Jamie Martin
Welcome to Life Time Talks. I’m Jamie Martin and we’re here with our performance and longevity series with MIORA. I have Jim LaValle with me, friend, colleague, and the chief science officer at Life Time. You’re also a clinical pharmacist, the co-chair of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, and the chair of the International Peptide Society. How’s it going, Jim?

Jim LaValle
Going good. You just made me sound busy.

Jamie Martin
I mean, we’ve talked a lot and I know you travel a lot, you’ve got a lot going on. So you are busy. Yeah. So you got a lot of things happening. Okay. So in this episode, we’re talking about a topic that is, I think, a really important one. We’re talking about what happens when your labs look normal, but you just don’t feel great, right? Like something seems off. Or maybe your labs don’t look great, but you feel okay. And vice versa.

So I mean, if many of us have probably sat in our doctor’s office and felt like I have something going on, but then you look at the numbers and you’re in the normal range, right? That can be really frustrating. And you know kind of intuitively that something is off. So let’s just start right there. What does normal mean in a traditional setting?

Jim LaValle
Yeah, so normal is a population based number. And then it’s also research based. Like for example, if your glucose is this high, here’s your risk of developing diabetes, right? So they have absolutes to it. But basically what it’s doing is it’s trying to tell you whether or not you have a disease or not. And so lab markers that in general are saying, you don’t have a disease yet.

Jamie Martin
Yeah. You’re good here.

Jim LaValle
You’re good, you’re good. You know, you’re normal. Well, why don’t I feel normal? Well, there’s this whole other side to labs, and there’s this whole other side to your chemistry, right? We’re gonna talk about that in a second as well. But there’s a whole other side to your labs.

So when you think of normal, normal is what’s set for a population, like it’s population data, but at the same time there’s numbers that tell you absolute. So once your blood sugar is at a certain level you’re pre-diabetic or you’re a person with diabetes. But the issue is that the normal standards are really more like do you have a disease or not standards. They’re not how well are you doing? They’re just the absence of a diagnosis of a disease.

So I wrote a book called Your Blood Never Lies because I had so many people over the years say my doctor said my labs were normal. And they were for not having a disease, but they weren’t for you feeling the best you possibly could. So there’s a lot of information related to various labs that are called trending analysis. Trending high, trending low could be meaningful in saying, I’m moving towards a future condition or illness, or why I feel the way I feel.

Even though I’m not out of bounds yet, it’s far enough down towards the bottom or towards the top that I’m starting to feel it. And it also works in another direction. A person could walk in and get their labs and they could be really bad. And they feel great.

Jamie Martin
Yeah, it could take you by surprise that it’s happening the other way.

Jim LaValle
Absolutely. But for most people, at least most people that I’ve seen over the last four decades, it’s why do I feel the way they feel? I feel off. I’m foggy headed, I’m tired midday, I’ve gained weight, I’m not thinking as clearly. My guts feel a little bit inflamed, or I’m gassy, I’m bloated, I’ve got these issues. I don’t have the stamina I think I should have.

But they go in and get a lab test, and because all the numbers are within normal range, it’s you don’t have a disease yet. We’ll wait till you cross that line and then we can medicate you. And that always doesn’t fix the problem, by the way. And we are now finally in the age of wanting to limit progression of where you’re at today, so you don’t move 10 years from now into a position of poor health.

Cardiometabolic illnesses, diabetes, all those autoimmune disorders, all those types of things. And the earlier you can look at your labs and determine that, hey, what are the interventions I can do to get these normalized? Better off you’re gonna be. Because I think it’s somewhat of a tragedy that we’ve got this great system for drugs, disease, drug approval. We really don’t dig in and have a great way of looking at, well, how far are you away from being your best possible self?

Are you moving to future risk for autoimmunity, or heart disease, or diabetes, or kidney issues, whatever, right? And so that’s what I think with labs, it’s so important that you just don’t accept they’re normal.

