3 Ways to Assess Your Nutrient Levels | Antonio Silva, Ph.D. | VitaHelix

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A dietary supplement can be a game-changer for your health. But if you don’t know what nutrients you’re lacking, a dietary supplement can be a waste of your money!

It’s not good for your health that trial-and-error has become the most common approach to choosing a dietary supplement. Instead, what if I told you there are 3 ways you can take the guesswork out of identifying the specific nutrients your body needs. Antonio shares with you how to choose a dietary supplement without trial-and-error or experimenting on yourself.

Contents

The following content is to provide you the insights into the video’s content. To see the charts and figures Antonio mentioned, please watch the above video.

Q: How can you assess nutrient deficiency and identify what nutrients your body needs?There are three ways you can assess nutrient deficiency:

1. Self-assessment.
   Self-assessment is challenging because the same symptoms can be associated with different nutrient deficiencies. Listening to your body is important. These symptoms can be your body warning you of nutrient deficiencies. However, you can’t tell with certainty which nutrient you should be supplementing, and by how much.There are four nutrients most of us are deficient in:
   • If you have Iron deficiency, you may experience fatigue, paleness, dizziness, shortness of breath, and headaches.
   • If you are low in Iodine, signs may be fatigue, weakness, swelling in your neck, unexpected weight gain, and hair loss.
   • Vitamin D deficiency may cause you to get the flu more often, or have fatigue, back pain, depression, hair loss.
   • If you are lacking vitamin B12, symptoms might be paleness, weakness, fatigue, mood swings, or memory loss.

2. A blood test.
   You can ask your healthcare provider for a vitamin panel blood test which normally covers the main vitamins your body needs. This is a great tool to assess your nutrients deficiency if you are very deficient or too much above nutrient levels. The downside of this assessment is the results are only based on the serum analysis. To put in a simple way, let’s make an analogy, imagine the cells being the submarine and the serum being the ocean where the submarine travels in. Imagine what happens in the ocean will not give information about what happens inside the submarine. In this case, the results provides incomplete information not showing nutrients inside the cells.

3. A DNA test.
   Nutrient evaluation by DNA test is the most advanced and personalized assessment of nutrients available in the market. Explain how DNA is relevant to nutrients. Understanding this connection is important to understanding why they’d chose this test method. For example:

   Your DNA affects how your body absorbs nutrients. Getting a better understanding of your genetic makeup will tell you specifically how your genes impact your nutrition and health. A DNA-based nutrition report will include information about how you use nutrients, including macronutrients, vitamins and minerals. Most DNA tests will provide data on vitamins A, B6, B9, B12, C, and D as well as calcium, iron, magnesium, and zinc.

   Depending on which plan you choose for the DNA test, the results can cover more than nutrient deficiency. A DNA test can also provide you with information such as food sensitivity, insights into body function such as how your body processes inflammation, and predisposition to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and osteoporosis.
   It’s easy to do a DNA test – you use an oral swab that comes with the kit to collect the sample.

Summary

Self-assessment is important because your body gives you signals that your nutrient levels are out of balance. But without specific data you’re left with trial-and-error. 

A vitamin blood panel test will tell you how little or how much you have of the 13 most important vitamins. But it won’t give you insight into how your body processes those vitamins. 

The DNA test provides the most complete information – your current nutrient levels, including vitamins, and the unique way your DNA affects how you process those nutrients. This data allows you to make choices based on your body’s genetic requirements.

Your body will warn you if your nutrition is out of balance. That’s why listening to your body’s signals is the first step. But before you reach for a dietary supplement, have either a vitamin blood panel or DNA test done to figure out what nutrients you’re lacking.

Then you can take action based on the test data, confident that you’re taking the right dietary supplement and dose to improve your health.

This is the smartest way to make sure you need a dietary supplement, and that you choose one that’s right for your body.