Episode 423: The Labs Every Woman in Her 30s, 40s & 50s Should Ask For
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What labs should you actually be getting? Everyone and their mom is aware of the fact that we need a liiittle more data on our bodies, and we have the availability to get it. In this episode, Erin gives you a complete deep dive through the labs she thinks EVERY woman should ask for, as well as the markers that often get skipped.
Erin also covers cardiovascular and menopause risks, fasting glucose, and the functional labs her team uses most often in practice, including the GI-MAP stool test, DUTCH hormone testing, Wheat Zoomer, and toxin testing, plus when each one might make sense.
If you’re in your 30s, 40s, 50s, or anywhere near perimenopause, this is your reminder to get the data, understand the data, and use it to take action.
P.S. This week, Erin is teaching a 2-day masterclass for practitioners on how to support clients through a woman’s hormonal lifespan. Grab your ticket here!
In this episode:
Why a CMP, CBC, and standard lipid panel are important, but still very much a starter pack
ApoB, and why it’s a must-have marker if cardiovascular disease runs in your family
What GGT can tell us about liver function, oxidative stress, toxin load, bile, and glutathione depletion
The metabolic health markers Erin wants women tracking before menopause
When a toxin panel might be the missing piece for chemical sensitivity, skin flares, liver markers, or symptoms that are not budging
Resources mentioned:
Applications for the Fall 2026 cohort of The Funk’tional Nutrition Academy are now open! If you’re ready to become a certified functional health practitioner, apply now.
Manifest Your Health is our neuroscience backed membership designed to help you reconnect with your body, regulate your nervous system, and finally break out of the symptom loop.
Order The Gut Panel.
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Erin Holt:
1 in 3 women will die of cardiovascular disease. And menopause is a huge turning point. If you are not metabolically healthy going into menopause, it is going to be like a 1-2 punch. This risk is gonna shoot way up, skyrocket way up. That's why I'm trying to get your attention about this now. Hear me, hear me. This is the stuff that I want you to be on top of.
Welcome to the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K, because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self-trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend because you never know whose life you might change.
Hello, my friends. I am so happy to be back here today with you. We are going to talk about labs every woman in their 30s, 40s, and 50s should ask for and get. And this is a topic that keeps coming up, so I want to keep sharing as much information as you guys need.
Full transparency, full disclosure, I'm really working Real time, like right now as we speak, working on some perfectionist tendencies. I've been recording this podcast for nine years, and it takes me forever to create podcasts. It takes me a very long time to write the transcript and come up with the notes and the research, and I think that's important for a health podcast. We want to make sure we're doing our due diligence and putting our time in. If I'm going to share information with you, I want to make sure that it's accurate. But then it takes me a really long time to record because I get. Spun out and caught up in perfectionist tendencies. So I will edit myself out.
I will go back and be like, why did I say that? Why did I say it like this? And then it can take to record a 45-minute episode sometimes like 2 and a half hours, which is so ridiculous. And last week I was very busy. I had a very full work schedule and I just didn't have time to play around with all of that. So I let her rip and I went off on some weird tangents and tears. You know, I totally did that, but it felt so freeing and so good to not have to like fully edit myself out. And it was quick, like one-take wonder. So I am going to attempt to do that today. I don't know why I felt the need to say that, but I did.
We're going to talk about labs and hormones and female health and just those perfectionist tendencies can really get you. Not only do they take a lot of time, but they cause a lot of stress. So we're working through it in real time. Okay. Anyway, Labs, that's the name of the game today. And when I first started my functional nutrition practice and this podcast, talking to people about labs was mind-blowing. It was such a paradigm shift to the way that we were thinking about our health, talking about the fact that we needed more data than we were currently getting in our PCP's office, talking about functional labs as a new resource, the different types of data that were available to us. It was real mind-blowing stuff.
And now, 9 years later, it has absolutely reached and infiltrated the zeitgeist, and everyone and their mom is aware of the fact that we want a little bit more data on our bodies and we have the availability to get it. So probably no surprise to you, I think that that is a really, really good thing. This summer alone, the people closest to me— I'm talking my friends and my family. So we have a lake house, people come visit us all of the time, and I feel like every conversation all led back to labs. People were asking me about labs. What labs do I need? What labs should I get? What labs should my wife get? So on and so forth. And I've just had so many individual conversations about lab testing lately that I wanted to create one episode where this could live and you could have it and have access to it and share it. And I want to cover all of the labs that every woman in their 30s, 40s, and 50s should ask for and get.
