How To Use The Wonderful World Of Self-Quantification To Take Your Health Into Your Own Hands (& Th

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I have a Master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From Sealfit, Kokoro, Spartan Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast. Everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

Hey. The Super Ultra special podcast episode you're about to hear is the first of a two part series that I recorded when I was in Lexington, Kentucky lecturing at a wonderful precision medicine conference down there. Not only did I get a chance to get on stage and talk about all the different blood and biomarker tests you should get, how to interpret them, how to line up your reference ranges, what tests are worth your time, what tests aren't worth your time. And I gave that lecture which I'm gonna give to you today, but I also gave a follow up Q and a, like a 90 minute Q&A on all this stuff with about four other physicians on a panel with me. So we're gonna take a deep dive into precision medicine next couple episodes. It's cool stuff and the shownotes for this episode are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kentucky and then what I'll do is I'll put the show notes for the follow up episode that comes after this over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kentucky number two, that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kentucky and BenGreenfieldFitness.comKentucky too. Okay, maybe I drank too much bourbon before this show. This show is brought to you by Kion, where we blend ancient wisdom and modern science to create pure and efficacious shotgun formulations of supplements and functional foods such as our wonderful tasty, addictively good energy bar. This is an energy bar with no artificial nasties in it. It's cocoa nibs and coconut flakes and almond and grass fed gelatin and cocoa butter and sea salt. It tastes like this bite of coconut. Chocolatily chocolatily chocolatey chocolate, coconutty, mind blowing explosion of flavor like chocolate coconut ice cream. Except in a bar you can actually freeze this stuff and put it on ice cream. That's my dirty little secret. Anyways, you can get this along with any of our other fantastic, fantastic things at kion at a 10% discount. Very simple. You go to getkion.com that's getk I-O-N.com and the discount code that you can use over there is very simple. It's bgf10 bgf tenetkion.com this podcast is also brought to you by the wonderful flavor wizards at Organifi. They make vegetable powders and red juice powders and yes, even gold powders. At Organifi they have this gold chocolate one. It's basically like kind of like the golden milk latte you get at Starbucks with a boost of cacao in it. But they throw reishi mushroom in that, which can relax sore, intense muscles. They put lemon balm in that to support with your sleep. They put turkey tail mushroom, which is this really good medicinal mushroom for your immune system. Even ginger for those achy muscles and joints. You can give some to your grandma. Sip it along with grandma.

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Realized. And what impresses me is men are just actually a really good person. Like, seeing how mindful and intentional I feel.

But seeing how intentional he is with his kids and his wife. We were going to a horse farm tour one morning and they hadn't had time to do their gratitude journal. So he did it in the car on the way there. Every meal they take a deep breath in and they talk about what they're grateful for. To see how his kids, he enjoys his kids and he lets them have a great time, but he's looking for all these teachable moments. It's really been inspiring. I feel like I should tell you that because you all know the other stuff, but you may not realize that now. How does that help you right now? It doesn't. So luckily he's also really smart. He's going to give you some great knowledge right now. I've learned a lot from Matt And Mike too, about the genetic SNP stuff they do. You can actually learn more from 23andMe than your risk for having a unibrow or preferring sweet versus salty things. So they do a lot with genetics. Touch on that during my presentation as well. But when these guys told me they wanted me to talk a little bit about self quantification.

Really where my mind went was kind of going beyond just like the Fitbit or even something like an aura ring or some of these things we can use to track sleep and steps and really delve into taking some of your health into your own hands. Looking at things like the type of tests that you can order online nowadays, you know, stuff you pay $10,000 for a decade ago at the Princeton Longevity Institute, or things that execs are going to places like the Health Nucleus in California do. There's so much that we can now learn just from our own computer browser via an email inbox when our PDF results from some, you know, home blood test or that stool that we annoyed our spouse with by keeping the refrigerator for a couple days before we mail it off to the stool lab. Open my refrigerator. You want to be careful. Don't eat the stew in our fridge until you ask first. But there's a lot that you can learn now and that you can find out yourself by ordering a lot of different labs online and paying attention to certain parameters. And granted, there's thousands of different things that you can track. I mean, I know that a lot of you, just from the few conversations that I've already had this morning, seem to be pretty keen on health and pretty self educated, but you know, when it comes to digging through these thousands of different biomarkers that you can track, what I wanted to do today was just identify some of the things that I think are the best parameters to track, especially if you're interested in kind of that ideal combination of health span and lifespan. And then I also want to get into some, some of the tech, some of some of the stuff like ketone monitoring and blood glucose monitoring and telomere analysis, and a few of these things that go beyond what you might test for on a standard blood panel. And basically the goal here is to allow you guys to walk away with a pretty good working idea of some of the lowest hanging fruit in terms of quantifying what's really going to move the dial for you in terms of health span or lifespan. So, and you know, you've already learned a little bit of that from Mike's presentation. Now you all know why we didn't get to have omelets for breakfast because it would have screwed. Half of you had heart attacks right and left here. So yeah, we just ate bacon and avocados instead. There's no genetic SNPs for those apparently. So.

A quick background. I know that a lot of you listen to my podcast and know my background, where I'm coming from, but specifically when it comes to quantification and where I'm coming from when we're talking about testing things like your blood and your biomarkers. I started off back in college when I was studying physiology and biomechanics and I really got hardcore into bodybuilding, which is why I'm showing you the photograph. Me right now, half naked, more than half naked. I guess that's about 92%.

The thing is that bodybuilding is kind of like this old school, like original biohacking kind of sport where people are constantly tweaking and testing different macronutrient ratios, gaining weight, losing weight rapidly, gaining muscle, losing fat at a pretty rapid pace. And so that initially got me kind of interested early on the day. You know, what can you do to really bring the body from good to great? Not necessarily from a health standpoint in this case, but just from a pure physique standpoint. Then after that I got into Ironman Triathlon and I raced Ironman triathlon for about 10 years. And it was about like six years into that, which would have been six, seven years ago, that I actually started to dig into and order tests from some of these companies that were popping up. You know, a few of the physicians that I interviewed on my podcast offered to run some blood panels for me and I started to dig into some of these early services that were online where you could order some of your own lab work, like Direct Labs, for example, or Genova Diagnostics. And I'd start to tweak and test some of my parameters. And I thought I was frickin fit, right? I had a engine that could go for days and looked really good in spandex and I could ride a bike quickly. But when I started to get my lab results back, I was pretty shocked at what I saw, right?

I was.

I had hyperforceolemia, or at least it appeared that I did. I probably didn't. I'll explain. Explain why when I talk to you guys about hormones later on, I have rampant amounts of inflammation and CRP value that I'll talk to you about as well. Today I had pre type 2 diabetes. Based on my. On my fasting blood glucose levels, I Had a lot of going south in my body, despite me being healthy on the outside. Right. I was that stereotypical athlete, was healthy on the outside but not dying on the inside or at least far from optimized on the inside. Actually, that initial testing when I was fit but really truly unfit was what inspired me to write that first book I wrote, Beyond Training, where I started to figure out what can an athlete do to kind of find that ideal balance between performance and health and longevity. And so that's what really got me interested in this stuff, was realizing, well, geez, we, we can look good, we can feel kind of sort of good, but we can be kind of dying of slow death on the inside and not know about it. And then now I do a lot of obstacle course racing. I still race for Spartan, and I still dabble around in the mud and the barbed wire. And, you know, I don't profess some of these masochistic sports to be healthy, but I still try to keep a pretty good idea of what's going on inside my body using a lot of the tactics that I'm about to show you. You. And I don't think that this is something that you need to do if you're, you know, just because you want to be, say, like a professional athlete or do an ironman or do a Spartan race. I mean, I sometimes get painted in this corner of somebody who only works with pro athletes. And frankly, Matt and I were talking about this in the car the other day. I mean, 80% of people I work with, they're just like CEOs, execs, people who want to live a long time, people want to feel good, people want to sleep better, people have gut issues that they want to fix. I'm not even working with that many pro athletes anymore. I'm primarily working with people who just want to feel good and live a long time. So don't think that a lot of these things I'm going to talk to you about are just stuff you ought to do. If you want to say, race and I are in triathlon, we're talking about things that I think are important for the general population. So.

Harping on what I was talking a little bit about earlier, what I want to go through today are some of the best blood biomarkers.

Evaluations that you can do on yourself initially. I'm going to give you guys specifically 12 of the best biomarkers that you can test, some stuff that flies under the radar, some stuff that you might already have a decent knowledge of. I'm not Saying that what I'm about to show you is all you ever want to test for. But when I sat down and thought about what I wanted to talk to you about today, I was trying to identify some of the things that you might find interesting that go beyond, let's say.

Vitamin D or total cholesterol or some of the things that you get done is just kind of an average, everyday bloody valve. And some of the stuff that moves the dial a little bit more. So as we go through, you've got Matt's cell phone number so that you can drunk dial him later on or send him obscene photographs of.

