He got Fired From Harvard For This One Lab Test
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Hey Reader, Dr Karl here. It predicts dementia and heart disease. Almost nobody orders it. In the late 1990s a researcher named Kilmer McCully was working at Harvard on a marker called homocysteine. He thought it explained a great deal about heart disease — more, in some cases, than cholesterol did. That was the wrong thing to be right about ... and the wrong place to be right about what he discovered. He lost his lab. He lost his position. For a while he had no job at all. His papers, his work, was supressed here, so they got published in Europe instead — and within a couple of years he was being flown across the Atlantic to speak at medical conferences while still being unemployable in his own country. Eventually the recognition came back around. It usually does, about twenty years late. Here's why I'm telling you this. Homocysteine is a real marker with a real signal: it tracks with cognitive decline, with dementia, and with thickening of your blood vessels. And in most people, a high homocysteine isn't some mysterious fate — it's a methylation problem, and methylation problems are fixable. Usually with the right form of folate, sometimes B12, occasionally just a dietary change. Inexpensive to measure. Inexpensive to correct. And almost nobody runs it. Mine came back at 6.9, with RBC folate just under 700. That's a good place to be — low homocysteine, decent folate, which lines up with better vascular and brain health. Though I'll tell you what I told myself: I actually want my folate higher. With the people I work with, I'd like to see 900 to 1,000. So even my "good" result has somewhere to go. That's the difference between reading a lab and using one. "Normal" would have ended the conversation. The pattern kept it going. I show the whole thing — my numbers plotted against the people I work with — here: [LINK] To your health, Dr. Goldkamp That's the whole reason I wrote Unlocking Optimal Metabolic Health: A Data-Driven Approach to Thriving at Any Age — to show you how to read your own labs, see the patterns, and act on real data instead of generic reference ranges. 📗 Grab the book Here: website Your labs are the map. The book is the guide. |
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Hey Reader, Dr Karl here. Flat and boring. If you have ever worn a continuous glucose monitor, you already know what I am about to show you, and you probably did not know it was the point. Four years ago her CGM trace was jagged. Peaks, drops, more peaks. Today it is a low flat line that barely moves all day. Flat and boring. That is the target. I have been saying it since before CGMs were fashionable, and I still say it. Put two people in front of the same ice cream cone. Both spike. But the...
Hey Reader, Dr Karl here. Nine point six. That is where her fasting insulin sat four years ago. On a Labcorp range runs 2.6–24.9 µIU/mL so 9.6 prints without a flag. Nobody called. Nothing was said.Four years later it is 3.4.Her glucose came down 16 points, from 108 to 92. Her CRP fell from 3.6 to 0.47, which is an 87 percent drop. She was 35 pounds over her ideal body weight and she is now 24. No medication for any of it. She takes progesterone for a twenty-year history of endometriosis,...
Hey Reader, Dr Karl here. It shows up in the data, and it's the opposite of what most people track. When I plot my clients by age, something shows up that I didn't go looking for. The older people in my data — the ones still healthy, still going — have a much lower fasting insulin. Not lower cholesterol. Not lower weight, particularly. Big difference between fasting Insulin levels between Insulin Resistant people versus Non Insulin Resistant ones. Lower insulin. The same pattern shows up in...