Functional Lab Markers That Actually Matter with Dr. Angela Taylor
When it comes to understanding your health, not all lab tests are created equal. In this episode of Fast Metabolism Matters, Haylie Pomroy sits down with Dr. Angela Taylor, Doctor of Clinical Nutrition, to break down how laboratory testing works within a personalized medicine framework — and why getting the right tests can make all the difference.
Why Personalized Lab Testing Changes Everything
Most conventional lab panels offer a broad snapshot of health, but they often miss the nuance needed for truly individualized care. Dr. Taylor explains how a personalized medicine approach uses lab data not just to identify disease, but to understand how your unique body is functioning at a cellular level.
This distinction matters. Two patients with the same symptoms can have completely different root causes — and their labs will tell that story, if you know what to look for.
The Case for Intracellular Micronutrient Testing
One of Dr. Taylor's key recommendations is obtaining a micronutrient panel that evaluates intracellular levels — not just serum levels. Why does this matter?
Serum levels reflect what's circulating in your blood, but intracellular testing reveals what's actually available inside your cells, where nutrients do their work. A patient can appear "normal" on a standard panel while being functionally deficient at the cellular level. This type of testing offers a far more accurate picture of nutritional status and can uncover hidden contributors to fatigue, brain fog, immune dysfunction, and more.
What Should Be in a Comprehensive Thyroid Panel?
Thyroid health is one of the most commonly mismanaged areas in conventional medicine — largely because many providers only test TSH. Dr. Taylor outlines what a truly comprehensive thyroid panel should include:
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TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone)
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Free T3 and Free T4 — the active and available forms of thyroid hormone
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Reverse T3 — which can block thyroid receptor sites and mimic hypothyroid symptoms
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Thyroid antibodies — including TPO and thyroglobulin antibodies to screen for autoimmune involvement
Understanding how free, reverse, and synthetic T3 and T4 influence physiological function is critical — especially for patients who continue to experience symptoms despite "normal" TSH levels.
Elevated Antibodies: What Markers to Watch
When a patient presents with elevated antibodies, the evaluation needs to go deeper. Dr. Taylor highlights which markers warrant careful attention in this context, helping practitioners and patients understand the immune activity occurring beneath the surface and how it may be impacting metabolism, energy, and overall physiological balance.
Iron, Ferritin, and Vitamin D: A Triad Worth Understanding
These three markers are often tested individually, but their interaction tells a more complete story. Dr. Taylor explains how iron, ferritin, and vitamin D work together to support overall health and metabolic function — and why looking at them in relationship to one another (rather than in isolation) can reveal patterns that individual results might miss.
Low ferritin, for example, can present similarly to thyroid dysfunction. And vitamin D deficiency has downstream effects on immune regulation, mood, and even how the body absorbs and utilizes other nutrients.
Lab Options and Practitioner Guidance
Dr. Taylor also shares practical recommendations for laboratory options available for patient testing, giving listeners and their healthcare providers a starting point for more functional, comprehensive evaluation.
Whether you're working with an integrative practitioner or advocating for yourself within a conventional setting, knowing which labs to request — and why — is a powerful tool for your health journey.
About Dr. Angela Taylor
Dr. Angela Taylor is a Doctor of Clinical Nutrition based in Baltimore, MD. She is double board-certified in both clinical nutrition and functional medicine, and runs a private practice called BrainFood Nutrition. She also serves as Adjunct Faculty at Johns Hopkins University and Nova Southeastern University, where she teaches Clinical Nutrition. Her specialty areas include Gluten-Free nutrition, Autism, ADHD, Sports Nutrition, and Herbal Medicine.
Connect with Dr. Taylor:
- 🌐 angelataylor.com
- 📘 Facebook
- 💼 LinkedIn
- 📺 YouTube – The Singing NutriDoc
- 📺 YouTube – Brainfood Nutrition Autism ADHD
About Haylie Pomroy
Haylie Pomroy is the Founder and CEO of The Haylie Pomroy Group and a leading health strategist specializing in metabolism, weight loss, and integrative wellness. With over 25 years of experience working alongside top medical institutions and high-profile clients, she has developed targeted programs and supplements rooted in the "Food is Medicine" philosophy. Inspired by her own autoimmune journey, Haylie combines expertise in nutrition, biochemistry, and patient advocacy to help others reclaim their health. She is a New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet.
Connect with Haylie:
- 🌐 hayliepomroy.com
- 📸 Instagram
- 📘 Facebook
- 📺 YouTube
- 💼 LinkedIn
- 🐦 X (Twitter)
Listen to the full episode of Fast Metabolism Matters – Functional Lab Markers That Actually Matter to hear Dr. Taylor and Haylie dive deeper into each of these topics and more.
TRANSCRIPT
Haylie Pomroy
Welcome to Fast Metabolism Matters, where we examine the scientific approach to how your metabolism influences every aspect of your life. I'm Haylie Pomroy, number one New York Times bestselling author. For the past 30 years, I have been creating a support system for vibrant health.
I was in my early 20s battling a life-threatening autoimmune disorder when I learned how vital metabolic health is to our whole being. Join me as I share these insights, and together, let's find out why having a fast metabolism matters.
Hi, I'm your host, Haylie Pomroy, number one New York Times bestselling author, research scientist in neuroimmunology. I'm here to tell you that having a fast metabolism matters. What your body does metabolically impacts every single aspect of your life.
