


20 Aug 2026 · 32m · 16 chapters

Whether to get blood tests (“bloods”) and how to use them for prevention and optimization, not just diagnosis. The hosts argue blood tests should start from a specific question (e.g., hormones, STIs, vitamins, cancer worry), and that trends over time matter more than single results. They discuss common markers: blood lipids (cholesterol) for cardiovascular risk, glucose/insulin resistance risk, and HbA1c as a 3-month average of glucose. They also cover vitamin D needs varying by skin tone, inflammatory markers (e.g., C-reactive protein), ferritin/hemoglobin for performance, and testosterone for aging (“andropause”).
No external guest is interviewed; the episode features Spencer Matthews and Oli Patrick discussing.
Preventative blood testing can reveal dysfunction before symptoms; NHS screening focuses on catching disease, not optimizing; direct-to-consumer testing can be useful but doesn’t replace clinical screening. False positives/negatives are caveats.
Coca-Cola vs fruit glucose response (fiber slows absorption); glucose tolerance testing; timing of glucose around workouts; Steve Redgrave’s low testosterone discovered via blood test leading to TRT.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Discussion on the importance of knowing what blood tests to take and the questions they answer.
“boring but i get a dm it's like should i get my blood done no offense to people who are dming you No.”
Exploring the benefits of regular blood tests for preventative health insights.
“And so that first question, should I get my bloods done?”
Discussing the insights gained from blood tests and their implications on health.
“I mean, you know, I'm not sat here pretending that I regularly go and get my bloods done, but I have had my bloods done.”
An overview of glucose, its sources, and its impact on health and performance.
“We wouldn't know because at that early stage, there'd be no symptoms.”
Exploring various health parameters, including HbA1c and their significance in health tracking.
“Yeah, because you are about to use that.”
Learn how glucose affects hemoglobin and overall health parameters.
“So if you've had high glucose for ages, more of your hemoglobin is being glycosylated.”
Explore common misconceptions about health products like Sunny D.
“Grocery shopping can be a little overwhelming, especially if you're reading labels.”
Understand the processes behind orange juice and its impact on health.
“Well, I mean, like, you know, does anyone want that?”
Discuss the importance of blood tests for understanding health beyond appearance.
“Not everyone's going to be able to afford, again, preventative blood tests.”
Explore how different definitions of health impact personal care.
“Preventative blood testing, I think, is a step for people who are particularly invested in their health and well-being who are interested in disease prevention and really looking after themselves.”
Learn why maintaining hormone levels is crucial for overall health.
“But the actual definition of good health is a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.”
Discuss strategies for maintaining healthy testosterone levels with age.
“we can rest in the care of the state system.”
Understand the effects of hormonal imbalance and the importance of testing.
“I took Anovar once when I was much younger, got chucked out of I'm a Celeb.”
Learn about the complexities of hormone testing and its implications on health.
“So timings, control, consistency, and what you want...”
Explore the potential benefits and drawbacks of blood testing for health insights.
“Well, you lose blood, which you can spare, because we'll make it back.”
Discuss the importance of consistency and pattern recognition in health testing.
“Consistency, pattern recognition, and starting with a gambit of tests that have been logically curated and are really going to form part of how would I spot future Oli today.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On UNTAPPED with Spencer Matthews, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:00Hello and welcome to Untapped, the Extra Mile with me, Spencer Matthews. And me, Oli Patrick. Today we're talking all about bloods. Lots of people just get blood tested now. Plenty to be looking at in your blood. It can tell you an awful lot, as we all know. But today we're going to listen to Oli Patrick, a genius on many counts, about why we should be getting our bloods tested, where we should be doing this, and what metrics are the most important to keep on top of. oh there's a lot in there oh yeah well i'm now gonna sit back and relax well no enjoy the episode this will be an active dynamic conflap between two good friends who like a bit of physiology love a bit of physiology blood's people i get a message i get dm'd i still my dms are woefully boring but i get a dm it's like should i get my blood done no offense to people who are dming you No.
