 |
 |
|
|
|
Nutrition Testing
|
|
|
Summary: Nutrition testing is a good idea to help determine nutritional status. Nutrition testing sheds light on whether a person's diet and supplement plan are working. Nutritional testing is done by many labs, so which one is the best nutrition test?
|
|
Nutrition Testing
Nutrition testing is a great way to identify specific imbalances of vitamins and nutrients. Nutritional imbalances determined by nutrition testing can help predict future health conditions.
But which nutrition test is best for you? Nutrition tests all seem to test for different components and may use samples from blood and/or urine. Nutrition tests should evaluate for more than just the amount of a vitamin or mineral circulating in your bloodstream or how much is excreted through the urine.
The ideal nutrition test is a nutritional blood test along with a urine sample. The lab will look for different metabolic by-products in the urine than they will in the blood.
One may think that nutrition testing simply gives you an idea of how much calcium, magnesium, Vitamin C, Vitamin A, etc. is in your body, compares it to what the medical community has determined to be "normal" and then a supplement plan is determined to bring deficiencies into balance.
Not exactly. Sophisticated nutritional testing can determine circulating levels of any given nutrient from your blood or urine, but more importantly there are other compounds created from the simple act of living...from the use of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that can be found in the blood and urine that gives a better picture of not how much of any given nutrient you have in your body, but how it's being used. These are called metabolic by-products or "metabolites".
Science understands what metabolites should be present in the blood or urine if all your body chemistry is working correctly. They can then extrapolate what nutrients you are deficient in or have too much of. This will be translated into a supplement protocol to bring your body chemistry into balance. Remember, it's not how much you have in your body, it's how it's being used.
There are two nutrition tests I recommend to my patients, both from a lab called Genova Diagnostics in Asheville, North Carolina.
----------
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
