H UMEDAL DE G IMILEO

Here are some tests are really helpful in getting to know your body:

• coMPleTe blood PRofile. Also called a Complete Blood Count (CBC), this is a test I highly recommend. The complete blood profile measures the concentration of white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets in your blood. This test is often used to identify the general state of your health, find an infection, identify whether symptoms are related to certain diseases, provide indi- cators of hydration or dehydration or reactions to inflammation.

principle #3 61 You can have a complete blood profile done by a health

professional, like a doctor (MD), naturopath or nutrition- ist. The test itself is simple: your blood is drawn and your results will be sent to your health practitioner, who will help you interpret the results. If you see any irregularities then you know that you may need to address something specifically. If you don’t that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have any problems or any challenges, but it’s one baseline that you can use.

I recommend that you get a complete blood profile once a year. One company that does complete blood pro- file tests in the United States is Lab Corp, which you can find online at www.labcorp.com.

• viTaMin and MineRal levels. A nutritional evaluation can identify whether you have vitamin, mineral and essential co-factor imbalances. It can be very valuable to know if you have mineral deficiencies, like sodium, potassium, magnesium, iron, calcium, and phosphate, for example. Mineral deficiencies can lead to several symptoms, chief among them is fatigue or low energy. Direct Labs is one lab in the United States that does vitamin and mineral testing.

Two important vitamin level tests for those following a plant-based or raw food diet (because these vitamins are mainly found in animal products like meat, fish and dairy) are:

(1) Vitamin B12. It is common for vegetarians and

raw foodists to have low B12 levels, but anyone can be low in B12. I will cover the importance of B12, why you could be deficient and signs of B12 deficiency in chapter 15. Getting tested can help you identify if you are low in vitamin B12, which

has important functions for your mood, energy levels and nervous system.

While there are several tests for vitamin B12 defi- ciency, the most sensitive is Methylmalonic Acid (MMA). The MMA is a non-invasive urine test. Sally M. Pacholok, R.N. and Jeffrey J. Stuart, D.O., authors of the book, Could it Be B12?: An Epidemic

of Misdiagnosis recommend Norman Clinical Laboratory (www.b12.com) for getting MMA test-

ing by mail.

Choose the Most Accurate test for B12 Deficiency:3

1. Serum B12: this measures the B12 in your blood serum and can give false negative or false positive results. There are also discrepancies in what is considered low B12 levels.

2. Serum MMA: This measures the amount of methylmalonic acid (MMA) in your blood serum and can result in false positives or false negatives.

3. Urinary MMA: This is the most accurate of the tests for B12 because MMA is 40 times more concentrated in your urine than in your blood. This measures the amount of methylmalonic acid in your urine and the test does not result in false negatives or false positives.

(2) Vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency is more com-

mon than you think. I will cover more about vita- min D deficiency, including symptoms, in chapter 15. Your health practitioner can order this test for you. Direct Labs (www.directlabs.com) is one lab in the United States that does vitamin D testing.

principle #3 63

• c-ReacTive PRoTein. Also known as CRP, the c-reactive protein test is used to diagnose signs of inflammation that play a role in cardiovascular disease, stroke, some forms of arthritis, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune disease and pelvic inflammatory disease. A CRP is a simple blood test that people sometimes get when they are getting their cholesterol tested. Direct Labs does CRP testing.

• heavy MeTals. Heavy metal toxicity can cause a vari- ety of symptoms, like digestive pain, nausea, headaches, sweating and candida. A good test for heavy metals is the hair test because it is the most accurate. Doctor’s Data, Inc. is a lab that does hair testing for heavy metals. The complete blood profile has been beneficial in my own health by helping me address low minerals. For candida (a systemic yeast infection), the tests that helped me were the IgA, IgG and the IgM assay, which test for antibodies to Candida albicans.. If I hadn’t had scientific tests to back up the root cause of the symptoms I was experiencing, I’d still be struggling today. With scientific testing, I have been able to work through these symptoms in a much more targeted (and much easier!) way.

The more scientific information that you can gather about your health, the more you’ll know your body. The more that you know your body, the more you’ll be able to tweak and adjust. For instance, if you took a complete blood profile every year for ten years, you could look at every year and see where you’re fluctuating.

Checking your cholesterol levels is a good example. If you noticed your cholesterol continued to rise, you could start addressing it right away — before there were any health issues, like a heart attack.

Fifty percent of men and 64 percent of women who died suddenly of coronary heart disease had no previous symptoms of this disease.3 _{Testing can be a great asset in disease preven-}

tion, in addition to helping you stay on track with your health. Whether you have health insurance or not, I like to think of testing as a kind of “health insurance” because it can help pre- vent future health issues that could otherwise go unnoticed.

If you don’t have a practitioner you can go to a company called Direct Labs (www.directlabs.com) and you can get the tests mailed directly to you. Direct Labs will send you to a local lab, like Lab Corp, where they will take your blood, urine or whatever is being tested. Once the analysis is com- plete, you will receive the results by mail.

Once you are armed with the test results, going online and researching what the information means is a much better process than surfing the web without really knowing what is going on. The results aren’t that difficult to read, but it can be helpful to have a health practitioner review and interpret them with you.