resistance, which forces the body to make higher insulin levels, and then insulin levels decline as insulin producing cells begin to burn out. And these changes are seen as the development of diabetes. And high insulin levels can be a warning sign for the eventual development of diabetes. So in most cases, you want your insulin levels relatively low. You could argue that if they're too low, you could be suppressing anabolism. So if you're, say, a football player trying to put on 30 pounds, or you're a bodybuilder, you may want your insulin to be a little bit more elevated than mine is. My insulin is rock bottom. It has for the past several years, as you can see, been at two and a half or lower. So I'm quite happy with the levels of insulin, But I'm more interested in what's called the Homa IR score, which I'll get to in a moment. But before I do, the other factors you'll see There are hemoglobin A1c, which is often abbreviated HbA1c, that measures the average blood sugar level over the last few months, and it examines the part of your red blood cells where excess sugar can attach. And a higher average blood blood sugar, of course, indicates in many cases that you're forcing your body to make more insulin, which increases your risk factor for insulin resistance and diabetes. And it's very interesting because sometimes people will do a test and their blood glucose will be high. Maybe they've had a cup of coffee, which would mobilize liver glycogen stores and cause blood glucose to be elevated. Before they went into their blood lab, maybe they got stuck in traffic so their cortisol went up. So again, they engaged in some glycogen before that test, and their blood glucose is high, but their hemoglobin A1C is low. Well, in that case I'm not too worried because for the past three months their blood glucose has been pretty low. And the only issue is that glucose, as a one time snapshot measurement, happened to be high. Same reason that even though I like to do blood tests for Hormones. A urinary evaluation of what's happening to hormones all day long can be a little bit more eye opening than a single snapshot. Now, anytime that you're on a WellnessFX panel and this is something that you're not able to see if you're listening, and something that you can't even see if you're on the PDF, is if you click on any of these values, what WellnessFX does is they give you a whole bunch of suggestions on how to lower that or raise it. They also have videos that show you how to learn more about that particular value. And they even have have genes that are related to that particular value. Meaning, for example, there's a gene related to blood glucose that it tells me about that I could go test if I wanted to take a deeper dive, so to speak. And then there are also a bunch of lab notes on there that if I were working with my own practitioner on my wellness effects, results would be left by that practitioner as notes for me. So it's pretty dang robust, this whole ability to be able to use an online dashboard like this to look at your labs. And if you were to go through all your labs and just click at all the videos and watch all the videos and read all the materials, you would be a freaking bloodwork ninja by the time you get through your own results. So, anyways, as you will be after listening to this podcast as well, you'll see that blood glucose mine was slightly higher than it tends to be. I'm wearing a continuous blood glucose monitor now, and my blood glucose tends to be between about 70 and 85. You'll see on the morning of this test, it was at about 90, which isn't concerningly high. I like to, in an ideal scenario, see it below 90. It's at 90. My hemoglobin A1C at 5.2 is pretty low. Hemoglobin A1C would ideally be below at least 5.7. I'm not that concerned about my blood glucose values. I see them throughout the day. I know that they're low. That morning they were mildly elevated, but not anywhere near what I would consider to be a risk factor or even an issue. Now, this HOMA IR score, this is very interesting. HOMA stands for Homeostatic Model Assessment. That's a mathematical model that's used to quantify your levels of insulin resistance, which we call ir, hence the term HOMA ir. And this calculation takes both your glucose and your insulin levels into account. So what it looks at is essentially almost like A ratio of the glucose to the insulin. So it's a mathematical equation that.

I forget what the actual calculation is.

It's like a ratio that you multiply by a certain number. It's something like your insulin multiplied by your blood glucose. And then there are calculators online that can help you out a little bit with this. But essentially your home IO score is a version of your insulin multiplied by your blood glucose. And it gives you a pretty good value of the ratio between insulin and glucose. You would ideally like for that ratio to be very low below 2. Mine is at 0.6. So I'm quite happy when it comes to my diabetic and insulin resistance risk, especially when you consider that I carry the gene that puts me at a much higher risk for type 2 diabetes. So what I'm doing is working, chewing my meals thoroughly and limiting the amount of carbohydrate and starch consumption, and taking bitters and digestifs before meals and frequently moving and just everything, intermittent fasting. Everything I'm doing is working. One of the first things that led me to begin testing my blood and biomarkers was back when I was an ironman triathlete and I was healthy on the outside and I was in a robot monster, but my blood sugar levels were through the roof, my inflammation levels were through the roof, my insulin was through the roof. I was literally dying on the inside. And that's honestly when I really started to take a deeper dive into health and longevity and biohacking. And that would have been about eight years ago or so that I, that I really began to pay attention to a lot of these variables more closely and learn about them more. Okay, so next we get to thyroid. For thyroid, you will see that, as I mentioned at the beginning of this show, there are a lot of things measured. On a typical blood panel, you would just see TSH. Now on my panel, you'll see TSH, total T3 free T3, T uptake, total T4 free T4, thyroid peroxidase, free thyroxine index, reverse T3, and antibodies to thyroid protein. Well, the first thing you'll see is that my antibodies to thyroid protein are pretty low. I don't, I don't seem to have any type of autoimmune disease. My antibodies are very low. You know, thyroid antibodies are something that you tend to see sometimes in people who have hypothyroidism because their body has mounted an inflammatory attack against thyroid tissue. And they have essentially a full blown autoimmune disease that is not the case with me. In addition, my reverse T3 is very low. Reverse T3.

