Why 'normal' isn't good enough for your health anymore

Feeling off but your blood tests are 'normal' or ‘fine’? 

If you’ve ever wondered why you’re feeling ‘blergh’, but your blood tests come back ‘normal’ or ‘fine’, you're not alone there, it’s a common complaint I hear from most of the women I talk to and work with. 

In this episode, I’m going to teach you why normal isn't always optimal for your health, and what to use instead:

• Understand the difference between normal and optimal: Learn what "normal" lab ranges really mean and why they might not be giving you the whole picture about your health.
• Optimal health ranges: Discover how shifting from normal to optimal lab ranges could transform the way you feel and manage your health daily.
• Proactive health strategies: Gain insights into functional blood chemistry analysis—a tool that goes beyond traditional testing to help you prevent health issues before they start.
• Actionable tips: Find out how to take control of your health using optimal ranges and when to seek a second opinion to ensure your health needs are fully addressed.

By understanding the intricacies of lab ranges and functional testing and analysis, you'll be equipped to make more informed decisions about your health, that can lead to significant improvements in your perimenopause experience.

It’s time to align your health practices with what’s truly beneficial for your body, not just what’s considered "normal".

Ready to shift from chaos to calm and take control of your health? Listen to the full episode and solve the mystery of normal lab ranges and how you can advocate for your health.

Don’t forget to send in your question using the message me link below for a chance to be featured in our FAQs segment!

Featured in this episode

• "The Blood Test Decoder: Optimal Ranges for Women 40 Plus" - your essential guide to understanding your blood test results using optimal ranges: https://theperimenopausenaturopath.com.au/blood-test
• Metabolic Balance and how it plays a role in optimal health: https://theperimenopausenaturopath.com.au/metabolic-balance 

Find out more about Sarah, her services and the Freebies mentioned in this episode at https://www.ThePerimenopauseNaturopath.com.au

• OPEN NOW: Discover how to use food as your most powerful medicine, smoothing hormonal fluctuations and easing perimenopause symptoms naturally. (Yes, you have more options than hormone therapy!) Say goodbye to feeling out of control and hello to feeling more like your old self every day, with PerimenoGO (because who wants to pause anyway?!)
• The Perimenopause Decoder is the ultimate guide to understanding if perimenopause hormone fluctuations are behind your changing mood, metabolism and energy after 40, what phase of perimenopause you're in and how much longer you may be on this roller coaster for.
• Been told your blood test results are "normal" or "fine" while you feel far from your best? Discover the power of optimal blood test analysis with The Blood Test Decoder: Optimal Ranges for Women Over 40.
• For more, follow on Instagram at @theperimenopausenaturopath.

Transcript

Sarah McLachlan: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Chaos to Calm podcast, episode number 46. I'm Sarah, the perimenopause naturopath, your guide through this journey of perimenopause. So if you're over 40 and feeling like you're changing hormones or hijacking your mood, energy and weight and you want to change that in a holistic way, then this is the place for you. Each episode I share with you my views on what the heck is happening in your body, why you're feeling the way that you are and what you can do about it, with actionable advice to help you feel more calm, in control, less stressed and comfortable in your body. I'm so glad you've joined me. Let's get on with the discussion of today's topic and shifting your perimenopause experience from Chaos to Calm. So today's episode is prompted by all the women that I speak to. One's like my past client, Christy. She always comes to mind when I think about this topic because she was in her forties, early to mid forties, and she was really frustrated, exhausted by like literally feeling exhausted, but feeling very frustrated because she'd been dismissed by her care providers with her concerns about how tired she was feeling and her brain fog, and like she had extreme fatigue and brain fog, weight gain, low mood, a lot of flags for thyroid being out of imbalance, but her doctor insisted that her lab results were all normal, which they were in the normal range, but she still felt terrible and that wasn't giving an answer to why she was feeling so rubbish. And it's almost like she felt like and this is what I know lots of you feel like as well. It's like, oh well, it doesn't matter, you can't do anything about it. You have to wait until things get really bad and you've got an actual disease or dysfunction diagnosed before anything can happen. And certainly it is a major difference between Western medicine and naturopathy is that we actually in naturopathy world, we have the opportunity to help you with preventative care and to help you take action and address issues before they become an overt dysfunction or disease.

