Explaining Labwork

It gives me so much pleasure to explain labwork to patients, so hopefully, no one feels like this with me. But, man it’s rough when this happens, right? The word Doctor is derived from Latin docco which means “to teach” and since we’re on Metabolic Health lemme break some stuff down!

✅Glucose: this is somewhat self-explanatory, but it’s literally the level of glucose (or sugar) that is in your blood measured in mg/dl. Ideally, fasting is between 75.-85 mg/dl.

✅Insulin: this is your trusty hormone that pushes glucose into the cell, but also generally sends the message of *growth* to your tissues. If you’re metabolically fit that’s not a bad thing, but if you’re metabolically unfit that basically means = STORE FAT and destroy tissue 😫

✅ Hemoglobin A1c (HgA1c): Hemoglobin A1c is a common marker checked in your PCP’s office. It’s essentially measuring how much glucose is stuck to your red blood cells. The problem is if you have short-lived cells or longer-lived cells you can have inaccurate readings on this. Not to mention, these markers change so late into Metabolic Dysfunction that it’s not super helpful. But, for giggles, I like this ideally around 5.2 or less.

✅ SHBG: This stands for Sex Hormone Binding Globulin. We tend to think about this as more related to our sex hormones. It’s essentially a little taxi that carries around excess hormone. But, low SHBG can be a sign of Insulin Resistance. In other words, you need more insulin to have the same effect on your blood sugar stabilization. Once this mechanism starts you begin a cascade toward weight gain, cholesterol changes, fatty liver, and frank Diabetes. SHBG should be above 45, ideally.

Let’s get you Metabolically Gorgeous!