And Matt's writing his number down on the board there. And if you have questions, you can text them over to Matt, and that way I'll just all roll through. And then I would say we can either save all of our questions for the end or Matt sees a question. It's just like super duper relevant. We don't want to skip over it. He'll just interrupt me and ask the question right then and there. And we've basically got. How long do we have here, Matt for, folks? So we. If you wanted one. All right, we'll break about seven Ps.

We'll go for a while. And depending on how quickly we get through this stuff. I did work in the opportunity for a pee break. You're welcome. First question for a presenter. We already have a. I didn't even start yet.

What product do you use in your hair? Looks amazing.

The trick is you just don't wash your hair. You let it get super oily, and then you rub your hands. Actually, that was poo. Yeah, yeah, Pomade. Pomade. Matter of fact, I'll tell you exactly what's in my hair right now. Badger balm. Pomade. That's right. It's got to be clean enough to be able to eat it. That's my only rule for what goes in my hair. Aside from that, I'm a complete dummy. I just kind of figure out what happens to be in there. So before we get into what parameters you want to look for in your blood and biomarkers, it's kind of important for you to understand that when you get the results back from an average, let's say a comprehensive metabolic panel and a complete blood count from your doc, and you're looking through all these reference ranges and. And they're going over with you, or you're looking at it yourself and you're just kind of. This is what a lot of people do, right? They look for what's what's marked high and what's marked low. Like, they'll just kind of skip over everything else and pay attention to what seems to be leaping out from the lab test. A lot of times when you get your results, it'll be like a big bold number that says too high or too low or something like Wellness fx, where something will pop up red and everything else is green. So you just pay attention to the red part. The problem is multifold when it comes to interpreting this data and taking caution with the reference ranges that they give you. What you're looking at right here is just, you know, it's this basic parabolic curve from a statistical analysis. And the way that these curves work is you've got about 95% of the population that fits into the middle of the curve, and then you've got 2.5% or so on either side of that reference range that's relatively unaccounted for on these lab tests. And part of that is due to the biochemical individuality that you can read about in a book by the same name. Excellent old book called Biochemical Individuality by Roger Williams. You thumb through that book and it shows how there's like 12 different sizes of the stomach and all these different shapes of the liver. And certain people excrete vitamin D at an extremely rapid rate. And some people hold on to vitamin D so well that they can get vitamin D toxicity from the average multivitamin. I mean, it's a fantastic book breaking the 60s, but it just goes into all the different ways that we operate biochemically. Then you combine that with what Mike was talking to us about when it comes to genetic individuality and a lot of these SNPs, and you get a pretty good idea that you might fall into that 5% of the population, or I think more that these reference ranges don't account for. Right. So if you're looking at, say, like your alanine aminotransferase or aspartate aminotransferase, liver enzymes, and it's telling you that your liver is just fine because your enzymes are at a certain level, that does not necessarily mean that that certain level is what's healthy for you, that's what's healthy for the general population. You can say the same thing about thyroid, you could say the same thing about vitamin D. So there's a great deal of biochemiform genetic individuality that needs to be taken into account. You can see Here point number one that I've already written out explaining you 5% of people fall outside the curve. Another thing is that ranges tend to widely vary from lab to lab, meaning that typically when you're getting a test, the reference ranges that that lab is using, those are supplied to them by the test manufacturer, whether that be Genova Diagnostics or.

Metametrix or any of these other companies that are producing these tests. What labs are supposed to do is they're supposed to go out and get a third party eval to see if those reference ranges actually are correct and fall within the value of that test manufacturer's recommended. The fact is, most labs don't do that. So you might test with one lab and it'll tell you your vitamin D levels are perfectly normal. You might test with another lab, it'll tell you your vitamin D levels aren't. It'll give you different reference ranges. And as you'll learn about when I talk about, say, food allergies testing, different labs in many cases are using different tests that are using different forms of evaluation. So you need to understand that your value is going to vary widely from lab to lab or even from physician to physician. So that's another problem with reference ranges. Number three that I've written here, and this is a big one. A lot of reference ranges, they reflect the absence of disease, the absence of disease, not necessarily the ability for you to go from good to great or for you to say, you know, live until you're more than 100, it's just, hey, is this person gonna drop dead in the next few months or not? You can use an example such as your thyroid, right? Typically, what a laboratory or reference range will reveal is that if your TSH, your thyroid stimulating hormone is below 4, that you're pretty good, your thyroid's doing okay. But when you look at thyroid dysregulation, a lot of people, whether it's autoimmune thyroid issues, whether it's inadequate conversion of T4 to T3 due to high cortisol or low blood sugar, whatever the case may be, they actually do better with Tsh that's below 2. When I'm looking over a client's labs or the blood or the biomarkers, I'm looking for a TSH that falls between 0.5 to 2. If I'm scrolling through, let's say, let's say a wellness FX lab report and I get to the thyroid section, I get to TSH and it shows, hey, Green, you're doing just fine. You're TSH is at 3.82. Well, to me, that's actually not a great TSH. Sure, that's going to indicate that I might not have full blown hypothyroidism, but it's not an indication of really great thyroid function. So you want to take into account the fact that many of these reference ranges do not reflect good to great. The same could be said for inflammation or magnesium or any of these other parameters that I'm about to show you. So you need to realize that many of the lab reference ranges are absence of disease and not necessarily your potential for longevity or for health span. And then the final thing is that in this shops you'll get lab reference ranges and they vary. They should vary widely based on whether you're male or whether you're female. And when I show you some of the reference ranges that you should be looking for when you get results from a lab test that you've done, or maybe your doctor goes through your results with you, but you want to go through them yourself using some of the information that I'm about to provide to you. A lot of times, male versus female isn't counted for. I mean, a perfect example of that would be, you know, iron. You know, iron is something that, as you'll learn later on, can be. It's an element that could essentially rust you from the inside out. And men technically should have a lower iron value than women have. Another one would be your liver enzymes that I talked about earlier when you, your ALT and your ast. Those are supposed to be a lot lower for females than they are for males. But most lab reference ranges just spit out numbers and don't say, hey, this is what your number should be if you're female. This is what your number should be if you're male. And so there's all sorts of problems when you're going through your results that you need to be aware of. And so take some notes as I show you some of the things that you should be looking at today. And by the way, I should have told you this at the beginning, but if I go back here to my introductory slide, I will make these slides available to you so you don't have to memorize all these values. Not that you guys don't have minds like steel traps and eight cups of coffee in your systems right now. Can't memorize all this, but if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com KentuckyCastle19, you can download the slides and also include articles, podcasts, scientific papers and references for a lot of the things that I talk to you about. For you nerds who want to take an even deeper dive or if you or just read a lot of stuff related to some of the other things.

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So let's go ahead and just jump into the good stuff here. Some of the lab parameters, specifically, I'm going to be going through 12 different things that I think you should look at and test for.

If you're really going to take some of your health into your own hands. The first is RBC magnesium. RBC stands for red blood cell, Red blood cell magnesium. Now this is an important one to look for based on the fact that as you can see here, it's going to indicate things like insulin sensitivity, physical performance can affect sleep and sleep architecture potential for sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle as you age.