Sarah McLachlan: 2:23

So many of you are told you're fine based on your blood tests and those really broad ranges that they use. You've probably heard it heaps of time you test the normal, but you're like why do I feel so bad then? So today this is I'm getting up on my soap box, I'm going to have a rant, but I'm also going to tell you why normal doesn't work for you, why you know you can be told your lab results are just fine, you're not, they're in normal and why you still feel rubbish. Within that, and how we use optimal ranges in the naturopathic world or I do, maybe not I shouldn't make a sweeping generalizationization, but it's what I do and what we do at the perimenopause naturopath with our clients, and it totally changes how our clients feel and how you manage your health. So, first up, I love routine blood testing and if you can get it in Australia it's medicare funded and in New Zealand too. In the US it might be managed with your insurance that you can get annual bloods done it's a great idea. You should absolutely, totally do it because it helps keep an eye on your general health and you can check is anything going astray or awry? If you've got something already diagnosed, you can annual checkups and annual tests let you see how they're tracking. Are they changing for better, for worse? So what I'm talking about today is those general health markers. It's what I use a lot of with my clients just your bog standard general biochemistry, general blood chemistry markers there, and what I love about them is that, yeah, they can help us spot problems early, before any major symptoms show up. Or if you've got some things like fatigue. There could be a lot of reasons behind that and those general blood chemistry markers. They help us see or decide which avenue to explore a bit further.

Sarah McLachlan: 4:17

As I said, if you've got a chronic condition, regular tests can help keep an eye on how things are going. They can check your organ function, particularly liver and kidneys. We want to keep an eye on your kidneys because when you lose function in your kidneys, you essentially can't get that back, and we want our liver and kidneys to be working well because they do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to health and care. So routine testing checks on them and make sure we're looking after them well. Routine testing, general blood tests they give you an idea of your overall health and what's happening there, and that's why we love doing them for all our clients as well, because they give us a health history and your symptoms is one thing.

Sarah McLachlan: 4:56

Blood tests really allow us to go a bit deeper there as well, and they can guide our treatment plans. If you're on medications, then hopefully your GP or whoever prescribed the medication is doing an annual check to make sure there's no detrimental side effects on your liver or your kidneys or something else, but also they can guide us with nutritional supplements and herbs, and I use these general blood tests to guide the personalized nutrition plans, the metabolic balance nutrition plans, that I generate for my clients as well. And, of course, having regular blood tests can help us decide if we need to tweak or adjust there as change. And I've mentioned preventative care there as well. So when we've got something rumbling, an imbalance or an abnormality and it's caught early on, it's so much easier to treat and manage and it gives you the opportunity to use food as medicine or herbs or nutritional supplements without having to go straight to medication Sometimes medications. I'm not here to bag on that, but I always think, if we've got the opportunity to do that preventative work or to use food as medicine or herbs or nutritional supplements first, or even in conjunction with why not Because they are really sustainable and maintainable for you, particularly food as medicine, because you got to eat every day, so you can harness the power of what you're putting in your mouth to really up-level your health or to address any of those issues that are rumbling.

Sarah McLachlan: 6:20

So, yeah, blood tests great because they can help us catch stuff early and prevent more serious problems down the line and also help us, like I alluded to before, but they also help us understand the root cause or the underlying issue that's driving how you're feeling or that's causing those symptoms to arise. And that means that we get truly resolved the issue. We're not just suppressing symptoms, which is what a lot of medications will do, just suppress the symptoms. We're actually resolving the issue driving the symptoms. So then they're gone for good and you don't have to keep relying on, say, supplements or medications or anything like that to keep suppressing the symptoms. You also don't have to worry about your body trying to express the imbalance or dysfunction through other symptoms. So if we're just suppressing symptoms, then our body wants to let us know. Symptoms are messages. They're all signs that there's something out of balance or something going on. If we try to ignore them or suppress them, push them down, our body is going to try and show us in a different way, so we'll get some different symptoms.