0:52I'm enormously grateful for any DM, a direct message for those not of the verbiage. I'm always grateful for feedback or an input or a question or a topic. But the question I get often is, should I get my bloods done? And it's like, that is not a question. No, that's not a question. What are you actually asking me? And the question before the question is the important one. What is that you want to understand that you think running blood tests might answer and then you're like oh i don't know uh which vitamins i need well that's a different set of bloods too i'm wondering if my hormones are at the right level that they should be which is a different question too i'm just a bit nervous i might have cancer yeah or like you know do i have chlamydia or whatever you know these are all different they're different needs different needs different tests probably in different places and gain full spectrum but you know from an std to a hormone to a marker of what we call pathology or illness to a vitamin marker that is these are different certainly throwing me with the chlamydia coming in from well just high left well i think i think if you if you are wondering if you have yeah a sexually transmitted disease then then bloods i think might be the answer they might sometimes you could also be checking your bloods you know for you know testosterone levels exactly and i think that that piece again is what is the thing you want to understand not what is the the liquid in which that answer might travel ollie i'm getting my bloods done good on you you know are you getting them so you've you've got a really clear answer to a question or are you running them because there's certain things that you'd be interested to see changing over time and the challenge with bloods is and we've got it you know in the title of this podcast is it doesn't mean anything out of the context of the question you're asking.
2:41And so that first question, should I get my bloods done? I'm going to answer that first by going, yes, I'm a big believer in running, again, rolling blood tests as part of a sort of a database of self. I love the idea that what's traveling in my blood is being tracked and trended over time. Which blood test should I run? That requires a little more nuance and a bit more context. I do kind of not defending the question that you seem to think is kind of vague, because it is. I understand where people are coming from when they just say, shall I get my bloods done? I think what is meant, as I'm sure you already know, is, you know, what will I learn if I get my bloods done?
3:23I think is more the question. I agree. And I think there's that general sense of I see other people doing it, and I see adverts on the tube, and I see lots of new companies starting up. So I feel like I'm missing out if I don't get bloods done. But there's also people like, well, surely if I needed those bloods, I'd have them run through my NHS GP or through some kind of provision. It's a bold new world where we've seen direct-to-consumer blood testing go from a sort of an early embryo of an idea to a fully developed adolescent as it currently is in the marketplace. There is a huge surge of companies that want you to send their blood or your blood to them and become the custodian of your health.
4:04And that, again, is a word I would potentially disagree with. Bloods will not tell the entire picture of health, but rolling blood tests can give an individual insights to things that they wouldn't have gleamed without proactively doing this or relying on a state-funded healthcare system that, unfortunately, without being political, doesn't have a preventative agenda because it cannot. And by prevention, I mean not just spotting a disease earlier in its cycle, but spotting a body that is becoming dysfunctional before it would even classify as having a sort of disease. So true prevention isn't spotting the illness before it kills you.
4:42It's spotting the physiology before it becomes ill. And I think rolling bloods could be a major contributor to that objective. Hi, this is Monica Reinagle of Nutrition Diva. Today's show is sponsored by Nature Raised Farms. Grocery shopping can be a little overwhelming, especially if you're reading labels. And in my opinion, chicken shouldn't be complicated, which is why I appreciate Nature Raised Farms. It's chicken that's just chicken. And their lightly breaded chicken nuggets are free from gluten, dairy, and soy. Look for Nature Raised Farms on your next grocery trip and feel more confident about your choices.
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6:33But also just generally running bloods. I mean, you know, I'm not sat here pretending that I regularly go and get my bloods done, but I have had my bloods done. I had them done relatively recently because we have a sponsor in Do Health and I went and had my bloods done. And it is interesting that they reveal things that you would have no idea about. So like, you know, I would consider myself to be a very healthy person. And then you go and get your bloods done. It's kind of, this is super high and this is really low. And it's interesting. It just gives you a bit of an overview of your general health and how you could improve it.
7:07I totally agree. And I think the thing with bloods is they don't always reveal in the physicality. So blood pressure is a similar thing. I don't know what your blood pressure is until I test it. You know, within bloods that start to categorize, some of the markers that are most commonly run would be what's called blood lipids which is the fats traveling around in your blood of which the most you know high profile would be cholesterol and cholesterol derivatives there's lots of different types of cholesterol and you would have no idea sat here now whether one of us has got seriously high levels of this fat traveling through our bloodstream which is proven to be a significant causative factor in heart disease stroke and what we call cardiovascular disease and we wouldn't know that until we know that We wouldn't know, between the two of us, whether we have slightly elevated blood glucose levels.