Works like this. Your body converts T3 to reverse T3 as a way to get rid of any unneeded T4 that it doesn't want to become bioactive T3. So when your body needs to conserve energy, like if you're sick or you're physically stressed, it will decrease the amount of T3 that you produce and it will increase the amount of reverse T3 that you produce. So I'll often see reverse T3 elevated in someone who is sick or is very stressed out or who essentially is undergoing some type of stress or cortisol that's decreasing their active thyroid production. My reverse T3 is very low. So I'm not concerned about stress being an issue in terms of causing my thyroid to be low. My free thyroxine index, that's obtained by multiplying your T4 with what's called your T uptake. It's a pretty reliable indicator of thyroid status and energy metabolism. In a nutshell, my free thyroxine index is normal. There doesn't appear to be any issues with the actual metabolism when it comes to thyroid hormones. The thyroid peroxidase is another value you can see there. That's an enzyme that's expressed primarily in the thyroid that releases iodine for addition onto something called thyrogloss, which allows you to produce your thyroxine or your T4 and your triiodothyronine, your T3. That's what T4 and T3 actually are. So thyroid peroxidase is often a target of antibodies. So if your thyroglobulin antibodies are high, then in many cases thyroid peroxidase is elevated. And you'll see that a lot in someone who has. For example, you may have heard of this, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, or some type of hypothyroidism, Crohn's disease. And if thyroid peroxidase is low and antithyroglobulin antibodies are low, that's often an indicator that there's really not an issue going on from an antibody standpoint when it comes to thyroid activity. Now, what you will note on my values is that I have low free T3, I have low total T3, and I have low free T4 and not extremely low, but kind of low T4. So I've got low T4, low T3, total and free. Now, this is kind of important for me to know because total T3, you have your T3 and T4, those are the two main hormones produced by your thyroid gland, T4, even though there's about 20 times more of it in the body, T3 is much stronger. It's about three to four times stronger. So low T3 is a pretty big issue. Low T4 is also, of course, an indicator of low thyroid function. Even though T3, I think, is a bigger issue. T4 is an issue as well. Now, if you have elevated free T3 and elevated free T4, but low total T3 and low total T4, it's less of an issue because at least means you know you're getting enough of that free bioactive hormone to go around, even though some of the total might still be bound up, so to speak. But I've got almost across the board low T3 and low T4, both free and total. And not surprisingly, as a result of that, even though it doesn't flag as a risk marker, my thyroid stimulating hormone is higher than what I would like to see. I like to see thyroid stimulating hormone between 0.5 and 2, and mine's at 3.7. Now, thyroid stimulating hormone is what triggers your thyroid gland to produce T3 and T4. The higher TSH is, the more likely it is that your brain is working very hard to try and get your thyroid gland to release more Damn hormones, more T3 and more T4. And if it's not doing that, you suffer from some loss of energy and you get cold more easily and your metabolic rate decreases. And you'll see that I have that pattern of high TSH, low T4, and low T3. It's not due to an autoimmune issue. We know that. It's not due to a stress issue. We know that. And this is where it's good to see the full value of thyroid hormone so you can begin to piece things apart and do a little bit of detective work. Well, the idea here is that this issue with my thyroid hormone activity is most likely due to the fact that I walk around even though I have a raging appetite. I walk around with that, what's it called, Hara hashi rule. You know, that push yourself away from the table when you're 80% full. My weight is 175 pounds. My natural weight, if I eat ad libitum, is about 190 to 195 pounds. I walk around 15 to 20 pounds lighter than what my body actually wants to be at. And I primarily achieve that through intermittent fasting and calorie restriction. Now, that's great for me in terms of me being able to Strike a sweet spot between having enough energy to compete, but not so much energy that I get fat or decrease my strength to power ratios. But looking at things from a pure health and longevity standpoint and, and looking at things from just an overall fertility standpoint, in an ideal scenario, were I not a hard charging athlete attempting to stay lean, were I not someone who is posing on magazine covers and trying to maintain low body fat, because it's honestly part of my shtick to be good looking with my shirt off, at least good looking according to current pop culture standards, I would actually gain weight weight, I would eat more. It's very seldom that I actually push myself away from a table full. I just don't do it. I might eat to full appetite maybe once a month. And I think because of that my thyroid is downregulated a little bit. I think it's a very simple scenario. I don't have a bunch of thyroid antibodies, I don't have an autoimmune disease, I'm a very low stress guy, which we'll get to in a minute. But I think that if I were to eat more damn food and this would be a fun experiment. As a matter of fact, if there's a sponsor out there like say US Wellness Meats or Thrive Market or some other company that produces amazing mouth watering food that wants to sponsor an experiment in which I eat normally for a month and then see what happens to thyroid, I'm all in. Just let me know anyways though. So that's what's going on with thyroid. We should keep going so that this doesn't turn into a three hour solo sode. So next is metabolic hormones. Now metabolic hormones primarily involve insulin. Insulin like growth factor, what's called your Z score, which I'll get to in a second and cortisol. Well we've already discussed insulin which of course influences how you metabolize fat, sugar and protein and store energy. Then there is insulin like growth factor which is stimulated by growth hormone. It's also called IGF1 and it's an easier way to measure growth hormone activity than to measure growth hormone directly. It's more accurate. And this would be the hormone responsible for anabolic pathways. Well, probably related to the same reason my thyroid is a little low. Probably related to the same reason that my insulin is relatively low. You can see my IGF one is pretty low, meaning that I'm not in a very anabolic state. That's wonderful for longevity, but for overall fertility, libido, metabolic rate, muscle building, etc. I like to see a sweet spot of insulin like growth factor where there's not so much that you're aging excessively, but enough for you to be pretty anabolic. And that would be above about 120. Mine's at 