Sarah McLachlan: 7:28

So yeah, blood tests are great. They are really useful and they help us understand what's driving how you're feeling. So that's why all my clients have extensive blood tests done to test nutritional levels and organ function, inflammation, all sorts of stuff white blood cells, red blood cells really extensive. So let's talk about the lab reference ranges, because that's really what I'm here for today to help you understand why those being fine or in the normal ranges actually can leave you feeling really blegh. That's the medical term.

Sarah McLachlan: 8:09

So reference ranges sometimes you might have heard them called reference intervals for blood tests are sets of values that are used to help us interpret the results from your blood sample. So the normal lab reference ranges that your blood. So if you get your blood results and I always suggest to my clients, to anyone I talk, to always get a copy of your blood test results and keep them in your email or keep them a paper copy so that you have your history there, so that you can see. And when someone like me says to you, well, okay, so what was normal, but actually what was it, what was your vitamin D or what was your iron or what was your inflammatory markers, you can go back and see if something has been trending up or trending down or staying the same for a period of time, right? So those normal lab reference ranges that your bloods are compared to or interpreted against are the averages taken. So it's usually so if we had like 100 people, we were testing the normal or the reference range is usually where 95% of those people where their results sit, so that, calculated based on the average values found within that sample population. So there's lots of people's blood test results. Each lab can have slightly different results then or ranges, and so, yeah, you've got 95% is the normal range, and then two and a half percent either side of that is higher or lower. So that's how your GP and the lab is testing whether you're fine or not.

Sarah McLachlan: 9:47

So I'm hoping that you're already seeing like what the problem might be there. So I'm hoping that you're already seeing like what the problem might be there. We're looking at 95% of a population that includes men and women. But we know that women aren't just little men. We have a different body. We're cyclical. Men's hormone function from puberty to later in life is pretty flat, like it's pretty similar, like always the same, and ours is not like that at all unless we're pre-puberty or menopausal. So that's the first problem.

Sarah McLachlan: 10:19

But the second problem is it's taking a sample or it's taking the average of people that are presenting for blood tests, and most of us, if we're having a blood test done, are maybe not in our best state of health, are we. So it's not necessarily a true marker of actual health. So it kind of skews the ranges against what's great for women and it's really not surprising then that if we're told we're in the normal range, or we're fine that we feel rubbish Because one size fits all. Or we're in the normal range or we're fine that we feel rubbish Because one size fits all, I'm always saying we're cyclical beings. We have hormonal shifts and that one range that's an average of men and women it misses the nuances or how those hormonal shifts can impact us as well. So I do what's called functional blood chemistry analysis and yeah, wendy and I use that all the time and it's a special interest that we have. So we don't use those normal ranges, we use the optimal ranges for women. So these ranges are designed based on what we know about optimal health for women and how women's bodies function.

Sarah McLachlan: 11:32

So I'll give you an example here. The thyroid is a really common area that women find discrepancies between how they feel versus what the tests show. And if you've had your thyroid tested then they're probably at the Medicare funded or then not going to do a full panel necessarily. Now the normal range for the thyroid stimulating hormone, tsh, is very broad. It can go from 0.5 up to 5 or 5.5. It varies between labs there as well. The optimal level is much narrower. I like it to sit between 1 and 2. So being on the high end of that normal so somewhere over two to five can mean fatigue and weight gain, brain fog, hair loss, lots of different things. But it's normal, it's fine, you're okay. So when we look at those optimal ranges, we can catch and address any aberrations or movement away from that really early. And that's. I'll talk a bit more about functional blood chemistry analysis in a moment and functional pathology in general. It's not just about catching disease, it's about preventing that disease from developing.