Jamie Martin
Well, we kind of have to push back and advocate for ourselves in that way, right? Like, let’s look a little closer. I’m gonna use myself as an example. Just before we hit record on this, I recently had blood work done through MIORA and I was like, hey Jim, do you wanna take a look at my numbers?

But I’ve been doing this enough times now. I think I have probably multiple years. I think this is maybe my third year, where you can start to see trends and you can start to see different things happening. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m sick with something, but it doesn’t mean I’m functionally optimized right now. There are things I could be tweaking. So for instance, glucose. Even though my glucose has trended down slightly, it still has been kind of borderline.

Jim LaValle
Yeah, you’ve been in the nineties. And these were big studies, right? Almost a hundred thousand people in two different studies. As your glucose gets up over 90, you start getting endothelial damage. So the inner lining of the arteries — you have a history of heart disease. I remember you said that, and you were saying, hey, I want to understand that. And the other one is that your risk for future diabetes goes up.

6% for every point over 84. So even if you’re just at 90, it’s a 30% — one out of three — risk.

Jamie Martin
Pretty significant.

Jim LaValle
And then if you’re at 95, which is normal, it’s a 60% risk. Now, if you look at the Japanese studies, it’s a 9% risk for every point over 90. So what’s interesting is both of those studies kind of come together and converge as you get to say a ninety-eight or ninety-nine blood sugar, which is getting close to being deemed insulin resistant or a person with pre-diabetes.

So glucose being off, that tells me there’s a little bit of metabolic inflammation. And then you add another thing, right? Your iron was really good, but your ferritin was kind of low. And iron to ferritin, when you don’t convert that, it’s because there’s a little bit of inflammatory signaling going on. Can we talk about all of this? I don’t wanna —

Jamie Martin
Fine with it.

Jim LaValle
Okay. So the other thing. I asked, because your sex hormone binding globulin was up, I said, how was your stress and sleep? And you were like, well, I didn’t sleep for two weeks before I took this test. You weren’t sleeping.

Jamie Martin
I wasn’t sleeping well. I wasn’t getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep. It was definitely closer to five to six, right? And I was waking up feeling it in my body all the time.

Jim LaValle
Yeah. So you start to see these changes kind of with a two or three week change in behaviors, that maybe that was playing a role. And just, your calcium was a little high, which a lot of times calcium gets a little high when you’re under a little bit of that metabolic inflammation. You get a little bit of what’s called acidic chemistry, which then you start to leach calcium from the bones. And this is all stuff that’s been published.

It’s not like I’m making all these things up. None of this is the world according to Jim. This is all published — that once again you start to show a pattern. Now, on the other side, a lot of your foundational labs were excellent.

Jamie Martin
Right. And if you looked over time, they’d been pretty consistently good.

Jim LaValle
Yeah, absolutely. But then there’s health goals. What do you want to accomplish? What’s the plan for that? Your insulin was just a little bit up, like six, I really like it at five, six — just the littlest bit. But then your lipids, because of your family history, your LDL cholesterol went up a little bit, but your HDLs, your triglycerides, all that stuff is good.

But the reality, when we looked at all your advanced lipid markers — and people should really think about advanced lipid markers right away. Don’t just get LDL, HDL, and total and trigs. Go a little deeper there. Because you actually looked really good other than your particle size was a little smaller. I think it was 1458.

So that usually happens from cortisol imbalances and a little bit of insulin imbalances. And I think when you look at that, it kind of sets up that, well, wait a second, I’m training really hard, I’m eating pretty good. Why isn’t my body composition changing more than it is?

Jamie Martin
Right. Feeling stuck, right? Feeling a little stuck. And nothing is so far out of range that it’s like a blaring red flag, right? Like, most of them are kind of in that normal range.

Jim LaValle
I think you’d be told, you know, you’re great, see ya next year.

Jamie Martin
Right. And that’s the point of all this, right? There’s more to the story if we’re willing to dig into it a little bit more.

