Dr. Casey Means

their entry into the cell.

So now you've got glucose rising in the bloodstream.

So, okay, fasting glucose, that was one of our biomarkers.

If that's going up, that is a little bit of that tapestry of maybe something's going on inside the cell that's blocking the entry into the cell, so it's rising in the bloodstream.

Okay, well, where's all that?

The body does not want lots of glucose floating around in the bloodstream because it can literally independently cause endothelial dysfunction, which is basically blood vessel problems.

It can cause oxidative stress in the bloodstream.

It can cause glycation, which is sugar literally just sticking to things.

The body doesn't want that glucose high in the bloodstream, so it converts it to triglycerides to be stored in a storage form of energy.

That's a key point that I think is helpful to understand is that the body, it's always trying to kind of keep things in the right range, so it'll convert things.

So then triglycerides, a picture in your blood of glucose being high and triglycerides being high,

is very much should signal to everyone when they look at their labs that there's probably something going on inside the cell that's blocking the cell from being able to use and process.

It's a sign of mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic overnutrition.

Too much substrate, not enough processing, glucose is going to go up, triglycerides are going to go up.

And so then if you kind of squint and read the tea leaves, it's like, huh, I think metabolic dysfunction.

And what's fascinating is that the travesty in our healthcare system is that a patient might go into the doctor and their fasting glucose is 99, one point under what we'd consider the normal range, and their triglycerides are 149, one point under what we'd consider the normal range from these things.

That doctor might say to that patient, you're totally fine.

Both glucose and triglycerides are normal.

But that's just really problematic because they're on the upper end of normal for both of those.

And so really what that would say to me as someone thinking about the mitochondria is like, this person is definitely metabolically dysfunctional.