7:51So glucose, the sugar we travel around in our bloodstream, that if it starts to get too high can start to challenge our blood vessels again, but could then lead to development of a condition like type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance. We wouldn't know because at that early stage, there'd be no symptoms. Can I ask a quick question about glucose? Yeah. That's why we're here. You don't have to ask. um yeah well i well we have to ask you to ask otherwise you won't know what i'm okay so i will ask anyway alas i'll ask um is processed sugar yeah so like the kind of sugar that you would find in a can of coke yeah the same as fructose so like the sugar that you would get in a pineapple if it's the same grammage so say like if you're eating fresh fruit that has you know call it 20 grams of sugar, fructose, but on the pack it will come up as sugars, 20 grams, like carbohydrates of which are sugars, 20 grams.
8:54So loads of sugar in a big pack of grapes. Is that the same as drinking a can of Coke? With high fructose corn syrup, so a version of fructose. The big difference between the two, so they'll have the same calories, is what else is in those products. So in the fruit... But your body will see the glucose very similarly. Really? But what you'll get in the fruit is it will arrive with fiber, most notably. And antioxidants. And antioxidants. But the fiber plays a crucial role because the thing about glucose is both, A, the calories from it, but also how quickly it moves through your digestive system and then turns from sugar in my food to sugar in my tummy to sugar in my blood.
9:35and a food that isn't attached to a fiber or a protein, forgetting all the other ingredients that would be in that high fructose corn syrup, like E numbers, additives, emulsifiers, whatever it might be, things my body doesn't like in isolation at all. The big challenge is in the absence of other factors that slow its rate of absorption, it will rapidly cause my glucose to rise. But does it need to be in the same food? So what if you drank your can of Coke with a meal that's full of fiber? then it would be a much diminished response. Yeah, so when you have naked carbs is often a phrase that's described.
10:10So naked carbohydrate, particularly of that excessively refined or processed, I'm likely going to see an elevated blood glucose response. There is a test that checks how good you are at dealing with rising glucose called a glucose tolerance test administered by labs. And that's looking to see whether you have so regularly potentially challenged your body's ability to manage glucose that that's becoming an impaired functionality. There is no science at the moment that says if I regularly get the glucose spikes, let's imagine I'm doing Coca-Cola after Coca-Cola, or other drinks are available that spike glucose.
10:42There's no great science that says that would turn into what we call metabolic disease, like type 2 diabetes. And actually, lots of that has not been proven to be universally bad for you, which is why those products are not banned. It's a logical play. It's a theoretical toxicity that why would I want my glucose to be spiked, than my insulin, the hormone that reacts to be produced to bring it back down, when I didn't need that response. What does that look like from an energy point of view, brain health point of view? And it's theoretically not good for you without being empirically proven. Well, that's very interesting.
11:14Is spiking your glucose before a workout something that one should consider? Yeah, because you are about to use that. If the workout is zone two, because as we've spoken about before, I'll be using fat and oxygen so I don't need a high circulating volume of glucose. If I'm running tempo zones three, four, five and above I'll be using quite a lot of my stored glycogen or the glucose in my bloodstream. So I would only want to increase my volume of glucose in my bloodstream if I'm about to do an activity that requires towards anaerobic or higher intensity work. Otherwise it's loading my car with a fuel it's not going to use anyway.
11:52And then you might even find, and the pacing of this, we used to call it reactive hypoglycemia where if I took a really high glucose food too too far away from my event i would cause my glucose to rise then my body goes what's all this sugar doing here so get rid of it but maybe even to a lower point than i started um so you know me whacking a mars bar in on the bus heading to a university football game was totally illogical because i basically would start the game like dead because what i when would you when is the so take a 5k for example take a 5k that you may or may not be running like an hour An hour before the race, would you spike it with a bunch of honey and a big glucose spike?
12:33And again, it would depend on... And that would convert to energy? It would convert to energy. Again, two things. If your glycogen store is already full, so if you have carb loaded and you've got high liver, high muscle glycogen, and it's all packed away and stored in there, there's a chance you wouldn't need to raise your baseline glucose levels. Your body's going to be able to access it and pull it out as it needs. And the timing on that, again, I'd have to refer to a sports nutritionist, but I generally believe it to be an hour is too far away, because in that hour, you have the opportunity for that glucose to rise and then fall again.