Sarah McLachlan: 12:42

A ll right, and now it's time to press pause on our discussion of blood test ranges and move into the part of the podcast that's driven by you. It's FAQs time, so let's dive in. This question is from Michelle, and Michelle asks how do I know if I'm in perimenopause? Well, so first of all, if you want an easy way, let's use our period as a marker of where we're at. If you're having a period, it's such a great marker of your health overall, your general health and well-being. It's like the fifth vital sign, and so if your period is changing and it's persistently changing and it's getting longer, so your cycle overall I'm talking about here so your cycle is the very first day. One is the first day of when you actually start a bleed and the last day of that cycle is the day before your next bleed starts. So let's say I have a bleed starting today and in 35 days time I have my period again or I start bleeding again, then my cycle length would be 34 days.

Sarah McLachlan: 13:53

So if you've got a persistent change of seven days or more in the length of your menstrual cycle, well you're probably in early perimenopause. But even before that very early perimenopause, you might actually notice some increased PMS, more menstrual pain. Maybe it's new the PMS or new the pain, you haven't had it before. Maybe your period actually gets heavier and it might even get shorter. So I said, a persistent change seven days, it can get longer, can actually get shorter to start with before it goes longer. So yeah, if you're having that change in your cycle length either shorter or longer, and maybe you've got an increase in things like PMS, menstrual pain, more mood changes leading into your period heavier bleeding, then you may be in very early or early perimenopause. If you're starting to have really long spaces in your cycle so 60 days or more then yeah, you're probably definitely in there, unless you're younger, and then perhaps it is important to go and investigate other things like p costs or your fat mass that may be impacting whether you're having a cycle or not. If you're younger than, say, mid 30s or late 30s, then do go check that out with your practitioner. Now I also have a freebie called the Perimenopause Decoder that helps you see if your symptoms are perimenopause related and also what phase of perimenopause you might be in, so that you can see well how much longer. Roughly there's some science to it, but really it's a guesstimate, isn't it? So, yeah, go check out the show notes the link to the Perimenopause decoder is in there, Michelle and you can work out whether you're in perimenopause and what phase you are at. So if you like this segment and you have your own FAQ you want me to answer, I'd love to hear from you. Please do check the show notes for how to email me your questions.

Sarah McLachlan: 15:53

All right, so let's pop back to functional blood chemistry analysis, because that's what I want to talk to you about first. So you might have heard about functional pathology. There's a lot of labs, particularly in Australia and the US, offering that you can go and purchase testing on your own or through your health practitioner, like a naturopath. Functional pathology investigates the status of the function of your body, your biochemical, nutritional, metabolic, hormonal processes, and the testing varies depending on what you're looking at whether it's blood, your stool, your saliva, dried urine. There's lots of different ways to do it. There's always lots of debate about what's best For cortisol. Is it best to do dried urine or saliva or blood? It varies. The debate always continues.

Sarah McLachlan: 16:42

But essentially, functional pathology is testing how your processes, your pathways in your body are going, and the great thing about that is because we know like we have an output, say like a liver enzyme, that comes when there's some damage to the liver, but we also know that can be produced at other times or as a result of other processes in the body, so it can give us an idea of, generally, how our body's going. So I practice what's called functional blood chemistry analysis. It is a great method, though, for looking into dysfunctional disease and see how it's evolving, and also try and then give us the opportunity to prevent it from evolving. It's like a signpost. This is where our patient or our client is. This is where optimal health is. This is where they're sitting. How can we move that to that? What systems or parts of the body, what pathways are coming up or telling us that we need to work on there? That's what functional blood chemistry analysis helps us with. Yeah, so, like I said before about the liver enzymes, because of what we know about the biochemical processes in our body that happen in our cells, we can use liver enzyme results to give us an idea of some nutrient levels and your digestive function. So, yeah, using it as a tool to identify or see where there's dysfunction developing or rumbling before it manifests as a full-blown disease or disorder.

