Blood Values
Optimizing Blood Values Doesn't Help
Many try to optimize their blood values. But true health doesn't come from numbers on a lab report — it comes from the body feeling that evolution has shaped in us over millions of years.
Blood Values
Many try to optimize their blood values. But true health doesn't come from numbers on a lab report — it comes from the body feeling that evolution has shaped in us over millions of years.
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Have you ever noticed...?
Let's look at Europeans for a moment — you'll see that there are very different skin colors. This doesn't necessarily mean that a South European is darker — even in Central Europe, there are simply people who have either a lighter or darker skin tone.
Of course, you know this well. Because depending on your skin type, you can stay in the sun longer or can only stay for a shorter time before redness or sunburn occurs. Accordingly, people also tan at different speeds in summer — or lose their tan at different speeds in winter.
Three enzymes are responsible for skin color, and one of them is particularly important: tyrosinase. This enzyme causes melanin to form. Melanin is a pigment that occurs in almost all living things and in humans is responsible for skin darkening and hair color.
Our genetics determine how active the enzyme is and how much melanin forms in our skin basally or after UV light exposure. If the enzyme is completely absent, albinism develops. In other words: our genetics determine how brown or light we are, or how quickly we tan (in summer) or become light again (in winter).
But what does this have to do with blood values? Well: imagine someone sends you their blood values and there's a ferritin level of 20. How am I supposed to know whether that's an optimal value for that particular person or whether there's already a need for action due to low iron content in the body?
After all, I can't tell someone with light skin that they should spend such and such a long time in the sun so they become such and such brown, because it looks nice or — to use blood value language — is "optimal." If I send someone into the sun for such and such a long time, I risk causing sunburn. And who am I to say which skin color is "optimal"?
Only evolution knows what "optimal" is — especially in the context of a specific environment.
In other words: I should think very carefully about whether I really want to push my ferritin level up if I feel good at the current level. I should think very carefully about whether I want a specific total protein level in my blood. I should think very carefully about whether I want to set a specific vitamin D level no matter what.
This last one is a perfect example. There are a large number of proteins — in other words, genes — involved in vitamin D metabolism. Let me point to a gene variant found in reindeer in the far north. These animals are 20 times better at converting vitamin D into the active hormone, calcitriol, than comparable species. Such variations probably exist in humans too — they just haven't been well researched yet.
In other words: the gold standard for whether we need to take action remains our subjective feeling. But since we're completely without context — without the context of our evolutionary past — we should keep reminding ourselves what our ancestors did or didn't eat for millions of years.
Because without this template, every approach becomes pointless and valueless. We humans are so small and so helpless when we try to control an organism — based on individual (blood) parameters — that runs on 20,000 genes and 80,000 to 400,000 proteins formed from them, and controlled by things like gene or protein regulation.
If we don't orient ourselves around a basic idea, we're hopelessly lost.
Why? How are we humans, whose minds were designed to crack a nut, supposed to figure out how we should eat? This egocentrism — the belief that we little humans can "figure everything out" (how ridiculous, see above) and then find the best solution to "the problem" — leads to ideas that make us sick again. These days that's called veganism... or "lockdowns."
No, no. When it comes to biology in its largest context — and the human body is such a thing — you can only find the solution through a feeling for biology. That's the opposite of technocracy, theory, and ant science, which only describes the tiniest individual parts, which then only apply in context X or Y. This is concretely about experiencing, sensing, and trying things — it's a very personal experiential science.
Because the interaction of this incredible abundance of proteins — which respond to every change in the environment (including diet) — ultimately creates a specific body feeling that works like a traffic light:
This feels good. This doesn't feel good.
Whoever then has the courage to try, even over a long period, and then consistently implements it, will do much, much better in the long run than someone who wants to raise blood X with supplement X to target value X and then "feel better." For YOU there is no single target value. But there is a template called evolution, and a body feeling that has been shaped by it over millions of years.
