If you want to do a deeper dive into assessing your nutrient status, then I would highly recommend considering doing a nutrient test that looks at both serum and cellular levels. What do I mean by that? Serum is what’s floating around in the blood now, so it’s very of the moment. In other words, I can say, “Hey patient, could you take this exact supplement for two days before the test and then check a level in the serum?” And we will likely see that serum level rise. But cellular levels are more reflective of a three to four month timeframe in total body stores because the cellular testing looks at nutrient values in the red blood cell or white blood cell and they live for about three to four months. Thus a cellular nutrient test does give us more in depth information on overall status, more long-term status of nutrients.
The test that I’ve been really loving lately is the Vibrant America’s Nutrient Zoomer panel because it does all of that. I get vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, amino acids, fatty acids. So I get a huge panel of information and I get serum and cellular levels both. So the value that I’m finding is that there are a set of people that have some discrepancies between these serum and cellular levels. So for example, a really common one I see is related to some of the Bs, especially B12. So you can have a high serum B12, but if we look inside the cells, the cellular level may be low normal or actually low. So that doesn’t mean … If you just judge based on the serum, you may say, “Oh, this person is good. They don’t need any more B12.” But when we look at the serum, it’s like, “Uh-oh, no, that B12 is not making it inside the cells.” So you either need a higher dose or more likely you need a different form of that B12 or whatever nutrient that we’re looking at the differences between serum and cellular. I have found the Vibrant Nutrient Zoomer test to be extremely helpful and clinically relevant.