Whenever I reference here what type of physical or biological degradation could occur as a result of one of these parameters being out of whack. Most of this is based off of the actual research that shows these are the biggest things to worry about if this number is not optimized. So in the case of RBC magnesium, insulin sensitivity, physical performance and sarcopenia potential, the problem is that when you get a blood test, a lot of times it's looking at intracellular magnesium, which is not bioavailable magnesium. What you need to instead look at, I'm sorry, let's look at extracellular magnesium, which is not bioavailable magnesium used by the cells. You need to look for intracellular magnesium. So that's what an RBC magnesium test looks for. So when you're getting your blood analyzed, you get your magnesium values back if it says it's low or if it says it's high. The first thing you need to look into is whether or not that's, that's an RBC magnesium. You need to ask your doctor, is this an RBC magnesium or is this an extracellular magnesium? Because those two differences are very important. Now what you need to be looking for, for ideal Ranges, when you look at their result is about 6.0 to 6.5. There are a few cases that I'm going to show you today where it's going to be different between men versus women. But for RBC Magnesium, generally 6.0 to 6.5 is where we're getting that ideal combination of health span, performance and lifespan. So that's what you want to look for on a magnesium evaluation. You can also, there's a company called Intracellular Diagnostics and Intracellular Diagnostics will also evaluate magnesium via a tongue scrape. That's also a very accurate evaluation and a way to look at your magnesium levels. So magnesium is number one. Anybody have questions about magnesium? By the way, you can text Matt if you do or if there's like super relevant stuff that pops up as I'm talking, you can go ahead and raise your hand. Whether it's like, you know, how do I self money with this, how do I get more of this, how do I fix this, etc. You know, in most cases what I'm recommending right now, most of my clients who are low in red blood cell magnesium is just using magnesium in the evening. And there's different forms I like to, I like to get different forms of magnesium like magnesium 3 and 8, magnesium glycinate, magnesium citrate. There's a company called Jigsaw Health that I personally use. They make a, like a triplicate form of magnesium called Mag SRT. So in most cases I'm using anywhere from 400 to 600 milligrams of a mix of magnesium at night. That keeps the RBC magnesium levels pretty dialed in, especially if you're eating a lot of mineral rich fruit, growing in mineral rich soils, organic produce, that type of thing. The next one is estradiol. And a lot of people think, especially men, that paying attention to estrogen levels is only something that women need to do. But estrogen is actually something I think flies under the radar as far as something we need to pay attention to. You can see here what I've listed all the different things that low estrogen levels or optimized estrogen levels would affect bone mass, oxidative stress or your antioxidant potential, your nitric oxide production, glutathione, one of the main antioxidants in your body, muscle repair, muscle strength, non optimized estradiol levels are going to affect all of those things. So it's an important number to look at for men. I've got the ideal range as written right here, 10 to 82 picograms per milliliter. That's what you need to look for on your results. Women it's going to fluctuate based on where you're at in your cycle. But you can see some of the different values here. For women less than 50 PGM during menstrual periods, up to 200 during follicular development, up to 400 just before ovulation. Now, when it comes to measuring hormones, the problem is that blood measurements will often just give you a snapshot of what's going on with those hormones. And they also won't show you the upstream and downstream metabolites of those hormones. I'm a bigger fan of a salivary or even better urine test to evaluate your hormones. A salivary test can at least give you, via four to five different salivary measurements in a 24 hour cycle what's occurring during the entire day. Because your hormones are supposed to fluctuate during the entire day. If you're just driving to a lab in the morning or your doctor does your labs at 8am in the morning, gives you that one time blood snapshot of a hormone, you're not getting the full picture. An adrenal stress index, a salivary index can give you a little bit more data. But what I'm going to show you in a couple minutes here are the results of something called a Dutch test, which is a dry urine test for hormones. And this one's great because it not only gives you what the adrenal stress index gives you as far as how your hormones are fluctuating during the day, because basically what you're doing is you're peeing on a strip at five different points during a 24 hour cycle. But it can also give you the upstream and the downstream metabolites of those hormones. So you can see, I'll give you an example of cortisol, for example, and, and why this is important, why you might get a blood test that says you're super duper high in cortisol and you need to meditate and do yoga and listen to Enya while you do your enemas and all this stuff. Lower cortisol, in many cases it's actually not the fact that your cortisol is high. The issue is that the cortisol is not being broken down adequately. So we'll get into the Dutch panel a little bit. But estradiol is the second one in addition to RBC magnesium diet to look at and track. Kind of opposite of estrogen or estradiol would be testosterone and, you know, men think that only women need to track estradiol. Women think that only men need to track testosterone. But the fact is, both sexes should be paying attention to both of these hormones. In the case of testosterone, we're looking at libido, sexual performance, energy strength, bone density, muscle mass, cardiovascular disease, and overall mortality if testosterone levels are not optimized. So I'm not necessarily saying that everybody needs to be on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, even though that's a very good strategy. I think as you age, assuming that it's overseen by Dr. And you're testing frequently to make sure levels are optimized, but you should at least be paying attention to different things you can do to optimize hormones. Now, the biggie with hormones is that they can be bound up by proteins. You look at testosterone, for example. Testosterone, your total testosterone can be bound up by two different things, albumin proteins or sex hormone binding globule. Now, if your total testosterone is bound up by albumin proteins, it's still relatively bioavailable. More importantly, if your total testosterone is bound up by sex hormone binding globulin, it's not as bioavailable. You'll oftentimes find that if your cortisol is truly very high, your sex hormone binding globulin is also high. Because it's almost that message that nature sends your body that it doesn't want you to make babies in times of stress, right? So you got a lot of cortisol going on, you produce more sex hormone binding globulin to bind up that total testosterone to keep from being free and active and keeping your libido elevated or keeping you from being sexually active. So the idea is that you want about 2% of your testosterone to be free. So if you look, let's say you're a guy, total testosterone measured, you're trying to figure out if your free testosterone is where it's supposed to be. 2% of it should be free. So your T level should be at least 1 to 49 free t. To bound T. Bound T being what's bound to sex hormone binding globulin and what's bound to albumin. So if your total testosterone is 500 nanograms per deciliter, then your free T levels would need to be right around 10 nanograms per deciliter. I'm a bigger fan of paying attention to free T versus just total T, because some guys will have what might be considered to be low total T. Like, let's say you're at 350 or something like that, but they've actually got free T levels that are pretty good that are even higher than 2% of that total value. On the flip side, you'll see guys walking around with like, you know, a thousand eleven hundred of total T or you know, some cases even guys on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, large amounts of total T. But because they're so stressed out or there's other things going on that that are causing the total T to be found, a lot of that testosterone just isn't bioavailable. So it's important to pay attention to your total testosterone and also to your pre testosterone. So I've got a few values here for you. For free T, you're usually looking at ideal levels being about 4.6 up to 22.4 and your bioavailable T, which is your albumin bound testosterone. Because remember, if albumin is bound to testosterone, it's still bioavailable. Sex hormone binding globulin is bound to testosterone. It's less available. You want that to range from 110 to 575 nanograms per deciliter. For women it's a lot lower. Obviously. It ranges from 0.02 to 0.5 nanograms per deciliter with ideal levels of bioavailability from 0.5 to 8.5. The other thing that I always like to take a quick glance at if I'm measuring hormones like estradiol or testosterone is dhea. Because DHEA is such an androgenic hormone, it's a precursor to estradiol, types of cortisol to testosterone. DHEA levels should ideally be optimized as well. That's why I like for example, the Dutch test, because it'll look at testosterone, it'll look at estrogen, it looks at freaking melatonin, it looks at cortisol, looks at dhea. So DHA is another very, very good one to look at. It's going to range quite a bit based on age. I'm going to show you here what DHEA levels tend to fluctuate. Like what you're looking at right here is the reference range of DHEA for males. You can see that as you go from 0 to 100 on this scale, it ranges everywhere from 5 all the way up to 30 in terms of nanograms per milliliter. So it's going to change as you age. And this is another issue with reference ranges. You don't just pay attention to whether you're male versus female. But it's also in some cases, especially with hormone, it's going to vary widely in terms of ideal levels as you age. So you can use a chart like this, for example, which would be ideal levels of DHA as you age. You can look at your results, say, okay, I'm 40 years old, therefore based on that, my ideal levels are going to be somewhere between, you know, approximately. If you look at this chart like, you know, 8 up to 25. And I've got references in the, in the slides. If you want to go and look at an actual reference from where this came, if you want to match up the numbers more precisely, here's another graph that shows you reference ranges for females. So when it comes to hormones, like I mentioned, I wanted to briefly touch on this Dutch test. This is what you're looking at right now is a screenshot of the Dutch test results. And it's kind of cool because it's almost got like this cloth like graph that goes from a low range up to a high range to show you if your numbers fall within the right parameters. Remember the, this is the urine test that you do, the dry urine test. You can order this to your own house. You can do it yourself. But for example, with the Dutch test, you can see here what I've written that the free cortisol, so the majority of cortisol in your body circulates, found a corticosteroid binding globulin and albumin. And about less than 5% of that circulating cortisol is free. But it's only the free cortisol that's able to be active within the body can access the enzyme transporters in organs. Now, free cortisone is also measured by the Dutch test, which is a corticosteroid related cortisol, creatinine, which is a breakdown byproduct of creatine and then a few different other metabolites of cortisol breakdown. Why is all this important? Because I can see your eyes starting to glaze over with talking about all these different forms of cortisol. Well, like I mentioned, I tested and I got test after test, blood test after blood test. That said, I had high cortisol, I'm hypercortisolic, I need to take my phosphatidylserine and do my transcendental meditation and do yoga and not train so much. Well, it turns out that what I actually found when I did my Dutch panel was that it wasn't that my adrenal glands were just producing cortisol 24,7 because they were so stressed out, because it kind of puzzled me because I didn't feel like I was that stressed out. Instead, that cortisol just wasn't being broken down into its metabolites. My cortisol metabolites were very high. So what did this indicate? Something was going on in my body that was keeping my cortisol from being broken down. Upon further investigation, it turns out that a couple things that can limit your ability to be able to break down cortisol would be inadequate amounts of storage glycogen. I was on a very strict ketogenic diet at the time while training. Another thing that can affect it is your thyroid activity. And lo and behold, my TSH reading was somewhere between 4 and 5. I had very low amounts of bioavailable T3, so I wasn't getting adequate T4 to T3 conversion. Also probably because I was following a very strict ketogenic diet or being very active. So it turns out that for me it's not about meditation, sleep and de stressing, which it could be for some people. For me, it was about eating more carbohydrates, paying attention to my training a little bit more carefully and optimizing my thyroid, getting adequate iodine, getting adequate selenium, eating some organ meats and taking that approach versus just lowering cortisol. So as you can see, you can learn some very practical things from a Dutch panel to give you deeper insight into what's going on with your hormones. It also tests dhea, like I mentioned, progesterone and progesterone metabolites, all of your different forms of testosterone and even melatonin as well. So it can be an adequate test to kind of dig into sleep architecture a little bit. So that, that's why I like the Dutch test for measuring warmers. Number six. Number six out of 12. Although I think this might be number five out of 12 because I had some issue on the slide there. I don't know if you guys noticed Testosterone said both 3 and 4, so we might be able 11, not 12.

