Rare Disease Discovered With At Home Blood Test (LIFE SAVING)

We actually found a lot of things that we weren't even aware of when we launched the product. So like a very good example is we started getting occasionally people with a ferritin. Ferritin is the protein that carries iron in your blood. Actually you're not supposed to have that much of it in your blood. It's mostly in your cells. So if it's very high, like if it's elevated, it's usually inflammatory because your cells are breaking up and releasing this ferritin into your blood. But we've started seeing people with super high ferritin, like 10 times normal. And it turns out that there is a semi genetic condition. I always mispronounce it, but it's like hemochromatosis I think, which basically takes like 10 or 15 years off your life that people don't catch until they're really sick. And you can catch it just by measuring this one protein, which is a relatively common. Again, these are not like magic in the corner biomarkers studied in some lab, like some. These are. Ferritin is like gold standard normal. Typically it's low in anemia. So they'll measure it like in pregnant women because sometimes pregnant women get anemia. But yeah, you have these kind of unicorns that have super high ferritin. And for them, you know, they take this test, it's whatever. I mean it's not very cheap, it's whatever, a hundred dollars, right? So it's not free. But I mean they take this test and they've now gotten their ferritin down. So they go. And it's actually pretty easy to treat. I think mostly what they do is just have them give blood. I've heard that too.

A couple times a year just give blood and everything gets recycled.

Yeah, there's one guy who actually wrote this whole long post on LinkedIn about how we basically, you know, helped him get a decade of extra healthy life. Right. So he was feeling terrible. He had gone through a bunch of like, he had had a couple of surgeries from like dirt biking or something and nobody had ever like getting hurt dirt biking. Nobody just ever measured his ferritin. Like even when he had, he was complaining of like different symptoms that are associated with this. He just never got it measured. And then of course he didn't buy our test looking for that. He just bought it like, I don't feel that great. Right. And we weren't even to be just completely honest. We're technologists, right? We do blood tests. We covered a lot of the major chronic diseases we even aware of this one? You know, like when in all of our interviews with, you know, advisors, doctors, whatever, nobody even brought this up and it turns out to be a relative. I mean, it's somewhat rare, but it's, it's common enough that we're finding people like this. And then you have a bunch of other things of that flavor. Right? So all these like relatively rare conditions, they add up. Right? And that's why it's nice to do a broad panel, because you can, I mean, another simple one that people don't look at that much is Trig hdl. And so you get Trig HDL from your doctor as well. So if you do like a yearly, they just don't, I don't think they usually actually show you the ratio. So you can take trig out and, you know, divide it by hdl.

And by Trig you mean Triglycerides.

Triglycerides, yeah, triglycerides hdl. Very predictive of metabolic health. And we see that, you know, if you look at the whole data set, we really see that Trig HDL is very predictive even when we just look at the person's bmi, right? Like, are they in normal shape? People with poor BMI are going to have that Trig HDL out of range. And that's something that lots of studies support it. You know, if you just look at your LDL or whatever, it's really trig HDL and even HBA1C, which is like the standard sugar marker. So it's the average of your last 90 days of sugar. That's how it works. So it's a protein that kind of sugar attaches to it has a 90 day lifetime. So the amount of this protein that has a sugar on it correlates to how much sugar is in your blood over the last 90 days. Wow. And that's a really good one. That's a standard one. It gets measured every year. So if you look at your yearly blood test, if you're getting one, it's on there. Typically they won't really talk to you about it until you're very close to diabetic. Right. So it's like going up, going up, going up. Nobody says anything. And then it's like, oh, actually you're getting diabetes. Right. But anyway, that's a later marker. So you can still have like pretty good glucose control, but already be very metabolically out of whack. And Trig HDL as well as fasting insulin are going to be much earlier and sometimes more accurate. Also so it's having this kind of like broad panel allows you to look at these things and sometimes one of them is fine, but another one is not because again, people are all different. It also depends on other things in your diet and lifestyle and even the day you take the test. Right. So there's variability. Sure. If you're taking 10 tests in a decade, that variability of like for example, testosterone and cortisol, those rise. If you have a normal circadian rhythm, those are going to rise every morning. So when you go into the doctor and you get your test, even just the variability, like if you're not able to take the test at a precise time every time, or if you didn't.

Get sleep or if your kid was keeping you up, I've been in that world.

Exactly. So if you have, if you can control when you take the test, if you say, okay, I'm always going to take the test one hour after waking, I'm going to take it on days where I've had like a normal day, normal sleep, that data is going to be much more accurate. Because otherwise you're just measuring noise. Right? You're measuring like how long did it take the phlebotomist to get to you? Right. So like an hour later or whatever it is, you know, you wait in line and then the number is different and what do you do with that information?

Right. That's a big one. It's a big one. Because if we can do a check in for ourselves three times a year, maybe four times a year, that truly, and I really mean this, like from my own life experience, I'm 43. So like I've been in this world since 2002, was my first year as a fitness trainer. So, so it's been well over 20, almost 25 years. And when I look at the whole gamut of clients I used to work with, my own self, people I coached online, people that have sat in this studio, what comes up every single time is what gets measured, gets managed. If you measure something, I don't care if it's like your business, even your relationships, your physical health, if you have some kind of a window, every successful business owner in the world, this is why I don't understand, this is why I'm so stoked on our podcast. I, I cannot understand why this conversation has not exploded across the entire nation. Because every single business, I don't care if you're like a mom and pop shop or a multi billion dollar company, everybody takes inventory. Everybody has a P and L. Everybody has some kind of tracking system. If you don't, you're screwed. If you don't have a tracking system, you're screwed. So, like, this conversation's really near and dear to me because I think about my father struggled with health. My Grandpa died at 80 of chronic heart failure. On both my parental and maternal side, there have been all these conditions that, honestly, if they were to just take a look throughout their life, maybe they'd still be with us, or definitely they'd be with us for longer. Like, there's a heartstring here for me, and there should be a heartstring here for all of us, that if we're actually taking an honest look at how we're showing up in our biomarkers, then our lives can be extended by 10, 20, even 30 years. You mentioned the ferritin. Is there anything else that you've had come across your desk of, like, clients or research or things that you just looked at and you're like, holy shit, this person just added so much time on their life because this one biomarker showed us they have to take this easy step to basically treat themselves, heal themselves.

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