You’ve been told your labs are normal, your doctor says you’re fine, so why do you feel like crap? Maybe not really awful, or maybe you’re really awful, or maybe just a little awful.
Let that sit for a second. You’re not feeling right, and you’re told you’re normal. I hear this all day long. So today, I’m gonna show you exactly why normal or what normal is, where it’s hiding, and why that word might be the biggest lie in modern medicine because normal doesn’t mean optimal.
Normal kinda just means you’re not dying yet. Seriously. Sit tight ’cause I’m telling you, this is gonna be a little long, so you may wanna play this in stages, but I really want you to listen to it because I have had so many people, and I will tell you, some of my closest friends have been reaching out to me because we’re starting to see some lab numbers kinda get a little wonky, and there’s a reason for it, and I keep explaining to them that there’s a reason for it.
So here’s your explanation. So I really want you… I’m gonna try and make it simple. I promise I’m not gonna put in the complicated biochemistry, but I really want you to listen to this and share it with people because here’s the thing. If you’re watching this, you know this feeling. Maybe you’re exhausted no matter how much you sleep.
Maybe you’re not losing the weight no matter how much you try. It’s not working from what you used to do when you were in your 20s, 30s, maybe even 40s, okay? I think this is most applicable for people who are probably in their 40s and up because this is when we start to see these numbers kinda change.
Doesn’t mean you’re not seeing it younger because what I’m seeing is younger people are actually sicker and sicker way earlier. So I think no matter who you are, this is gonna be important. But weight loss that you can’t change no matter what you try. Your hair is thinning. You’ve got brain fog.
Your mood is all over the place, and every time you bring it up to your practitioner, you get dismissed. It’s just stress. It’s just aging. It’s just menopause. You’re fine. And maybe you’ve seen two or three specialists, maybe four or five. I’m gonna tell you, by the time people come to me, it’s four or five or six, and no one’s connecting the dots, okay?
And then somewhere you start to wonder, “Am I the problem?” Because you’re being dismissed. You’re not getting answers. So here’s what I’m gonna tell you. You’re not the problem at all because here’s what’s going on, and it’s not conspiracy. It might be. It’s a whole other conversation. It is math Because lab reference ranges are built for averages.
They take a huge pool of people who got tested, including undiagnosed unhealthy people. And normal just means you didn’t fall outside the average. And what I wanna tell you, it’s like this bell curve, right? So for those of you that are watching me, here’s the bell curve. And if you’re anywhere in that long range of lows and highs, you’re gonna be called normal.
In functional medicine, we get very tight. That normal is a very different range for good reason, right? We don’t want people who are just in the average because normal to them means you’re not a statistical outlier. It doesn’t mean you’re thriving. And look, to be fair to conventional medicine, okay, its job is to test, catch a disease, and name the disease.
That’s what it is built for. It’s not built to ask, “How do we get you feeling like yourself again? What does all of this mean?” It’s two different things. So let’s put it this way, like conventional labs are like the smoke detector. We’re the ones who smell the smoke first, right? Usually, there’s smoke before there’s fire.
You gotta get to the smoke, okay? So let me show you what I mean with the labs that I look for in almost every person. Now, I’m gonna tell you, this is not the extensive list, but I think these are the important things that are pretty comprehensive that everyone should be getting, and if it’s not on your lab testing, which more than likely it’s not, you’re gonna wanna pay attention to this, and you’re gonna wanna get it tested.
Okay? So for example, TSH, thyroid-stimulating hormone is typically on your labs, okay? But conventional ranges go up to four point five, sometimes even five point five at… So one to four point five or five point five. In functional medicine, we want that range between one and two point five. So if someone is sitting at four and is being told your thyroid is fine, that could be the presence of hypothyroid in every way that matters to how they feel.
So you could be symptomatic, and then you’re told you’re fine because you’re in the range, and most of the time you’re not in the range. And I will tell you, I have seen women especially get dismissed who are at numbers like seven and eight, like, ugh, not good. Okay? And so a 4.0 TSH isn’t a diagnosis.
