Will Checking Your Blood Routinely Have Much Of An Impact On Your Health?

I get asked a lot, do I think that checking your blood routinely is going to have much of an impact on your health?

I'm Megan, a nurse practitioner, the CEO and founder of Rejuve Health. Yes, I think it is essential to not only test your blood but to test it routinely.

Why should you test your blood and what should you be testing for?

We often refer to blood testing as biomarker testing and a biomarker put simply is just a measurable substance or molecule to track a current state of health. Blood work or biomarker testing is essential to understanding your current health status and your future health trajectory. At Rejuve Health, this is a cornerstone of our offerings and an essential first step when becoming a patient here. We track biomarkers because they can tell us an essential first step of where we're going to put our focus in order to prevent disease. 

This means rather than watch and wait, we can proactively treat your biomarkers years before disease begins. This is why we are such a huge proponent of biomarker testing. For example, when you begin an intervention, you want to track its effectiveness. 

Fasting is a great way to impact the value hemoglobin A1c or otherwise known as HA1c. 

We know the research supports that fasting can improve your hemoglobin A1c. Improved hemoglobin A1c levels can lead to lower levels of inflammation.  It can lead to increased insulin sensitivity. We can also see levels of testosterone improve for both men and women. We also see visceral fat reduction, which is the lead causing indicator of metabolic disease, heart disease, and just general chronic disease. 

Impacting and improving your levels of hemoglobin A1c can help reduce an all-cause mortality. 

What does this mean? We're reducing all risks of anything that's essentially going to kill you. So why not look and try biomarker testing and specifically hemoglobin A1c levels? There's a few other biomarkers that I really like to check and that I routinely check in the office and I'm confident that you're probably not getting these levels checked. 

First and foremost, what is oftentimes missed is thyroid autoimmune antibodies. We see this missed all the time in clinical practice. Why? Because it's oftentimes expensive and two, a lot of people don't know what to do when they get these numbers back and they're positive. 

We want to understand if you have positive antibodies against your thyroid because this isn't necessarily the cause of thyroid disease but a symptom of thyroid disease and thyroid disease is a symptom of a bigger problem of leaky gut syndrome and that's why it's critically important to check zonulin levels. Zonulin levels are found in the inner linings of your gut wall. We know that high levels of zonulin lead to increased levels of inflammation, increased levels of disease, and certainly increased chances of autoimmune thyroid disease. 

So oftentimes these numbers go hand in hand. If you have elevated levels of autoimmune thyroid disease, you have elevated levels of zonulin as well.

The other value that I like to check is fasting insulin. 

Fasting insulin is a component of aging and the higher your levels of fasting insulin are, the likelihood and the speed of rate of aging is going to be increased. So we know that high levels of insulin correlate to higher levels of aging and faster rates of aging. The other thing that is really important to check is your genetics. 

Genetics tell you what you're predisposed to developing, whether that's heart disease, cholesterol, things like autoimmune, methylation patterns, and we know that genetics don't necessarily cause or correlate to a disease, but they can help trigger and cause you to develop disease a little bit faster than the average person. The other thing that's critically important or other biomarkers that I like to check are food sensitivities. Everyone is going to have different levels of food sensitivities at a different state of their life because what I'm eating versus what someone else is eating is going to be different and what's causing inflammation in me and what's causing inflammation in my counterpart, it's going to also be different. 

So understanding what foods, even though they might be healthy, could actually be causing correlating levels of inflammation internally for you. This also leads to gut microbiome testing, looking at what types of bacteria do you have in your gut and it's not just what types of bacteria, what are the corresponding levels of bacteria. Oftentimes we can test for parasites, we can see different levels of viruses, bacteria, and we want to make sure that just like a household, everyone is in check. 

So looking at your gut microbiome for parasites, bacteria, and also viruses. And last, but certainly not least, is a total hormone profile. We don't just want to check individual levels like testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone.

We want to look at things like IGF-1. We want to look at things like pregnenolone and DHEA and cortisol because all of these hormones play a part in not only just disease, but certainly how you feel. And so looking at a complete hormone panel is going to predict just that, how you feel.

So if you care about your health and you care about your longevity, you absolutely need to check your biomarkers and check them routinely, particularly if you've started a new diet, you've added in a new intervention, started a new supplement, so that we can track its effectiveness and evaluate your risk for disease.