An Important Blood Test That Will Measure Inflammation
Hey! I hope you’re having a great day!
Blood work. An unpleasant topic for many people. Just talking about it makes many people cringe. Feeling the needle in your arm and seeing your own blood is enough to make some people throw up and others pass out.
I totally get it.
I had to get blood drawn dozens of times while going through chemotherapy as a teen and I must say that it was never what I would call enjoyable. However, as I got wiser to the usefulness of blood analysis I began to see it much differently. Now I actually look forward to it. Let me explain why.
Right now you have roughly 5.5 quarts of blood inside your body. That’s almost a gallon and a half.
A healthy adult heart beats approximately 65 to 75 beats per minute. With each beat, the heart pumps an average of 60 to 70 milliliters of blood, or about five liters per minute. It is estimated that if you were to line up all the blood vessels in the human body from end to end, they would circle the Earth four times. That means when you add them up, the body of an adult contains about 100,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries.
The blood in your body will make a full round trip, stopping at every single cell about 3 times per minute depending on what your are doing. Once the blood gets to its destination, it releases nutrients, oxygen, hormones, chemicals and anything else necessary for the cell to live and function. Once the blood makes this “delivery”, it picks up waste, sends it out to be excreted and then heads back to the lungs to re-oxygenate and get pumped back out again. This is happening constantly throughout the day.
I bring this up because one thing to keep in mind is that at any moment in time you can take some of this blood out of the body, analyze it, and get a snapshot of what is going on inside. This allows us to see inside as to what is or isn’t happening the way it should within our body.
The benefit to this type of analysis is that it is objective, observable and measurable. You can literally count the number of molecules that are present and get an unbiased view of what is going on.
This type of an approach is extremely important when we are measuring things inside our body that affect our health. As I’m sure you’ve experienced, this is the approach used for measuring things like cholesterol, triglycerides and hormones. What you probably haven’t been advised to measure though is something called the C-Reactive Protein.
The C-Reactive Protein is a protein that is made and released during periods of inflammation. We all have some amount of inflammation in our body so we all have some amount of the C-Reactive Protein. However, as our inflammation level goes up, so does our C-Reactive Protein level.
What causes inflammation to rise? To name a few- consumption of inflammatory foods like sugars, wheat, dairy, fried foods and processed foods. Alcohol consumption, certain medications, inadequate water intake, physical injuries, infections, allergies and oxidative stress, which is a result of free radical damage on our cells that causes our cells to age faster.
Inflammation will cause a slower healing rate, muscle and joint pain, lower energy, and will contribute to the formation of nearly every disease.
So you’d think that because inflammation is such a harmful thing and it is so easily tested via the C-Reactive Protein, that doctors would tell all their patients to have this blood test regularly right? Wrong.
Unfortunately most conventional medicine doctors only order this test if they suspect there is an infection or a high risk for heart disease. Terrible!!
This is one of the things that bugs me about conventional medicine. They wait until the patient is close to being terribly ill or at risk of near death before they bother to check things out thoroughly.
Fortunately, in this day and age we don’t need a doctor to be in complete control of our wellness, we can be in control of it ourselves. One way this is made easy is with facilities like Any Lab Test Now (ALTN). As the name suggests, they will allow you to have virtually any type of blood test you can imagine by just going to their facility, putting in an order and giving them a blood sample.
ALTN works with over a dozen local laboratories and they will send your blood sample to whichever one is best for the test you order. They send the blood, get the results and email them to you within just few days. It couldn’t be any easier.
For someone like me who is always curious about the state of my health and who doesn’t want to just rely on how I feel to tell me if there could be a problem, a place like this is a gem.
If you want to find out about the full inflammation panel they have and see the address, phone number and hours of operation click here- Lab Test Link
Of course you can also ask your doctor to write you a prescription for the test and get it at whatever lab they send you to as well. Either way I highly recommend you have it done at least every 6 months.
Also, be sure to check out my article from last week where I talked about a new supplement that has 17 peer reviewed studies showing its positive effects on health including reducing inflammation and oxidative stress.
I did the C-Reactive Protein test before I started taking it and again 4 months later and my inflammation went down by 30%. Pretty cool stuff.
To your health!
Chris Vercelli MATm, RTS, CPT
Founder: Non-Fiction Fitness