I'm gonna do my best to keep this somewhat short. We'll see how that goes. You guys know me. You know I to educate. I love a deep dive. I like to do deep dives on things, but I am going to try to hold myself back a little bit because I don't want this to be a 4-hour-long show. And when we start talking about labs and all the different options that are available to us and what all the lab markers mean, it can get really long. So I want this to be a little bit more direct, to the point.
I want you to be able to use this as a resource, get the information that you need, take it and apply it To yourself. Like I said, maybe share with a friend. By the way, I do feel the need to say this. Thank you guys so much for sharing this podcast as much as you do, sharing it with your friends, your colleagues, your family. We regularly get messages saying how this podcast has changed the trajectory of someone's health, and that is really thanks to you for spreading the word, for sharing the love with your friends. And loved ones. The show is, of course, educational, so I'm here to educate. But if you ever want to go deeper with what I teach here on the podcast, there are really 3 primary ways to do that and to work with my team.
One, we have the Functional C.A.R.E. Method. That is the one-on-one work. So all the lab testing that I'm talking about today, you can get access to that through being a client of ours and working with us. 2, we have Manifest Your Health, which is a mind-body membership. It is a program that helps you rewire your subconscious, your nervous system, your brain, And your body toward health. So if you're working on nervous system health and you want to understand how influential it is on your body of health, this is the membership for you. So that is available for purchase anytime. And then we have a ton of free resources available on our website, so you can go to thefunctionalnutritionist.com and get those resources for you.
And of course, if you're a practitioner looking to do what we do, we've got our academy, the Funk’tional Nutrition Academy. We're about to be open for our fall cohort. If you are a practitioner that’s new to the show, and you want more practitioner-level information, I got you. You can come to my 2-day masterclass called Her Body Keeps the Score. It's a practitioner's framework for seeing the whole woman behind her hormones. And guess what? That's happening today, today and tomorrow, August 25th and 26th. So if you're listening to this podcast in real time, there's absolutely still time to sign up for that. All right, now let's get into the meat and potatoes of what we're here to talk about today— lab testing.
There are a couple of key concepts that I really need you to know and understand before we get into lab specifics. And the very first one is that just getting the data isn't always enough. Just because you have the lab data doesn't mean that you necessarily know what to do with it. You really do need to have somebody that interprets the data for you. And I don't just mean the raw data points, like the lab results themselves, but also looking at those data points alongside other factors, like what you're experiencing in your body, your health history. Ideally, we have the data of labs combined with your story, with your background, with your entire health history, with your context, your symptoms, what you're experiencing in your body right now. When did that start? What was going on for you at the time that that started? And I will say that that's really the benefit of working one-on-one with a clinician. I'm always going to advocate for getting that one-on-one attention, especially if you've got something going on.
If you feel off, if you're dealing with symptoms, if something different is happening in your body, I would love for you to get that one-on-one attention. I'm a little biased, obviously, because I am a practitioner and we do have a clinic, and I would love for you to work with us. But honestly, this is exactly what I'm telling people IRL. These are the same conversations, the And this is the same advice that I'm giving my friends and my family, the people that I care about most. When they're asking about labs, I'm saying, yeah, these are the labs that I want you to get, but please understand, lab testing is only as valuable as the interpretation of those labs. So I tell this to the people that I care about the most, and I'm going to tell you the same thing. Like, yes, get the data, but it's really the interpretation of that data and then what we do with that data that matters most, how we take that data and turn it into action if something needs to change. That is really the make or break.
Okay. Labs and data and testing is so valuable, but we got to take that testing and turn it into being proactive. And that really leads me to my next key concept. Number 2, my advice for you is that the earlier you can intervene, the better. I was going through some old notes. I went to the IFM conference with my team, my clinical team, back in May. We traveled to San Diego to go to it and There was a panel on female health and talking about working with women on fertility. So usually this is in 20s, 30s, maybe 40s.
And they were talking about how beneficial that is because we're intervening, we're doing this at a time where women are young, they're motivated, and they're upstream of chronic disease. And it was really that line that I paid a lot of attention to, upstream of chronic disease, meaning we are intervening before something becomes chronic, before Before something becomes long-term, before the web of symptoms gets so complex and complicated that it is harder and harder and harder to untangle. So what I'm about to share with you, if you haven't done any of this yet, the earlier you can do it, the better. The earlier you can prioritize this, the better. Okay, so here are the labs that I would recommend again for women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Men, I love you, and we do work with you guys in practice, but your bodies are a little different. So today I am speaking to the ladies. these.
