In this episode, I share my recommendations for blood testing for health, disease screening, and peak performance with particular relevance to fitness-minded males who want to age gracefully.

Unfortunately, typical screening is just scratching the surface and there are many flawed and dated misconceptions about mainstream medical system blood screening and disease risk factors,  so I wanted to talk about which tests I recommend, counter some of the misconceptions and misinterpretations about this topic, and share commentary from highly respected ancestral health leaders like Dr. Cate Shanahan, Dr. Ron Sinha, Dr. Peter Attia, Dr. Paul Saladino, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, and Dr. Layne Norton.

After listening to this show, you will come away with a better understanding of your test results and also with an understanding of how you can take more control of your blood testing. One way to accomplish this is by ordering tests directly and getting results via the Internet—I have done this myself for many years by testing my male hormone profiles frequently and tracking the results against my lifestyle practices (hint: overtraining tanks testosterone).

Enjoy this episode, and feel free to share it with any cardiologist so he or she can reply ‘who dis clown?’”

TIMESTAMPS:

Brad has done much research on blood tests. His knowledge and personal experience brings solid information we all should be aware of. [00:45]

The blood test results you typically get from your doctor don’t go very far. [01:51]

Any talk of your “good cholesterol is good” and your “bad cholesterol is bad”, is coming from someone who is 40 or 50 years behind the emerging research. [03:39]

The triglycerides to HDL ratio is the single most important marker for heart disease. [05:31]

There are some things to analyze on your own blood report. Ask for fasting blood insulin. And test your body composition for free. [12:14]

As you age, it is important to focus on the sex hormone panels. Testosterone is an extremely important hormone. [19:20]

Vitamin D technically is a hormone rather than a vitamin. It is important for cancer prevention. Learn about proper sun exposure. [27:04]

Some other important tests are hemoglobin, hematocrit, and iron. High blood viscosity is a red flag.  [33:30]

Fasting glucose and HB A1C levels can predict what your blood sugar is like. [37:19]

A quick analysis of your waistline is to look at the waist-to-height ratio.  The waist in inches should be half of the height in inches. [41:20]

Colonoscopy and mammograms are important but you need to beware of false positives and the stress they cause. Insist on thorough EKG. [43:20]

Blood pressure is something you can monitor at home. There are many causes of high unhealthy blood pressure that can be handled by changes you can make.  [48:12]

In summary, stay on top of your blood readings, especially if you are an active athlete. Testosterone is especially important as you age. [49:30]

Brad talks about handling illnesses naturally rather than depending on prescription medications that mask the symptoms you are experiencing. [50:28]

LINKS:

• Brad Kearns.com
• Brad’s Shopping page
• B.rad Whey Protein Isolate Superfuel – The Best Protein on The Planet! Available in Two Delicious Flavors: Vanilla Bean and Cocoa Bean
• Dr. Ron Sinha
• Dr. Cate Shanahan
• Dr. Peter Attia
• Dr. Thomas Dayspring
• Dr. Paul Saladino
• The Primal Blueprint
• Outlive
• Forever Strong
• Dr. Layne Norton
• Don’t Worry About Bad Cholesterol
• Truth About Dietary Cholesterol
• Ashley Merryman Podcast
• Ultralabtest.com
• The Vitamin D Solution
• High Intensity Health
• Blood Viscosity YouTube
• Nutrisense
• Levels
• Primal Prescription
• Podcast with Dr. Krause
• Paleo Thyroid Solution
• Primal Blueprint 90-Day Journal

LISTEN:

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B.Rad Podcast:

Brad (00:00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world-ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple, actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype, hacks, shortcuts, and sciencey talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad.

Brad (00:00:38):
If your blood is really thick, it can be a big, huge red flag warning sign.

Brad (00:00:45):
This is Brad’s blood test recommendations for aging badass males who want to age gracefully. Yeah, I write these long emails to my friends about blood tests, whatever. And then I think, you know, I should share this and turn this into a breather show. So here it is. I put some notes together, and I think this is gonna be a nice recommendation for those interested in peak performance, not just disease screening through mainstream medicine, but going a little bit of the extra mile. It’s so popular now. All these, uh, resource laboratories where you can do some customized testing and get some consulting, get some, uh, online interaction to, um, uh, uh, uh, determine, you know, some, some recommendations. A lot of it is on the cheesy category where you go and perform an expensive test, and then you get this fancy report that says try to eat more vegetables and whole grains and get some exercise and make sure you do interval training and make sure you do this, and you do that.

Brad (00:01:51):
And it’s kind of like they’re trying, they’re reaching at straws to try to give you some quote unquote, customized recommendations, but it’s not really that customized. And some of the expertise is pulled from flawed and dated health recommendations. So, um, I’m not terribly impressed with what’s going on except for those consulting outfits like Marek Health and, inside Tracker where you’re actually getting some expertise when you purchase the test and people can help walk you through it and make some custom recommendations for supplements and things like that. So, as far as getting your blood tests, hopefully, uh, those of you listening who are advancing through the age groups have some form of regular interactions with the medical community and are getting test results and looking through for factors. But generally speaking, they don’t go very far with your typical annual blood screening.

Brad (00:02:45):
And you gotta kind of dig in and go deeper and request some extra tests. And fortunately, these days, you don’t have to navigate through the medical mainstream quagmire. You can go online and order your own blood tests. Just go and you pay a reasonable fee far less than the insurance, uh, quotes for these, uh, blood tests. And then you put in your zip code, you go to a local blood lab, at least I’m talking about United States here, and you can get your blood drawn. And then, a few days later, you get a PDF with all the, uh, the values in the reports. Then if you see something that’s a red flag or that concerns you, perhaps you could reach out, uh, in, in the opposite, opposite direction, where you reach out to your physician and say, Hey, I am having fun doing my own blood tests a lot, and I want to talk to you about something and make an appointment rather than waiting for them to test you perhaps in a manner that’s not as comprehensive.

Brad (00:03:39):
So I’m gonna give you some suggestions for advanced blood tests. You can share these with your physician if you want, and ask for more stuff on the, on the chart, but also some recommendations from the leading experts in progressive health scene, ancestral health scene that I follow and respect tremendously and have a lot of, uh, value and research and validation behind their work and how they’re looking at a different story than perhaps your average physician who’s going over your blood results with you and saying things like, well, your good cholesterol’s this and your bad cholesterol’s that. And if your physician says such a quote, you’re talking about someone who’s 40 to 50 years behind the emerging research about cholesterol being a very poor marker in isolation for heart disease risk. In fact, a UCLA meta study, a meta study is a intensive study of hundreds of other studies.