97. So again, I'm considering not only maybe having a few more re feeds of calories, calories spread throughout the month, but I might step up my intake of one thing that can really boost IGF and get you pretty anabolic without necessarily vastly increasing the number of calories that you need to consume. That's colostrum. So there's this stuff called colostrum. It's the first part of the milk that mammals consume when they're young. I have a really good source for it from an organic grass fed goat farm in western Washington. We sell it at Kion. I've got a couple bottles in my fridge. I just need to start remembering to take it in the mornings because my IGF is low. This is why I test, so I can get educated decisions about what kind of supplements I would want to take, et cetera. But this would be one way for me to have raised my IGF without eating too many calories. So IGF is a little lower than what I'd like to see. For me to be anabolic, it's almost like I've got this anti aging thing dialed in to the point where I risk being cold or having low libido, which I don't. My libido is fine. You'll know in a second what my testosterone is at, which I'm very happy with. I wake up with morning wood every day. There's your TMI for the day. And I feel great about libido. However, I would just say if I wanted to put on some muscle and maybe see what it would feel like to have even more robust energy levels from a thyroid and an igf. One standpoint, I should have a few more refeeds and I should start using something like say, colostrum. Okay. And next we get to one of the elephants in the room. Whenever I test cortisol, you can see if you're looking at my values right now, they're always high. They're not like, you know, 30, 40 high as I see in some folks, but they're high. You know, my Cortisol is at 24.

You would like to see cortisol below 20. Between about 2 and 20 is pretty good for your cortisol levels. Cortisol is that stress hormone that can increase blood sugar for energy and it could potentially in high amounts suppress the immune system. I personally never get sick, but.

I do want to be wary when my cortisol levels are this high. And sure, like I mentioned, cup of coffee, driving through traffic, even just being nervous about going into a lab and giving a bunch of tubes full of blood. All of these, these things can increase your stress hormone. Which is why a one time snapshot of cortisol, in my opinion, only tells you so much. So if you like me, test your cortisol and you find it to be elevated on this one time snapshot, you may need to take a deeper dive to make sure it's not an issue. Now, I meditate, I do a lot of breath work. I'm not a very stressed out guy. Anybody who hangs around with me knows that even though I'm a hard charging high achiever, I'm not a stressed out guy. I live life at kind of a pretty slow pace. You know, I'm really not angry or ill tempered or, you know, I've got low amounts of stress. I can tell you that right now. Now here's the deal. Cortisol metabolites are important to understand. Cortisol is made from cholesterol in a certain layer of your adrenal cord right above your kidneys. And 80 to 90% of cortisol is bound to something called cortisol binding globulin. Very similar to like thyroid is bound to thyroid binding globulin. And testosterone is bound to sex hormone binding globulin. So a very small percentage of cortisol winds up being free and unbound. The rest of cortisol is kind of in transition. So cortisol gets metabolized, it's metabolized into something called called THF5A THF. Then it gets metabolized into 5B THF. And then there's another variant of cortisol that cortisol can get metabolized into called cortisone and that also gets metabolized into something called 5Bthe. So all of these would be considered to be cortisol metabolites. So the amount of cortisol that's produced and the amount of free cortisol available can be very different at different points throughout the day. And if all you're testing is blood cortisol versus metabolized cortisol, sometimes you don't get a clear picture of everything that's going on when it comes to cortisol. So for example, what I mean by that is you could have issues with cortisol clearance which you might See, elevated cortisol clearance, you would see in something like hyperthyroid. You'll see that in obesity sometimes too. And when someone tests, they'll have very low levels of free cortisol because they have elevated cortisol clearance. And it's not because they have adrenal fatigue. It's typically because they have something like hypothyroidism or, I'm sorry, hyperthyroidism, or they're obese. And a lot of times a doc will look at low blood cortisol and be like, hey, you got adrenal fatigue, Take some time off. Your adrenals are pooped out. When in many cases, if they're not looking at metabolized cortisol, it's not an issue at all. And you often see the opposite in someone with, let's say, low thyroid. Right. When the thyroid slows down, or if there's peripheral Hypothyroidism where free T3 can't get into cells, the clearance of cortisol slows and as a result, free cortisol starts to increase and can show up elevated on a blood test. And this, I think, is one of the reasons that my cortisol is high. I think that, that some of the thyroid dysregulation that you can see there is causing the clearance of cortisol from my blood to be slowed. Now, how can I test that and how can I test whether or not I would have a low amount of metabolized cortisol? Well, there's another test called the Dutch Test that's a 24 hour urine sex steroid test. It's one that I run on a lot of my clients. It's one I've run on myself before on. And I have indeed found this to be the issue. My cortisol metabolites are low, so cortisol isn't getting metabolized as well as it could. And that's due to thyroid. It's not due to the fact that I'm a super duper hard charging, stressed out guy. So this is a perfect example of when you need to take a deeper dive. I am, of course, in the position where I've already taken that dive. So I'm just able to tell you right now why it is that my cortisol would be this elevated, but ultimately the Dutch test for hormones. So again, it would be an interesting experiment to see if I were to eat a whole bunch of food on a more regular basis, take a bunch of colostrum on a regular basis in the mornings, and continue leading the lifestyle that I'm leading without changing anything else. I will wager a bet that my cortisol will decrease. I'm thinking now that during the holidays it would be a very good time as the holiday holidays are a good time to overeat for me to take a break from any of my hard charging racing and just eat more damn food and gain some weight and see what happens. Particularly to cortisol and thyroid. I would expect thyroid to go up and cortisol to go down. I will link to that Dutch test by the way, which would be prudent for I think anyone to do over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com deep dive blog.

