Know Your Blood, Know Your Health

Book excerpt: A guide to accurate, individualized blood test analysis for improving personal health and avoiding disease • Explains the differences between conventional lab reference ranges for blood tests and functional analysis and why the difference is important to your health • Reveals what healthy blood should look like and the critical markers that signal the very beginnings of a health problem, including thyroid dysfunction and inflammation • Provides recommendations for bringing blood markers back to an optimal healthy range through diet and supplementation Your blood holds the clues you need to maintain vibrant health. Yet a standard blood lab panel--the most widely used diagnostic tool in Western medicine--may not reveal subclinical imbalances or the earliest beginnings of disease. Your lab work results may come back “normal,” even though you have lingering symptoms of allergies, pain, headaches, fatigue, inflammation, depression, food cravings, PMS, or gas and bloating. This is because the reference ranges, to which you are being compared, are gathered from sources such as textbooks, averages based on outdated guess-work, or a small number of people who aren’t even well. You could be a tenth of a point away from a disease pattern, but diagnostic protocol won’t sound the alarm until you are “lab high” on a particular test. In Know Your Blood, Know Your Health, Kristin Grayce McGary explains the benefits of a Functional Blood Chemistry Analysis (FBCA), which looks at far more markers than standard blood tests and interprets your results against healthy ranges. Using real-life stories and examples, the author explains the basics of healthy blood and how a functional blood test provides a baseline for personal health and a powerful tool for disease prevention. You will learn what is meant by a standard Complete Blood Count (CBC), find clues to strengthen your immune system, and discover which markers indicate inflammation. McGary details what different reference ranges mean and highlights the importance of a full thyroid panel for women. She reveals how health issues such as insulin resistance, high cholesterol, and anemia have specific patterns in blood chemistry. She also provides recommendations for bringing markers back to an optimal healthy range through diet and supplementation and offers a road map to using your unique blood chemistry to design a customized healthcare plan to optimize your health.