Brad (00:04:35):
So when you hear the term meta study, it comes with a lot of credibility because they’re looking at the hard work of many, many people. Maybe a a a small portion of those studies are flawed. It’s not gonna affect the conclusions or the observations found in a meta study. So a meta study from UCLA, that was, uh, brought to my attention by Dr. Ron Sinha host of the Mental Health Meta Health podcast, found that 80% of heart attack victims had LDL cholesterol levels that were considered quote normal. Now, a lot of those people had an artificially suppressed LDL level through the use of statins, but the takeaway is very important to realize that there is no clean <laugh>, uh, skate free from heart disease risk factors. If you have shitty lifestyle habits, pop a pill and get your cholesterol, your LDL down under blank blank, whatever the recommendation is.

Brad (00:05:31):
So we have to go much deeper here. And, I’m gonna mention these experts that I follow who have all come to mention, a similar new and evolved and more refined screening values that they, that they favor. And, uh, one of ’em is triglycerides to HDL ratio. Triglycerides to HDL ratio. Dr. Cate Shanahan has said this is the single best marker for heart disease risk. Dr. Ron Sinha has said the same thing, that he prefers triglycerides to HDL ratio as the best marker for heart disease risk. Dr. Peter Attia goes even deeper, his tremendously detailed content, especially with one of the acknowledged cholesterol experts, Dr. Thomas Dayspring. I think there’s two six hour shows, or a total of 12 hours of commentary on the topic of cholesterol and heart disease and a lot of the misconceptions and misinformation. He has also mentioned the importance of triglycerides to HGL L ratio, as has Dr. Paul Saladino.

Brad (00:06:32):
Um, and so we’re talking about people that are making this, their life’s work. If they happen to be in conflict or not lined up with your family physician, it’s important to dig deeper, ask more questions, and perhaps recommend some books. Who knows to get on board here. But triglycerides to HDL. Triglycerides, the amount of fat circulating in your blood, and, uh, you’ve probably heard how important this is. I don’t think that’s disputed by anyone that we really wanna see. Uh, the general recommendation is to get triglycerides under 150. If you have high triglycerides, it’s an indication that your liver is overstressed. Uh, you’re producing too much insulin, it’s not working well. You’re developing insulin resistance, and you are headed down the road to heart disease, elevated heart disease risk factor due to those high triglycerides.

Brad (00:07:23):
Dr. Sinha wants to see people under 100. So forget the 150 because look, we’re talking about the fattest, sickest, most diseased population in the history of humanity where heart disease has become an epidemic annual killer. And so we do not want to be normal. If you’re listening to this show, you want to be superior. So triglycerides under a hundred. Now we have HDL where we desperately want to be HDL above 40, and ideally over 60 would be going into the, uh, the, the really thumbs up category. So now you can see where these two are meeting. So if you go to the blood lab and you deliver a result like triglyceride 78 and HDL 78, that one to one ratio is considered ideal. In contrast, it is, uh, desperately recommended that you get your ratio better than 3.5 to one. That is an urgent recommendation.

Brad (00:08:16):
So if your trig, if your HDL is, uh, 50, let’s say, um, we wanna be 1 75 to 50 as a 3.5 to one for a quick example, you desperately want to improve that ratio getting down near one-to-one, or even better. My last blood result. I think the HDL was up in the seventies and the triglycerides were in the forties or fifties. So that is better than one-to-One somewhere around one-to-one is outstanding. And if you’re looking good with that ratio, the experts are in agreement that your heart disease risk factor is minimized. Uh, even if you have an elevated LDL number, which could be from a variety of reasons. And one of them is that you have a large amount of large fluffy LDL, it’s called as opposed to small dense LDL. So there’s different types of LDL with different particle sizes.

Brad (00:09:10):
Small dense LDL are the potentially problematic molecules that have the opportunity to lodge on the walls of your arteries and get started with the oxidation and inflammation process that causes heart disease that we’re familiar with getting the plaque forming on your arteries. So small dense LDLs, the one that we want to be concerned about, where large fluffy LDL is generally harmless. And if you know a little about HDL, the widely touted good cholesterol, it’s also nicknamed nature’s garbage trucks because it has the ability to scavenge the bloodstream and remove and recycle and repair potentially problematic, damaged LDL molecules that could be on their way to contributing to heart disease if your HDL is low. So a high HDL means you’re doing a good job with your garbage trucks, scavenging the blood. And a low-ish triglyceride level means that there’s not too much, there’s not excess blood fat circulating around looking for a chance to cause trouble.

Brad (00:10:16):
So things are under control when you’re at that one-to-one or better. So, again, a quick takeaway looking and obsessing with your total LDL number as the quote unquote bad cholesterol is 40 to 50 years behind the emerging research. It’s oversimplified, it’s taken from flawed, and often manipulated science, and it’s time to wake up and listen to what the experts are doing. And remember, Brad Kearns is not a cholesterol expert. I’m just someone who listens to a lot of these experts, have some privilege of engaging with them for long conversation. You can go back and listen to our conversations and many other fantastic content. For example, what I mentioned on Peter Attia’s Highly Regarded Drive podcast, where there’s extreme scientific rigor for who’s even invited to be a guest. And the topics and the coverage is extensive and thorough. So educate yourself, if you’re at all concerned with someone telling you that your LDL is too high and they want to artificially suppress it with statins, like 80% of heart attack victims per the UCLA meta study.

Brad (00:11:18):
Do you remember the popular CNN anchor Tim Russer, who dropped dead, ooh, probably a decade ago now, of a heart attack at the tender age of 51? His total cholesterol, LDL plus HDL, his total cholesterol was reported 110 or something ridiculously low, where probably some, uh, ill-advised cardiologists probably gave him a thumbs up and said, oh, wow, your numbers are even lower now. You’re looking good with a total cholesterol of 110. Unfortunately, that was very likely to be an insufficient HDL. Remember, you desperately want to get your HDL above 40 and your triglycerides below 100. And then what minimal LDL that he had in his bloodstream are a lot of heart attack victims, apparently, is potentially causing problems due to a state of oxidation and inflammation driven by adverse lifestyle practices. And we talk extensively about this in one of the early chapters of the Primal Blueprint.