The other parameters that you'll see there are of course my hormones, my estrogens, my progesterone, my follicle stimulating hormone and my luteinizing hormone, which are the signals sent by the brain that would for example, signal my testicles to make testes or my testes to make testosterone. You can see my free testosterone there, which is the actual, actual active form of testosterone not bound to sex hormone binding globulin. You can see the total testosterone as well as what's called dhea. Dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate is what DHEA is or dheas. That's an anabolic hormone. And so when you look at all of these parameters you'll see, first of all, my LH is something that has gone up. It's actually increased significantly since I began, of all things, shining light on my balls. I've been using this thing called a joov light, what's called photobiomodulation. And one of the things that is supposed to do is it's supposed to increase mitochondrial activity in the testicles and also increase the ability of Leydig hormone to be able to operate properly or I'm sorry, luteinizing hormone to be able to operate properly in the Leydig cells in the testes. Well, my, my luteinizing hormone has increased pretty well since I started using this Joovelite, so I'm happy about that, especially because it was not associated with an increase in estrogens. My estrogens are low and sometimes in men who experience an increase in LH or an increase in testosterone, which I'll get to in a second, you'll see what's called over aromatization and presence of man boobs or you get weepy or just want to watch more chick flicks or whatever that means. Estrogen is building up. There are other reasons estrogen can Build up, for example, exposure to too much plastics. But ultimately my estrogen is low. My luteinizing hormone is going up, My free testosterone is going up. My total testosterone, which used to be back when I would race Ironman, you can see some of the early values there on my lab tests. I used to be in the right around the three hundreds for my total testosterone when I was doing a lot of chronic cardio. Well, as I have shifted towards more explosive activities, you know, things like spartan racing and obstacle course racing, more weightlifting. I have actually gained about five pounds. So I put on a little bit of weight. I've started using things like, like, you know, the light on the balls, right, like the photobiomodulation. I have started to incorporate a lot of the testosterone hacks that I talk about in, in an article that I will link to over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com deep dive. My article on top testosterone hacks not only includes things like photobiomodulation, but the incorporation of more minerals in the diet, more zinc in the diet and some of these testosterone precursors. More frequent sex, which just goes without saying. You would expect that to increase libido. It's like a positive cycle. And increased testosterone as well. I've been doing a lot of things to increase testosterone. Even stem cell injections and PRP injections into the penis. All these things can help out a little bit. Well, my testosterone has been slowly climbing over the past few years. It's now at almost 900. So my total testosterone is at 881, which I'm very happy with. My DHEA similarly has climbed quite a bit. My DHEA is at 319. My total testosterone is not quite as high as I would like for it to be. Some of it is still bound to sex hormone binding globulin. It's at 78.5. Now how can I get more of that free testosterone to be active or how can I free up more of that total testosterone more specifically to be active as free testosterone? Well, ideally I would want to lower sex hormone binding globulin or sh, which can inactivate hormones like testosterone when bound to shbg. Well, it turns out that one of the things that can elevate SHBG in addition to increased cortisol is lower thyroid activity. So now I've got this cluster of symptoms that seems to arise primarily from my body getting this message that there's not enough food on board. Thus it must downregulate thyroid a little bit and this affects my cortisol clearance. And it must also down regulate fertility a little bit, which would decrease my sex hormone binding globulin. And so even though I'm making a lot of testosterone, my body's saying, okay, keep some of it bound up. We don't want this guy to become too fertile because he might be living in a time of stress or a time of starvation or both. Well, that sounds like a woo woo way to describe it. But a lot of times many of these physiological mechanisms are indeed just built in ancestral mechanisms. So to lower sex hormone binding globulin, my strategy will be to eat more, possibly move and work out a little bit less. Pay attention to thyroid, pay attention to that cortisol value. And I hazard a guess that sex hormone binding globulin will decrease. Of course, there are an enormous number of supplements that supposedly decrease sex hormone binding globulin. And you'll see like tongkat Alicia and stinging nettle and vitamin D and minerals. Frankly, I take a lot of little Chinese herbs and my whole supplement regimen. I can get into it another time. But I don't think my sex hormone binding globulin levels are elevated because I'm not taking enough Chinese herbs. If anything, you could argue that if you look at my vitamin D, which is a little low, I actually carry the G genetic marker that makes it so I'm unable to absorb vitamin D from sunlight and therefore must supplement with vitamin D. My vitamin D is at 52, and low vitamin D can cause increased sex hormone binding globulin. So it's possible that I could also experiment with adding a little bit more vitamin D from a supplementation standpoint and also see if that kind of makes a dent in the shbg, the sex hormone binding globulin. But that about covers all of the reproductive hormones. So ultimately, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at from a libido and a hormonal standpoint. But I would like to lower my sex hormone binding globulin a little bit. And some of the strategies that I use to do that will be similar to the strategies that I'll use for thyroid and for sex hormone binding globulin or for cortisol. Okay. Next up would be the liver and the kids. Now, first of all, one of the big things that leap out is you see high