Dr. Casey Means

No sugar stuck to them, causing dysfunction.

And because blood cells last for about 9 to 120 days, hemoglobin A1C is giving us basically a snapshot of average blood sugar levels over 9 to 120 days.

And if that average is higher, again, probably a sign that cells are rejecting glucose from the cell and it's causing a rise in the bloodstream.

And then...

Just talking about one other biomarker in that that we talked about, which was blood pressure, people might say, well, how does blood pressure relate to like what's going on inside the cell, you know, in the mitochondria and whatnot?

And a really the fascinating link is that when that cell becomes insulin resistance, which, again, is a compensatory mechanism for mitochondrial dysfunction.

the insulin is going to rise in the blood because the body's insulin resistant.

So the body's going to churn out more insulin to try and overcome the insulin block to drive the sugar into the cells.

So insulin levels rise.

Well, insulin is one of the key activators of nitric oxide, which is the molecule in the blood that dilates and relaxes blood vessels.

And so when we become insulin resistant and we're not responding to that insulin signal,

we end up getting less nitric oxide activity.

So this is how kind of looking at even these very basic, very cheap biomarkers through the lens of basic cellular physiology, we can start to see, man, my body might be like underpowered.

I might have a mitochondrial issue here.

So that's a few of those tests that we really want to shoot for.

Yeah, truly.

And I think the nice thing about these, again, very basic tests, and there are so many other tests that I talk about in my book and that you've talked about on your podcast, ApoB, uric acid, fasting insulin, HOMA-IR, HSCRP.

liver function tests, GGT, all these other tests that are great that can really tell us more about mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation.

But the ones I'm mentioning are the ones that you will not have to fight with your doctor about.

Everything I just mentioned, the doctor should order on an annual physical.