And we are going to start with a comprehensive metabolic panel. This is like baseline, baseline blood work is a CMP, comprehensive metabolic panel. And that is pretty much always included with basic lab work from your doctor. So if you went into your primary care doc or your GP and you're like, run my labs, they would pretty much always start with a CMP. And this is a blood test that is used to evaluate blood sugar, electrolyte status, liver function, kidney function, acid-base balance. We're looking glucose, we're looking at calcium, sodium, potassium, chloride, CO2— those are your electrolytes. We're looking at BUN, creatinine— that is not the same thing as creatine, okay? That's looking at kidney function. Creatinine, albumin, which is a protein in the blood— if that's off, it can indicate problems.
We're looking at liver enzymes, and if those are elevated, that can tell us that, hey, there's some liver inflammation or there's some toxicity. It's one of the things that we are preliminary screening for with fatty liver. So CMP offers a lot of information. And so when you're looking at all of it, it can seem like a lot of lab work. So sometimes our clients will come to us and being like, I've had all my labs tested, I've had them all done, but all they have is a CMP. I consider that more of a starter package. So we are ruling out some big stuff. We like to see it.
I think it's important to see all of that stuff. We don't want to skip over that. We don't want to bypass that stuff. But it is really preliminary. What your doctor is looking for is really disease Screening. We wanna rule out some of the big scary stuff. What we're doing from a functional root cause preventative lens, which is how we practice and how I teach here on this podcast, we're really trying to assess for patterns of imbalance before it gets to a disease state. Remember, it's upstream of disease, upstream of a chronic problem, upstream of a diagnosable disease state.
So when we are running your labs, we're interpreting labs differently. Mm-hmm. We're looking at them differently. We're looking at different reference ranges, but we're also adding more labs, which I'm going to share with you in just a minute. But regardless, a CMP or comprehensive metabolic panel is for sure the best place to start. And then usually your doctor will layer on a CBC or a complete blood count. That's also part of most basic lab work. This is going to look at your red and white blood cells, your platelets.
It's essentially looking at how well you transport oxygen, how well you fight infection, how well your blood clots. Again, super, super, super important information. It's also going to give us a general overview of what's happening with the immune system. So we're looking at your white blood cells. That's what WBC means on a CBC. This is looking at infection or immune stress. If your white blood cell count is low, that's when we can start to suspect things like autoimmunity. It's telling us that your immune system is exhausted, your immune system is compromised.
And so we really have to work on that. So CBC, also super important. And then a lot of basic lab work will also include a standard lipid panel, which is very, very, very important. We're going to get into this more in a little bit. But if you are a woman in your 40s and in your 50s, make sure your doctor is running this on you and basically like consistently running this on you. So if you get labs drawn once a year, make sure a standard lipid panel is on this because it's something that you want to track. So a lipid panel is looking at total cholesterol, that's the total amount of cholesterol in your blood. It includes both HDL and LDL.
LDL cholesterol is the cholesterol that we think of as bad. It's low-density lipoprotein. Then of course we have HDL cholesterol, which we consider as good. This stands for high-density lipoproteins. And then we also are looking at triglycerides, which are free fatty acids plus glycerol, and they are either used as energy or stored as fat. And triglycerides are an important marker because They play a crucial role in insulin resistance. So when we see high triglycerides, that can be a marker of insulin resistance, and it's a really good early marker for metabolic dysfunction. So this is something that we want to really catch early.
So if we are running your labs regularly and we see triglycerides start to go up, that is a red flag, like, hey, we really need to pay attention to this. And we're going to circle back around to that concept in a minute here. But again, if you are in perimenopause or you are anywhere near menopause or post-menopause, I really need you to tune into this.
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Okay, so those are the 3 things that your doctor will typically run: a CMP, a CBC, and a standard lipid panel. What we do here at The Functional Nutritionist is all of that and more. We have a custom blood work panel that we use here for our clients, and it includes everything that I just mentioned, but we also add on more markers. So obviously, when I'm talking to my friends and my family and my loved ones, this is the exact one that I'm recommending. I'm sending them a printout of like, these are the ones that I want you to ask your doctor for. So I'm going to recommend that to you too.
So again, we start with a CMP with a CBC and a lipid panel, and then we add on hemoglobin A1C. Now, this might be on lab work that your doctor orders. It's a pretty regular one, but it's not a given. Fasting glucose is what is on a CMP. Hopefully you did that, that lab fasted, but that is looking at your glucose, your blood sugar levels at one moment in time. It's at the time of the blood draw, so it doesn't give us a full picture. It's great information, we need it, but it doesn't us the full picture. Hemoglobin A1C really reflects the average blood glucose over the past 2 to 3 months, so it's a much longer-term picture.
