(I have no affiliation with any company or product I recommend or review. My reviews and recommendations are always authentic and never influenced in any way, by anyone. Period.)
You can only manage what you can measure.
When it comes to health, you need to know your numbers. Yes, listening to your body is important, but it’s not enough. There are biomarkers that may indicate something very different than how you feel – in fact, a lot of them.
As I continue building up and adding to this blog – how can we move on to anything else without first knowing our basics?! And that starts with your blood biomarker testing.
I do a lot of different testing as part of my health optimization journey. But by far the most important and impactful is my blood biomarkers. For a little over a year now, I’ve been using Function Health for this.
Function Health is a new service, backed by Dr Mark Hyman, which provides extensive testing without the need to convince your primary care doctor – an all-too-common challenge facing far too many. As the service matures, expect to see significantly more AI integration that can provide even better recommendations and detailed analysis of your results. Exciting stuff for sure.
Does your doctor screen for ApoB? A far more important indicator of lipid health than LDL. Do you know your Alzheimer’s risk? Are you ApoE 2,3, or 4? This matters, as there are clear interventions that you can take to reduce your risk, if necessary. What about your liver and kidney health? Heavy metals? Stress? Thyroid? How about your metabolic health?
They even provide panels specific to both men and women – testosterone, anyone?
Why is this not normal?! And that’s why Function is changing the game. They are making comprehensive testing normal – and putting the results and data right into your hands.
100+ Lab tests
You read that right. Over 100 different labs. And that’s just the base offering for the very reasonable cost of $499 (annual) – which also includes a 6 month follow up test. For me? I did some add-ons and track a total of 176 biomarkers. All the basics plus some extras like food allergies, Alzheimer’s risk (ApoE), cancer liquid biopsy screening (GRAIL), and a couple others. Now, the pricing can add up with the add-ons, so do so at your own pace.
The benefit is that most of these addons are one off tests and you probably don’t need all of them or maybe even any of them. However, I do strongly recommend adding your Alzheimer’s risk if you aren’t aware of your ApoE status. And if it’s within your budget, consider a yearly GRAIL cancer screening that you can do through Function – but I know this just isn’t going to be practical for many, and that’s ok. Do your best!
What I strongly appreciate about the service is how easy they make it to schedule labs – including the add-ons. And if you decide you want to go check your lipid panel after a few months again, you can schedule just that, too.
The service is not limited to just their basic 2 visits. Think of it more like a concierge practice for your labs – where a quick text message is all it takes to get in for some more labs. The requisition form is submitted by a Function Health physician and off you go. They’ll charge you for the additional testing accordingly. I found the prices to be below expectations.
For a complete listing of the labs that Function Health provides, click here.
Where do I get my tests done?
Function Health uses Quest Labs for their blood draws. You probably have one nearby already. They’ll even handle the scheduling for you. As I was set to take a significant amount of blood, I had them spread it out across a few visits – and they were more than happy to do so. I showed up at Quest at appointment time and was in and out within minutes.
How helpful is this? What do I do with my data?
This might be where Function shines the most. For every biomarker, Function provides you with several pieces of information. Starting with “Why it matters?” – you get a thorough explanation of the specific biomarker and why you need to know the results – along with plenty of links to the source medical literature that you can click on and read through should you feel like learning even more.
You’ll then see a “Summary” that summarizes your results and what they mean to you – along with suggestions for Foods To Eat, Foods To Limit, and even supplement recommendations where applicable.
Function also offers a rather comprehensive clinician note after each visit that provides a detailed summary of your overall health. How cool is that?
You will get a calculation for your biological age which you can track along with your biomarkers. This is a fun metric that I wouldn’t take too seriously, but I find that my wife and I enjoy a little competition here. And regardless of how accurate it reflects your age, it does indeed give you an overall trend of your health progress. For the best bio-age testing and speed of aging testing, for now I’ll stick with TruAge tests by TruDiagnostic – which is the current gold standard.
Look at me, just 29 years old!
Regular follow-up is key to meaningful change
Another one of the strengths with Function is how the system manages, displays, and tracks your data. After your first test, you’ll likely have a few out of range biomarkers. Normal!
So what is next? You would review the information provided for these biomarkers. Learn about why it matters, review the summary, then implement the recommendations the best you can. 6 months later, you’ll do your follow up and see how impactful these changes have been.
If you can measure it, you can manage it.
And it really is that simple. Functions system will keep track of each biomarker and plot it on a nice little graph for you. Below, you can see one of my out of range biomarkers – total cholesterol. I implemented a couple of their supplement recommendations along with minor lifestyle changes – and sure enough, look at the improvement on my next test!
How do I get started?
Just visit the Function Health website. As of this writing, they claim to still be in a limited beta, though when I signed up I was approved within a day. I’m unaware of any other competing service that is truly on the cutting edge of health technology or comes even close to providing such a robust data set at this type of price. If you know any, feel free to share.
It’s nearly impossible to manage your health without knowing your data. Whether you use Function or another service, I encourage you to get as comprehensive testing as you can – especially a robust lipid panel that includes ApoB and Lp(a). In future posts, we’ll be discussing a lot about interventions you can do for many different biomarkers – but if you don’t know where you stand, how can you possible know if you need to intervene?
For me? I’m due for my next follow-up in just 2 weeks and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how my interventions have gone. As you can see above, I’m currently just 8 biomarkers out of range. Let’s see if we can get that to zero?
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