Your health status is a combination of two factors – your genetics and your daily living. Daily living is the only modifiable factor, and is influenced by your environment and your lifestyle choices. "Metabolic health" is the daily living aspect of your health status.
Metabolic health can be monitored by testing biomarker levels in blood. A biomarker is a biological element that is linked to a health risk. Metabolic health biomarkers are "metabolites" – small compounds in your blood that are the biochemical materials your body uses and produces during normal biological functions. Measuring key metabolite biomarker levels in a blood sample provides an instantaneous snapshot of your body's biology.
Phreedom Santé monitors hundreds of biomarkers linked together in the context of health systems; we call these groups of biomarkers "biosystems". By monitoring systems of biomarkers related to one another, we can offer a more comprehensive picture of metabolic health than by using single biomarkers.
In humans, the metabolites present in a fluid or tissue can change depending on daily living factors; things like nutrition, environmental pollutants, exercise, natural aging, and pharmaceuticals can all exert an influence. Disease can also influence what metabolites, and what levels of these metabolites, are present.
This is not a new concept. For example, cholesterol has long been a marker of risk for heart disease. Cholesterol is a metabolite that can be measured in your blood, and because it has been scientifically shown that high levels of cholesterol can put you at risk for heart disease to develop, your doctor measures it as a marker to get an overall picture of your cardiovascular health state.
Cholesterol is also a good example of the power of metabolites for monitoring health, because it is modifiable by lifestyle. We know that someone with high cholesterol can change that by changing their diet and exercise, and reduce their risk of developing disease. This is a characteristic of metabolites, which is not true of DNA or proteins. Your genes are determined at birth, and they code for the proteins produced by your body; genes cannot be altered. They represent a "genetic potential" for something that may happen, and daily living plays a large part in whether genetic potential is realized.
The important thing to remember is that metabolites can be directly impacted by daily living interventions to reduce health risk.