But like Matt said, I, I graduated and I was, I was 15. So I didn't get through as much math as I probably should, but yeah, my counting is a little off. Yeah, once I run out of fingers, I'm screwed. So high sensitivity. C reactive protein. This is that HSCRP I was talking about. Remember how I said that when I was racing? I felt really good. I looked good in spandex. I had an aerobic engine that could go for Days, but I had rampant amounts of inflammation. Now this is important because of the link between inflammation and specifically heart attack risk. Now a lot of people will go in and they'll get, they'll get their inflammation tested and it'll be, their HSCRP will be 0.8, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. When you get above 10.0, that's typically a really big sign that you probably, you've had a heart attack, you're right on the verge of a heart attack. But with crp, it is important to realize that if you're looking at it and you worked out the day prior, especially if you did some form of eccentric exercise the day prior. When I say eccentric exercise, I mean something that will cause the muscles to have to decelerate. Usually the top two are running or weightlifting. Your CRP levels are going to be artificially elevated. So you don't have to worry as much about this number if you worked out hard the day prior. Typically if I'm going to go in for a lab test, I still like to work out every day. I don't just sit around and eat Twinkies before I go in for a lab test, but I'll just do like swimming, yoga, sauna, a little bit of cycling, like things that aren't tearing down the muscles quite as much. So my CRP levels aren't artificial elevated. Now, when it comes to crp, the other important reason that you need to pay attention to this is because if you have rampant levels of inflammation and you're also following some of the trickle down advice we're seeing a lot in the health industry right now, which is like, pay attention to really good forms of cholesterol. Eat your eggs, eat your avocados, have fatty cuts of fish, make sure that you're getting enough fatty acids into your body. The problem is that high amounts of, of inflammation can cause oxidation of that cholesterol in many cases. When I'm looking at someone's lipid panel, which I'll get into here in a second, I go straight and I look at inflammation, I look at blood glucose, because those are two factors that can cause cholesterol to become atherosclerotic. I mean, I personally try to keep my total cholesterol above 200 based on the fact that that's great for hormones. It's been shown in research to be wonderful for your intellectual development, especially as you age. But I would be screwed if I had high total cholesterol and my CRP was elevated and my blood glucose was elevated. I'll get into cholesterol particles here in a second. But CRP is another one that's very important to pay attention to. Sure there are a lot of other inflammatory markers like fibrinogen and cytokines and all these other things that you test for inflammation. But CRP is such low hanging fruit and such an easy blood test to get that I recommend that you look at that one as well. So next is your triglyceride to HDL ratio. I just mentioned that if I'm looking at a lipid panel on someone.

I pay a lot of attention to CRP and the blood glucose. But one of the other biggies that I pay attention to is the triglyceride to HDL ratio. This is actually called your atherosclerotic index because it has been shown to be far more important in terms of, of determining your risk for cardiovascular disease and your true cardiovascular health. Far more important than total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol. And you don't even have to get a fancy cholesterol particle lab test called an NMR profile to look at this number. You can get this number just off a basic plain Jane lipid profile that you get from the average doctor. So let me show you what you want to be looking for when it comes to trig to HCO ratio, which indicates, as I've written here, all cause mortality, heart disease and insulin resistance. Three biggies that take out a lot of people, they influence both healthspan and lifespan, are influenced by this trig to HDL number. So ideally, if you're looking at trends as you change your diet and you become healthy, triglycerides should generally go down over time. HDL should generally go up over time. What you want to look for for your ratio is your trig to HDL ratio. Lower is better. You want to be below one. This is the problem with reference ranges. A lot of times reference ranges will look at whether or not you're below four. I think that that's bad news bears if your triglycerides are at say 150 and your HDL is at 40, in many cases a lab result will tell you you're doing just fine with this index of atherosclerosis and that simply not the case. I think I called it an index of atherosclerosis. I believe it's actually called an atherogenic index. Don't quote me on that. But it's anyways, your trig to HDL ratio is very important. It should be lower. I like to see it below one, meaning well below one, mean it would mean low.

Triglycerides, high hdl, right? You want low triglycerides, high hdl. For example, how do you get your triglycerides low and how do you get Your HDL high HDL responds very favorably to things like omega 3 fatty acid sources such as fish oil, for example. Fish oil supplementation has been shown to be wonderful for increasing hdl. If you ask the people who design the food pyramid, they'll tell you whole grains increase hdl. They do like eating a diet of quinoa and amaranth and millet and oats and whole wheat bread. That will all increase your hdl. The problem is that many of those foods have the same glycemic index as a Snickers bar. So yeah, you're increasing your hdl, but you're also keeping your blood glucose relatively elevated simultaneously. Instead, from a dietary standpoint, plant intake, dark leafy greens, adequate fiber intake, a lot of these seem to positively favor hdl. Some people will say, what if I'm on the carnivore diet? What if I'm doing like low vegetable, low rubbish thing? Well, heck, you get lots of fatty acids from your grass fed grass finished rib eye steak and your sardines, your anchovies, mackerel and your salmon. So there's more than one way to skin the cap when it comes to hdl. But ultimately, no matter what you do, you want to keep it elevated. And when it comes to triglycerides, well, exercise and caloric control is one of the best ways to decrease triglycerides that your body isn't having to shovel these fatty acids in the storage tissue. But two things that really elevate triglycerides are your intake processed shoulders starches and your intake of vegetable oils. If you can adjust for those two things, you'll see your triglycerides start to go down. So it's almost like eat more plant fiber, slightly limited amounts of whole grains or just fatty acids overall while decreasing vegetable oils and starches. And you tackle this index pretty thoroughly. The other one to pay attention to that's interesting, a lot of people don't look at is your HDL to total cholesterol ratio. So lower is better. And again, even if you don't get a particle count, NMR profile, particle count, which I'll talk about in a second, this can still give you a decent idea because it's correlated to particle count. So if you look at your HDL, the total cholesterol, let's say your HDL is at 70 and your total cholesterol is 190. Great, because you want that ratio to be 0.24 or higher. 0.24 or higher for your HDL, the total cholesterol. So you can very easily, if your doctor sent you a PDF or printout of your lab results, just go look at hdl, go look at total cholesterol, go look at triglycerides, and you can calculate all of these numbers yourself and see if you're really, truly falling into the range that you want to be at. Okay, number eight, I'm going to keep harping on lipids here. A full lipid panel along with an omega 3 index. If someone really, truly wants to look at everything that's going on.