13:02And so the challenge you've got is the balance between getting glucose in, but not having gastric emptying challenges. And that's really why the rise of the gel has existed. So a gel will give you that rising glucose without that concurrent need to empty food out of your stomach. If we're running bloods, which of course is our topic. Which is the topic of the day. Topic du jour. A parameter that's increasingly been used would be your average glucose over time, which is a parameter called HbA1c or glycosylated hemoglobin. And that is a rock star parameter. How do you know that? Because I love that parameter.
13:36I love it. Hb. Hb. Hb. Hb for hemoglobin. Yeah. And HbA1c. Have an A1 day. That's Breaking Bad's car park. Well noted. Car wash, sorry. So if you have too much glucose, the reason high glucose or sugar is bad for you is if there's too much glucose, it covers cells in glucose. It turns them into like an M &M and then the middle dies. But that's how glucose causes chaos. And it does that to your hemoglobin. So if you've had high glucose for ages, more of your hemoglobin is being glycosylated. And so you run a blood test and it's like, okay, over the last three months, I've been getting it wrong.
14:15I have been potentially overeating on refined carbohydrates. I've been getting ready for races I never ran, and I've been eating tons of bowls of pasta and lasagna that I haven't justified. You have. So principally, you end up in a scenario where that's a really interesting parameter to say, I would have no idea if I've been getting that right or wrong until I look at my blood. I'd have no idea if my volume of saturated fat, because I'm eating so many calories because I'm such an athlete, has now triggered my liver to make more cholesterol than I would like circulating. I've got no idea whether I've got enough vitamin D because my evolutionary advantage compared to all other males and females on this planet is that I'm so pale, I can convert more vitamin D from sunlight.
14:57That's my only superpower. And what a power it is. Well, I'm delighted to have passed it on to my offspring, who again will be delighted. So that lack of melanin, which is an absolute joy on the beach, means I convert more vitamin D from lower sunlight exposure. And so I probably don't need vitamin D. Someone who's moved from Middle Africa and relocated to London, where there's a tenth of the daily sunlight, is not going to get as much of a response from the sunlight through their melanin. And the reality, assuming they've got dark skin, the reality of that is they probably need a vitamin D test to see how much vitamin D they need to take orally to get their results to optimize.
15:37And sunny D is not the answer. Sunny D would be of no value to any human being. assuming they're not coming in as a lead sponsor on the show. No, no. Which we would rebuke. Hopefully not. But can you remember when Sunny D would pretend to be healthy? I thought Sunny D, because everyone else had it, and I thought it was going to be delicious. And the first time I tasted it, it's an aberration.
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17:32I've heard, by the way, this isn't an attack on Sunny D, but large manufacturers of orange juice, even when they claim, you know, 100 % orange juice, not from concentrate. So the oranges are squeezed like a year ago, and then they're put into a vat where all of the air is sucked out of the vat so that it's just held for a long period of time. This is your large orange juice producers that shan't be named. Then, of course, some of the flavor is lost. So the juice is then bottled or mixed with flavor professionals which don't need to be named on the label. It's just additional stuff. And then all of a sudden you have 100 % orange juice, not from concentrate.
18:14But actually it's artificially flavored to taste like orange. That's great. And it's just like it's year-old orange juice. that is just a bit shit. Well, I mean, like, you know, does anyone want that? In the fact that I think Sunny D had literally no orange in it. It was just a chemical warfare. But I mean, it's just bollocks, isn't it? It is. But the food system is broken. And here we go, back to Bloods. Of course. At every turn, there is something disrupting the internal aspect of me. So if I'm nailing a high street brand of orange juice that has got very little vitamins, very big impact on blood glucose, how would I know that's unhealthy if my weight was okay?
18:56And here is that general sense. There's that fascinating thing British people do. They go, you look well, you look healthy, because your weight is roughly what it should be for your height. They're not basing that on the fact you've got good circulating levels of inflammatory markers, that your lipids and cholesterol are in control, your HbA1c is an absolute rock star, your vitamin D is through the roof, your testosterone is that of a... Hard to see any of this without a blood test. You can't see any of this. And the challenge there is, would it be interesting to know this? And we have to play socioeconomics here.