Jim LaValle
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, looking at markers — this is what I’ve spent literally virtually my whole career doing. Wait a second, people feel this way and the labs are pretty normal, but they have every sign that maybe they’re insulin resistant or they’re under stress, they can’t get to sleep at night, they perseverate, they stress eat, reach for comfort foods, right? But yet nothing’s showing up on their labs yet.

Well, that was the beauty of traditional medicines. In traditional cultures, you would go to the shaman or the medicine man — or woman — and they would go, take these herbs to get you back in balance. Well, we don’t work from that. Basically what happens here is: do whatever you want. Come get your labs. And as long as nothing fell out of line yet, keep doing what you want.

But then you come back one day and it’s, well, my lipids are off. I’m having trouble sleeping and I’m anxious. Time we got to get the script pad out. And that’s because we’re in that reactive phase. And as I said, there’s nothing wrong with medicine when it’s helping fix those problems, but we don’t do enough on the side of what’s prevention? What is proactive care? Proactive care in order to say, look, I need to move the needle on my lab scores. I’m not happy with them.

And I gotta be honest, when I wrote that book, I didn’t want to write it. It was just my editor asking me questions ad nauseum. I was just like this. And after I got it done, it’s probably the book I’m happiest with. Just because it helped serve something foundational. You know, writing twenty-eight books, you got favorites.

Jamie Martin
Absolutely. Over time that’s bound to happen.

Jim LaValle
And that one was it because people could go to their doc and go, hey, I saw my lab. I looked this up and it’s saying that I should consider this or maybe work on this. And it just creates a better dialogue for you and your doc. Now, sometimes that doesn’t go over so well. But I would say that if you’re in, for example, what MIORA — the number one thing we want to do is talk to you about your lab.

Jamie Martin
Well, labs and also how you’re feeling. It’s the both-and there.

Jim LaValle
Right. Big questionnaire of how do you feel. Because based on how you feel, sometimes you can figure things out before the labs are starting to shift.

Jamie Martin
Well, that kinda leads me to the next question. What are some of the common reasons people can feel off but their labs can look normal, right? Are there any common things that might be happening?

Jim LaValle
Well, it’s just that the labs haven’t caught up with how they feel. Or it’s in normal range, but it’s low normal or high normal and that makes them feel the way they feel. So even though they’re still in normal ranges, their chemistry is changed because there’s a pattern that’s established between two or three organs miscommunicating with each other.

And that happens a lot. For example, yes, I get hay fever, my sinuses are congested, damp moldy days bother me. Well, that’s pretty clear that there’s questions that say your immune system’s hyperactive because it’s all allergies. And so immune hyperactivity — well, was any of that driven by the gut?

Jamie Martin
You can make those kinds of —

Jim LaValle
Yeah, exactly. So I think those are the things that are really important.

Jamie Martin
Well, talk a little bit more about other types of questions that the questionnaire might ask about how you’re feeling. Because I just went through this pretty recently and it was things like, do you feel bloated after eating? Or a variety of things that might happen.

Jim LaValle
Do you eat past being full in order to fulfill an emotional need? Do you get tired at, you know, two to three PM? Do you have trouble staying asleep, falling asleep? Do you perseverate? Do you crave comfort food mid to late afternoon? How’s your hands and feet? Are they cold? Does your head feel heavy? Do you have diarrhea? Do you have constipation? Do you have alternating constipation and diarrhea?

Jamie Martin
Right. You don’t necessarily know that offhand from a blood test though, right? So that’s why the both-and is so critical here. This is real life, this is how you’re getting through the days and these are the things that are happening to you.

Jim LaValle
Exactly right. Are you slow to start in the morning? Is your skin dry? Or is your hair brittle? These are all things that a lab may or may not correlate to, but they’re important because they tell you about an organ or a system that’s not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

Jamie Martin
And ideally we want them to be able to correlate those things to understand how do we help you be optimal in many cases, or be thriving better.