Specifically from a fats and a fatty acid standpoint, this is what you want to ask your doctor, your functional medicine doc, your integrative medical practitioner. These guys use the stupid term precision medicine. I think they just made that up. Sounds smart, but I'm just kidding. Precision medicine, functional medicine, integrative medicine, you name it. You want to ask for a full lipid panel, which would be like an NMR panel with an omega 3 index. This can indicate cardiovascular risk and inflammation. Here is what you want to look for. And when it comes to this NMR profile, what it's actually telling you is the size of your cholesterol particles. You've probably heard this before, guys like Dr. Peter Attia, he has a wonderful six part interview series with Dr. Thomas Dayspring where they take a deep dive into cholesterol and cholesterol particles. But the general idea summed up in 10 seconds is you want your particles to be large fluffy particles and not small atherogenic particles. And you generally want your particle count to be low. That's what you want to be looking for. Total LDL particles should be less than 1,000 nanomoles per liter. Okay, that's a big important 1. Total small LDL particles less than 600. I also have some sizes here. LDL size should be greater than 21 nanomoles or nanometers. ACL size should be greater than 9 millimole per liter. VLDL should be less than 0.1 nanomole per liter. This is what you want to look for. If you get a full NMR panel, that's actually telling you your particle count. Now the other thing is an omega 3 index to go hand in hand with this, which actually measures the EPA and the DHA in your red blood cell membranes. Okay, so it's an index. You can see the example here that I've written is that you have 64 fatty acids in the cell membrane and three of those fatty acids are comprised of EPA and DHA. You would have an omega index of 4.6. Okay? That's how that calculation would go. Now, an index of 8% or higher is ideal, meaning you want your index to be higher. When it comes to your omega 3 index, the amount of EPA and DHA in your cells, most people are testing, especially in America, somewhere between about 4 and 6%. Indicating in many cases they would be from a dietary standpoint, consuming too many omega 6 fatty acids from vegetable oils, seeds, nuts, nut butters, parent essential oils, etc. And too little omega 3s from a more Mediterranean olive oil, avocado olives, fatty fish, small fish like mackerel, anchovies, sardines, etc. That's generally what you see. Vegetable oils are also a big, big issue when it comes to lowering your omega 3 index. So the highest risk zone being a 4% or below has actually been correlated to a 90% risk of sudden cardiac death. There's a reason I'm recommending the specific lab parameters that I'm recommending to you because these are the things that are very important when it comes to healthspan and lifespan. So an omega 3 index. You can also look at what's called your stearic acid to oleic acid ratio. That's the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fats in your cells. This is also very important. It's indicated for non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Huge issue nowadays. Prostate, colon, gallbladder cancer. You want that to be about 0.97 to 1.02. The nice part is if you have a test like this done, you can see I've written a few of the ways to get it here. OmegaQuant has one. Great Plains has one, Quest has one, WallaceFX has one. If you get this test done, typically the PDF results that you'll get with it give you a pretty decent idea of your percentages. And their reference ranges on those charts are good. But I mean, big picture is you want to look at 8% or higher for your omega 3 index. All right, we're already at number nine, IGF1. You guys know which one this is? IGF1. Dr. Rhonda Patrick talks about this a lot. Insulin, like growth factor one. And a lot of people who are kind of like in the fasting and autophagy sector talk about keeping IGF1 low, not eating too much dairy, not eating too much protein and red meat. Especially being careful to not be in a constant state of growth activation, right? Not in a constant state of anabolism, but using things like feast, fast cycling certain times of the year or certain times of the week when you're moderating or restricting your protein intake, not having red meat every day, not consuming dairy every day. Unless you're trying to grow into like a big high school football player, you're trying to take a little kid and get them all fat and big. Like these are things that work for anabolism but that directly conflict with any method that you want to use to increase longevity. So you want a sweet spot of IGF1 in my opinion. Many people in our industry say keep IGF1 low. Well, I don't know about you, but if I'm not weightlifting and I'm not eating red meat and all I'm doing are like cold showers and sauna and walking and eating vegetables, yeah, I might live till I'm 125. I'm gonna be like cold and libido less hungry. Like, I don't want to live a long time. That's how I'm gonna feel the whole time. So in my opinion, you should instead look at life as a series of press cold cycles, right? You have certain days where you lift heavy weights and you exercise hard. You have your big old ribeye station for dinner. And then you have certain days that are a recovery day where you might say, okay, Sunday, I'm doing meditation, prayer, maybe spending an hour in the sauna reading a spiritual book. And I'm going to fast from Saturday dinner to Sunday at dinner, right? So you've got that day where IGF levels are very low. But then Monday, you might be lifting weights and having a nice cut of salmon or steak. So that's the idea with IGF1. Now, in terms of the actual values, the approximate sweet spot for longevity and performance, if you're looking at IGF1 values on a lab test is between 80 and 150. That's the range that you want to look at for IGF1. If you want to limit your risk for dying earlier for getting cancer from very elevated insulin or IGF1 levels, but still feel good, be able to maintain muscle, be able to maintain libido, body temperature, etc. Okay, number 10 is very, very similar. And.

I could say just about the same things about insulin as I could about IGF1 for the same reasons I just named. You want to pay attention to Insulin, in addition to IGF1 and insulin is of course also important to pay attention to because it is what's going to help partition nutrients that you eat, or specifically things like glucose that you consume into fat or if you liver or into muscle or allow those things to be stored, constantly elevated insulin levels. You've no doubt heard this analogy before. If you constantly have insulin circulating through your bloodstream, your receptors eventually become insensitive to insulin and create insulin resistance or insulin insensitivity. So you want to pay attention to insulin levels. A lot of times a normal blood test isn't showing you insulin, but you want to make sure you get that tested for in addition to your blood glucose. I'll talk to you about blood glucose test later. But you can't constantly measure blood glucose like you can constantly measure insulin. Like this weird thing on the back of my arm here. This is tracking my blood glucose 24 7. It's called the Dexcom G6. At any given point, I can pick up my phone, I can look at my phone, I can get what my blood glucose values are. I can see what a cup of coffee does to it. I can see what, you know, speaking on stage in front of a bunch of grumpy people who didn't get to eat eggs for breakfast does to it. I can't always know what my blood glucose is. They don't make that for insulin. So you actually get a blood insulin evaluation. You ideally want it to be below 3. Some reference range will tell you below 5. I'm a bigger fan of being below 3 international units per deciliter of insulin. Okay, so pay attention to your insulin levels as well. I got two more I want to get into with you here. Number one is called a complete blood count. This is a pretty standard panel that a doctor rows called a CBC with differential. CBC with differential is basically in a nutshell. It's just your white blood cells and your red blood cells. Why is this important? Well, your white blood cells are your immune cells. Your red blood cells are information carriers for things like oxygen and hemoglobin. Now, white blood cells, a consistently high white blood cell count. It's actually shocking how much of a risk there is with a high white blood cell count and increased death at an early age, particularly from cardiovascular dis. If you're looking at things like neutrophils, eosinophils, basophils, all these things that get spat out when you get a complete blood count. If these things are constantly elevated, not only can it indicate that you've got constant inflammation that you have some type of infection. Sometimes you'll see these things elevated with Lyme mold, mycotoxin exposure, etc. But basically the research shows that you will die at an earlier age if you consistently have high white blood cell counts. That's why that's an important one to pay attention to when it comes to very, very low white blood cell counts. A lot of times you'll see like psychological depression or depressed immune system or poor immune system function being associated with that. And there are reference ranges for these. And like I mentioned, increased risk of mortality associated with high white blood cell counts is maintained over 40 years follow up from these tests. So this is a pretty powerful thing to pay attention to. I've got some percentages out here for you because typically your white blood cell counts are reported in terms of percentages.