19:24Not everyone's going to be able to afford, again, preventative blood tests. But I believe there is a logic to make a case for running a view below the surface before the state has decided there is a test to identify a disease you might have. And the NHS, of course, is going to fund a test when it believes you've got a high incidence of that potential problem. It's got a screening criteria. but its job is not to optimize you its job is to catch you going from dysfunctional to diseased and so a step earlier than that is spotting trends in parameters that directly correlate with lifestyle in some cases and some cases are completely random and the more trends you have the better the picture you can say of where i've come from but more importantly where i'm going and there's a very cool phrase which i which makes someone sound cool which is called predictalytics which is how would I use the past data of you to predict your future self and if I've got two years of bloods on a six monthly basis I've got a hell of a trend to say that's what Spencer's going to look like in 2027 and if we don't attenuate some of the causes of these negative results then we can't complain potentially when they manifest as disease or dysfunction.
20:35How many people do you think are actively interested in their health? everyone when it goes wrong and that's a really difficult that's a really good answer but you know i'm sat here thinking you know lots of people just feel that they're healthy right so they might listen to this and say i don't really need to get my bloods done because i'm not ill right so a lot a lot of a lot of people i think would get their bloods done at their doctor's request when they are ill so that they can see what has gone wrong. Preventative blood testing, I think, is a step for people who are particularly invested in their health and well-being who are interested in disease prevention and really looking after themselves.
21:27I'm just curious as to how many people. I would be interested to understand through Randox Health or, you know, Do Health, how many people actually come through the doors. Is it a massive thing? It's a massive growth. And I think it's growth for two reasons. People have realised that the state definition of health is the absence of disease, right? And that's fair because, you know, when you look at these bloods, these aren't a rival to the NHS. These are an adjunct. This is not something the NHS in the UK can do because it's tied up with managing the incredible job it does of people who are currently unwell and currently need complex care.
22:03And just the complexity of managing someone with a multiple stage cancer is so outrageously time and effort demanding that of course there's not a budget to start running preventative bloods on you and check you every six months and see if they're changing by 7%. I think if you define health as the absence of disease, that's fine. But the actual definition of good health is a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease and infirmity. And why that definition is interesting is no one is a good health professional. No one is trying to make you optimized.
22:34So if you went into your doctors and said, I've got a testosterone of 17, it's not their job to go, well, you might feel better at 19. Or it used to be 22, now it's 17. their job is to go, we don't start treating people until it's eight. And therefore, if you don't meet a criteria for treatment or management, you are declared well. And sitting at the crux of the rise of bloods is the idea that not being bad is not the same as being good. And on these parameters that circulate in my blood, some of them correlate with not just whether I'm going to get diseased or not, but how I feel. Lots of our running community, their ferritin might affect their ability to have good quality hemoglobin to carry blood.
23:20Their body's C-reactive protein, an inflammatory marker, might affect how well they recover after sessions. Their vitamin D might drive their winter immunity. Their testosterone might adapt their response to training stimulus. The principle is, you know, is if we only interested to spot it at the late stage, we can rest in the care of the state system. if we want to take ownership of the opportunity of optimizing self, and the only person responsible for that is the individual, then I think bloods can play a part of that. How do you feel about drops in testosterone past a certain age? Would you be of the opinion that you would want to keep your testosterone levels where they should be?
24:04Yeah, massively. And I think we've mentioned on the show before, perimenopause, menopause. Finally, there's a better understanding of those things in everybody, because that's not a female problem, that's a societal challenge to manage that stage of life. We don't hear as much about the andropause, which is our version of that. So males don't have a menstrual cycle. So it's not as obvious that we're changing the circulating levels of this virility hormone testosterone, but we reach a certain age and stage, could be 35, could be 40, and that level starts to diminish. And that's the hormone that gives me, contributes to sex drive, contributes to muscle mass, contributes to bone mass and it's diminishing year on year and no one's going to be interested until you turn around with with such low mood state or such impaired functionality that you'll potentially risk to yourself and at that point they might consider i think it's it's a huge blind spot there is there's individual nuance to all of this right no one's going to hopefully take what i say and use that as a clinical case study but principally if you and i have got diminishing levels of a hormone that gives us the very essence of ourselves and it's dropping wouldn't we be interested in ways of increasing that both naturally and then again pharmacologically and by that i mean i might need to eat more protein do more weight training sleep better i might need to take a testosterone precursor could be an ashwagandha could be a tongkat alley there's herbs and all sorts of things going on but if it gets so low maybe i just put testo gel and rub it on the inside of my legs and get my levels back to what it were when I was 35.
