Dr. Ben Bikman

The fact that we don't include insulin on that panel is an absolute travesty.

It is, in my mind, the best overlooked marker.

So fasting insulin, if a person can get their fasting insulin measure, do it.

If that measurement is six microunits per mil or less, it's a great sign.

If it's up to about the mid teens or high teens, that's maybe an okay sign, because insulin can be dynamic.

But then if it's in the high teens to the 20s, it's a problem.

That's a warning that you're metabolically off.

And then let's come back to some of the common ones.

The triglyceride to HDL ratio is a great surrogate marker for not only metabolic and like insulin resistance, but also cardiometabolic where we focus so much on LDL, for example, but the triglyceride to HDL ratio is a way better predictor for cardiovascular risk than LDL is.

So triglyceride to HDL ratio,

So you take your triglycerides, which you're always going to get on a blood test, and divide it by your HDL cholesterol, which you're always going to get on a blood test.

If that number is less than 1.5, that's a great sign that you're doing well metabolically.

And then...

Maybe uric acid is another one, although I could go on.

But I did mention uric acid.

It's another one of those that really well done longevity study, the Amortis study from Sweden.

It looked it found that uric acid was one of the very few predictors that when they looked retrospectively at these people measuring the same markers for decades, their glucose control was a predictive variable and their uric acid was a predictive variable as to who lived the longest, healthiest lives.

So lower uric acid is going to be better.

Yeah.

So I do too.