On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
30 Apr 2025
Why is understanding your metabolic biomarkers essential for health?
And I'm like, I know I'm young and healthy, but I want to stay young and healthy. And I believe that requires a bit more effort than me saying I'm young and healthy. It doesn't matter. And I've learned about early stages for me of LDL, of my predisposition to diabetes because of my heritage.
And, you know, there's so many things that I'm so happy I know about today, which has reduced my intake of certain things that I love or I enjoy or I've been addicted to for years, whatever it may be. So How do people make sense of what to do with those 200 biomarkers?
The first thing I want to say is that the system, again, benefits off you thinking it's really complicated. It is not that complicated. Everything I learned about how to interpret lab testing, I learned after medical school. I learned it doing my own research. And I think that every American adult is totally capable of understanding their basic biomarkers, and in fact, we must.
And so what I would say is start simple and start free. Every year, if you go to the doctor, they're gonna order a very basic set of tests that usually involves a cholesterol panel and a fasting glucose test. They're gonna take your blood pressure as well. So- A lot of people might be asking, how do I figure out if I have good energy or bad energy? And it's very simple.
You start with five essentially free biomarkers, fasting glucose, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, waist circumference, and blood pressure. They generally come standard on a physical.
And if you have a fasting glucose less than 100 milligrams per deciliter, an HDL cholesterol above 40 for men or 50 for women, triglycerides less than 150 milligrams per deciliter, a blood pressure less than 130 over 85, and a waist circumference less than 35 for women or 40 for men, and you're not on medication... you, by our standard criteria, fit the category of essentially having good energy.
That is essentially saying you are metabolically healthy. Shockingly, people who meet all five of those criteria not on medication currently comprise less than 6.8% of American adults. 93.2% of American adults, based on the most recent research, have at least one of those metabolic biomarkers off or not in the optimal range. So that's just step one is just know where you stand.
And you can literally like log into your electronic health record right now and get a tape measure for your waist and figure out those things. And I think a simple way, I'll just simply say kind of what those tests mean. So fasting glucose, like I mentioned, if that's rising in the blood, it's a symbol that deep inside your cells, the mitochondria are overwhelmed.
The mitochondria are overwhelmed from all the lifestyle things we talked about that are under our control, and they are saying we cannot process any more of this into energy, therefore we are blocking it from coming into the cell, therefore it rises in the bloodstream. That's why fasting glucose matters. It is a sign that deep inside the belly of your cell
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