Sarah McLachlan: 18:12

Rather than waiting for iron deficiency or insufficiency to become anemia or insulin insensitivity to become diabetes, a functional blood chemistry analysis allows us to get in there earlier and avoid the negative health outcomes. We're looking at a group of markers together. We're looking for patterns in there as well that tell us about the issues upstream or how the systems of the body are going, rather than just looking at one single marker, which is what, like your doctor's doing is just assessing that marker against the range there and then prescribing or accordingly if it's out of that very broad normal range. So if you're feeling off, but your lab tests, your pathology tests, have come back as normal, I do want to encourage you to get a second opinion and someone that can test against those optimal ranges for you. You can go to my freebie, the blood test decoder. It's optimal ranges for women 40 plus and you can compare your blood results against those optimal ranges. And in that freebie as well I give you an idea of what sort of thing, what the each marker is telling you about your body and how it's functioning. So I want you to get a copy of your bloods and put them against your optimal ranges and see what's happening there. Consider looking or talking to a specialist in this functional approach, like a naturopath or there's some integrative GPs that do that as well, but certainly naturopaths. We love looking at optimal ranges as opposed to the normal ones and use my freebie, of course, to help you with that too.

Sarah McLachlan: 19:55

And I want you to also remember, like don't underestimate the power of nutrition and lifestyle and how it can influence your lab results. So small tweaks in diet it doesn't necessarily have to be giant, sweeping changes. We can. Sometimes it's small things, probably the order that you're eating the food, or like how you're eating it, not just what you're eating. Maybe it's too much exercise or not too little, like everyone always seems to think, but those tweaks and changes in your diet, your exercise, stress management can really shift how you're feeling and move your results from normal to optimal. And especially when those tweaks, like that advice, is personalised to you your health history and your blood biochemistry Like one thing that often comes up apart from the thyroid, that's a really common one that I see a discrepancy between normal and optimal there as well.

Sarah McLachlan: 20:48

Cholesterol levels is another one as well. I don't necessarily agree that they should be as low as what the lab ranges indicate. However, we know that leading into menopause and post-menopause, women's cholesterol levels can increase because of the change in estrogen. And food is a small part of changing cholesterol about 20% but actually, like your organ function, your intestines and your liver, and that is really important with that there too, and we can get a good shift in that and a better balance in things like your triglycerides and your good cholesterol, your HDL, with food as medicine. And you know, just had results from a client come through and they were really excited because their GP was happy with their cholesterol. How to change that? The total number had come down. But when I look at it, I saw how much their triglycerides had come down and that really excites me because that's a better indicator of your cardiovascular risk than just looking at total cholesterol. Anyway, that is a whole nother podcast episode that I'll do another day.

Sarah McLachlan: 21:49

I hope you've enjoyed this session today and I hope you understand the difference between normal and optimal lab ranges, how those ranges are calculated, why that doesn't really work for us and why you might be feeling really rubbish even though you've been told your test results are normal, and also what you can do about it. So I want you to question the norm and seek optimal ranges, or find those optimal ranges and compare your results against them. So educate yourself about what those ranges mean for you, what you can do to move yourself towards optimal. And I just want to affirm with you it's really okay to seek a second opinion, it's okay for you to ask for your test to be done again or if there's something that you can do to help have them reassessed or investigate further. If there's something that you can do to help have them reassessed or investigate further if there is something indeed going on. So please remember for more resources relating to the show.

Sarah McLachlan: 22:46

I'll put the perimenopause decoder and the blood test decoder in the show notes. If you want to submit your own FARC for me to answer, please do visit the show notes and don't forget to hit subscribe while you're there to make sure you never miss an episode of Chaos to Calm. Once again, thank you for tuning in and sharing your time with me today. I really do appreciate it and I hope that you remember your health is worth more than a normal label. Looking at your bloods from the functional perspective to get them closer to or in the optimal range is another way that we can keep you moving from chaos to calm. I'm looking forward to talking to you next time where we'll explore health fads. I'm excited Health fads and trends and I want to keep you in the loop and also keep you feeling amazing, so you can see what's a waste of time and what's worth it and feel amazing despite the chaos of those perimenopause hormone changes. So until next time, take care.