It’s like a warning system that no… or a warning signal that nobody’s listening to. Okay? But here’s the thing, TSH is a small part of the story because you’ve got free T3, free T4, and reverse T3, and this is more about conversion, okay? And these are never ordered most of the time on a standard panel. So what do I mean about conversion?
So you can have plenty of thyroid hormone floating around and not be able to use it, right? So plenty of thyroid hormone doesn’t mean plenty of usable thyroid hormone. Here’s what most people don’t know. Your thyroid gland actually makes mostly T4, not T3. T3 is the active form and the ones, the one that your cell actually uses.
So about 80% of your body’s active T3 isn’t even made by your thyroid. It’s converted from T4 in the liver, in the gut, in the muscle tissue, and it uses enzymes like selenium to work and other things, right? You need the zinc. You need all of this kind of stuff. So someone can have a totally healthy thyroid gland, normal TSH, normal T4, and still be hypothyroid because the conversion system, the conversion step downstream is broken, right?
So your thyroid can do its job perfectly, and you can still be hypothyroid if the rest of your body isn’t finishing the job. So really important to understand the whole sequence, not just small pieces of it. Then there’s something called reverse T3. This is what I would call the mirror image of the thyroid hormone because there is a third enzyme that converts T4 into an inactive form instead of the active one.
Here’s why your body does that. It ramps up that enzyme on purpose during things like stress or illness or inflammation, even aggressive dieting. That is a built-in brake pedal to conserve energy when your body thinks it’s under threat. So chronically high stress or chronically undereating. Oh, by the way, if you’re on a GLP-1, that’s important, okay?
So it can look on paper exactly like a thyroid problem because functionally it is one, even though the gland itself is fine. So reverse T3 isn’t a broken thyroid. It’s your body pumping the brakes because it thinks it’s under siege. So let me be straightforward. Mainstream endocrinology does not order this one.
But when someone has every hypothyroid symptom and they’re told, they’re normal, like this is where you need to go looking next. Don’t just take TSH and one other number and think that is the whole story, okay? And the next two that I’m gonna talk about isn’t even about thyroid hormone at all.
It’s whether your immune system is the one causing the problem. So your antibodies, thyroid antibodies that are called TPO and thyroglo- thyroglobulin, these aren’t even hormone levels. They measure whether your own immune system is what we call attacking your thyroid gland. It’s technically not attacking it, it’s attacking virus matter, but that’s a whole other conversation, okay?
But this is what we call Hashimoto’s, and it is the most common form of hypo- hyp- hypothyroid- thyroidism, and it’s an autoimmune issue. It is not a slow thyroid issue. So here’s the number that should change how you think about this because research following women for years before their official diagnosis found that TPO antibodies were already elevated in roughly two-thirds of the people who would later be diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, and that elevation was already present as far back as the study looked, which is about seven years out, okay?
So by the time your TSH moves, the antibodies may have been attacking your thyroid for years, okay? This is the earliest warning system that nobody, or again, almost nobody is checking. And this is rarely, if ever, run on a standard panel because if your TSH and T4 are normal, most physicians won’t look further.
And there’s also a real connection worth knowing because celiac disease shows up at a much higher rate in people with Hashimoto’s than the gene- general population, which is why Like I don’t look at the gut as– and the thyroid as two separate systems because guess what? They’re not. You can have a completely normal thyroid panel and be years into an autoimmune condition that is attacking your own thyroid.
So the antibodies are a part of the story that the TSH is never gonna tell you. Okay? Here’s the same story with iron. Let’s talk about ferritin. It’s the trickiest marker I think on this list because what’s considered normal, and I’m gonna call it the floor, can be low as ten to 15. Oh my gosh, if you’re a ten to 15, that’s a problem, okay?
But again, it’s not gonna get flagged if it even gets run. I want that number between 50 and 100, sometimes even higher for certain people So you may not be anemic, you may not be diagnosed as anemic, and you can’t get off the couch, and you’re, like, struggling for breath, and you’re exhausted. You can’t work out, right?