Brad (00:12:14):
So it’s a nice way to get a general layperson’s understanding view of the cholesterol dilemma and the cholesterol misunderstandings. So here I’m just gonna point to trigs to HDL. So go look that up on your most recent blood tests and see if you can get to that one-to-one. Dr. Paul Saldino makes a strong recommendation to add an obscure and rarely ordered test called fasting insulin or fasting blood insulin. He thinks this test is number one, his number one favorite, and you wanna look for a low healthy fasting insulin level because we know and experts are in agreement that hyperinsulinemia, that’s a chronic overproduction of insulin, is widely regarded to be the single most concerning widespread health problem. Today in modern Western world, hyperinsulinemia drives a condition known as metabolic syndrome, which is actually collection of risk factors, different test results like, uh, excess waistline, high blood pressure, uh, low HDL, high triglycerides and metabolic syndrome is the driver of all these disease processes.

Brad (00:13:27):
Dr. Attiaa covers this in his book Outlive, where when we have poor metabolic health, it’s one of the major killers in modern life, and you can determine this easily by tracking your metabolic syndrome markers and the state of, uh, insulin production and insulin sensitivity. That’s a positive, that’s a desirable insulin resistance is a negative. So when you look at this fasting insulin number, Saladino’s favorite, rarely ordered by doctors, uh, he contends that it’s urgent to get that fasting insulin number under 15. Getting under five is good, and getting under three is excellent. If you listen to some of Dr. Attia’s shows, he talks about this this molecule called A POB. This is a protein present in all LDL particles, and he really favors this as a red flag or a predictor of your heart disease risk.

Brad (00:14:24):
And whether your LDL, is troublesome or not. So you can go test for A POB. Um, I think Peter said he’s obsessed with it, his favorite term to talk about race driving bone, arrows, medical health, progressive health longevity. So, uh, that’s another one that I will mention on this list. Um, and here’s a fun one. How about testing your body composition for free? You don’t even need to go to the blood lab, although that’s pretty darn easy and highly recommended, but get a pair of tight fitting clothing and test over time to track improvements in body composition. This is, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who’s now become really popular with a great book release, I think it’s called Forever Strong and also great podcast where she promotes this concept of muscle centric medicine. And muscle centric medicine is rather than focusing on how much fat we’re gaining over time and trying to get rid of that fat, instead turning the attention to focusing on the development and preservation of lean muscle mass throughout life as the number one intervention for longevity.

Brad (00:15:34):
That’s a quote from Peter Attia that exercises the single best intervention for longevity ever known. Nothing else even comes close. Hopefully I’m paraphrasing close enough. Uh, but you know, when you can get fit and work, those muscles, muscles are glycogen sinks, quote unquote, from many experts. That means if you do have concerns about hyperinsulinemia, about high blood sugar, about poor metabolic disease risk factors, and you start working your muscles, they’re going to soak up that glucose in your bloodstream and make you more insulin sensitive rather than the disease pattern of insulin resistance. So, it’s as simple as this. Any positive change in body composition is going to deliver comprehensive improvement in blood test values and metabolic disease risk factors. I also appreciate how Dr. Layne Norton, who not only is a nutritional scientist biochemist with a lot of training and research behind him, but a high performing power lifter and bodybuilder.

Brad (00:16:43):
So, you gotta respect people who are walking their talk in real life rather than just spouting information from their chair with the white coat on in the laboratory. And Dr. Layne Norton makes this big point, too, this, if you get in shape and just get stronger and get fitter, you’re gonna have across the board improvement in blood values, even if you do it by any means necessary. I remember one podcast he was talking about the guy on the Twinkie diet. This is a famous internet lark where someone succeeded in losing 20 pounds over six weeks or something, uh, by calculating their calorie burn and eating a sufficient number of Twinkies to create a deficit every day and get excess fat off their body. And all their blood work was improved. Of course, this is a short term ridiculous strategy, but it does illustrate an important point that if somehow you can clean up your diet and eat more nutritious foods and eliminate the processed foods that interfere with metabolic function and fat burning, and get out there and burn some energy, doing an appropriately conducted workout pattern, you’re gonna improve your blood work.

Brad (00:17:48):
It doesn’t be have to be something that you have to stress about every day and go on these in incredibly regimented diets. You just have to bust loose, bust down, Tatiana, bust down. You can’t look on, uh, YouTube for a Paul Saladino Quick interview titled, don’t Worry About Bad Cholesterol. Another great clip, A short clip from Peter Atita, titled, Truth About Dietary Cholesterol. We’ll put those links in the show notes. I talked about the UCLA meta study. I talked about if someone is telling you that they’re concerned about your high LDL level, then you would want to test for particle size. So you can test and break it down further. Um, ask your doctor about a particle size test. If you’re in this boat where someone’s telling you to take statins, then you’ll get a report and determine the ratio of large fluffy LDL to small dense LDL, and then compare and contrast that with your trigs to HDL ratio, and determine whether you’re even at risk at all.

Brad (00:18:48):
Um, Dr. Sinha’s podcast, the Meta Health podcast, he does a great job breaking down some of these topics and trying to simplify them, uh, for the general audience with brief shows where he’s just walking you through this, uh, perhaps superior to the way that I’m breezing through this. But I think you’re getting the point that we need to look bigger than the template recommendations and talking points that well-meaning people are, are trying their hardest to, to deal with this metabolic health problem. But some of the info is 40 to 50 years old.

Brad (00:19:20):
Okay? So now, if you’re an OG in the advanced age groups, I’m gonna talk about a succession of important tests that you might want to consider adding to your docket and tracking these things over time. And the first one I’m gonna start with, which I believe is the most important for me, and especially for anyone who considers themselves to be in pretty decent metabolic health, pretty decent body composition, pretty decent fitness, not in this high risk category where we’re gonna have to be going and, and tracking a bunch of other things and trying to avoid getting put on prescription medication. And that is the sex hormone panels. So I believe testosterone status is a proxy for overall general health status. If you have good testosterone that suggests that you have good metabolic health. Remember muscle centric medicine, if you build muscle and lose fat, you’re gonna improve your testosterone level dramatically. Same with increasing your fitness, minimizing your stress, optimizing your sleep. All these things are revealed in the preeminent male hormone for vitality. Oftentimes we narrowly consider testosterone to be aggression and libido, but testosterone as, Ashley Merryman talked about in detail on our podcast interview several years ago. She calls it the social status hormone. So testosterone fosters devotion, motivation, discipline, competitive intensity to be the best that you can be in any area that you direct your competitive aspirations towards. So it’s not just lifting heavier weights in the gym or kicking someone’s ass in a boxing match, or, uh, giving someone the finger in traffic because you’re so hyped up and have too much testosterone.

