In this comprehensive article I want to outline how a thorough Comprehensive Blood Chemistry (CBC) can be one of the main starting and ongoing assessments used to get an overview of your current state of health and to guide decisions about your health, nutrition and lifestyle habits.
Salicylates are chemicals that are naturally found in plants. They act like natural pesticides to help protect the plant against insects and disease. In some individuals, salicylate sensitivity is possible, and the symptoms are pretty obscure such as headaches, IBS, irritability etc, making it hard to diagnose.
Another major role of salicylates is their potential role in improving blood flow. The best known medication for thinning the blood, aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid and was originally extracted from willow bark. Adverse reactions to aspirin may be an indicator of salicylate sensitivity. Knowing that salicylates have the potential to improve blood flow we can then use this to our advantage in certain health conditions and also the recovery and repair of certain injuries.
Blood sugar regulation is the cornerstone of any good nutrition plan, and unbeknown to many, poor blood sugar regulation and thus insulin control can have a significant effect on male sex testosterone production.
Type 2 Diabetes is one of the most prevalent chronic disease around, especially in developed countries. Truth be told it is a disease of lifestyle. Some people are more prone to the development of the disease, but if the right lifestyle patterns are followed it can often be prevented and in some cases we can even reverse type 2 Diabetes naturally.
Working as a nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner, I am able to work with my clients on a number of different levels. I work on every single aspect of their lifestyle to elicit the most optimal change in their health, we look at sleep, stress, digestive health, immune, energy levels, blood sugar regulation, exercise to name a few. Most my clients are for fat loss, however my view is fat loss should be a side effect of improved health, this is why few of my clients will lose lean tissue when reducing their body fat levels and their health and energy levels improve.
In the UK we have the third highest obesity rate in the world, with 22.4% of the population obese. Between 50-60% of the population are also overweight and these statistics are rising each year. Alongside the obesity rates diabetes prevalence has almost doubled since 1997 from around 2.5% percent to almost 5%. What could be going wrong?