Neutrophils, you want at 40 to 60% higher than that indicates viruses, autoimmune disease or detox issues. Lymphocytes, you want at 25 to 40%. Higher would be increased risk of illness or chronic infection. Monocyte, 0 to 7% higher would be liver dysfunction, sometimes Epstein Barr, or recovery from it with prostate issues. Eosinophil, 0 to 3 higher than that sometimes indicates food sensitivities, environmental allergies or parasites. Basophils, 0 to 1% higher than that a lot of times indicates histamine intolerance. So here's an example of how you use this. Let's say you test you're constantly showing high white blood cell counts, and in particular, you notice the eosinophils are high. You haven't yet decided that you want to shovel out, say, 500 to $1,000 for something like a Cyrex food allergy panel. But you've seen this on the past two blood tests that you've done, these eosinophils being elevated. So finally you decide, okay, my white blood cell counts are showing. I probably have a pretty high risk of something that I'm eating causing a food allergy or I'm intolerant to something I'm eating. I should go out and get a food allergy test. You can sometimes use some of these cheaper tests like a CBC to give you a pretty good idea of whether or not you should order a more expensive test like food allergy evaluation. I'll get into food allergy testing today as well, by the way. So red blood cells, you're going to see a lot of different values. Your meat crepuscular volume, your mean Corpuscular hemoglobin, your mean crepuscular hemoglobin concentration, red blood cell disease distribution risk, your mean platelet volume, and your platelet distribution width. I don't have time today to get into every single reference range for each of those values, but what I can tell you is that some of the biggest things you want to pay attention to are your red blood cell count, low being anemia, high being a risk factor for essentially like increased blood clotting or thick blood. Erythrocytosis is typically the most common. So for women, 4.2 to 5.4 is a sweet spot for red blood cells. For men, 4.7 to 6.1. For children, 4.1 to 5.5. Those are the main things you want to look at for red blood cells. Make sure that kind of similar to crp, you haven't done heavy exercise going into a CRP test. You want to make sure going into a red blood cell evaluation or complete blood count that you're well hydrated because a lot of times if you're dehydrated, that can throw off values, particularly your red blood cell. Just something to pay to. But complete blood cavity will tell you a lot, as you can see. And then finally there's iron. Iron a lot of times is it's heralded, I think probably because of the sporting industry and the athletic industry and the prevalence of anemia and a lot of far charging athletes, particularly endurance athletes, who have a very high red blood cell turnover. The problem is that in the production of ATP by your mitochondria, you produce what are called lipid peroxides. And in many cases these can result when they interact with iron in the production of hydrogen peroxide, which can essentially act like a rust inside your body. This is a bigger issue in men in particular who don't bleed every month, or in men who aren't endurance athletes who aren't going through a lot of iron. And it's fixable if your iron levels are constantly elevated, or in particular something called ferritin is constantly elevated or ggt, that's gamma glutamyl transferase. This is an enzyme that can indicate that you have low iron turnover if those two numbers, GGT and ferritin, are constantly elevated and iron is constantly elevated. A lot of times guys just need to give blood a couple of times a year, quarterly, and that fixes the issue. But you do not want your iron constantly elevated, especially if you're a man. Increased risk. Look at all these cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Parkinson's. And the problem is that typical reference ranges used by most laboratories for ferritin are 200 to 300 nanograms per milliliter for women and men. Not only is this an issue because they're giving you the same values for two different sexes, but it's also an issue because for lowering the risk of rusting your body from the inside out, you want your ideal levels for adult men and non menstruating women to be between 30 and 60. And ideally you don't want fairer to the below 20 or above 80. Kind of like there's a sweet spot for IGF one of 80 to 150. There's a sweet spot for ferritin between 20 and 80. And like I mentioned, GGT, which is also an enzyme that you can have measured on a blood panel that can indicate excess free iron levels as well. If you're a man, you want that below 16 units per liter. If you're a woman, you want that below nine units per liter. This is a big issue when it comes to heart disease, this issue with iron and is becoming more and more the awareness of the issue with it is becoming more and more prevalent. I think more doctors are going to really start paying attention to ferritin, the GGT and total iron. But it's something that you need to be aware of and that you need to be looking at, especially if you're a man and you're a non menstruating woman. Okay, so now, appropriately enough, before lunch, so you can be all orthorexic about every bite of food that you put into your mouth. We're going to talk about food allergies and food sensitivity and testing for these. Because this is another question that I get in the realm of self quantification. How do I know if I'm allergic to something? You know, let's say my white blood cell counts were constantly elevated and I decided I'm going to get a food allergy test. Do I get the elisa? Do I get the Al cap? Well, I don't recommend many food allergy tests because most of them give you a laundry list of false positives, right? Like the 10 different 8 and a half by 11 sheets of paper that show all the things you're allergic to that you hang in your refrigerator and you open your refrigerator and they're just like a lonely, forlorn like chicken breast and some broccoli because that's all you can eat. Now if you got your food allergy test, the problem is that a Lot of these food allergy tests are not accurate. They're neglecting to test for a variety of things. Nor are they doing a double test for each protein to make sure it's not a false positive result. So what I use is Cyrex. Some of the reasons I use Cyrex, and I'm not financially affiliated with this lab at all, it's just the one I use on myself and all my clients as the gold standard for food allergy testing. They've got 22 different arrays at Cyrex. But for example, the gold standard I use is their array 10C. All the arrays are given different numbers. Array 10C tests for gluten, cross reactivity and food reaction to about 180 different antigens. But they test to certain things. So for example, they use a technology that tests for specific protein concentrations for each antigen. They validate each antigen individually rather than using a reference range to an entire group of different foods. They run, like I mentioned, in side by side duplicates. So they're doing two different tests of each protein. In many cases, what you'll find is that if you eat food that's cooked above a certain temperature, the antigenicity or the allergic reaction to that protein actually decreases. And a lot of these labs, like using a Lisa Alcat methods, they're testing your white blood cell reaction to the uncooked version of that protein. And so if your results show that you're allergic to eggs, all it means is maybe you produce an immune system response to raw eggs or raw chicken, not the cooked version of that. And it's very common. People just do fine with the cooked version, but not the raw version. They test for cross reactivity. So they'll look at certain things that cross react with other things in human tissue called pan antigens, like shrimp tropomyosis or food aquapocorin, or a lot of the things you'll find as additives to soy sauces, condiments, dressings, etc. They look at reactivity, common food combinations. Like they'll tell you, well, you don't have an issue with gluten and you don't have an issue with coffee. But if you consume coffee with your gluten, you get this cross reactivity issue that actually does produce a food allergy reaction. They look at binding isolates like lectins, which you've probably heard about before, agglutinins. They look at some of these plant defense proteins that other companies don't look at. They look at artificial food colors so they'll tell you certain types of processed foods that you may or may not want to be careful with. They'll tell you if you have issues with red, blue, yellow, with a lot of these food colors you probably shouldn't be eating a lot of anyways. But I mean, you might have a really great multivitamin, but they happen to color their capsule blue and you're allergic to that. You don't even know it. So a few other things they test for are oils called oleisins. So they're not just testing for proteins, they're testing some oils that have hidden protein in them. They're looking at transglutaminase, which is actually used to break down milk. And then they're also looking at combining IGA and IGG on the same test. So essentially these are all reasons why I go with Cyrex for food allergy testing. I also use it for some of the mold of mycotoxin testing I'll tell you about shortly. But it's a really great way to test for food allergies. And if you're gonna order food allergy tests, I recommend this one. My only complaint about Cyrex is that you can't yet order this as a test to your own home. It's a blood evaluation that must be ordered by a doctor. But if you have a good doctor, like a functional or integrated medical practitioner, and you tell them, hey, I want to get, let's say Cyrex array 10C as a gold standard standard food allergy test, in many cases they'll order that test for you. There are also labs, there's one that I work with called True Health Labs. Dr. Brady Walsh and or Dr. Brian Walsh and Dr. Brady Hearst, if you call them up on the phone, they can order this test for you. And speaking of Dr. Brian Walsh, by the way, for those of you who in here is a practitioner, a medical practitioner, or has designs of being a medical practitioner, he has a course of blood marker and lab interpretation course that is fabulous. It's like some of the stuff I'm teaching you right now, but I mean like a full on deep dive into blood measurements and in evaluation of lab. So his course is really great too. If you guys dig this stuff and you want to take even deeper dive. Now the cool thing is you can also use microbiome testing for food allergies. For example, some of you have probably done a biome test or heard of longevity. I know that these guys at the Wild Health podcast, they just did a podcast with the guys from Longevity. Both of these are examples of full microbiome evaluations of the gut. And the cool thing is that certain metabolites produced by the bacteria in your gut can also reflect your propensity to certain food allergies. I'll give you some example. If you have decreased, decreased lactobacilli and increased aphylococcus aureus, that's associated with egg and milk allergies. So if you have a full microbiome analysis, how many of you in here have like biome results or longevity results, but back home or on your computer don't even have done like a full microbiome yet? You can learn a lot of cool things, like sometimes for them to test your microbiome and say, well, you're deficient in such and such a probiotic, therefore you ought to take this probiotic to maintain health. There's not a lot of research behind that stuff. But what you can look at are some of the things I'm showing you right now. You can get some interesting data about inflammation, food allergies, food sensitivity, decreased levels of L. Rhamnosis, lkc, L pericase, and bifidobacteria. Those are all accompanied by allergies to cow's milk and egg whites. You can have reduced bacterioids, proteobacteria and actinobacteria. Those are associated with general food allergies and sensitivities. And in many cases, you don't have an autoimmune reaction like an IGA IGE reaction to a food. In cases, or in many cases, it can be your bio like a bacterial imbalance that's affecting your propensity to produce certain histamines and have certain issues in response to certain foods. Lack of microbiome diversity. You get your results back and it just says you have a low amount of bacterial diversity that can increase your capacity to gluten, to fodmap and to histamine production. There are certain species of bacteria that actually can help you with your production of polypeptidases that break down gluten. If you are deficient in those bacteria, sometimes you're not gluten intolerant, you're bacteria deficient. And by replacing or paying attention to these elements of your microbiome, you can fix these issues. You can get back eating bread, for example, or things with food in them, bacterial overgrowth of the small intestine. That's when there's an overall deficit of good bacteria in your gut. That's another thing that you can pay attention to. You risk for something called small intestine bacterial overgrowth or sibo, and then histamine intolerance. Let's say you get a headache after you have a glass of red wine or some kombucha or some fermented food. This can also be aggravated by an overgrowth of histamine producing bacteria. And when you look at the results from microbiome tests like biome or longevity, and these are home tests, it's just a very small swab of your stool. Don't be proud of yourself. I have some clients who are so proud that they managed to shovel a whole heaping teaspoon of stool into the tube and that messes up the results. Pay attention to the instructions when you're hovered over the toilet doing your microbiome analysis. But you can get some very, very good data from your stool that doesn't just indicate like a three day stool panel. Well, you know, I'll talk about the three day stool panel in a second here. We'll come back to that because that will test for different things like yeast, mold, fungus, the microbiome test. You're more looking at the absence or presence of certain bacteria, the bacterial diversity and some amount of inflammatory markers. So that's another one that I recommend that you get. Mold toxicity. Anybody in here familiar with the growing prevalence of mold issue in homes, mold and mycotoxin exposure in food fungus, etc. A lot of these can cause issues with food allergies and they're brought on by mold and mycotoxin exposure. You essentially develop a hyperactive immune system. Things that you weren't allergic to or sensitive to prior to that exposure, you become allergic or insensitive to. So companies like Quest Diagnostics or LabCorp, they can measure the C4A, GTGF, Beta1, MSH, VIP, VEGF and MMP9. Now, I realize there's a lot of acronyms on it, trying to get into all of them along with leptins, but all of these can actually indicate that your body has been exposed to mold or mycotoxins and you might have some amount of mold toxicity present. It's a huge issue. One of the best books that I can recommend to you that I think you can probably get through even if you're not a medical practitioner, is by. It's a relatively new book by Dr. Neal Nathan called Toxins. It's a great walkthrough of the issue with mold and mycotoxins and the multimodal approach that's necessary to get rid of the biofilm and to fix the issue for good because it comes down to a lot more than just say, take an oil of oregano and a full spectrum probiotic or something like that. These are serious issues that take some management Anyways though, Cyrex, like I mentioned, they can do a mold and a mycotoxin panel as well. They're array 11 and array 12. If you just want to get mold, mycotoxins and food allergies all done in one, get array 10C, which is all your cross reactivity, your antigen production to over 180 different foods. And then you can get array 11 and array 12 to look at all these different things like MSH, VIP and VGF and you get a really good picture of whether or not you have mold or mycotoxin issues. And I'm flabbergasted or surprised rather by the number of people I test who have some amount of mold and mycotoxin issues that can and should be addressed. Okay, micronutrients. Most blood panels are going to tell you things like vitamin D or say in many cases rbc, magnesium.