25:37And I feel pretty similar to what I felt at 35. And I think the argument against that is that lots of people confuse optimizing hormones as having higher levels versus keeping your levels as they were. Yeah. I think keeping your levels as they were is incredibly important. Like as soon as my testosterone levels drop at all, I will add to them and make them what they were or are now as far as i'm aware i think last time i did my bloods my testosterone levels are just normal perfect the question then would be are they dropping so if you got two testosterone six months apart yeah i'm interested then in the predictoristic pattern they go well why am i going to wait for you to become dysfunctional particularly oh yeah no just i have no interest in that i on a personal note don't care at all when people take testosterone in order to be large and have huge muscles whatever like each each their own i have zero interest in in that as a physicality move or play.
26:36I took Anovar once when I was much younger, got chucked out of I'm a Celeb. So, you know, I've dabbled in this before, right? And that was for all the wrong reasons, right? I wanted to look good in the shower. I wanted to be bigger. I wanted to have bigger muscles. Couldn't care less about this at my age. You know, it doesn't mean to say I don't want to be physically fit and strong, but, you know, I have that anyway. I think, you know, I would be very interested in keeping my testosterone at a level that it's supposed to be at into my old age. Because I just don't see why you would allow it to drop.
27:14The main reason would just be ignorance that you don't have to. You know, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sir Steve Redgrave, who's spoken about this openly, that he fell into what was sort of diagnosed as a clinical depression post, you know, our England's or Great Britain's greatest ever Olympian, five-time Olympic rowing gold medalist, finished the 2012 Games and fell into this depression. And it's hard to work out whether his symptoms of depression were misdiagnized low testosterone. so effectively he went for a random blood test found he had super low testosterone went on testosterone replacement therapy trt as it's often you know shortened on the streets uh and and suddenly you know changed physically changed back into you know a version of his old self and and he's a great advocate for testing and for supplementing and that's different to me wanting to get jacked and the challenge with a hormone is it's not like other things what it's like all things it's not better is is more better is optimum so if i put too much testosterone in i'm saying to my body whoa why would you have so much testosterone and that sends the signal back to my gonads my my testicles no less and it says well you guys aren't probably needed because i'm making too much testosterone so then i get the hypogonalism of the tiny knackers um and and then i might get the breakout of acne and i might get the increased um aggression and i might find all those negative points and all what happened there is i didn't use a parameter to steer the dosage of the intervention right because i'm just putting too much in yeah and having the optimized amount isn't about having more it's about having the right amount and i think hormones are a good example that they're much more confusing because not every hormone is stable if i think cortisol everyone's interested in the stress hormone cortisol it's meant to be high in the morning low in the evening so when am i testing it what happens if i test it after i've just had a row with someone.
29:01So timings, control, consistency, and what you want... Who are you having rounds with? Very few people, interestingly. Yeah, I don't find that that interesting. I think you're a lovely man. I can't imagine you ever round with anyone. I don't see a great need for a round. No. I think a round could be mitigated. I couldn't agree more. I see it as just wasted energy. Yeah, I think we're deeply aligned on that. And finding stress in things that don't need to be stress is a really important modern day trait. because there's stress everywhere. Amen, brother. Stress everywhere. We love the peaceful life.
29:34And stress can be a good thing, as we discussed in a previous episode of Untap the Extra Mile. So if you've not heard our episode on stress, do go and have a gander. I think you should. I think, again, the blood thing is like, okay, I'm interested in, you know, from your point of view there, you're interested in preserving the, you know, a vital, energized, athletic spencer. So tracking your testosterone would be a part of that. you're hopefully interested in optimizing your inflammatory markers, having those tracked to be a part of that. Vitamin markers. The test most asked for is, you know, what blood test do I need to work out which vitamins I need?
30:09And most vitamins are not traveling around meaningfully in our blood. So it's a really hard test to do. You can do a DNA test and go, oh, you've got an increased need for omega-3. You can do a blood test and go, you've got an increased need for omega-3. But we're only going to see what you might have needed when you're a baby and what you ate over the last couple of days, maybe even a week. So there's no great test easily that says this is the nourishment gap that you've got. But tracking and trending things like vitamin B12, vitamin D, your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, so good oils versus potentially less effective oils.