Brad (00:21:09):
In fact, as John Gray mentions in many of our shows, someone who has dysregulated temper and dysregulated emotions is likely suffering from low T the opposite of what we blather with sound bites. So testosterone is extremely i.portant for overall human health, of course, for the female too, even though the female level is, uh, 20 times less than the male, the female needs an appropriate level of testosterone, especially through aging. Otherwise, things are going to be compromised, like libido, focus, all those kind of things. So, uh, because I have such high regard for tracking my sex hormone panels, I have tested oof about 25 times, I’d say over the past four years. I have all the tracking and noticing, the things that cause blips and testosterone, trying to peg myself way up there at the highest range, rather than being in the normal or the medium.

Brad (00:22:04):
As I talked about before, we’re comparing against a absolutely pathetic general population. So when it comes to sex hormone panels, you wanna be up there pushing the top of the charts. And I laugh because I remember congratulating myself doing some social media posts when I got one of my highest testosterone readings, the serum testosterone was over a thousand. So I’m showing the results saying, yep, 1,008, feeling great at age 58, that’s in the 99th percentile, clap on the back, another pat on the back. And then realizing that anything below, let’s say the 85th to 90th or whatever percentile is pretty much pathetic because the comparison is so disastrous. As I track these test results, the range in serum T has been quite significant over the over the test and all the way down to, I think my lowest was 563. So my testosterone has ranged from 563 to 1,008.

Brad (00:23:05):
I’d say the average or the, um, uh, the median’s probably seven 50 to 800, right? But it bounces around a lot. And I contend that the main variable for me personally, is the stress load of my training. So if I’m tiptoeing into the direction of over training, I will see that dip in testosterone of a hundred or 200 or 300 points, and then know how to bring it back up nicely with that nutrient dense diet, that sensible training and especially, uh, optimizing, prioritizing my sleep. So when I say that I’ve tested 25 times over the past four years, what I’m doing is going online. One of my favorite resources is ultralabtest.com, where you just go and cash pay for a male hormone panel, and they’re testing serum testosterone. That’s the total that we hear the numbers bantered about frequently, but also important to test for free testosterone.

Brad (00:23:59):
That’s the amount of testosterone that is circulating and available to act upon target organs. So there are rare occasions where you can have a healthy or a high serum testosterone, but it’s not being used optimally as evidenced by a low free testosterone reading. Now, you might hear some people making a quick comment like, free testosterone’s the important one, because that’s the one that’s free enacting. And so focus on that. But it’s not that simple because there are certain variables where you really wanna evaluate both of them. And perhaps, as Dr. Tommy Wood told me a long time ago, perhaps prioritize your serum testosterone readings rather than your free T for one. Free T is measured in pictograms. Ooh, let’s Google that. Is it a millionth of a gram or something like that? It’s an incredibly small amount. So it’s a very difficult test to read and has potential margin of error, because we’re talking about such nuance.

Brad (00:25:01):
I’ve noticed my free tea, uh, very wildly as well, to at certain times I contend again to over training. This was years ago where I didn’t have myself dialed and I was engaging still in endurance training. I had some lower, really low free T where I had to turn things around. And in a short time, I bumped up to, uh, the high end of the normal range rather than outside of the normal range a couple times due to that exhausting nature and that hormone suppressing nature of endurance training. So we wanna look at free T for sure, but we don’t want to obsess on it to the extent to the exception of serum T. And we also wanna look at this, uh, number called sex hormone binding globulin. And that indicates kind of how much free t how much testosterone is being carried, is being bound by sex hormone binding globulin.

Brad (00:25:54):
Now, some people will say that if you can lower your SHBG, you will raise your free T, and that’s a good thing. But there’s also confusing or potentially confusing research that people with low sex hormone binding globulin are, unhealthy and a weak and emaciated, elderly people. So we don’t wanna obsess that lower SHBG is always better. And, that’ll always contribute to a boost in free T. We wanna also have a, a, a healthy level of sex hormone binding globulin. And in my case, because some of my serum numbers are so high, I also, reveal a high sex hormone binding globulin level, as well as a healthy free tea level. So I’m not at all worried about having what is called high, even outside of the normal range of sex hormone binding globulin. My body’s just doing its work to make a lot of testosterone in the late dig cells of the testes re-lease it into the bloodstream, with a nice high serum level showing that I am, uh, delaying the aging process and using what’s appropriate and necessary, uh, by having some circulating free T. So, don’t get pigeonholed into black and white thinking when it comes to these big three important readings to track: serum testosterone or total testosterone, free testosterone and sex hormone binding globulin

Brad (00:27:04):
And now we’ll take a breath, take a drink of water, and go down to talk about a bunch more important blood tests. Next, I wanna discuss vitamin D. This is a critically important hormone. That’s right. It’s not a vitamin. It’s actually technically, considered a hormone, and it’s really important for hormone manufacturing, including the sex hormones. And it’s also important for cancer protection because it controls, or it influences this important gene called P 53, which is nicknamed the spellchecker gene, because this gene goes through and makes sure that cell division happens appropriately and tries to control against unregulated or inappropriate cell division, which is another term for cancer cells growing in your body.

Brad (00:28:07):
So you want to have a healthy vitamin D status for cancer prevention, especially the reproductive cancers. And there are stats showing that people of African-American descent, due to their darker skin and more difficulty making vitamin D from the sunlight, which is the main source of vitamin D, have extremely increased risk of reproductive cancers, both male and female. So, vitamin D is a huge thing, and unfortunately, it contrasts with this widespread fear of the sun today that is driven by perhaps the dermatology community or the sunscreen making community where we are obsessed with covering up every morsel of our skin in the hopes that we won’t contract skin cancer. These risks are overblown according to many Vitamin D experts. Dr. Michael Holick, author of the Vitamin D Solution. Dr. Mercola, his popular website talks about this a lot. How the form of cancer, that’s the most skin cancer that’s the most dangerous, is melanoma.

Brad (00:29:12):
Melanoma is often fatal. It’s a real deal where carcinoma is the stuff that they scrape off or burn off., Basal cell carcinoma, a popular one, a common one. And this kind of stuff is vastly less concerning to your mortality than the very serious melanoma. And one of the highest risk factors for melanoma is low vitamin D levels. Also interesting to note that most melanomas occur in areas where the sun don’t shine, as opposed to the carcinomas that occur on the back of your hand, on your nose, on your ears, on the places that get too much sun exposure. So, to piece this together and try not to piss off dermatologists, I’m gonna recommend that you obtain s sufficient sun exposure to maintain a slight tan and you never, ever, ever want to burn. A single burn incident in your teenage years is enough to significantly increase your risk of melanoma in the ensuing decades.