levels of creatinine in the kidneys. Now, creatinine or serum creatinine is a waste product that gets formed when cells break down. This is another one that a lot of Athletes will see on their test, and they get concerned. They think they're going into kidney failure. They think all that creatine they're taking is destroying their kidneys. Well, not only do I use creatine, about 5 grams per day, but I also exercise. And if you exercise the day prior to a lab test, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I didn't mention creatinine, creatinine tends to be elevated. Now, if you're poorly hydrated, that's another reason creatinine can be elevated. If you have poorly functioning kidneys, that's another reason that creatinine can be elevated. But if someone has exercised the day prior to this test, and especially if they've exercised the day prior to the test and they're also taking creatine, then I don't get concerned about this marker at all, indicating poor kidney function. It's just a relic of what's going on with someone's lifestyle. And as you can see, my glomerular filtration rate, which is a measure of my kidney's ability to filter blood, that looks great. My albumin, the protein in the blood that would, in very high amounts, cause the kidneys to become overstressed, is not excessively high. My uric acid, which is a purine breakdown product that, when elevated, has to be excreted by the kidneys and thus can be difficult on the kidneys, that number is just fine. And so most of my kidney function markers look just great, except that creatinine. The other one that's elevated is blood urea nitrogen or bun. Now, blood urea nitrogen is also a waste product that gets formed when proteins break down, including your own muscle proteins when you exercise. Exercise. So that's one that I tend to see elevated when someone is either a dehydrated, which I was not, I drink a lot of water and a lot of minerals, more importantly, or if they've exercised the day prior to the test. So ultimately, I, you know, in retrospect, especially since I'm doing this podcast for you, I should have, like, gone for a swim or an easy bike ride or something like that the day prior to the test to scratch my exercise itch or maybe, you know, done some yoga or gone on a long walk in the sunshine. As it is, I lifted weights and I went running, right? So I did a double whammy on my. On. On the things that would elevate creatinine, the things that would elevate blood urea nitrogen, and the things that would elevate that. That last marker that I talked about, the HSCRP inflammatory markers. So ultimately, I'm not that concerned about any of those values. Now, one that does cause me to raise my eyebrow when I look at it is my liver values. You'll see that my liver is. Well, it's lit up like a Christmas tree. My alanine aminotransferase, which is alt, that's a liver enzyme. Alanine aminotransferase, when elevated, mildly, is not of major concern. But I've seen a pattern over the past three tests where it's gone from 26 to 50, 55, and now it's at 83, meaning my liver seems to be somewhat stressed out. In addition, aspartate transaminase, or ast, also an enzyme found in the liver that tends to be elevated if you've exercised the day prior to the test, is unfortunately much higher than it would be even if I've exercised prior to the test. It's at 172. Now, the last liver enzyme, alkaline phosphatase. That is low, but it's low to the point where it indicates some suppressed liver function. Now, this is not due to excess calorie or excess protein intake because you can see my albumin is low, my bilirubin is low, my globulin is low. All these things I would indicate, you know, just my liver having to shuttle too much protein or my kidneys being stressed. None of those seem to be an issue. Now, in addition, after seeing this test, I did some liver palpation, upper right quadrant. I felt around in there a little bit, and it was tender. Gallbladder and liver area was pretty tender. And so there is something going on when it comes to my liver function that I need to address. This was really one of the first markers I ran into where I really did have a big old. Oh. Now, I don't drink excessively. I don't take a lot of pharmaceuticals. But it's possible that my liver function is declining due to some other variables that might be present. Well, what are some of the things that you can do to influence liver function? If it seems to be sluggish, which can happen with age, for example, but it can also happen with air pollution and environmental toxin exposure. It can occur with chemically sprayed crops. I have been traveling a lot, including international travel. It's possible that I might have been exposed to something that's causing my liver to really have to metabolize a lot of junk. So eating a diet that has adequate fiber in it that's good for the liver. And some of the best anti inflammatory foods in that respect would be things like mustard greens and chicory and arugula. Dandelion is extremely good. A lot of fermented vegetables like kombucha and kefir are also really good, as are things like Swiss chard or collards which raise your levels of glutathione, which is really important for the liver. Dark leafy greens in general are fantastic for the liver. Cruciferous vegetables and grasses. Chlorophyll from algae is also really good. Fresh herbs. Cilantro is a biggie. Turmeric, coriander, parsley or others. High amounts of high antioxidant fruits, particularly small ones like dark berries. Raw honey is very good for the liver. Green tea is very good for the liver, as is apple cider vinegar. Whenever I see something that responds well to dietary parameters, I make it a point to begin to include more of those. I began, for example, cutting out that huge dark leafy green smoothie that I was doing every morning. At least 20 servings of plants in that thing because frankly, I was getting tired of having to take a massive dump at about 2pm in the afternoon. Well, it turns out that I may have robbed Peter to pay Paul. Right. So maybe my liver isn't getting as many antioxidants as it needs. From that standpoint, there are supplements that you can take. Some of the biggies would be milk thistle. Holy basil is another one. Dandelion root, like a more concentrated form of supplementation of dandelion, also important. So there are a few different herbs that I should probably begin