Jim LaValle
I think thriving is awesome. I think for people they just need a direction. And today people are so confused. I’ll tell you how confusing it is. I read a post by a colleague that said, well, these Olympians have higher cortisols and higher blood sugars, but they’re world-class athletes. Okay.

What’s that mean? Did you measure the people that broke and understand that because they overtrained, their labs got so bad that they’re out, and these athletes still survived?

Jamie Martin
Where’s the gap there?

Jim LaValle
The gap is between being functional and non-functional. To be vital versus not, to thrive versus not.

The point is, you’ll hear a lot of this like, well, lab values really don’t mean that much, they can be all over the place. Yes, they do. They really do. People with heart disease typically have bad lipids or a nervous system disorder. People with diabetes that have all kinds of complications always have blood sugars that are elevated. And it’s not like, you’re an athlete, your blood sugar doesn’t hurt you.

Jamie Martin
Yeah, that’s not gonna affect you then.

Jim LaValle
Right. It’s like, yeah, I’ve got this special switch because I train, that when I have too much glucose in my bloodstream, it doesn’t affect me. It’s like, I don’t think it works that way.

Jamie Martin
Not exactly.

Jim LaValle
No, not quite. But those are the things that I think people have to watch out for, because they’re looking at all this information. And our reality is labs can be a really great indicator of who you are today. More importantly, where you’re going tomorrow.

And it’s very powerful when you include a questionnaire that’s asking you questions about the way you feel. When people hear questionnaire, they go, what do you get from a questionnaire? Did your dad have a history of heart disease? Did your mom have a history of heart disease? Did your dad have a history of Alzheimer’s? That question you get when you go to the primary care. Are they giving you a big questionnaire saying, do you feel bloated or gassy after you eat? Do you feel like you’re pushing a thought through jello? Do damp, moldy days bother you?

These are things that you think about and go, whoa, wait a second. How’d they know that? So anyway, if you don’t get both of those — symptoms and labs — you don’t get a complete picture of who a person is.

Jamie Martin
And the goal is to get the complete picture so you can ideally move in a positive direction.

Jim LaValle
That’s right.

Jamie Martin
Right. And you’ve said that we all have more control over our future health than we might realize, right? So these labs in a way can act as a window into the future, right? Help us make choices now that influence where we’re going.

Jim LaValle
I think that is a key step in managing your symptoms, both of them. And you know what my — when I think about what’s the real goal? To me, the real goal is: did you ever just have a day where you just went and did everything you needed to do and you just felt good? It was like, hey, I’m looking at this beautiful flower. I’m in this moment.

Or, it’s like that feeling of I just hit this golf ball, I had the perfect swing, and I’m in Nirvana right now. I kind of feel like that’s what I want people doing, to understand how they can feel. Now life stress will affect you, right? Relationships, all that stuff. But the thought that you can straighten your chemistry out in order to just feel present and not be worrying about, this is wrong, this is wrong, I didn’t take this peptide, I didn’t do this.

You want to get to a place of I’m on autopilot with the things I need to do. And my labs and my symptoms are guiding me to being able to understand what’s my next step. What is my next step? How do I create an evolution in my health?

Jamie Martin
Well, and again, that puts more of the power in our own hands to make those choices on a day to day basis.

Jim LaValle
It’s so interesting. You need accountability, so having somebody to help you is great, but in the end, you’re the one that’s empowered, you’re the one that has to get there.

Jamie Martin
Okay. Let’s talk about some of these markers that we know really influence health — our long term health — but then we still kind of do a poor job of identifying or managing them. What are some of those and why is early management so important? Is it insulin, is it glucose? What are some of those markers that can be really informative for us?

Jim LaValle
Sure. Well, glucose and insulin are for sure, because you can have a 98 glucose and that’s considered normal, but a 98 glucose would be a 78% chance of being a person with diabetes. That’s a pretty big number. And once it’s over ninety, you’re already getting vascular damage.