Brad (00:30:14):
So, burning very, very, very bad deal. Do whatever you can to avoid burning most priority is to cover up with clothing vastly superior to many sunscreens that contain toxic chemicals in there. Saladino has done some good shows on this, but for sure don’t overexpose. Now, when it comes to your face, the back of your hands, your ears, like I said, they have a high potential to get overexposed. So go ahead and cover those up and screen those up every single day if you want to, especially if you live in Hawaii or Southern California, or places where you’re gonna get a lot of natural sun exposure. Your face is not a critical component of making vitamin D. And so you wanna keep your skin wrinkle free and avoid sun damage. That’s fine. You can cover that face all you want. But just make an effort to expose the large skin surface areas of your body to direct sunlight at the times of day and times of year of peak solar intensity in your area, such that you can obtain a slight tan over as much of your body as possible.

Brad (00:31:20):
And that is the best way to produce vitamin D. A 20-minute session, good sunbathing session with the large skin surface areas exposed. And, uh, going toward a little tan is gonna make 10,000 IU of vitamin D. Um, you’ll note from the charts on your diet, a glass of milk has a hundred, the best food, the oily cold water fish, uh, a huge serving will only have a thousand. And then you can take the supplements where a lot of ’em come in, uh, 1000 IU or 2000 iu. But sun exposure is by far the best way to obtain healthy vitamin D status. Now, here’s the other kicker with the vitamin D controversy as detailed in Dr. Holick’s book. I believe he was in charge of the, um, dermatology division at Harvard, and he was kicked out because his views were so controversial and so counter to mainstream.

Brad (00:32:08):
But, you know, this is a guy who spent his life’s work promoting the importance of vitamin D status. Um, if you go to the blood test now, uh, to, to mainstream medicine, and look at your number, I believe it is the number 30 nanograms per milliliter is saying that you are normal. So anything above 30 is unquote normal. However, as Dr. Holick details, Chris Kresser does a lot of good content on this about vitamin D status. Dr. Phil Maffetone also advocates for a much higher vitamin D level to be considered healthy or optimal. So, these guys want you over 50. Dr. Maffetone said he wanted to see me over 75 when I proudly reported my 55 vitamin D. So getting that vitamin D up there is super important for cancer protection, and I want to weigh that carefully against a widespread and irrational fear of all sun in the name of protecting yourself from Cancer Carcinoma.

Brad (00:33:07):
Yeah, don’t get it. Cover your face. Buy one of those nice safari hats. Wear long sleeves if you’re gonna be out in the sun for a long time, but take that opportunity for the first 15 or 20 minutes at the beach to get that tan going, then cover up. Okay, that’s enough about vitamin D, but you wanna strive for 50 and perhaps up to 80 for ideal status to prevent cancer.

Brad (00:33:30):
Now here’s some, blood oxygen tests that are super important, hemoglobin, hematocrit, iron. And what you’re looking at is blood viscosity. You might be familiar with hematocrit if you’re an athlete, because this is what the endurance athletes dope to increase. That’s the percentage of red blood cells circulating in your bloodstream. And when you take the drug EPO, irisin, it has been determined to be the single best performance enhancer for endurance athletes by far.

Brad (00:34:02):
It came into be in the nineties. First a bunch of cyclists died because their blood got too thick, they didn’t know how to use the drug. And now, even today, it represents kind of it’s transcended the sport, the endurance sports to the extent that if there’s someone getting an advantage through EPO, it’s gonna, it’s gonna ruin the level playing field because it’s been confirmed that the advantage is at least 6%, at least a 6% advantage in your endurance performance. So let’s calculate that on a two-hour marathon, 120 minutes, 5% is six minutes. So you’re saving six minutes if you’re a world class marathoner. That’s the difference between gold medal and 17th. So it’s a massive, massive difference. That’s why everyone in the Tour de France was doped off their ass for a good part of two decades before they made, uh, perfunctory attempts to clean up and hopefully are doing better today.

Brad (00:35:00):
But it’s a game changer for endurance athletes to get that hematocrit higher than normal, which might be considered for male 42 to 45 a female, a little lower maybe 38 to 42 would be the normal range for hematocrit percentage of red blood cells. Um, so that’s an interesting side note. But when you’re looking at your blood viscosity as an average person, there are some concerns now, which were, uh, explained, uh, a wonderfully in detail by Mike Mutzel at his High Intensity Health, YouTube channel, which is a fantastic resource for really rigorous scientific presentation of recent studies and health and peak performance tips. Mike himself was a competitive cyclist. He’s been on my show for a great conversation. So, check him out on this topic. We’ll put the link to, um, the video that he made on the subject of blood viscosity.

Brad (00:35:48):
But the deal is, if your blood is really thick, it can be a big, huge red flag warning sign for poor health and elevated disease risk factors. So the endurance athletes are getting their blood thicker, more red blood cells, and they’re going faster on the race course. But for the average person to get up there with the hematocrit up to around 50 rather than the normal for males, 42 to 45, it could be big trouble. And the recommendation is to immediately go give blood. Same with high iron is a strong indicator of adverse health consequences and elevated disease risk factor. So anything outside of the normal with hemoglobin, hematocrit iron, and if there’s a blood viscosity reading or something described as that, we want to be careful there and not make my initial flawed interpretation. When I was, uh, looking at my friend’s blood test and his hemato was 50, it was like, wow, you’re like a Tour de France athlete.

Brad (00:36:44):
Naturally, that’s amazing, but I didn’t realize the, uh, adverse impact of having high blood viscosity. Um, Mike Mutzel’s report on the subject, he says, eight of his 10 male clients show markers of high blood viscosity. That would be a high hematocrit going up in the high forties or 50 whatever. And he contends and cites research that this is worse than high cholesterol, donate blood immediately and regularly if you fall into the high range. Okay, so that’s about blood viscosity. We’ve got the sex hormone panels, we’ve got the vitamin D.