to include either in my diet or in my return to the house that morning. Smoothie, or both in order to give my liver what it needs. From that standpoint, the consumption of bitters and digestive enzymes can help out quite a bit with gallbladder activity, which is also important for supporting the liver. And that book that I mentioned, Radical Metabolism by Ann Louise Gittleman, gets into that quite a bit. There's also a new book based entirely around this issue of non alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is a growing epidemic. Apparently as high as 40% of people are now struggling with non alcoholic fatty liver disease. And frankly, my lab results show that even though I haven't gotten a liver biopsy, I may fall into that category. And there's a new book by Dr. Alan Christiansen called the Metabolism Reset Diet. And not to be confused with the book Radical Metabolism by Ann Louise Gittleman, which also has some really Good Treatises of the Liver and the Gallbladder. I will be revisiting both of those books, which hold a place on my bookshelf to dig through and see if there are some other things that I could do to address some of this liver function. I really can't think of much else aside from embarrassingly enough, I did do this panel a couple of days after some pretty hefty international travel. Well, hopefully TSA and the Feds are not listening in too closely, but one of the the things that I do to sleep on an international flight is I typically take an edible of marijuana and usually a pretty significant dosage of edible. Like we're talking about 50 to 60 milligrams of THC, which is metabolized by the liver. And part of me wonders if maybe eating an edible on a plane flight a few days prior to a panel like this would have caused my liver to have to work pretty hard to metabolize that edible again. I really should do a repeat test here and see, but what's more concerning to me is I see a pattern here. You can see if you're looking at the results. ALT has been climbing over the past few tests. AST has been climbing over the past few tests. So I think that I need to. And I mean if there's any good liver docs listening in, feel free to pipe in. But I need to pay some close attention to the liver and it's possible that I may need to. This would not go well hand in hand with eating more over the holidays, but some type of detoxification protocol that's a little bit more intensive. I'm leading a whole group of podcast listeners, as many of you may know, on a Swiss healing retreat of biological medicine June through July of 2019, which is several months after this podcast comes out. So I. So I don't want to wait until then to do my big two week detox, which is one thing that we'll be doing during that retreat. But I'm going to be paying some pretty close attention to some of these liver issues and probably starting right off the bat into just like a mild liver detoxification liver support because they're pretty dang elevated. And like I mentioned, palpation of my liver and gallbladder is a little tender too, and I only have one of those damn things so I want to take care of it. Okay, a few other parameters to look into here as we get closer towards the end of today's show. One is electrolytes. Electrolytes like sodium, potassium, chloride, and CO2. Now, one of the things that I pay close attention to when I'm looking at someone's electrolyte panel is the CO2 and the chloride levels. So chloride is a nano negatively charged electrolyte that balances positively charged electrolytes like sodium and potassium. Sometimes when chloride is extremely low, it can indicate some type of mineral depletion or electrolyte imbalance when CO2 is low. So let me explain CO2 bicarbonate or HCO3, that's the main form of carbon dioxide in the blood and it acts as a buffer against acids in the blood. So if bicarbonate is very low, it can suggest that your diet has shifted towards one that is too acidic. Well, you can see my CO2 has dropped. It's very acidic. And part of me wonders if it is whether or not because I've cut out all of those alkalinic vegetables I was consuming every morning. Sure I have a big ass salad at lunch every day, but this process of me cutting out that huge morning smoothie and what I've replaced it with, with for the most part has just been things like exogenous ketones and putting some superfoods in coffee or tea and blending that. This morning I had half a can of organic sweet potato puree with some macadamia nuts in it. I mean, my breakfast has been widely varied of late. And I'm wondering if simply the absence of this high, high intake of alkalinizing greens that I was having in the morning up until recently has affected not only the carbon dioxide in my blood, blood, but also my liver function. So, you know, some of these laboratory tests can be frustrating because you realize you've got some digging to do. But ultimately, CO2, that's important to look at because as you can see in me, it's indicating a shift in my acid base balance towards acidity, which is concerning from an overall health standpoint. So that's something that I will keep an eye on as well. Are those CO2 values? Next we get to bone health and you can see that I've tested 25 hydroxy vitamins, vitamin D. Now more vitamin D is not better. Once you get above 80 and especially above 100, you tend to see increased risk of mortality. The sweet spot for vitamin D is between about 40 and 80. Mine is at 52. And for the reasons I mentioned earlier, particularly related to sex hormone binding globulin, based on these lab values, I'm going to try and get mine closer to about 70 to 80 via vitamin D supplementation. And that's another important thing to pay attention to is 25 hydroxy vitamin D. The only other thing you'll see on that bone panel that's of importance is calcium, the mineral that's, of course, found in bones. And only about 1% of your body's calcium is found in the blood. But within the blood, it circulates in both its free form and also bound to a protein called albumin. So if calcium is abnormal, sometimes that can be caused by abnormal albumin. And my calcium is just fine. My albumin is just fine. So I'm not concerned about either of those parameters as well. You can see that I have fantastic values for total white blood cell count. And you can see that this particular lab test, tests. You know, we're getting into blood now, by the way.