That’s a ferritin story. That is not necessarily a hemoglobin anemia story, right? But here is the catch, and I will tell you, we see this all the time. I just had a young girl who we were treating, and ferritin was through the floor. We’ve a- addressed that, not just… You don’t wanna throw iron at it only because here’s the catch.
Ferritin rises with inflammation, so a normal number can actually be hiding a real deficiency underneath. Low ferritin is actually a pretty reliable red flag, right? Normal or high ferritin doesn’t rule anything out if inflammation is in the picture. So you have to understand how to look at the picture, right?
You don’t look at it alone. I wanna test iron, something called TIBC, total iron binding capacity, transferrin saturation, and inflammation marker- markers before we even talk about supplementing. And even when it’s genuinely no- low, the number doesn’t tell you why. Things like heavy periods, gut issues, low stomach acid, like those could be indicators of why ferritin is low.
So it’s not just, “Here’s a low ferritin. Take a supplement.” It’s, “Here’s a low ferritin. Why is it low?” You gotta find the leak. You’re not just patching up the tank. Ferritin is never just a yes or no switch. It’s a clue, and it only makes sense next to the rest of the story. All right? And here’s the next one that actually kinda scares me the most, right?
Because fasting insulin is the earliest warning that nobody’s running. And nobody’s running this because guess what? Your glucose looks fine. But we know insulin climbs five to ten years before we see even glucose moving. Right? Glucose is the last domino to fall. Insulin is the first And here’s why that gap exists.
Because when your cells start resisting insulin signal, your pancreas doesn’t just give up. It compensates, like everything in our body. It pumps out more and more insulin to force glucose into your cells, and that compensation is really effective for your body. It’s effective enough to keep your glucose and even your hemoglobin A1C looking completely normal for years, yet the insulin is climbing in the background.
I literally just had this conversation with a very close friend of mine. She’s like, “My glucose is fine. My glucose is fine.” I’m like, “They’re not running insulin. We’re missing a big piece of this.” So think of it like this. Is like, think of glucose alone like checking if a dam has broken. By the time the ga- dam breaks, guess what?
Everybody on the other end of that is in big trouble, right? You gotta check the pressure against the dam building behind it. That is what fasting insulin gives us. And then there’s another calculation called HOMA-IR, which looks at insulin and glucose together. So it catches the pressure before the flood gets released, okay?
Because again, by the time glucose moves, your pancreas has been shouting for help for years. Fasting insulin is where you hear that signal, okay? And insulin resistant isn’t just a blood sugar story. It’s upstream of an enormous list of things that people don’t connect back. For example, PCOS or new, like the new diagnosis PMOS, things like a fatty liver, high blood pressure.
Even things like androgenic hair loss have been linked to higher rates of insulin resistance, and that’s what some of the new research is showing. So large population studies estimate well over a third, maybe even close to half of adults are already walking around with measurable insulin resistance, like measurable.
And most of them have zero ide- idea because no one is running the test that would have caught it early. So this is one of the most under-tested, over consequential markers in all of conventional medicine. And look, here’s where this connects to something we haven’t even talked about yet, because insulin resistance doesn’t just raise your blood sugar risk.
It drives up the number of what we call atherogenic particles in your bloodstream, those, those sticky fats. Okay? And so this now takes us to the next sequence here, your cholesterol panel, or more specifically, w- why your cholesterol panel has been telling you an incomplete story. So let’s talk about what’s happening in your blood vessels.
And I need you to track with me here because we’re gonna talk about a lot of different numbers, but I really– I’m gonna go slow. I really want you to listen to this because as I have said for years and years, especially your post-menopausal women or menopausal women, cholesterol is not the whole story.
Never is. Okay? So let’s talk about ApoB. Your regular cholesterol test measures how much cholesterol is riding around in your blood. ApoB measures something very different. It counts the actual number of particles carrying the cholesterol. Think of it like this, LDL, low-density lipoprotein, is how much cargo is in a truck.
