Health Sep 07, 2022
Know your Blood Test Contributors and how they can decode your health
What is the best measurement of a person’s overall health?
The human body is complex and cryptic. Therefore, regardless of if you are feeling under the weather or in the best shape of your life, there isn’t a standalone aspect you can measure to unravel all the answers. Instead, you have to follow a series of cues and decode what they are saying about your mind and body, and what it means for your overall health.
These cues are what we call ‘Blood Test Contributors’ and, as the name suggests, they can be measured from your blood.
What can Blood Test Contributors tell me?
Blood Test Contributors give you a detailed picture of how the main areas of your health are performing. Not only can contributors lead you to an overview of your health, but they also assess your body’s capacity to fight against various diseases.
Luckily, we don’t have to take a masterclass in blood analysis to understand our health data, because today’s blood-testing technology can connect the dots for us. The best part is, it’s able to do so by analyzing a single finger-prick blood sample.
Nightingale Health’s proprietary technology uses all or a combination of Blood Test Contributors below, as well as your BMI and smoking status, to measure Heart Disease Resistance, Diabetes Resistance, Mental Resilience and Immune Resilience. Here’s a quick recap of the 5 Contributors you’ll find on your Livit app and how they relate to your overall health.
1. Fatty Acid Balance
Fatty acids are a source of energy that’s essential for building new cells. There are different good and bad types of fatty acids, some we get from the food we eat and others produced by our bodies. Fatty Acid Balance measures the relationship of the different types of favorable and unfavorable fatty acids in your blood.
2. Cholesterol Balance
Cholesterol is a substance in our blood that’s needed to produce healthy cells. But a build up of too much ‘bad’ cholesterol (which is cholesterol that’s being carried towards your cells) can clog your arteries and increase the risk of heart disease. Whereas, the ‘good’ cholesterol (meaning the cholesterol that is being transported away from your tissues and body) protects against heart disease. Cholesterol Balance value captures in detail the varying types of cholesterol in your blood.
3. Low-grade Inflammation
Inflammation is what happens when certain cells in our immune system send signals to deal with an invader (like an infecting bacteria) or clean up damaged cells. It’s a carefully regulated response that can be activated unnecessarily – if the chemical signals in our body malfunctions. This can throw the body into a constant state of fighting itself. Nightingale Health’s technology is able to identify a special chemical signature shared by different molecules in blood and detect Low-grade Inflammation, even in otherwise healthy individuals.
4. Dietary Fatty Acids
Dietary Fatty Acids are made up of omega-3 and omega-6 which come from the food we eat, because our bodies cannot produce them. Omega-3 levels reflect your recent diet while omega-6 shows long term aspects of your diet, liver function and overall health. Both these fatty acids are essential for building healthy cells and have anti-inflammatory properties that improve resistance to many diseases. Dietary Fatty Acids tracks the levels of omega-3 and omega-6 in your blood and how they affect your health in relation to each other.
Read more on omega-3 and omega-6
5. Metabolic Efficiency
Metabolism involves all the chemical reactions required for life. This includes how your body converts the food you eat into simple sugars in your bloodstream – essential for producing energy and maintaining day-to-day activities. Metabolic Efficiency measures how well certain small molecules called amino acids work to keep your insulin level in check. It also tracks how these molecules carry blood sugar to power cells and store energy for later.