And then we're also looking at fasting insulin. This is not done on most labs, but we want to see it because this can detect early insulin resistance before we might see big changes in glucose. So we want to see fasting glucose, we want to see hemoglobin A1C, and we want to see fasting insulin. Those are really important, especially Well, they're important for everybody. They're important for everybody all of the time. Okay? Metabolic health is like really major. But since I'm talking to women today, tune in, listen up. If you drifted off, if you're multitasking, come back to me now.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in women. I am really, really on one about cardiovascular disease risk right now. Okay? Could you tell? If you listen to the podcast, you've probably picked up on that, but I need you guys to hear me. 1 in 3 women will die of cardiovascular disease. And menopause is a huge turning point for women for cardiovascular disease risk, mostly due to loss of estrogen. But there's a lot of other changes that happen in the body alongside of this. It creates elevated metabolic disease risk. So we see increased insulin resistance, we see increased visceral fat.
This is not fake news. This is not all in your head. If you're like, I'm going through the change in my body composition, is changing. That's real. I am affirming that for you. I don't really give a flying fuck what men on the internet say. This is real, okay? Your body composition does change. So the visceral fat is the stuff that goes around your organs.
You might not even be able to see it. It is metabolically inflammatory though. So this is kind of the— I don't like to think about things in the body as good or bad, but just to make it easy to understand, visceral fat is is the bad fat. We also can see increased lipids, we can see increased triglycerides, we can see increased blood pressure, we can see an increase in the hardening of vessels, our cholesterols can dysregulate, ApoB can increase. So looking at all of these things while you're in perimenopause is so, so, so important because we can see this progression happen in real time. And if you are not metabolically healthy going into It is going to be like a one-two punch. This risk is gonna shoot way up, skyrocket way up. That's why I'm trying to get your attention about this now.
I want you to start thinking about this now. I want you to start planning for this now. I want you to start taking action steps on this now. This is why I released a podcast last week talking about how I am training for perimenopause. I am 42. This is at the forefront of my mind. I have been really focused on this for the past 2 to 3 years is my metabolic health. I've always prioritized health.
Obviously, it would be like kind of questionable if I was, you know, sharing health information with you for 9 years and not prioritizing my own health. But now at 42, I'm really paying more attention to my metabolic health. Okay, now, so more than ever. So hear me, hear me. This is the stuff that I want you to be on top of. I want you to be tracking. I want you to be clocking it. If you're gonna run any labs, Continue to run these fasting glucose, fasting insulin, A1C, and your lipid panel.
Stay on top of this. Okay? Each 1% increase in your hemoglobin A1C, so that's the blood sugar marker that's like two to three months. Each 1% increase of that is associated with a 14% increase in heart disease risk. Remember, that is the number one killer of women. So track your hemoglobin A1C. More than one in three adults in the U.S. have pre-diabetes. And 80% of people with prediabetes do not even know that they have it.
So this is not something that we're staying on top of. This is not something that we're clocking and tracking, and I need that to change. And it's either not being screened enough or it's not being communicated appropriately. That's why people are unaware. Fasting insulin is not part of routine testing. It's rarely ordered in standard primary care practices unless you specifically request it. So start requesting it. It.
Ask for fasting insulin every single time you get your blood work done. A woman's metabolic health profile is a key determinant for her cardiovascular health, but it's not being focused upon by healthcare teams. So you need to be your own advocate. You have to request, dare I say demand, these labs for yourself. It is literally a difference or life or death. I am not trying to be hyperbolic here. You guys know me and you know that I don't do fearmongering. I do But this one is like kind of a big deal.
And it's not sitting duck energy. We have so much power to change these stats. We can do things to change it. When we catch insulin resistance early, it's like low-hanging fruit. A lot of the choices that we make about what we're eating, about how we're moving, about how much stress we're under— and yeah, you know, stress isn't always a choice, but sometimes it is. Go back to the very start of this episode where I was talking about my perfectionist tendencies. That's a choice. Yeah.
Whether I choose to record this episode 352 times because I want it to be perfect, or do a one-take wonder, that's actually a choice, you know. So some of our stress is in our control. And last thing I'll say here before I move on to labs, I know it's difficult because you're caring for your family. Like, you might be a mom listening to this, you might be a caretaker, there's a lot on your plate. I totally and completely get that. But I am begging you to take up some space in your own life. I am begging you to be a priority in your own life. If there's a lot of things on your plate, you've got to be At least one of them.