Insulin I think is a part of that glucose relationship. So it’s important. Homocysteine, really important marker that shows methylation in your body — it’s a byproduct of methylation. If you have enough B vitamins, it filters through, your number stays low. When it goes high, you get a lot of oxidative stress and damage to your tissues. It’s associated with development of Alzheimer’s, damaging the kidneys. So I think that’s a big one.

One that a lot of people neglect all the time is GFR. Glomerular filtration rate, which is how your kidneys are doing. We have an epidemic here in this country of people that are going to dialysis. You can look around. There’s a lot of dialysis centers.

Jamie Martin
Yeah, this was something we talked about as we were prepping for this season. How much that is the rise of those.

Jim LaValle
It’s alarming. So you’ll see people with a sixty GFR, which means the filtration rate’s kind of low, because you really want to be in the eighties. It can get skewed if you’ve got a lot of muscle mass. But for most of us, you want your kidneys filtering, because once they start to tucker out due to damage — and the kidneys get damaged due to loss of redox poise, heightened oxidative stress, environmental burden, dehydration — all those things create the problem. So GFR, I find it to be really important.

And these are the basic, like on a basic lab test. There’s some really cool other ones. So if you have CBC with a differential, you have a neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio. So N to L ratio is basically showing you if your immune system is overworking or if it is no longer able to mount the defense.

Jamie Martin
So you’re more susceptible potentially to infections or cold and flu or whatever that might be.

Jim LaValle
And if it’s high, it’s that chronic inflammation story of metabolic inflammation. I’m achy, I’m not moving as well, I’m not recovering. And so that is a big one. Monocytes, eosinophils, and basophil percent — those are subsets of white blood cells that show you, is there reactivity going on in the gut? Am I making too much histamine? Like the eosinophils are high. So those are important. And then, so many labs are important.

Jamie Martin
I know, right. So outside of the CBC, are there — you mentioned advanced —

Jim LaValle
Well, I would do an advanced lipid panel too, because a regular lipid panel today, it just isn’t enough information. We already know there’s fractions to your cholesterol called lipoproteins. That’s where it’s at. If you’re making a lot of bad actor lipoproteins, you’re probably gonna end up having heart disease. Because lipoprotein little A, independent risk factor for creating a myocardial infarction, independent of your cholesterol.

Myeloperoxidase, the enzyme that triggers calcification. What is your OX LDL? What is your APOB to A ratio? How big or small are your lipids? You get a better picture of how much metabolic inflammation is going on by doing that.

And I think liver function’s incredibly important. When your liver AST and ALT — when you start getting up in the upper thirties, which could be normal depending on which lab test you’re looking at, but it’s kinda heading up towards the higher of normal, you’re probably starting to load fat already in your liver.

Jamie Martin
So, and again, this is also something they’re talking a lot about. It’s no longer known as fatty liver disease — non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. There’s a new name for that as well, from what I understand.

Jim LaValle
Is that another metabolic fatty liver? I mean, it’s an interesting new term.

Jamie Martin
But there’s — that’s on the rise as well though.

Jim LaValle
Well, here’s the — why looking at the liver is so important. It’s involved in thousands of reactions. It’s just a vitally important organ. So measuring for that’s really a big deal. Now, I would say a morning cortisol is really good to understand your stress. If it’s up over seventeen or down below ten, you’re probably either worn down — down below ten, I’ve worn out my awakening response — or it’s up around twenty and you’re a cat on a hot tin roof. It’s one or the other. If you’re in the middle, you’re good to go.

Jamie Martin
Kind of that cortisol curve number you’re looking at.

Jim LaValle
Exactly. In the morning you want that awakening response, right? So that part is good. And then look, electrolytes are so important. Magnesium, potassium, where’s your chloride? That balance is important. So that’s why, for a lot of people — at least for me — I can look at a CMP and a CBC without even getting any other labs and go, wow, this is where you need to start. And that doesn’t include doing hormones. And when you do hormones, it’s a very healthy hormone panel, not just testosterone for men.

