Dr. Mark Hyman

I'm looking for relationships between things.

I'm looking for root causes.

So instead of like looking for, oh, do we have a diagnosable disease that shows up on a lab test?

Do you have like megaloblastic anemia that comes from severe B12 deficiency?

Maybe not, but maybe you have a subtle change in the size of your red blood cells that's creeping up

that indicates that you might have a B12 deficiency that's an early on one that's not so severe.

And so you can look at these things like insulin.

You might see insulin should be, you know, the reference range is 18 on the lab, but it should be less than five.

So if it starts to go from five to 10, you're like, oh, you're getting in trouble over 10, more serious over 20, you're in big trouble.

So really how to look at subtle things, a thyroid, subtle shifts in thyroid, subtle shifts in inflammation, subtle shifts...

in your insulin-related lipids, which are particle size, particle number.

All these things really help you identify what's going on.

And they're beautiful because we can actually not just measure one point in time, we can actually track things over time in a systematic way.

And that tells you some really important data.

So like, for example, like you might see your blood sugar is 95 and the doctor goes, oh, that's fine.

But your insulin's a little high.

Your triglycerides are going up, which is a sign of prediabetes.

Inflammation's going up a little bit.

And these are clues that things are really going off the rails long before you actually become diabetic.

So really important to start tracking these things, subtle changes over time, and tracking it against you because everybody's different.