all right hi everybody john meadows here and today we're going to talk about something a little different we're going to talk about blood work it's a popular topic and it should be a popular topic because it's very important now one of the challenges i used to have maybe seven or eight years ago is i used to go to my doctor and who was very good with blood work but i would get very comprehensive labs done and then i would get these notices in the mail that my insurance wouldn't cover it and it was very expensive usually was anywhere from 700 to a thousand dollars for the test i was getting and it was um there was a long length of time where i had to wait to even get the results it was it kind of turned into a pain so what i did was i noticed a company out there called direct labs and direct labs was really cool because the process is is you pay for the lab tests that you want done online and then you print out it's a requisition form and then you walk into like for us we walk into a quest diagnostics but you walk in there with a piece of paper and you hand it to them they look at it they take your blood you go home i'm never there more than five minutes and then maybe three to five days later you get your blood work the results sent to you in a document and i printed some of those out actually today to show you so the process was really good it was real easy so buy the labs that you want done online print off the requisition and then take the requisition in to uh in my case against quest diagnostics they draw your blood three to five days later you get the results back and you can see your labs and the other bonus was it was much more affordable so what i was paying 700 to a thousand dollars for i could now get for somewhere between three and four hundred dollars and so i did that for many years and then i just randomly asked him one day is there any way i could kind of customize test to maybe take some things out that i'm not interested in maybe put some more things in that i'm interested in and they said sure so i was like wow this is really cool so now what i have is i have a link i'm actually going to put it in the description and if you go in that link you'll see you can get an advanced panel or a basic panel the advanced panel just has i'm actually going to go through it and show you what you'll get tested and then the basic panel is a little bit less and a little bit less but it's still a really good test now of course i can't get everything like i know that some people watch this and say well why don't you have this this and this i mean at some point you know there's things i wanted in there like glycomark is a really good marker but it was an extra 100 on the test so overall i think it's a good combination of things so i'm going to put um i'm going to walk through these with you just so you can see what i get tested so i'm going to start here this is the advanced panel of course the testosterone on here uh is certainly very important for guys you'll see that and you scroll down you see the lipid panel cholesterol 105 hdl 34 triglycerides 89 ldl54 now my um my hdl is actually 41 now and the triglycerides and ldl the triglycerides so for a lipid panel what i try to think of is i try to keep the hdl up and triglycerize down that's the advice i always got from dr serrano and some of the other really smart people around here then you get obviously you get the ratio and then down below that there's hscrp that's high sensitivity c reactive protein a really good marker for inflammation now i know some people say well that can be acute it could be you have a cold or something but just generally speaking it's a real good marker for inflammation of course there's a lot of pretty good evidence to support the inflammation can have really um bad effects when your arteries artery health and things like that so that hscrp is one of the good markers that i encourage everybody to get then i go to page two here uh you'll see homocysteine actually that's another inflammation marker but i i took it out so the new advanced panel doesn't have that and you'll see what i put in this place and then the metabolic panel i mean glucose i mean that's obviously very important to watch it's not just glucose it's some other items below that we'll get into and then you know you'll see you'll see urea nitrogen blood urea nitrogen creatinine egfr that stains for a glomerular filtration right those are all really good in that indented ratio of b when decorating those are really good indicators for kidney health sometimes people since you have to fast they get a little dehydrated so you'll see that bun number come up mine's actually always been really good the crab 9 sometimes gets a little high that's just that can be influenced by muscle size so if you carry a lot of bit you carry a lot of muscle then and even taking creatine will make the grad 9 reading come up i remember one time years ago i failed a an insurance physical because my creatine i was out of range and i was taking it was just five grams of creatine at the time and i quit taking it and had a retest in two weeks and it had fallen right back in line where it's supposed to be but those are those are good for kidney function and then you know you kind of go on down the list there you'll see bilirubin alkaline phosphatase ast and alt those are pretty good indicators for liver health the ast and alt will sometimes get a little bit elevated just from just from the stress of training so if those are a little bit out of range there's no need to panic i've had a lot of people come to me and say oh my ast is 55 and normal is 10 to 40 it's not a big deal any good doctor will tell you that's not a big deal now if it starts going 150 200 250 now we've got some problems you may want to get some liver scans done but those are just good to watch for liver health these this so that's on the panel hemoglobin a1c that okay so i mentioned glucose is it's a good number it's fasting glucose to keep an eye on hemoglobin a1c is even better because hemoglobin a1c is um it's it's not an acute measure so it's not just what your blood sugar is in the morning it's an average level of blood glucose over 90 days so it gives you a little bit more of a broad picture over 90 days as opposed to just one time at one point in time so that's a really good indicator you want to be below 5.7 moving on to the next page you'll see uh fibrinogen actually i had fibrinogen taken out too and replaced with something else so right above that tsh that's a decent test uh for thyroid it tells you how hard your pituitaries has to work to make thyroxine you want that number to be low you don't want it to be up in that four or five six category that's that's not a good thing um and by the way the new the the replacements that i have i'm going to show you here in a minute then you got the blood count uh that's that's