Jamie Martin
Like just one in isolation. Well, that actually gets to my next question. Because I’ve just asked you what are the tests you would recommend? But I think we have to remember that it’s not always about more labs, but what are the labs telling you? Again, what’s the story or the picture that this is painting? And we need to be careful not to just — because you have all this, it can feel overwhelming when it comes to, I actually have to do something now.

Jim LaValle
Yeah. So it’s tough. I think it’s interesting what’s happening in the social media longevity space. There’s a lot of people that have been pushing a lot of things out to people. Relatively unproven, promising, but maybe not proven. And that’s why when we built Metabolic Code, it was: here are the labs. We created those patterns and algorithms, but we still also assess the labs individually.

But it’s, with your interventions, are the core drivers of aging moving? Yes or no? And that’s that responsible evidence base of I’m gonna prove to you what’s getting better. Are your symptoms going away? Retake that test. Is your lipid panel great? Hey, it looks pretty good.

So that I think is what’s really important — understanding the patterns. So that you don’t need a hundred and fifty lab values in order to be at least firmly on the path forward. Then as you get deeper into it, there could be other advanced things that you might want to do. But I think it’s just important for people to understand: more is not better. Doing the right thing is better. Measuring the right values is better.

Jamie Martin
Right. Can you think of an example that you could share, without revealing identifiable information, of someone you’ve worked with who initially had normal labs, but then after diving deeper, it revealed kind of a different picture? Is there a story that you could share?

Jim LaValle
Oh my gosh, you’re so — I had a gentleman come in and he brought in his normal labs. Blood pressure was a little bit elevated, had a little bit of insulin resistance, stressed out executive. Didn’t even have really the — I’m trying to remember, was there even serum cortisol? I didn’t think they even had a cortisol on there. When we did his program, we saw his four-point salivary cortisol was skewed. Blood sugar was in the upper nineties. His insulin was at ten or twelve — that’s typical.

Jamie Martin
And you ideally want that under five, right?

Jim LaValle
Yeah. And then GFR of fifty-eight. All of a sudden that constellation of, this person is really insulin resistant. It’s choking out kidneys. And it’s disrupting his energy cycle and he’s gained weight. But normal labs wouldn’t have picked that up because you might not have ordered insulin, which is perfectly normal to order. May not have ordered a morning cortisol, perfectly normal.

And typically, I can tell you where you see it the most is when you do advanced lipids. Because people are just making a lot of bad lipids.

Jamie Martin
Yeah. And it’s like a really good window into more of the specificity of what’s happening with you.

Jim LaValle
To me I look at it as the very first line of defense. When the lipids start going sideways, because they’re getting damaged — and your lipids are what make your cell membranes up. So you don’t want damaged goods going into your cell membranes, because that just creates more inflammation signaling.

So it’s a really interesting time for people because they’re finally wanting to learn a little bit. And I would say there’s still people that don’t. Just give it to me. I don’t care what it says. Just give me whatever I need. But what I’ve seen by teaching and educating both practitioners and patients is that when you teach them those network patterns of here’s why things went wrong, here’s what you do to countermeasure it, people do better.

Jamie Martin
Well, and again, what’s really important about the Metabolic Code and the five triads that you have too, is it’s not like you’re saying you need to fix all of these at once either. Start with the one that has the most — it’s indicating the story is telling you that this is the place to start — versus trying to do everything at once.

Jim LaValle
Right. Absolutely. Well, I don’t think your body can’t handle doing everything at once anyway.

Jamie Martin
It’s just like habit stacking. Just because you can stack five habits doesn’t mean you necessarily should. Maybe start with one and build upon that slowly over time.