Let me. Let me back up for just a second. Your blood has two different components in it. The cellular components, which would be red blood cells, white blood cells, and these cell fragments that are not known as platelets, and then a liquid component, which is called plasma. And together, these two parts of the blood are responsible for oxygen transport, temperature regulation, blood clotting, immune defense. But you're looking at cellular components and plasma. Now, one of the first things that's tested is your platelet count. So platelets help to form blood clots at the site of an injured blood vessel. So knowing your platelet count can help to reveal any potential blood clotting issues. And if your platelet platelet count is very low, you could be at risk for abnormal bleeding. And if it's very high, you could be at risk for sclerosis or some type of clotting deposit in the arteries. My platelet count is perfect. Sweet spot, normal. Sometimes I'll see, by the way, abnormal platelet counts in people who are low in vitamin K. Vitamin K is extremely important for blood clotting factors. My mean platelet volume is also fine. So a mean platelet volume is just the average size of my platelets. And newer, more recently produced platelets tend to be a little bit larger. And so if you're making more platelets than average, you'll tend to see platelet volume slightly up. Mine tends to be borderline high, probably because I do so much infrared sauna and so much red blood cell turnover and so much blood building that my platelet volume, I just tend to have a young, large platelets. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's actually a good thing. So mean platelet volume looks fine. You'll see that my white blood Cell count, from neutrophils to lymphocytes to monocytes to eosinophils to basophils to granulocytes, all of it looks absolutely fantastic, which is great. A low white blood cell count would indicate a decrease in the disease fighting cells that my body depends upon. A very high white blood cell count could indicate potential for a cancer like leukemia. My white blood cell count looks absolutely fine. It's the sweet spot. And you also want the sweet spot, by the way. From a longevity standpoint, both a high white blood cell count and a low white blood cell count have both been associated with increased risk of mortality. So you ideally, you don't want too many of these immune system cells, you don't want too little of them. And mine are just fine, by the way. If you have too many of them, a lot of white blood cells, cells can get stuck in the arteries and harden and cause plaque to build up and are capable of causing oxidative stress. That's why you don't want too much of a good thing. Red blood cells. You know, I do a lot, like I mentioned, a lot of things to increase my red blood cell count because I had low red blood cell count for a long time. I had low hemoglobin, I had signs of anemia, and I had low hematocrit, which is the percentage of my blood made up of red blood cells. Well, four times a week now I use an infrared sauna, which is great for blood building. Twice a week now I work out on this thing called a live O2, which allows me to fluctuate between hyperoxia and hypoxia. And that also causes a profound improvement in mitochondria and in red blood cell count. I just keep it next to an exercise bicycle in my office, and I hit it for a half hour twice a week, alternating from hypoxia to hyperoxia. You'll also see that my iron levels are just fine. I am neither low risk nor high risk. And especially in men, you want to be careful of something called hemochromatosis, which would be excessive iron content in the blood. My ferritin, which is the iron storage protein that stores my body's iron for later use. And it can also act as an inflammatory marker when it's high. That can be elevated due to inflammation. That also is. It's good. It's a little lower than what I'd like to see in an athlete, but in endurance athletes who frequently break down red blood cells and iron, and I still consider myself to be an endurance athlete. My ferritin is just fine, much higher than what I tend to see in many endurance athletes, marathoners, cyclists, triathletes, Spartan racers, et cetera. So my iron and ferritin I'm pretty happy with. Could my body do well with perhaps throwing in an extra steak once or twice a week? Probably the iron and ferritin I would like to see a slight bump or increase in they're not concerning to me, but when it comes to optimizing every variable I'd like to raise iron and ferritin just a little bit so I may start to consume more chlorophyll from algal sources which will elevate iron and ferritin, increase my red meat intake just a little bit, which goes hand in hand with some of my increased calorie intake that I plan on engaging in anyways. I probably won't start to take an iron supplement if I did. If I had low iron and low ferritin, the 1, 2 combo that I typically recommend to people for that would be a non constipating form of iron called iron bisglycinate which is made by thorn. And then there's also a very good way to get your ferritin up via again a non constipating pretty safe ferritin pyrophosphate form of supplementation called Floradix F L O R A D I X. That's like a shot that you take, like a liquid shot, not like an injection needle shot, but like a shot that you drink. So I'll link to both of those in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Deep DiveBlood if you are somebody who has ferritin or iron issues and needs to address those.