Brad (00:37:19):
Now, of course, we’re gonna be looking at fasting glucose and HB A1C levels hemoglobin A1C, also written as HB A1C is a reading of your average glucose levels over time. So they’re trying to predict what your blood sugar’s been like for the previous six weeks. And throw up a guess that your blood glucose, uh, has been in the one 20, if you have an HB A1C over the the danger zone of 6.0 or 5.5, a lot of physicians like to see it 5.5 or below. So hand in hand, you’re looking at fasting glucose and HB A1C for a bigger picture. But now, fortunately, with the wonderful advancements in technology, we can do much, much better than those, than the guests of HB A1C. And then the snapshot single moment in time for that fasting blood glucose test that you did when you showed up at the doctor’s office. And that is through the use of a continuous glucose monitor, such as offered by the great company Nutrisense, where not only they send you the technology and you put the little patch on your arm and zap it with your smartphone and get a twenty four seven reading of blood glucose as long as you zap it every eight hours or so. And there’s beautiful charts and averages and calculations for your standard deviations and all these important things. And you also get expert support on their chat.

Brad (00:38:40):
So the very well-trained dietician can give you some perspective about why your blood glucose spiked up to 170 at your workout and then came down to 98 and then back up to 142 when you sat down for a meal. And whether that’s something to be concerned about or not. And, I’m loving to see the popularity of Nutrisense and Levels. that’s another company that does the same thing Dr. Casey means. One of the principles was on my podcast, uh, but there’s also a lot of misinterpretation of people who are jumping in here, the biohacker types, getting that, uh, zapper on their arm, and then thinking that the, the goal is a flat line of glucose at a hundred all day long, 24 /7, and it’s nothing of the sort. We’re looking at a much more nuanced and complex view of healthy blood glucose.

Brad (00:39:31):
So one of ’em is a reasonable fasting level, obviously, and you’ve often heard of the, um, the benchmark of a hundred or below to indicate healthy fasting glucose. We also wanna look at tight glucose regulation. So when it does spike in response to a workout, an argument or a meal, it will spike back down. It will drop back down to near your baseline level, and that your baseline is in a tight range. And overall your blood glucose is tightly regulated, such that your standard deviation is low. So when it does spike, for example, at a meal, we wanna see a spike no higher than 140, and then back to a hundred quickly within two hours, rather than having it spike sky high in a meal, having it stay high and then stair step down over three hours or four hours. Those are signs of poor metabolic health.

Brad (00:40:23):
So you can get so much information from doing even a single two-week journey with a Nutrisense or a Levels monitor. And, go from there. If you find out that some of your reports are adverse, then you’re gonna probably want to go get professional medical help and clean up your diet. And amazingly, I talked about the metabolic syndrome markers and other adverse blood values in a few weeks, weeks, not months, not years. But in a few weeks of cleaning up your diet, you can decimate these concerns, these high values in that short of a time. So if you have four of the five metabolic syndrome disease risk markers at your latest blood test in a few weeks, you can correct, you can correct four of ’em. The fifth one is expanded waistline where your waistline’s beyond, safe or recommended level that might take a few months, right, to lose a few inches off your waist.

Brad (00:41:20):
And a quick one there, uh, Dr. Mafetone and Dr. Ron Sinha both, promote this really simple calculation of waist to height ratio. And we want our waist to be less than, less than half our height, or put otherwise, double your waist is gonna be less than your height. So if your waist is 35 and you are five foot 10 inches tall, that’s 70 inches, you are right there on the borderline for adverse waist to height ratio, which Dr. Maffetone classifies as being over fat, not necessarily overweight or obese. You might even look okay in clothing. But if you have that expanded waistline, that accumulation of visceral fat in the abdominal area, that’s gonna give you a wider waistline that is an indication of poor metabolic health. So you have that waist to height ratio to calculate and want to get that under half.

Brad (00:42:24):
So, well under half of course would be better. So someone who’5’10, getting that waist down to 30, right? That’s well under, double 30, 30 plus 30 is 60. The height is 70 looking good. But a 35 inch waist on a five 10 person or, um, you know, ca calculate otherwise, if you’re talking about a smaller female who’s, 66 inches tall, 5’6″ you do not want to exceed 33 with the waist. But these things can turn around really quickly. Okay, so we have the glucose markers I mentioned, and then, of course, we’re gonna look at that. PSA prostate standard antigen. You want those numbers really low. You can reference the ranges, revealed on the blood chart. I think under one or under three is when a urologist is gonna say that you’re, you’re looking really good.

Brad (00:43:20):
They also widespread recommendation to get a colonoscopy every 10 years, starting at age 50 or every five years. If a polyp is found, that seems to be pretty reasonable for a healthy, energetic people who don’t have a high risk of such a procedure. But as Dr. Doug McGuff, and Robert Murphy point out in the book, the Primal Prescription, some of these widely-practiced screenings sometimes have a risk reward ratio that you might want to consider. And when someone is 90 years old, you probably don’t need to go give them a colonoscopy due to the risk of complications and so forth weighing out versus the potential benefit of finding, you know, some, some screening and something where a surgery would be recommended that might be too harsh for someone who’s 90 years old anyway.

Brad (00:44:11):
Okay. And there’s also some concerns about false positives. And Dr. McGuff some really interesting research in his book where false positives on the mammogram cause, a disturbance to female health for up to six months after they’ve been corrected. In other words, someone gets the diagnosis that they have cancer, then they go, oops, sorry, uh, with further testing, we realize we were wrong. But the stress and the, you know, the emotional response lingers for a long time. It’s, it’s devastating to the person and completely unnecessary when we’re talking about imperfect test results. So keep everything with a grain of salt, but I’m certainly in favor of going and getting whatever screens possible, especially when you have risk factors. That’s why I’ve done some extensive work in the cardiovascular area to perform further tests than would typically be offered to someone who seems healthy and active and athletic their whole lives.

Brad (00:45:06):
Because as many physicians are not aware, especially the ones that denied my request to get this, these tests paid for, long-time endurance athletes are high risk for cardiovascular disease patterns, especially atrial fibrillation and other conditions associated with long-term repeated scarring and inflammation of the heart from overly stressful training programs. So I pretty much demanded to perform at what’s called a stress EKG test. So you’re familiar with EKG, where they put the wires on your chest and they watch your heartbeats and look at that. And a stress EKG is essentially an EKG performed while the heart is under stress. So I got on the treadmill in the cardiologist’s office, got all wired up, and ran my butt off as they kept upping the incline. And the technician said, okay, you’re done now. I go, no, no, no, keep it going. I want to go all out to my absolute maximum and see my heart performing when my heartbeat is up at one 90 beats per minute.