And your health, in your metabolic health in particular, has to be one of those things on your proverbial plate. I mean, I'm talking in metaphors here, but also literally, like, fuel yourself correctly. That's a huge part of metabolic health. Take care of you. You know, just like Viv and Kit told each other in Pretty Woman, take care of you. I don't know if that's still our outro for this podcast, but it used to be at one point. Take care of you. I'm here to remind you, take care of And if you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not there yet, I'm not in perimenopause, I'm not in menopause, who cares? Just know that every single thing that I'm talking about here— metabolic health has a huge, huge effect on fertility, on conditions like PMOS, on your hormonal health, including thyroid hormone.
Metabolic dysfunction is like the brakes that will put the stop on everything else from functioning properly in your body. It drives up inflammation. We can see it show up on your skin. Like, it impacts everything from tip to tail. Last week I talked about the hormone hierarchy, and insulin is at the tippity top. So if you want good hormonal health, no matter what your age is, you gotta balance your blood sugar. You gotta watch your insulin. Okay, super important.
Now back to labs. We are also adding uric acid onto blood work. Uric acid is produced when the body breaks down purines. It's an early marker of metabolic stress. correlates with blood sugar, fructose metabolism, and inflammation. And it has been increasingly recognized as a very important factor in, you guessed it, cardiovascular disease risk. Elevated uric acid levels are linked to hypertension, metabolic syndrome, coronary artery disease, heart failure. And so that's something that we want to be tracking and something we're popping onto everybody's lab work.
Next up is hs-CRP, which stands for high-sensitivity C-reactive protein. This is a really good marker of inflammation. And I should clarify that it's a marker of acute inflammation, so meaning that it's measurable inflammation at the time of the blood draw. So when you get your labs done and this is high, that's saying that inflammation is happening right now. And as a practitioner, what we start to think of is like, okay, we gotta go inflammation hunting. We have to figure out where this inflammation is coming from, 'cause CRP won't tell us the cause of the inflammation. It will just tell us that it's there. So then it's really our job to be like, all right, we gotta figure this one out.
And so I think I think that, my opinion, CRP is something that we should be getting every single time we draw blood, every single time we get blood work done, because again, it is that acute marker to essentially check our inflammation status. Another marker of inflammation that we can use is homocysteine. So we do like to see this on labs. That will tell us that inflammation is present. It's also associated with cardiovascular disease risk. So it's another one for women in our 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond to be getting. Homocysteine is a naturally occurring amino acid. And it's produced during the metabolism of methionine, which is an essential amino acid that we get from eating food, and it plays a key role in the body's methylation process.
So this marker can also reflect methylation. It can reflect folate, vitamin B6, vitamin B12 deficiencies. So it gives us a line of sight into lots of different stuff. We can also see homocysteine creep up when you're under stress. And one, stress can be associated with inflammation, but two, when we're under stress, we can really burn through our B vitamins. vitamins. So homocysteine is another good one to track on your labs for that reason. Now, if you are in your 40s and 50s, and this is especially true if you know that there is cardiovascular disease that runs in your family, I would also recommend adding ApoB.
ApoB has significant impacts on cardiovascular health. It's a protein that is produced in the liver, and it's a precursor to LDL. And ApoB is more likely to insert into the arterial walls, which LDL from being recycled by the body. And that is not a great thing because that is how plaque formation happens. And so with ApoB, when those numbers are high or elevated, it's associated with the increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, atherosclerosis. So it's something that we want to pay attention to, especially later on in life, as we know that our cardiovascular disease is going to— or disease risk, I should say, is going to increase as we hit menopause. Another blood marker that we really like to see here at The Functional Nutritionist is GGT. This is an enzyme that's present in your liver cells, and so this marker can really help us see liver dysfunction.
It's also a sensitive marker of oxidative stress, of toxin load, of xenobiotic exposure, and there's an inverse correlation with glutathione in GGT. So it can really be used as kind of a backdoor marker for glutathione depletion. Glutathione is a really good one. Glutathione is our body's main antioxidant. It's very important. So if we see this number elevated, we're thinking liver, we're maybe thinking bile, we're maybe thinking toxin exposure, and we're going to want to go digging a little bit deeper. But it's a super inexpensive lab to just add to basic blood work that gives us a clue into next steps. Okay, what other information do we need for this person? And of course, you guys know, if you've been listening for a minute, I'm going to talk about a thyroid panel.
