Need for Optimal Testing

Here is a case study close to my heart….

My daughter who is 14 has been unusually tired in the last 6 weeks. Really struggling to get out of bed (not just teenager behaviour) and dropping off in school lessons (double Geography!).

History: 

She took the decision two years ago to become vegetarian, which I supported her through, for reasons of being an avid lover of animals.

Since then she has obviously grown and her periods have also commenced.

So, I suspected that as she hadn’t been taking any highly absorbable heme-iron (plants only provide non-heme iron and we cannot use this as humans) or B12 in her diet she was experiencing poor oxygen delivery - anaemia.

Optimal Testing

And here - a simple blood test shows - just this, she is literally bobbing along the bottom of “normal” - but look at the ranges…. Crazily broad. So, do you wait for them to drop just out of range? Or read the results in conjunction with the case history. If we consider her body as a bank account and these energy giving nutrients are the currency, she has been taking money out of the account for two years, not making regular cash deposits and once a month making  a substantial withdrawal in the form of a period, and now she is just about to go into overdraft!

Low ferritin -  optimal levels need to be around 90 ug/L

Low B12 -  optimal levels at least 100 ug/L

And low-normal Vitamin D - optimal levels70-80 nmol/L

This is a fantastic example of where using supplements to bridge a nutrient gap is so well placed. I am using Patch MD iron plus for a month, which also includes folate and Wild Nutrition’s B12 Plus together with BioCare’s Vitamin D drops and will re-test in 6 weeks (having the Summer off will help too of course) .

In health, Tanya X