ApoB is how many trucks are on the road, and it’s the number of trucks, not how full each one is, that causes the traffic jam in your artery. This matters because if you’re insulin resistant, again, which is incredibly common and usually invisible, you can end up with way more of these small particles even when your regular cholesterol number looks normal.
And this is part of the problem with statins. I’m not gonna get into that today, but statins don’t necessarily always touch this. Okay? So this is also brand new, okay? Twenty twenty-six guidelines just added ApoB as a recommended test for the first time ever. And this is why I never look at cholesterol without looking at insulin and ApoB, because ApoB isn’t its own separate problem.
It’s a symptom of the insulin issue we’ve already talked about All right? Okay, let’s talk about LP little A. Again, this is another one that has been getting a lot of attention, but this is different because it’s a genetic marker. It’s about 90% genetic, okay? So we know that this is set from birth, and diet and exercise are not…
I am gonna be honest with you, they’re not great at moving it. So you can’t out-diet your LP little A. You can’t out exercise your LP little A. But this is why it matters so much to get down what is in your control. Because the new guidelines say that everyone should at least get this checked once in their lifetime, and most people never have.
And I will tell you, we started adding it. I did it all the time on my cardiovascular patients, clients. Now we’ve added it in. And this is something, again if you’re high, don’t freak out that there’s nothing you can do about it. There are other tests that you can do to see what’s going on in your arteries.
There’s things like the Cleerly tests and some of these others that actually show plaque buildup and how significant of a difference or contribution LP little A is making. So important to look at that. But more important than anything else, okay, is oxidation and oxidation markers. And let’s talk a little bit about that.
I’ll get slightly science-y here because I think the term oxidation and oxidized fats and things like that is being thrown around. I don’t know if you’re hearing it. It’s been around in, in the context of functional medicine forever. But I think we’re starting to– as we start to look at artery health a little more deeply and understand the nuances of what creates issues in the arteries, these numbers become more and more important and more relevant to you guys.
Again, they’re always relevant to me, but I want you to understand why they’re so important to understand. So Myeloperoxidase and oxidized LDL. There are other things we look at, I will tell you that, but these two are about something that’s happening in real time in your blood vessels. And I wanna explain oxidation first, because I use that word a lot, and again, I think you’re gonna hear it more and more.
So oxidation is something, it’s a process that, that your cells, when they’re exposed or when something is exposed to oxygen, it breaks down. So think of when you cut an apple. When you cut an apple and you leave it exposed to oxygen, it turns brown. When you leave a nail out in the rain, it turns rusty.
The same process is happening, but it’s happening inside your arteries. So oxidized LDL isn’t about how much cholesterol you have, it’s about whether or not that cholesterol’s been damaged. And that, my friends, is the biggest piece of this story. Because once LDL is damaged, okay, or cholesterol is damaged, your immune system treats it like trash.
It responds to it, and it sends cleanup crews after it. And those cleanup crews get stuck in the artery wall, and that is literally the start of plaque. Just cholesterol by itself doesn’t necessarily become dangerous. It’s dangerous when it sticks and becomes oxidized. So myeloperoxidase is what your immune system releases while it’s doing the cleanup.
So it tells It– what kind of inflammation? It tells us what kind of inflammation is happening right now, not that it just exists somewhere in your body. So these are not basic markers. They tell you if there’s active inflammation happening in your blood vessels today, not just whether plaque exists, but whether it’s calm or it’s actually turning into a problem.
So how does this all link together? Because that’s important that you know that. Insulin resistance drives up your ApoB particle count, right? The more trucks on the roads. Those particles are more likely to get oxidized. Oxidized particles get attacked by your immune system inside the artery wall.
And all of that, system-wide, is what eventually shows up as inf- as inflammation on a blood test. That’s the whole thread in one sentence, okay? Insulin resistance build the part– builds the particles. Oxidation damages them, and your immune system spends years cleaning up the damage before any of it becomes an actual diagnosis.