I love a thyroid panel. Super, super, super, super huge advocate for women getting your thyroid health screened regularly. So a full thyroid panel is going to be TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, free T3, total T3, free T4, total T4, reverse T3, T3 uptake, and antibodies including TPO antibodies and thyroglobulin antibodies. So I know that this is a lot. Your doctor might not be super stoked and willing to run all of these. But this is what we like to see for full comprehensive look at what is going on with your thyroid physiology, not just what is TSH doing, not just what T4 is doing, but the whole kit and caboodle, because that really gives us a line of sight into what's contributing to the thyroid dysfunction and what we can do about it to support you. And then of course, those antibodies are really important because Hashimoto's thyroiditis is the most common cause of hypothyroidism, and that is characterized by the presence of these antibodies. So we don't know if that is what's causing and contributing to your thyroid dysfunction unless we test for it.
We have to test for those antibodies. Those antibodies are going to ramp up T-cell activation, which leads to the destruction of the thyroid gland. And so most doctors in conventional medicine are waiting for that destruction to happen. They're waiting for TSH to go up and T4 to go down. Before they intervene, before they say, hey, we have a problem here, we need thyroid medication. But we can really catch this whole process way, way, way early on if we're screening for it correctly and appropriately, which I think we deserve as women. Call me crazy, but I think we deserve that. Because here's what's real: Hashimoto's doesn't start in the thyroid, it starts in the immune system.
And by the time TSH changes, which is what your doctor is screening for if you ask them to test your thyroid, Your thyroid cells have already been attacked for years. Antibodies elevate years before TSH does, usually. And so we don't want to wait until there's already destruction of the gland before we intervene. If you wait until TSH goes high before you make any intervention, you're waiting way too long. You're not catching the beginning of the disease state; you're catching the fallout. And so, if we know that Hashimoto's starts in the immune system, shouldn't we be scanning and testing for antibodies? antibodies, but shouldn't we also be scanning and testing for other things that can contribute to immune system dysregulation? All of the metabolic health markers that I just talked about would classify as that. All of the inflammatory markers I just talked about would qualify as that. And then also the next one is ANA, antinuclear antibodies.
We should be testing for this regularly too, in my opinion, because this is a marker for autoimmune activity in the body. And you can test positive for ANA. positive for years for ANA before someone's ever diagnosed with autoimmunity. And when we see this go high, if we're tracking your labs and watching your labs over time, if we see a positive ANA pop up, that means you're in a susceptible state. Now is the time to get busy. Now is the time to intervene because we can reverse this. We can address the triggers of inflammation. We can address We can address the factors that are contributing to immune system dysregulation.
We can modulate inflammatory mediators with dietary and lifestyle changes, and we can make a tremendous impact in somebody's life, in your immune system, so it doesn't progress to a disease state. Like, how wonderful is that? And you guys, I haven't even gotten into functional labs yet. I'm just still talking about basic blood work that you can ask your doctor for. These aren't These aren't even like specialty labs. These aren't even like the razzmatazz, like big guns. This is just your run-of-the-mill basic blood work. But you gotta know what we're testing for. You gotta know what we're looking for.
And you also have to advocate for the right labs. A few more. We're gonna look at your iron panel. So this is total iron binding capacity and percent saturation. So that's gonna give us a full picture. We're gonna look at ferritin, which is like your iron storage, but this can also be an inflammatory marker. If ferritin is high, we wanna be thinking inflammation or iron overload. If ferritin is low, we wanna be thinking about iron depletion.
And then 2 more nutrient markers we love to see, vitamin D, obviously super important, and then RBC magnesium. So all of those labs altogether are super important. They give us so much information. We consider all of those baseline labs, and what we will do is add on more labs as needed for our one-to-one clients. But if I didn't know you, and I didn't know your backstory, and I didn't know your health history, that list that I just gave you is really, really good and comprehensive starting point. Just as a heads up, I do have all of those written out in a list form in my Substack. I published it last week. My Substack, just as a heads up, is really more about like my personal stuff.
My personal life, my business. It's not so much health forward. All of the health stuff really comes to this podcast. But if you want that list, just a heads up, it is in my Substack. We can link that up in the show notes for you.