Vitamin E, vitamin A, sometimes vitamin B. You'll usually get B12 and some of these other major vitamins covered. But in many cases, if you have low energy levels, poor sleep, chronic fatigue, gas bloating, poor nutrient absorption, you need what's called a micronutrient evaluation. This is also known more popularly as an organic amino acids evaluation. It tells you a lot about your body. I mean, when I have a client run this, I'm getting like a 20 page report on all the different amino acids, all the different fatty acids, all the different markers of fungus and yeast. You can find out a lot about mitochondrial function, gut function, and overall physiology function with a micronutrient analysis. Just think of this as taking an E deeper dive. I don't have everybody do this test, but for people who I coach, who just want to get the best of the best and learn everything about their bodies, or for people who I'm seeing issues with that I just can't figure out, I'll a lot of times advise them that they should look into getting a micronutrient panel so you can see some things. They look at a full vitamin B complex, all your folic acid, vitamin A, B and D, beta carotene, coenzyme Q10, big one for the mitochondria, all your amino acids, all your fatty acids, all your organic acids, elements for inflammation and oxidation like lipid peroxides and homocysteine. These are markers that go above and beyond Just the hrc, the HSCRP that I talked about, and then compounds with yeast and fungal origins. So you can find out a lot from one of these analyses. The one that I use is called a Metametrics ion panel with 40amino acids. I know that's a mouthful. Put a link to that one in the resources page for this presentation. If you go to what did I say it was? BenGreenfulFitness.com KentuckyCastle19 so that's a good test to get. They're more expensive. These tests sometimes go in excess of a thousand dollars, and because they're so kind of niche, a lot of times aren't covered by insurance. But you can learn a ton about your body even if you just do something like this, you know, once every few years just to make sure there's no lagging micro. Micronutrient issues. There's a lot that you can discover from these micronutrient evals. Okay, gut. I talked about microbiome. What a microbiome test will not look for is the presence of things like yeast, fungus, bacteria, parasites. There's a lot of people who have gut issues who literally have unwanted parasitic critters living in their gut. I'm not necessarily a fan of the idea that all parasites are bad. Many of them are not opportunistic. I mean, I've done helminthic therapy with tapeworms and whipworms and use some of those to modulate my immune system, particularly when I travel. But in many cases, you know, if you want to look at stuff like C. Difficile or H. Pylori or some of these other things that can really affect gut function and mood and sleep, you need to get a stool panel that's not one of these full microbiome analyses, but that's one of these panels where you're literally pooping into the equivalent of a hot dog tray for three days in a row, collecting your stool and sending it off to the lab. And within a couple weeks, you get a PDF to your email inbox that tells you that your shit stinks.

You have issues going on in your gut. And so in many cases, this can tell you everything from inflammation, undigested food particles, presence of metabolites associated with leaky gut. There's a lot of stuff that this does to tell you. The one that I get, you can see here at the top of these results called the GI Effects Comprehensive Stool Panel. And I'm a bigger fan, even though it's more expensive of the three day versus the one day because your stool will change from day to day. This is kind of nasty to think about, but if parasites are shedding, a lot of times if you're just getting one glance on one day, it's not going to give you the full picture versus if you spread out the eval over three days. So that's what I like for the gut. Then we have the jeans, like I mentioned. You know, Mike did a pretty good job giving you guys a very good overview of the jeans. And did you guys record that, by the way? Matt? So that'll be available if someone is listening and they're not in the room. That's also something that's probably going to be available on the Wild Health podcast for you to listen in too. But as far as jeans go, a few of the things that I think are the cool lower hanging fruit, even though there's tons of stuff you can dig into, for example, carbohydrate and fat sensitivity, detoxification ability, antioxidant capacity, muscle fiber composition is a very interesting one. The idea that certain people have higher amounts of fast twitch muscle fiber, certain amounts of people have higher amounts of slow twitch muscle fiber. So some people are power responders versus endurance responders. Dr. Andy Galpin, I forget which university he's at, but he's doing a lot of things with muscle biopsies and figuring out your slow twitch, fast twitch muscle fiber capacity. I work with pro athletes and then completely changing their set rep loading velocity schemes just based on their muscle fiber composition. But if you don't want to go in for a painful needle biopsy, you can at least get a decent glimpse into this. With a basic genetic analysis, you can see whether or not your neurotransmitter production, your comt genes are affecting your dopamine, your serotonin metabolism, whether you're a warrior versus a warrior type of gene. You can look at your ancestry. I mean, there are wonderful books out there like Hundred Years of Food by Dr. Stephen Lee, or the Jungle Effect by Dr. Daphne Miller, or Return to an Ancestral Diet by Dr. Michael Smith. And these books help you look at, okay, did I come from sub Saharan ancestry, Southeast Asian ancestry, Northern European ancestry, what my ancestors eat, and how can I structure my diet accordingly based on my epigenetic expression, what foods I'm actually able to digest and do best with, because this is what my ancestors ate. So there's a lot to be said for just looking at ancestry, just so you can look at the food and the activity and lifestyle habits of your ancestors. So we could spend as Mike and Matt know, hours and hours talking about genes, they have done that. But few of the companies that I use, and my apologies that I use, just had a total brain fart elephant in there. I didn't list Wild Health folks as one of the people who can look at your genes, but you get them tested. DNAFit's a very basic analysis that just gives you a general nutrition and fitness overview of your genetics. Most of these are salivary analysis. You do a salivary swab, you send it into these folks. 23andMe, of course, can test for a limited number of single nucleotide polymorphisms or what I'll call SNPs, but they can still give you a basic idea. You can also go to the website 23andyou.com. 23&you.com has a whole list of different websites you can upload your raw genetic data results to. To take an even deeper dive, just this morning I had some 23andMe raw results come in from one of my clients. I just want to do a quick eval for them. So I uploaded those results to a software called Prometheus, which lets me take a deeper dive into the health data that 23andMe won't release. Yes, I'm working with a limited number of SNPs, but it still gives me a decent idea of some things like, you know, potential for diabetes, celiac disease, etc. Strategy. Dr. Ben lynch, the author of the excellent book Dirty Genes, he looks at nine different genetic pathways that are kind of like the lowest hanging fruit. Nitric oxide synthesis pathways, antioxidant glutathione pathways, sulforation pathways, and gives you a pretty good report that you can read through on your own that indicates the biggest dirty genes that your raw genetic data is indicating that you have more or less of a susceptibility to. Genetic Genie is a great website. Another couple companies I've worked with before is Dr. Bob Miller. He's got Tree of Life. They do a certain type of analysis as well. Probably kind of similar to what these guys at Wild Help are using. And then the DNA company up in Canada, they also do a pretty good analysis as well. And so when I say pretty good analyses, what I'm saying is they're taking your raw genetic data and they're developing a very specific list of exercise, diet supplementation and lifestyle recommendations based on your genetics. Things as simple as my son's back there hiding under the table and he has lower levels of superoxide dismutase and glutathione production capability based on his genetics before school in the morning, it takes a little bit of glutathione. Both of them have the genes responsible for lower levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor bdnf. So they do things like they go in the sauna, sometimes they take lion's mane extract before school. You know, I personally have the same gene. I spent a lot of time doing aerobic walking sunshine. So there are specific lifestyle parameters that you can change based on what your genes are telling you. Those are just two examples. There are many more that I can get into. I and of course the most important, as you've already learned earlier today, is coffee, right? Can I suck down a cup of coffee after noon or can't I? And I'm lucky, I'm a fast caffeine oxidizer. I can drink as much coffee as I want. Okay, a couple of others. I want to go through blood glucose. I mentioned that I wear this Dexcom G6 on the back of my arm. Main thing number one thing I look at with blood glucose is I like my fasted values to generally be below 90. Some people are eating a low carb, very low carb diet. They tend to have slightly lower amounts of insulin sensitivity just because they're not producing as much and they don't need as much. I don't get as worried if I see someone on a low carb diet with values between about 90 and 100 for their fasting values. But general population, I like to see it between about 80 and 90. But more importantly, what you want to pay attention to is your postprandial blood glucose. So the number that I look for is two hours after a meal. My levels are less than 120. A lot of doctors will tell you 140. I think that's too high after a meal. Whether you're testing your blood glucose with a finger prick or whether you're wearing a continuous blood glucose monitor, which if you approach your doctor and you tell them you're concerned about your risk for type 2 diabetes, a lot of times you can get a prescription for a lot of times you can get that covered by insurance. It just sends your blood glucose constantly to your phone so you can check in on it anytime. Healthy fasting blood sugar, like I mentioned, 70 to 99. Dexcom G6 is the one that I wear. I was having a conversation with somebody about this a few minutes ago during the break. The nice thing I like about the Dexcom is it's also low EMF for those of you concerned about like constantly having a bluetooth signal or a WI fi signal on your body? So it tests low for EMF and it gives you a constant data number. One thing to look for is 70 to 99 for your fasting glucose and especially within two hours after a meal. Has my blood Glucose drop below 120? Ketones are another thing I get a lot of questions about. This is something that I measure. I have a breath ketone monitor in my office. There are also companies now like Keto Mojo that are coming out with very cheap, like less than a dollar versus dollar four a strip cheap ways to test your blood ketones. A lot of times people will test via urine. The problem is if you're following a low carbohydrate diet or if you're trying to get into ketosis. The more and more efficient that you do at utilizing ketones, the less and less of this thing called acetoacetate is going to wind up in your urine and so you'll see less ketones even though you're in ketosis just fine. So urine isn't a good measurement. Breath is pretty good. They've done a lot of correlative studies and have found that the levels of ketones in your breath, the levels of acetate in your breath correlate pretty well with the levels of beta hydroxybutyrate in your bloodstream. So doing a simple breath measurement allows you to not have to test your blood on a frequent basis, but it also allows you to get a decent idea whether or not you're in ketosis. And there are companies like Ketonix Keto that's K, U, Y, T, L and also level. I have actually all three of those because I just get random shit. So my house all the time. But they can all give you a decent idea of your breath acetone levels and tell you whether or not red light, green light, yellow light if you're in, near or out of ketosis. Gold standard though, like I mentioned, is blood. If you really truly want to maintain a state of ketosis, which would indicate that your brain, your liver, your heart, your diaphragm are getting a very stable, slow burning fuel available to them that's also very good for anti inflammation simulates a lot of what we get. We're in a fasted state increases cellular autophagy. There's a lot of reasons that having a high amount of ketones or being good at utilizing ketones is a good idea. Blood's the gold standard for that and you can simply do like a blood Measurement. When you get up in the morning and before you go to bed at night, get a decent idea of your ketones. So ideally for true metabolic efficiency ketones believe between 0.5 and 3, blood glucose between 70 and 99, you can measure those two values. You're going to learn a lot. Okay? HRV and readiness. This is what you want to pay attention to if you have some type of device that can quantify your body. I use an aura ring. A lot of people use a wristband called a whoop. The problem with, like the average Fitbit, for example, or jawbone, is they don't actually dig into your nervous system. They don't tell you what is called your heart rate variability. But what this allows me to do is know at any given point throughout the day how stressed my body is, how prepared my body is to train, how good of a job my sympathetic and my parasympathetic nervous system are doing, being coordinated, how toned my vagus nerve is and how well that's innervating the sinoatrial nerve of my heart, meaning cardiovascular function. There's a lot that you can learn from HRV and readiness. So these are all the different values that something like an OURA ring uses to calculate my readiness score. How good was my sleep the night before? How balanced has my sleep been over the past week? How much activity did I do the day prior? What was the activity balance of that activity based off my activity on other days? What's my body temperature, which is very important. Right. A lot of times your readiness will be low when you wake up in the morning because you've had meat sweats all night or the room was too cold. Resting heart rate, and especially your recovery index, which is how good a job your heart rate is doing, recovering and dropping low after exercise. And then finally, heart rate variability, which is a measurement of the difference in time between each beat of your heart, which indicates good interplay between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system. Okay, so these are all eight factors that go into calculating a morning HRV or readiness score. You can look at all these individually. One of the reasons I wear the OURA ring is because I can just wake up in the morning and I can dig into each of these numbers individually if I want to, but it can also just say your readiness score. My readiness score today was at about 80, not super high, but my sleep score was really high. I got great sleep last night, but it was so high because I took 26,000 steps yesterday. Right? So it looked at my step count and said, okay, you have very high, disproportionately high amount of activity. Yesterday you had good sleep and you should be careful not exercising too much. Which is why I'm not wearing my weighted vest right now in my backpack with the kettlebells in it. It's the only reason usually I wear that on stage. You get a really good idea of how your body's doing each day. The other thing is sleep. Sleep can also be measured. And these are the parameters that I look at with sleep. Again, I use the OURA ring to do this. Total sleep sleep efficiency, meaning a lot of times you can be laying in bed for nine hours, but you is six and a half hours of sleep. Right? That's poor sleep efficiency. Sleep disturbances, how many times you wake up during the night. REM sleep, which is where a lot of our memory consolidation and learning is going to occur. And then deep sleep, which is where a lot of nervous system and muscular repair and recovery is going to occur. We want adequate levels of both sleep latency, which is how long it takes you to fall asleep. Your head hits the pillow and you're asleep in three minutes. Your sleep latency score is going to be great. If you lay awake with racing thoughts and it takes 37 minutes, your sleep latency is going to be poor. And then sleep timing. How's your sleep architecture based on your circadian rhythm? Are you going to bed at 9:30 and getting up at say 5:30 on a regular basis? Are you 11 one night? Nine? Another night, 1:00am Another night? That would indicate poor sleep balance and poor sleep timing. So there's a lot of things to pay attention to that go beyond just, was I in bed for eight hours tonight? Do I wake up and I'm not sore tonight? These are all ways that we can quantify our body. And it's easier and easier to do now in this day and age. So I really don't think there's any reason that you shouldn't be quantifying things like sleep and hrv. I've got two more slides to show you here.