30:45These are things that over time can build a picture that says, do you know what I always want is I want to know that what I'm doing works. I want to hyper-personalize my lifestyle, so I'm not wasting my time doing things other people thought was useful but weren't useful to me. And I want to spot patterns before they become a problem. And that predictolytic power, often needing to be powered by an AI agent or some kind of third-party brain, is for me the future of medicine. And blood is an incredible window to look into the real meat of physiology in the human. Another mind-blowing episode. Isn't it just?
31:24Get your bloods done. what can you lose? Nothing. Well, that's a really good point. Apart from blood. Well, you lose blood, which you can spare, because we'll make it back. One of the arguments against, and you might have heard false positives and false negatives, you heard those things shouted out in the street? Not at me directly in the street, but yes, I'm aware of what you're talking about. So whenever you test someone outside of a structured screening programme, they'll say, well, the risk is a false positive. So a false positive is often cited at things like a mammogram, which is the X-ray of breast tissue to look particularly for breast cancer.
31:56A false positive would be I run, or a physician runs a mammogram, they spot a little lump in the breast, say there's something we're worried about, you wait four weeks for a biopsy, which is where they put the needle in, they check the cells and go, oh, it's just a cyst, or it's a bit of dense tissue. So you had four weeks thinking that you'd falsely tested positive for cancer. And that creates great worry, it creates secondary cost, that cost is often borne by the NHS, we're saying, look, don't send me another person when I've already got 80 people with genuine breast cancer in my waiting room.
32:25So when a test generates false positives, it generally creates angst and burden on a healthcare system. So that's a false positive. You didn't have the problem I told you you might have. False negative is also a risk, which is something I speak about often, that you do a little testing and get a false impression that you're healthy. So I know lots of people come out of a medical and they're like, I had a full test of a doctor, I'm completely well. I'm like, well, there's 155 ,000 diseases and they seem to have run eight tests. so I'm not sure how they're telling you you're completely well, they're telling you you didn't die on the table in front of them but they haven't got great insights beyond that so there is that interesting caveat that says we can't establish a true state of health no matter how deep we test so false negatives, I run a couple of tests on you and say you haven't got that problem, actually you did and then you decide to not follow up with that test six months later or not follow up in two years later so that's about whether the tests have what we call the right sensitivity and specificity Sensitivity is would it find it if you had it?
33:24Specificity is the test is looking for a particular thing. I won't dive into that because listeners will fall off in their droves as we go into it. But the principle being a test has to meet some of these criteria to be useful. And you've got to trust that whoever's putting that testing together has validated that we're not going to give false positives. We're not going to give false negatives. We're going to manage the patient or client experience pretty effectively. But that argument isn't robust when we look at individual cases. There's an individual's case where if you start with a question that testing can be useful, If you throw it out to a population, you will get false positives and negatives.
33:55And that's one of the blights where people would say, I'm anti-preventative blood testing for that reason. So there is a caveat to be thrown in. So consistency then? I believe so, truly. Consistency, pattern recognition, and starting with a gambit of tests that have been logically curated and are really going to form part of how would I spot future Oli today. and if I've got past Ollie, present Ollie, future Ollie's a much easier picture to draw. I can't wait to meet future Ollie. I love present and past Ollie, so I can only imagine that future Ollie will be a wonder as well. Thank you very much for listening to this week's episode of Untap the Extra Mile, all about blood testing and why it could be beneficial to have your bloods tested for preventative disease.
34:44We'll catch you next week for a brand new episode of Untap the Extra Mile. Thank you for your listenership. We love you. We do.
35:03Hi, this is Monica Reinagle of Nutrition Diva. Today's show is sponsored by Nature Raised Farms. Grocery shopping can be a little overwhelming, especially if you're reading labels. And in my opinion, chicken shouldn't be complicated, Which is why I appreciate Nature Raised Farms. It's chicken that's just chicken. And their lightly breaded chicken nuggets are free from gluten, dairy, and soy. Look for Nature Raised Farms on your next grocery trip and feel more confident about your choices. Who says Halloween only lasts one day? With Wayfair, one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home.
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You can feel perfectly healthy and still have no idea what's happening beneath the surface. Spencer Matthews and Oli Patrick explore what blood testing can reveal about your health, performance and long-term wellbeing.
From cholesterol and blood sugar to vitamins and hormones, they explain why your results are most powerful when tracked over time, and how personalised data could change the way you approach your health.
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