Hey guys, if you've been following me for a while or you've been listening to the podcast, you probably already know that when it comes to your health, there's more to the story than what you've been told. A lot of you guys are really smart. You've tried things, you've run labs, you've worked with practitioners, and you're still sitting here like, why doesn't my body feel better yet? That's actually the exact person we work with inside our one-to-one care. You are not doing anything wrong. It's just that no one has really put the full picture together for you. Inside our one-to-one functional care method, we look at everything together— your gut, your hormones, your nutrient status, your nervous system, your history. We don't see them as separate issues, but as one connected story, because it is. And then we help you actually work through that with real support, ongoing guidance, adjustments, and helping you understand what your body is doing and why. Our goal isn't to just help you feel a little bit better for a few months. It's to actually create something that lasts. We don't go for 90% better. We keep it 100%. So if you're dealing with chronic symptoms, gut issues, hormone imbalances, autoimmunity, and you feel like you've tried everything, I really do get it. And at the same time, I'll say this. I know. When we work with someone like you, it's very rare that we don't find what's missing because that's what we do. We're a team of highly skilled practitioners working on complex cases every single day. You're not doing this alone. You have ongoing support, messaging access to your practitioner, monthly appointments where we're looking at your progress, your labs, what's working and what's not, and actually adjusting those things in real time so we can find what works for your You can apply to work with us through the link in the show notes, and our team will take a look and guide you from there.
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Now I'm going to transition into functional labs. So everything that I just talked about is blood work that you get through a blood draw. These are more of the specialty labs that we run on our clients. And I want to be super crystal clear that we do not run the same labs on every single person. This is a very individualized process, and it's based on what is going on But why we use labs in our practice and why they can be so helpful is that they really give us confirmation and clarity.
They're such a great clinical tool to identify root cause. If somebody comes in and they've got all of these symptoms or this entanglement of diagnoses or conditions— just this week I had somebody comment on one of our Instagram posts talking about how she had endometriosis removed, but some remains on the outside of her bowel. She has SIBO. She says SIBO has ruined her life. She has adenomyosis, and the options that are being presented to her are not good. So she has this big entanglement of 3 different pretty significant conditions. And this is how so many of our clients are coming to us. They're showing up with like a laundry list of issues.
And so in those situations, functional labs can be such a great insight into what are the drivers of all of these things that are going on with you. And then of course, it can really help us direct our plans, our treatment plans, and our treatment strategies. It can encourage compliance with behavior change because sometimes we don't want to make the changes that we know we have to make to be healthy. But when, when we see the data, it's kind of like the saying, labs don't lie. And so some people just need to be confronted with the hard truth of the data sitting right in front of them before they're like really incentivized and motivated to make the appropriate change, which I totally understand. So labs help us do that, and we can really move from just from testing and having the data to being proactive with that data. So that's why we use functional labs and why we love them in our practice. The ones that we use the most, I'll start with a stool test.
We use the GI Map. This kind of stool test is very different than what you'd get at your GP or your GI doc. Usually those type of stool tests are looking for acute pathogens, so they're looking for maybe a parasitic infection or a bacterial infection that is causing diarrhea, for example. Yeah. The test that we're using looks at those, but it also looks at a lot more. So it is also telling us how well you are digesting your food. If you have food sensitivities, it's giving us a line of sight into why that might be the case. It shows inflammatory markers in your gut.
So remember earlier how I said if we find inflammatory markers in your blood, we have to go inflammation hunting. We have to figure out where that inflammation is coming from. A lot of the times it's coming from the gut. So a stool test gives us that information to say definitively, yeah, this is contributing to the the overall inflammatory load of this client. It gives us a line of sight into the health of your overall microbiome that really trains your immune system. So if we see a positive ANA marker on blood work, if we see those Hashimoto's antibodies elevated, we need to go right to the gut because the gut and the microbiome is what trains that immune system and modulates that immune system. So we have to figure out what's happening at the level of the gut. It also will show us a Yeah.
Things that are contributing to hormone balance as well. We rarely will test somebody's hormones or intervene on their hormones without looking at their gut because it's such a huge piece and part of your overall hormonal picture. So we're running this lab not just on people with digestive symptoms or gut symptoms, but we're also running this stool test on anybody with autoimmunity or suspected autoimmunity. If we need to find inflammation in the body, if somebody has a lot of food sensitivities, Anybody with skin issues, because inflammation in the gut can show up through the skin. And like I said earlier, hormonal issues as well. Because this lab offers and does so much, it's the only lab that we offer à la carte for purchase from us. All the other labs that I'm going to talk about today, you have to be an active one-on-one client with us in order for us to order those labs for you. The one exception to that is the gut panel.
That's what we call it, the Gut Panel, which is the stool test I've just been talking about. You can order that anytime from our website. I'll link it up in the show notes. show notes. It's called the Gut Panel. And when you do that, you not only get the lab, but you get our interpretation of the data as well. So it's just such an important tool. It's such an important piece of your overall health puzzle that we do make that available for you to purchase anytime off of our website.