Jim LaValle
Exactly. The most important message out of all that is the better you can change your lifestyle, the better you can get exercise in, the better you can walk, the better you can sleep at night — it makes it easier to correct for that imbalance or disturbance that’s there. And then I think it’s important for people to just realize Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Jamie Martin
Right. Takes time.

Jim LaValle
That takes some time. Sometimes people will feel better at the end of three weeks, two weeks. I’ve had people call me the next day. I can’t believe how much better I feel. And then we have people that’s two months. It just takes time.

Jamie Martin
Yeah, it takes time. I know like Coach Annika and some of them, we talk a lot about — if it took you five years to gain, let’s say it’s a weight related thing, you gained fifty pounds over five years, those fifty pounds aren’t necessarily gonna come off in five months, right? Versus five years. It’s gonna take time in both directions, to improve and make change. So it’s the sustainability piece. We wanna do it in a way, make improvements that are sustainable and repeatable, that ideally move us towards better health.

Jim LaValle
Yeah, you have to look at your labs and go, what is it that’s missing? Where am I missing out on, say, my adiponectin?

Jamie Martin
Tell us more.

Jim LaValle
Adiponectin’s a marker that you can get in your lab test that shows you how insulin resistant you are. Because the lower the adiponectin, the less you have available to make your insulin receptors work. And then also, adiponectin is a measure of oxidative stress. So it’s kind of a cool marker. You can get that at LabCorp or Quest, it’s not that hard.

But there are some really cool things that you can look for that can be helpful for you to understand where am I. Because in the end, the lab piece to me — you’ve got to do labs. You have to understand yourself. And at the same time, you can’t get freaked out.

Jamie Martin
Right. It’s not a diagnosis or a death sentence if you get a number that’s a little out of range, right? Take it as part of the bigger puzzle of what you have going for you.

Jim LaValle
Absolutely.

Jamie Martin
You mentioned earlier your book, Your Blood Never Lies. I know you’re working on a second edition to that right now. Are there any new insights or changes in the health landscape that made this the right time to update that? Like why now to update?

Jim LaValle

The big one was because of needing to get advanced lipid markers in. Just to get some more markers in for people. iIncrease the information that’s come out. I mean, I wrote that book. It’s crazy. 2014.

Jamie Martin

You know, we’re going on twelve years later. It’s twelve, yeah, almost thirteen. So time to update it.

Jim LaValle

Yep. It’s time to update it. And it’s just for that reason. But there but I mean I could I mean we look at hundreds and hundreds of markers. Epigenetics, genetics, you know, we could do that all day long. It just for a lot of people it’s like how does it change their behavior? Is it better that they get a big stack like that and they get confused? Or do we lean just lean in, look at where their metabolic weak spots are, get them getting energy feeling better, then you can start to peel off and create more of these specialty tests for people. But you have to establish some baseline.

Jamie Martin

Know where you are. Yeah. Right. And then just kind of over time continue to check and go from there. Right. Right. Anything else you would want to add, Jim, as it relates to labs and normal or feeling off, what that might look like before we sign off this episode?

Jim LaValle

I just think it’s important that people get a lab test, understand that those lab values, if you’re told are normal and you’re feeling anything at all that’s off, you need to start to dig in. And your conventional doc, great doc, I’m sure, may not be able to give you that kind of insight. So now you find someone who does, you know, integrated functional longevity, precision healthcare. There’s so many names to it.

Jamie Martin

Well, and again, be your own best advocate, right? Be willing to ask questions so that you can go in and ask and learn more.

Jim LaValle

I mean most people spend more time shopping for a refrigerator than they do learning about their body.

Jamie Martin

My gosh, the amount of that just makes me think of my husband who researches everything at nauseum. I’m like, okay, I know enough about this appliance. There’s other things to focus on. So all right. Well I can relate to that.

All right, Jim. I always love being here with you. Thank you for all the great information.

Jim LaValle

Sure.

Jamie Martin

And we’ll see you soon.

Jim LaValle

Absolutely.