the red blood cell count and hemoglobin hematocrit those are certainly all things that can get out of range as well then you got all the white different white blood cells and different things below that very very good to get tested ferritin's below that um i've had my ferritin get pretty low uh when i was donating blood a lot and then it actually got a little bit low when i got out of the hospital uh last year too and uh below that you have dhea sulfate dha is really interesting it's a it's an anti-aging kind of hormone it's how people view it it's actually um it's a hormone secreted in your adrenal glands a little bit in your testis and ovaries but uh it has a lot to do with stress and i can tell you when i got to the hospital last may my dha was very low you can see the range here is 70 to 4.95 and mine's 460. it was down to like 80 or 90 when i got out of the hospital and um i showed dr serrano that he went through the you know how it's a precursor and he was all those different stress hormones how it gets drained okay and below below dhea there's another really really important one insulin fasting insulin so i know a lot of people in our industry are just just obsessed with measuring your blood glucose but that's only part of the story and i will tell you that when people just worry about that they're they don't see the big picture you can have perfectly normal fasting blood glucose but it's just because you could have your pancreas cranking out tons of insulin like all the time which makes that look normal but if you were to look at someone's fasting insulin and it's really high that means okay things are okay now but we're on a course that could be bad so eventually your pancreas cranking out insulin non-stop it could get would say tired and you could have some issues there so fasting insulin to me is also one of my top top things to look at so this the crp number i mentioned is really really key the fasting insulin is really really really key certainly your hormones your testosterone things like that but i wanted to mention fasting insulin too because i think uh you know you see a range right there you want it below 19.6 minus a 10. you want to keep that in range if you see that climbing then you know you could be headed for some issues then the next page progesterone and estradiol master dial is a little bit high maybe that's why i'm so emotional all the time and then last page i wanted you to see this because there's a little bit of a story behind this so my vitamin d my vitamin d on this test is 28 and that is not good that sucks that's terrible and you know most uh most people who live in a non-tropical climate especially if you're a pale white face like i am you'll have low vitamin d levels but um i want to show you or i want to tell you about something i did to bring that up and i want to show you so this was this is the advanced panel but what i did was i recently remember i told you i could take things out and put things in so i took out the homocysteine i took out the fibrinogen and what i did was i added free t3 free t3 is is pretty cool it's another it's a much better indicator of thyroid health it's not even necessarily thyroid health is conversion of the inactive thyroid the active thyroid so a lot of your thyroid is hormones are bound to protein in your blood and what you don't have bound is called free that means it's biologically active so what i did i'm going to show you a clip of that on here down at the middle you'll see free t3 um so that i added on so you'll see that if you order this blood work oh and then by the way down there my testosterone 566 is a little bit lower in this one than it was on the other one but then above that okay so i wanted to wrap up with this one above that you'll see the vitamin d and you'll see that's 50 in this test this is a recent test i just had done now what i did um i've struggled really mightily with getting that vitamin d in range and i've done up to seven thousand units a day just constantly it didn't budge it didn't budge so what i did was i actually took a hundred thousand ius on sundays that's it just on sundays for four weeks and then i pulled it back to about 35 000 um a week and boom it's 50 which is you know middle of the range that's good and i'll and i'll tell you this i actually feel i think i feel better and i think it's actually made a difference mentally and how i feel you know you you read all the time about low vitamin d levels how they can result in depression and all these other issues and i know what i'm not telling you to do this by the way i'm just telling you what i did you know that megadose of vitamin d on sundays it's a it's a fat soluble hormone you don't need to take it every day and i've talked about this with some doctors too and this is kind of standard to what a lot of the really good doctors do now they just hit you with a big bolus of it once a week but it worked for me and you can see the number it got a lot better it didn't go out of range i'm not going to get toxic and die from having too much vitamin d way too many people worry about overloading with fat soluble vitamins the reality is is the way we eat our diets we don't get enough fat soluble vitamins as it is so you don't have to worry about unless you're eating like you live in antarctica and you eat whale blubber all the time like you're not going to worry about getting toxic levels of vitamin d so that's what i want to show you so this is like if you order these tests these are the ones that you'll see and um and this is the advanced panel the basic panel doesn't have quite all this but if you go to that link i sent you it'll tell you exactly what you get out of your test but i wanted to give you an alternative and i wanted to show you what i look for because i get a lot of people asking you know what should i get tested i think these are pretty good again this isn't everything um but it you know this advanced panel is 300 some dollars so you can get more um and we could ramp this thing up to where it costs you 700 or a thousand dollars which is what i used to get charged but i i wanted to i think this is pretty comprehensive this is this is a this is a good deal for you so that's it simple video just uh hopefully this will help you for those of you who are concerned about your blood work or maybe you're not concerned you just want to do a checkup once a year either way it's always good to pay attention to your health take it from me man at any time things can change so i hope you find this helpful uh and again we're going to have the links to the website in the video so if any of you want to order a test you can do that now i will tell you this i do get a commission on these so if all 485 000 let me order this i'll be rich so anyways i do get a commission on this just so you know so that's it i appreciate you listening and we'll see you next time