Now, next up, I'm going to talk about the Dutch test, which is our favorite way to test for hormones, which everybody wants to know about and everybody wants to get tested. The reason that we love this one so much is because it's not just telling us the levels of your hormones in a snapshot of time, which is what we would see when we test hormones through blood. While still super valuable, this is done through urine and it shows us different things. It shows us the rhythms of your hormones. It shows us how they're being metabolized and cleared. And all of this information is really helpful in directing treatment strategies that actually work. So with the Dutch test, we're not just looking at your sex hormones like estrogens, progesterones, and testosterone, but we're also including your adrenal hormones like cortisol, cortisol and DHEA and your neurotransmitters as well. And I think that this is all important because what I've seen after 15 years in practice, people, us, all of us collectively, we're not always so great at gauging our stress.
So we can be under a lot of stress. Our body, our physiology can be under a lot of stress, but mentally we might not be clocking it. So this lab actually shows us evidence of how you are really living your life, how you're really handling your stress. And I've just seen that be such a key component for people actually being willing to make the change. Kind of like what we were talking about earlier, the data doesn't lie. And sometimes when we are confronted with what's actually happening in our physiology, it is the thing that we need to be like, I'm going to actually do this. I'm really going to go for it. So love the DUTCH test, and we run it, I would say, on probably the majority of our clients.
The gut panel, the stool tests, we're running on almost everybody. Blood work, we're running on almost everybody. DUTCH test, we're running on, I don't know, maybe 80% of our clients, I would say, at this point. 2 more labs that I will share with you that are a little bit more situational. We're certainly not ordering them on everybody, but we are running them regularly enough that I want to communicate them to you so you know that they exist. The next one I'm going to talk about is the Wheat Zoomer. And so we use this as a way to rule out leaky gut and gluten sensitivity. So if you are all So if you're all of a sudden reacting to a lot more foods, if you're experiencing a lot of skin reactions like eczema, rashes, psoriasis, if you've got a lot of brain fog, and we did not find as much data as we were hoping to on the stool test, this would be another great test to do.
It is a blood test, and it's going to show us whether or not you're reacting to gluten. This is another really good one to do with autoimmunity or inflammation, knowing that gluten can be a trigger for autoimmunity and inflammation in some people. Situational. We're pulling this out for some people when we feel like they need it. And same is true for the next one I'm going to talk about, which is a tox panel. Really not the first place that we start, but if somebody's coming to us and they have new or worsening symptoms after starting a new job or after moving to a new home or moving to a new environment, that tells us like, hey, something in the environment is triggering this. We want to figure out what that is. If somebody has increased worse tolerance or loss of tolerance or more reactivity to chemicals, to foods, to supplements.
All of a sudden you're like, I am so sensitive to everything. This is another great panel to do. If when we did your lab work, the blood work, and we saw your GGT was really elevated, your liver enzymes were really high on that blood work, that tells us there might be some toxin exposure. So this lab is going to show us what exactly those toxins that you're being exposed to are. And we might sometimes use this for skin flares like acne, eczema, rosacea. Fascia, or somebody who's just non-responsive. So like, we're doing everything and we're just not moving the needle. I will say that that is pretty rare in our practice.
But boy, is it so nice to have this in our back pocket to pull out when like nothing else is making sense. We're like scratching our heads and we're like, this just doesn't make sense. More often than not, when that happens, even though it is rare, this tox panel will really give us line of sight into what exactly is going on and what you're being Okay, so there you have it. That is the list. Those are the labs that I think every woman in their 30s, 40s, and 50s should get. If that feels overwhelming to you because you're not somebody who regularly gets your lab work done, totally understand. Start with the blood work. Start there.
That's going to give you a lot of insight into what's going on. And then from there, I would expand out to stool testing, into hormone testing, because That's going to give us more information on the different systems in your body and how they're interacting. If you've got a lot going on, if you just do not feel well, if you've got a lot more symptoms than I just want to check in and optimize things, that's when I would recommend working with my team. We can take a full, comprehensive, deep dive look at not just your labs, but everything going on with you. And we have a lot more tools in our tool bag. I just kind of threw out a couple examples of the Wheat Zoomer and the Tox Panel at the end, but we have a lot more. to different types of functional labs that can really help us kind of crack the code on what's going on under the hood with you. And if that's something that you're looking for, you can fill out an application to work with my team in the show notes.
And until next week, take care of you, and don't forget to share this episode with somebody who could benefit from this information. Love you guys, and I'll see you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.