So this can be going on ten, fifteen years. We see this in twenty and twenty-five-year-olds, okay? And that’s why we start to see cardiovascular events as we age. Okay, last one I’m gonna talk about is CRP-HS, high sensitivity CRP, C-reactive protein. This is your overall inflammation marker, and nobody p- most of the time people are not having it run unless they’re already sick, okay?
Because inflammation doesn’t scream, it whispers years before it becomes a diagnosis. So quick version of what it actually is. CRP is made by your liver whenever your immune system is responding to something. That HS means, like I said, high sensitivity, and that matters because the regular version, just CRP, only catches big, obvious inflammation.
This virgin– version, HS, catches the slow-burning kind that’s actually driving most disease. So listen to this. There was a major study, Jupiter, called Jupiter, that put people with totally normal cholesterol on a treatment based on high HSCRP alone, and it worked. It cut major cardiac events by half. So people with good cholesterol will– were still at risk, and the marker that caught it wasn’t cholesterol.
It was inflammation. That’s the whole point of this video, right? General ranges for CRP, like under one. Under one is good. One to three is average. Above three is high. I want people at the lower end, not just flag, like there’s something, okay? And When I, we’re gonna talk about this, but what else contributes?
We see people who have a lot of stress, even things like high cortisol and stress, like emotional stress, we’re see- we see that HSCRP go up too. So like I said, inflammation is not screaming at you, okay? It whispers years and years before it come- becomes a diagnosis and you’re not feeling it, okay?
So if we don’t catch it before you do… Because by the time you do feel it, there’s been a problem, okay? So here’s how we actually work. We test wider and we interpret narrower. More data points, tighter targets. That’s the whole method in one sentence. And we ask why. Why? What, what’s going on, right? We ask why because how else are we gonna get this whole picture?
Because… And conventional medicine, we know, stops at the, here’s the average. So high CRP isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s the beginning. Why is the person inflamed? Because here’s the thing, your body isn’t malfunctioning randomly. Symptoms are information. It’s not just random noise. And I’m gonna say this too, healing isn’t just a protocol.
It’s not just, “Here are your high numbers. Have at it.” “Here’s what… Here’s a supplement.” You cannot… There’s no such thing. Anybody who’s saying, “Take these five supplements for stress, and take these supplements…” Bullshit. I’m gonna call bullshit on that because you can’t out-supplement your way of stress, unprocessed emotions, your nervous system.
And I know there’s been a lot of talk about nervous system regulation, but it’s true, okay? And it shows up in your cortisol, in your inflammation, in your gut function. So when we treat the whole picture, the mind is a huge part of that lab work too, and you’ll never see that on a test So people often say isn’t this expensive alternative medicine?”
No. Because most of the time, I will tell you, the markers that I just talked about are actually covered by insurance, and this is medicine that actually looks underneath, right? That iceberg picture all the time. You see the top of the iceberg and not what’s underneath it, and that’s the biggest part.
That’s what I’m gonna tell you. The crap that’s under the iceberg is what is important. So here’s what I want you to do. Here’s real time what you can do. Pull up your lab report right now if you have it. Find your TSH, find your ferritin, find your fasting insulin. Compare it to what I just gave you, not the normal on the page, okay?
And I want it… I also– We’re gonna link it here if you want it. I have a cheat sheet with the functional ranges for everything that I just talked about. So click the link below to grab it because you’re not crazy, you’re not lazy, you’re not making this up. Your body has been trying to tell you something, and for once, someone’s actually listening.
That would be us. That’s what root cause medicine is. If you want help actually figuring out what your labs are telling you, that’s what we do. So click a fifteen– the link below. It’ll give you a fifteen-minute free consultation to me, and we can talk about this. And if this one really landed, the next one we’re doing is about gut health, and that one’s important.
It’s really about the five things that you should be avoiding. So that one’s coming next. Subscribe, share because if you subscribe, you’re not gonna miss the next one. All right, leave us comments as always. Hope this was informative and left you with something to think about. This is Your Rebel Nutritionist signing off, everyone.
Make it a great day.