Now after, after all of these blood values, platelets, white blood cells, red blood cells and iron, we get to vitamins and minerals. Now I've already mentioned vitamin D which appears there. Folic acid is an interesting one. Folic acid, along with vitamin B12 is essential for DNA synthesis and required for normal red blood cell maturation. When folate is extremely high, sometimes it can indicate someone is using one of these crappy multivitamins that has a high amount of folic acid in it, which can get converted into the inflammatory marker homocysteine, can increase cardiovascular risk factors and that's typically seen in someone who has methylation issues or what you might have heard of before called the MTHFR gene. Sometimes if someone's folate is through the roof, and especially if they're supplementing with like a synthetic form of folic acid that you find in many multivitamins quite commonly these days. I'll have them go out and get a genetic test for the MTHFR gene, which you can even do with something like a 23andMe test. Although there are other tests that I'll talk about in the podcast here in a separate podcast that will take an even deeper dive. Like there's one called Utreance, for example, that will look at even more methylation issues. But ultimately folic acid is something to pay attention to. Mine is just fine. I don't carry any of those methylation issues anyways. But it would be concerning if it were through the roof and you had an MTHFR issue and you were taking a synthetic multivitamin. Vitamin B12, that's important because it's necessary to make DNA required for tissue repair and healing and for proper nerve function. My vitamin B or B12 rather is through the roof. Vitamin A, my vitamin, a very important fat soluble vitamin for things like vision and teeth and immune system. That one is elevated or not elevated. It's in perfect present amounts thiamine, which is important for a healthy nervous system. And thiamine deficiency can manifest in things like memory difficulties and nerve disorders, which is why thiamine is something you'll see included. Also seen as vitamin B1 in a lot of nootropic smart drug type of supplements. My thiamine is actually pretty high. It's gone up a little bit. I think part of that is because I use this, this nootropic smart drug called Qualia and I use that about three times a week called Qualia Mind. It has a really large amount of the B vitamin complex in it because B vitamins are water soluble and they just get peed out in the urine. I'm not concerned at all about my high thiamine levels, but I suspect they're elevated because I'm getting a lot of B1 from that supplement that I take. You'll see minerals. Red blood cell magnesium, very important one to pay attention to. Red blood cell magnesium is the most precise way to assess magnesium in cells. And my magnesium is just fine. I tend to take a little bit of magnesium before I go to bed at night and I eat a very mineral rich diet. So magnesium is good. Copper, that's a mineral that's needed in trace amounts in order for the body to function normally. You don't want it too high because that can indicate heavy metal issues. But low copper can cause things like. Well, anemia is the most common, as well as bone problems and immune deficiencies. And my copper is just fine. It's in the sweet spot. Selenium is also within the sweet spot. That's an essential mineral. It's necessary for, among other things, proper thyroid activity. And one role of the seleno proteins is also to protect the body against free radical radicals, which are the reactive molecules that form when oxygen breaks down in the mitochondria. So whereas too much selenium can cause hair loss and nerve problems and muscle damage, too little can cause gut issues and compromised intestinal function and, you know, free radical accumulation. And selenium, for me, it's sweet spot, it's just fine. Zinc mineral I mentioned earlier, very important for males for testosterone. It's good for protein production, good for DNA synthesis, good for a whole host of chronic disease management, including intestinal disorders and diabetes. Too much zinc can cause some breath issues, excessive sweating, fever, et cetera. My zinc is pretty good, but it's borderline low. It is one of those things that I should consider perhaps even adding more of. And one of my favorite ways to do that is via this black ant extract. Ten times higher in zinc than than oysters. This black ant extract, I've got a whole bunch up in my pantry and I should probably just start taking that a little bit more regularly because my zinc isn't quite as high as I would like to see. And then just a few other small things. Psa, prostate specific antigen, which is an indicator of course, of your prostate cancer risk. That one is rock bottom low for me, which I'm very happy to see. Lead and mercury, my blood levels of both of these obviously very damaging. Heavy metal, rock bottom low. And mercury has even gone down significantly since my last test. So I'm very happy when it comes to heavy metals as well. And then you can see if you're following me on the PDF, that's where we reach the end of the panel. Aside from just like my, you know, my weight 175, my body mass index, all that stuff. So normals, blood pressure, that type of thing, all those are just fine. But ultimately what we just went through was if you were keeping track, 25 hydroxy, vitamin D, all the APO Bs, lead, mercury, lipoprotein fractionations, ions, minerals, the complete metabolic panel, the complete blood count, ferritin, fibrinogen, folate, fatty acids, omega 3s, the lipid panel, all the thyroid values, all the hormone values, some other little things thrown in there like the vitamin a, the vitamin B12, vitamin D zinc. So this is an extremely comprehensive panel and I hope that by me just going through my own results and kind of elucidating to you some of the decisions that I would make and some of the things that I learn whenever I pour through my results when I get them. And again, I do this on a quarterly basis, but you could do it annually as well and still get tons of really good information. Hopefully the this has been helpful for you and hopefully this whole solo so thing hasn't been excessively boring for you. If it has been, perhaps I should just lay down some tiesto or maybe some Paul Oakenfold tracks below the talking so you get some driving techno beats in the background, something like that to spice it up. I don't know. Anyways though, what I'm going to do over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com deep dive blood is I will link to to everything that I talked about. I mean everything, both the Longevity Blood panel for men and the one for women. So both the men's and the women's version of everything that you just listened to. A little PDF and better where you can just download the PDF of all of my results. That article I mentioned that is the ultimate guide to self quantification where I also get into poop testing, hair testing, urine testing, all these other parameters, that Dutch hormone test that I mentioned, the R article on lean mass hyper responders, that Swiss healing detox retreat I'll be leading next year. Pretty much anything I mentioned I'll put over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com deep diveblood I hope that this has been helpful for you. Leave comments either good or bad or critical or helpful. If you can save my liver or whatever else, just don't please offer to send me any booze because apparently that's not going to do my body any favors right now at this point in my bloods. But ultimately leave any comments over there. Of course I love discussion. I love helpful chatter around issues like this and topics like this. And ultimately the big reason for me doing this was to be able to, as is the reason I do just about all my podcasts, hopefully connect you with some good information and enable you to be able to live a higher quality life to optimize your body, optimize your brain. And I think that about covers everything that I wanted to talk about. So this podcast, as all of the podcasts are, will be transcribed and laid out with robust show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com deep diveblood thank you so much for listening in. Leave a positive review in itunes if you get a chance. That always helps the show out. Except I think it's called Apple Podcast now, not itunes if I remember properly and spread the word about the show. And I hope this has been, as I've said about a billion times now, helpful for you. So shut up. It's hard to end an episode when it's a solo sode, but I'm Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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