Brad (00:46:07):
Because sometimes a healthy looking heart at risk can respond in a quirky manner when you’re performing a stress EKG test, espelly for an athlete. And then you want to go and perform other tests. And another recommended test, especially for people in the high risk category for heart disease. And surprisingly so, that means the, the six-pack superfit, healthy healthy guys that have been going for years and years slamming that heart. Another recommended test is the coronary artery calcium scan, also known as a calcium scan, also known as an Agatston scan. And named after, uh, Arthur Agatston who invented the scoreboard and also wrote the South Beach Diet. Pretty funny. But I went looking for this test, and I had an extremely hard time navigating mainstream medical world. No one would approve it. I didn’t even know where to get it.

Brad (00:46:57):
I had to make several calls around town and finally found a place called a heart center where they did this advanced imaging. I had to pay cash, it was 300 bucks. Go in there and lay in the tube like you’re familiar with for the CAT scan and get my internal arteries and heart scan for calcium deposits. And you’re going for a low score, which means a low accumulation of calcium plaque on the walls of the arteries. But interestingly, so if you’re a high performing longtime endurance athlete and you get an elevated score, uh, it’s probably, it’d be if you’re still healthy, it’s likely that the, the, uh, plaque has calcified and it’s not an immediate danger. And what you wanna do for the rest of your life is just screen more frequently and try to keep that number at base.

Brad (00:47:43):
So if you go in there and your score is 400 or 300 or something, that’s potentially concerning what your goal is from that point on, because you’re not gonna reverse it. You’re gonna try to keep it at 300 or 310 five years later and 320 ten years later, that kind of thing. Okay? That’s the coronary artery calcium scan. That’s definitely an optional add-on for high performing, longtime endurance athletes that might have some concerns. Same with the stress EKG tests.

Brad (00:48:12):
Now blood pressure, simple one, you can go buy your own blood pressure machine on Amazon right now. This is, a really good window to the state of health in the cardiovascular system and hypertension, anything over 120 over 80 on either side of the systolic and the diastolic. So if one of those numbers is high, or both, you were talking about an overly stressed, suboptimal functioning of the cardiovascular system.

Brad (00:48:42):
High blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack, strokes, aneurysms, kidney failure, and the cause, of course, they’re widespread. We hear about smoking, we hear about, diet high in processed foods. We hear about, lack of activity. Excess activity can also be a risk factor. The seed oils and the insulin resistance drivers can also, affect the cardiovascular function as well. So something to track regularly. You might have heard of white lab coat syndrome, where someone who goes in for a checkup all of a sudden shows high blood pressure, and it’s simply because they’re nervous at the doctor’s office. And that’s when you want to get your own unit and perhaps test yourself five times a day for the next few weeks and see what really your cardiovascular system is doing in general routine everyday life.

Brad (00:49:30):
Now, just to summarize, you wanna get, of course, the complete blood count and the normal routine panels that come from a blood tests, and I would also say pretty much mandatory for any aging peak performer is to track those sex hormones, frequently, more frequently than anything else really, and for the rest of your life, because that’s your vitality. And then we can do a whole nother show on the topic, the very popular topic now of testosterone replacement, hormone replacement therapy. When it comes that time when you’re doing everything you can and checking all the boxes with your lifestyle, your sleep, your diet, your exercise, and you’re seeing this adverse decline in sex hormone panels, then you can consider, uh, the possibility of a really closely supervised and, uh, highly expert dispensed testosterone replacement therapy. I’ve talked about this topic on other interviews and Brad’s shows.

Brad (00:50:28):
And my staunch philosophy right now is I wanna live as clean and undisturbed lifestyle as possible. So I try to stay away from any and all prescription drugs and even things like non-steroidal, anti-inflammatories, unless I absolutely need them. It’s not an easy way to go. It’s not the easiest way to go, but I contend that overall, I do better and have better health status than if I had a, a medicine cabinet full of prescription drugs. Sometimes, ones coming up for need because of the use of other ones, right? Um, so things like getting, the global pandemic illness and being laid out for nine days, um, I wanted to absorb and endure that and then get up and go about my life rather than arguably or potentially prolonging certain conditions. When you take something to relieve the pain, even a mild fever is the body’s desirable immune response to try to kill the bug that’s circulating.

Brad (00:51:24):
And if you suppress it with something that’s gonna lower temperature, it’s just gonna make the body harder to naturally heal. So that’s my position. And when it comes to sex hormones, there’s one thing that’s concerning about testosterone replacement is that the experts say that once you choose to go to the dark side and start getting exogenous forms of testosterone, rather than relying on what your body makes, once you choose that route, you’re pretty much committed for the rest of your life to become reliant upon the needle and kind of transitioning away from being natural in that sense. Now, the counter argument is, hey, you know, we’re caveman. We’re only evolved to live, uh, to reproduce. That’s our main function, and then we might as well die. And so this process of aging that we see today, is completely unnatural.

Brad (00:52:15):
And, you know, we’re, we’re fighting against something that is inevitable. And if there’s any way that we can fight this battle and enjoy more energy, vitality, libido, peak performance, for more decades, hey, I know, sign me up and I strongly support that attitude. And when that day comes, and we’ll be checking in on this, on the podcast every five years or so, when that day comes, when it’s time for me to turn to whatever prescription drugs are available to help me overcome things that I just can’t seem to correct with, you know, beautiful and, uh, optimal lifestyle practices, I’m not gonna be against it at all. But I think it’s super, super important before you consider anything or remotely associated with hormone replacement or outside intervention, that you are checking every single one of those boxes with great devotion.

Brad (00:53:03):
And boy, this can be proven when you go on hormone replacement therapy, but you are unhealthy and inflamed as evidenced by having that spare tire and not qualifying with the waist to height ratio. Guess what’s likely to happen with the extra testosterone that’s coming into your bloodstream? That’s right. It’s going to be aromatized. And aromatization is the term for the conversion of testosterone into estrogen because your body is in an inflammatory state. So those who stand to benefit from testosterone replacement therapy are due to our already in pretty good physical condition and just want to get a little performance edge. And you’ve heard Mark Sisson and I talk about it, he’s a big fan of hormone replacement. He is been doing so for about 10 years. Mark Bell has been on the juice for about 20 years, and if you listen to Power Project podcast, the topic will come up frequently where he says, Hey, man, <laugh>, I think steroids are awesome.

Brad (00:54:04):
He is talking about Liver King or whatever, hot topic of the day. And, um, he’s pretty open and honest about it. It works for him. He’s an incredible athlete. And the commonly sided downsides from dispense for years and decades that if you take testosterone, you’re gonna get cancer, you’re gonna increase your risk of cancer, have now been pretty well refuted. It is true that if you are baking a cancer already, so if you’re someone that already has prostate cancer diagnosed, that taking testosterone might possibly increase the rate of growth of cancer cells because you’re taking growth factors into your bloodstream. Same with growth hormone, right? So that’s a risk to be aware of if you’re already having cancer. But man, there’s emerging research. I got into this when my father was in the later stages of prostate cancer in his late nineties.

