About No matter what suggestions I make to try to improve your body and mental health (or the many other good sources of information and inspiration) it is nice to get some feedback on if your health is improving. You can use your subjective measurement of how you feel – which might be the most important, but it is also useful to have some concrete measurements than you can follow your progress.
All the hot buzz is personal health measurement centers around personal genomics, but in general your DNA does not change (mutations changes your genome and there are epigenetic changes (e.g. methylation). Therefore, you can’t use your genome as a measure of your changing health.
In a series of post I will discuss the many current cheaper and highly useful (predictive) measurements of your personal health you can use today. I will be concentrating on tests that are easy to implement and give a good bang for the buck.
Non-Invasive markers
Heart rate (self measurement or a heart rate monitor: low end $ 0.00, median $100, upper end $ 400)
Blood pressure ($ 50 – 100)
Physical aerobic ability
VO2 max (general fitness): done at exercise lab, but can do various approximate tests at home.
Body fat burning ability at different levels of exertion (approx $ 250 ? see Alan Couzens and his colleagues: Gordo Byrn, Matt Steinmetz )
Body fat
General body fat level not as good health predictor as visceral fat
(Tanita scales are the most popular: $100. )
Visceral body fat (DEXA scan: $125 -300 each scan)
Slightly invasive
Blood profile
Glucose (blood glucose meters: cheap or free but pay per test for strips)
Cholesterol: New home devices can measure cholesterol (approx $ 100)
Cholesterol, HDL/LDL (CardioChek PA: approx $ 550, might be new alternatives)
Inflammatory levels
C-reactive protein (CRP): no home test at this time.
IL-6: no home test at this time.
This is a first basic level of measurements that you can test and more importantly retest. Most of them you can do at home repeatedly (notable exception at this time is the inflammatory markers). The optimal test would be easy to perform, high reliability, and cheap so you can test many times. Additionally, no one test is the best measurement of ‘health’, so multiples test would give you a more accurate measurement of your health.
Tomorrow, hopefully I will concentrate on one of the simplest which is heart rate. There are multiple measurements that you take and get some predictive clinically tested health measurements.
Hey did you hear about the news, ‘Japan Cracks Down on Waistlines’? The following is quoted from the U.S.News,
‘One regulation, effective in April, requires all citizens over the age of 40 to have their waists measured every year. If a man’s waist is more than 33.5 inches or a woman’s more than 35.5 inches, they are considered at risk and referred for counseling and close monitoring. The government is also requiring companies to slim down their workers or face higher payments into the national insurance program.’
Hm…. measuring the waist line, JUST the waist line, as an indication of how healthy a person is. I found that not useful at all.
Well at least the Japanese government is doing SOMETHING about people’s health…I guess.
I found the trend of ‘American-ization’ of the used-to-be healthy Japanese diet disturbing…
McDonalds, Krispy Kreme, and many other American-style restaurants are multiplying at an alarming rate here in Tokyo, and they are very well-accepted by the young generations. Scary.
Kawai,
sorry I didn’t respond sooner – somehow I missed your comment. You make some very good points. Waistline can be used as a good measurements – since it correlates with visceral fat – which contributes to many negative health outcomes.
thanks again