So we're on the home stretch. The first is telomeres. A lot of people want to know if you can actually measure the telomeres, the end caps on your DNA to figure out whether or not your telomeres are shortening at too rapid of a pace. Because generally you have adequate levels of telomerase, an enzyme in your body that regulates telomere length. Your telomeres are shortening at not too rapid of a pace. This would indicate that attempts you're making to increase your health span, or more specifically, your lifespan, your longevity are actually paying off. Now, telomere testing is a little bit of the wild, wild west right now. A lot of times they're just testing, for example, the telomeres on your on your white blood cells. Off single drop of blood. You tend to get results from different labs that come back telling you different telomere lengths. For a long time, I was pretty hot on using telo years. But I recently interviewed Dr. Bill Andrews. Excellent podcast on all the different things that can help keep your telomeres long. Go listen to my podcast with Dr. Bill Andrews if you haven't yet. But he likes repeat diagnostics and life length as the top two ways to measure your telograph, which you can do on a yearly basis to find out what your biological age is compared to your chronological age. Like maybe you're chronologically 60, but biologically you're telling your leg shows you're 49. Great. Or you could be chronologically 30 and your biological age. And I see this 60, 70, because you have rampant inflammation, glucose, all these elements that are increasing the rate at which you tell them you're short. You can actually test this. And then finally, there's a company called Osiris Green. They're not testing your telomere length, but what they actually look at is on a frequent basis, you send in a test of that and it looks at epigenetic changes in your DNA expression over time. That's also kind of a cool metric that you can use. It's very similar to telomere analysis to track your aging, how fast you're aging or how slow you're aging. And then finally, how the heck do you keep track of all this stuff, right? Like, do you just have like a folder on your computer where you're storing all your lab results? Are there websites where you can upload all these results to one single platform to be able to look at them? Well, there's a few different ways to go about doing this. The company Heads Up Health is pretty good. That's an online software. I believe they have an app too. You can upload all your lab results, keep track of things like your Apple health data, et cetera. Just put it all into something like Heads Up Health. It'll keep track of a lot of that for you human os. They are a company that do a lot of good health education. They're in the process of building out metric tracking, lab tracking, self quantification tracking into their system as well. So if anything, you can just subscribe to their newsletter and kind of find out when that kind of stuff becomes available on their site. WellnessFX, that's the platform that I've used for a very long time to upload all my lab data or to get tested and to have it all appear in one single spot. All my blood biomarkers, etc. Longevity is kind of like the up and coming new replacement for Wellness fx. You can go listen to the podcast, or to the podcast that Matt and Mike did with Longevity, or my podcast with Longevity, and you can basically learn how they're allowing you to take your gut microbiome, your salivary information, your blood information, etc. And have that all exist on one platform rather than having all this disparate info spread all over the place. Trainingpeaks is another one. That's what I use to track a lot of the exercise and a lot of the recovery metrics for the clients that I coach. And then finally Dropbox, like you can literally have just a single Dropbox folder. And the cool thing is, I'll tell you exactly what I do. All my lab results from any company go directly into a Dropbox folder. I can then upload those to a Longevity platform or Wellness FX platform. And then my Oura ring data, like my sleep and my HRV and my food data that just goes straight into my phone on an app. When I'm coaching a client, it's very simple. I have access to their training piece, so I've got all their workout and their exercise information. I have access to their Oura ring, so I've got access to all their sleep and HRV information they take. They have a private Instagram account, they share their food logs with me every single day. And then I keep all of their lab information on Dropbox. And that allows me to just have everything in just a few different spots and keep track of blood and biomarkers on Dropbox, HRV and sleep on the Oura ring data, food on Instagram, and exercise on training fees. So I can juggle four different things. That's generally the same approach that I use myself.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

Sa.