Brad (00:54:56):
And, um, something popped up from his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, where they dosed dudes with advanced prostate cancer with high levels of testosterone, the absolute opposite that we’ve been told for years and decades. What to do with someone who’s suffering from prostate cancer, especially, they dosed these guys with juice and their conditions actually improved. So it was granted an experimental process with a few, subjects only. So you can’t make sweeping conclusions. But the idea here and Sisson’s idea with going hormone replacement and acknowledging the risk reward factor is that if you can maintain your strength, your energy, your vitality for years and decades through the help of hormone replacement, perhaps you will fight off the decline <laugh>, that can be a, a large driver of cancer. Again, it’s back to this muscle centric medicine from Dr. Lyon and Dr. Attia and Layne Norton saying, if you can stay strong and healthy and explosive and energetic, you are going to fight that battle of aging royally, including perhaps withstanding some of the consequences that cause breakdown, for example, insulin resistance and things where you become more susceptible to cancer.

Brad (00:56:09):
So that’s pretty heavy insight, pretty heavy takeaway. Um, that goes back to my emphasis on sex hormone panels. And if you got a problem with those sex hormone panels, it is time for massive, massive intervention with experts looking at your diet, looking at your stress levels, maybe getting into meditation as Dave Rossi recommends for comprehensive hormonal and metabolic benefits and all the great research that’s out there for that. Oh, and finally, closing off this nice lengthy show so that all you need to know about blood tests recommendations. If you’re not feeling well, you feel like something’s nagging, bringing you down, you’re not recovering, you got afternoon blues, brain fog, whatever the symptoms are, that’s when you want to go exploring down some of the rabbit holes that can get potentially expensive. But if it’s that important to you, maybe it’s worth engaging with a functional medicine specialist.

Brad (00:57:01):
I had Dr. Jannine Krause on the show for some interesting podcasts. One of ’em, she was talking about acupuncture, but she’s also deep into functional medicine and recommending appropriate supplements for things like gut dysbiosis or leaky gut syndrome. And I had some problems with my digestive system recently, possibly due to after effects of suffering from a global pandemic illness. And she gave me some supplements and it feels like it helped and I recovered. And so, yeah, it’s a little weird to spend $78 on a bottle of pills, but if your gut is blown up and you don’t feel right, it’s time to take some, take some action. And one of ’em is to get these advanced blood tests. So, comprehensive thyroid panels would be an excellent recommendation. And not just the simple, basic numbers that they show on a regular blood test, but going deeper and getting things like reverse T three and all the things that Elle Russ talks about in detail in her book, Paleo Thyroid Solution.

Brad (00:57:58):
And also on her podcast, she also has a thyroid course. So if you have some thyroid concerns, oh my gosh, educate yourself further because it goes so much more nuance than the typical approach. You can also test for inflammatory markers, which might be the sign of acute illness, things like HSCRP, that’s high sensitivity, C reactive protein. There’s another one called creatine phosphokinase, CPK homocysteine interleukin six, and LP2A. So these weird, numbers, weird titles that you can write down. And you go in there and something looks off, that’s an indication of something disturbing your natural healthy inflammatory balance. And that is a bad deal. I know an elite, national caliber, collegiate, division one athlete, and he had a rough season. He was exhausted probably from an incredible high school career as an MVP in two sports and then traveling around and competing at the highest level.

Brad (00:58:59):
And he had an elevated H-S-C-R-P, which was a window into something that was dysregulated with his, his, uh, his body and his metabolic function to where he had to miss a season and try to get healthy. And, I don’t even know if they finally identified what was wrong with this incredibly high performing athlete, but he just needed a lot of rest and, that high H-S-C-R-P number, which should be, uh, is it under one or under three or something low and his was 28 or 48 or something ridiculous. So it’s worth performing these tests if you’re feeling lousy, and then it’s time to zero in and address the problem. There’s a whole bunch of other ones written down in our book, the Primal Blueprint 90 Day Journal, things like DHT lh, FSH, those are the luteinizing hormone follicle stimulating hormone estradiol, also known as E 2D HEA, which is a precursor to sex hormone production.

Brad (00:59:52):
So you want to track that DHEA, and perhaps take it as a supplement in small amounts. If your DHA is low, it might give you a boost in sex hormone production. Insulin-like growth factor one is something that can be tracked as well. Um, and you know, really I think going toward functional medicine and an expert when you’re talking about these advanced blood tests and whether they’re relevant or have value to you would be the best way to go. But to summarize this whole show, triglycerides to HDL vastly superior marker of metabolic and heart disease risk factors than the, uh, obsession with LDL, which is decades old now. Fasting insulin per saladino, A POB per Peter atia tracking your body composition per Dr. Gabrielle Lyon and Dr. Layne Norton. Simple. How can you get more simple than that? Then we go down to the sex hormone panels per Brad Kearns go and test there frequently.

Brad (01:00:44):
They know my name at the blood lab. I go there so much, I ride my bike, it’s two miles away. Hey, how’s it going? Take some more vials out. Go home, look at the PDF, chart it, track it. See what I’m doing with my training. You can’t beat that for $68 on ultra lab test.com for male hormone panel vitamin D. We want to get over 50, not over 30. That’s not appropriate. It’s not, nor it’s normal, but it’s not appropriate. Um, we wanna test for that blood viscosity and make sure you’re not on the high scale that up there with the hematocrit inch and up toward 50. We want to check that glucose, regulation, ideally with a, uh, A CGM continuous glucose monitor. But at the very least, testing fasting glucose and HB A1C. We wanna track our PSA and keep that number low.

Brad (01:01:29):
Otherwise, we gotta go see the urologist. Colonoscopy every 10 years. If you’re a high performing longtime endurance athlete, go get yourself a calcium scan as well as perhaps a stress EKG test. Check your blood pressure as a nice simple tracker for the health of your cardiovascular system, and then going into some more advanced blood tests if necessary. And that is a wrap. Good luck and hey, email in and let me know, how your sex hormone panels looked and if any of the other tests were, uh, something that hit home and something that you pursued and I’d love to share, especially on a Q and A show. Thanks for listening. Watching podcast@bradventures.com is how you connect with us.

Brad (01:02:11):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email, podcast@bradventures.com and visit bradkearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.

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