Today we're going to talk about labs — what labs to run, what do they mean, what's the difference between intracellular and extracellular values. I have a super exciting guest. It's Dr. Angela Taylor. She is a doctor of clinical nutrition. She's double board certified in clinical nutrition and functional medicine. She's an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, as well as Nova Southeastern here with me.
Today, you guys, we talked about some really cool things. Why you can't just run iron. Why having copper in the blood is very different than having copper in the cell. How all these values can impact the metabolism, and what to look at when you're talking about the thyroid.
Enjoy this podcast. It's extremely empowering.
I'm going to welcome my community — the Fast Metabolism community — here. This is exciting that we're starting to film our podcast this way. In doing so, my goal is to provide you guys with a very unique and special platform to get to ask questions to the people in my world and in our world collectively — at the Institute, through my private clinics, just over the 31 years of clinical practice that have helped me formulate such strong opinions. Opinions that I value incredibly, that I draw on when I'm stuck on a particular client, case, or research question. Bringing that into this community, I think, really enriches our opportunities to find our own unique pathway to health and wellness.
Today, you guys, I'm really excited. I know that in our community, Dr. Taylor, I've talked about you quite a bit. I'm very excited to have you come in and be on this podcast.
Some of the topics that we're going to talk about today are near and dear to my heart personally, and I know are very critical to engage in with all of the people in our world that are going through this journey of either trying to reverse disease, reclaim wellness, or just stay healthy in the environment that we are in.
Today, everybody, I have Dr. Taylor. Dr. Taylor is a doctor of clinical nutrition. She's double board certified in both clinical nutrition and functional medicine. Our paths crossed — she's an adjunct professor at NSU and also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Taylor, thanks so much for coming in and talking to us all about this really important topic.
Nice to be here, Haylie. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. One of the things that I think everybody's getting savvy about — and I personally think COVID shoved this to the forefront — is people are talking about science. They're talking about their body and how they can communicate with their body.
A big component of that is running labs. Is that a cornerstone in your personal practice?
Oh, sure thing. Absolutely.
How often do you run labs with every client? Do you have clients bring labs in? How do you incorporate that in?
Angela Taylor
We do it on a case-by-case basis because we do personalized medicine. If clients or patients come in with some recent labs, then we're going to start with those. If their vitamin D levels are from two years ago, then we're going to definitely ask them to go get some new labs.
Haylie Pomroy
Speaking of going to get new labs — I just had mine run on Friday. I always try to do it at least twice a year. I know I've shared with you that I have an autoimmune disorder called ITP, so I look at my labs at least twice a year personally.
But one of the things that I find in our community is a lot of people will say they go into their doctors and they get their labs run, and everything comes back as normal or in a normal range. "You look great," they'll maybe even be told. And they're like, did you read the litany of symptoms that I'm having that showed that there's got to be something off in my chemistry?
Do you feel confident saying, hey, everybody's great if they just run a traditional CBC or even a chem screen?
Angela Taylor
Well, it's interesting because the ranges that are used at LabCorp or Quest are for the whole entire population of America, of which many people are not in the best health. So what we like to do is maybe even just start by taking those labs and apply optimal ranges, which are much narrower, and those can really give us a lot of good information.
Haylie Pomroy
Do you look at ratios too? Sometimes we'll add monocytes, basophils, and eosinophils and look at that collectively or combined. Do you ever do that or look at ratios? If one's really flirting on the high end of normal and one's flirting on the low end of normal, that's a bigger deal than if they were both right in the middle, or both high, or both low.
Good question.
Angela Taylor
Yeah, ratios can definitely be helpful. Percentages can be helpful. I mean, there are ratios for all sorts of markers. So yeah, we could definitely look at that.
The ratios don't always show up on the paper. So sometimes we'll have to plug them into our own lab template in order to interpret them.
Haylie Pomroy
So if someone's going in and they're getting labs — if you were to say the top five, you can even include a panel, like you can say CBC is one of them — what would be the top five things that a woman or a man, who is either wanting to optimize their health or, like me, trying to stay in homeostasis with an autoimmune disorder, would love to see run?
Angela Taylor
All right. So Haylie, there are two different ways I can answer your question. Number one, I can answer your question with a lab you're going to get from LabCorp with your insurance. But on the other hand, I could answer your question with my honest answer.
So I'm going to go with my honest answer.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay.
Angela Taylor
So my honest answer is, what I really care about is people's underlying nutritional status, because that's what drives everything. So my honest answer is I would actually only have them run one lab, and that would be a micronutrient panel that looks at intracellular levels. That's it. Simple, done. One-stop shop.
Now there are a lot of labs you can choose from. They're all functional because LabCorp and Quest don't do this.
Haylie Pomroy
I am seeing at least a few more add-ons becoming available through them. I mean, it was terrible before — you could never get a full celiac panel, you could never get a methylmalonic acid, you could never get ferritin levels. I was like begging to get ferritin. So I'm going to stick with that for a second, though. In the micronutrient panel, you said two things that made my ears perk up. One, that you said intracellular nutrition. How is that maybe different?
Angela Taylor
All right. So when you go to LabCorp and you get a level on zinc or copper or any nutrient, pretty much — they're just looking at what's in the serum. So what's sort of floating around in your bloodstream. But what we really want to know is if the nutrients are getting into the cells.
So there are certain nutrients that can be run at LabCorp and Quest as intracellular. And I love those. So I'll just list a few of those off for you.
You can look at RBC magnesium, RBC selenium, RBC zinc, RBC copper. So that stands for red blood cells. That's intracellular.
Haylie Pomroy
But that is at a specific lab, so they have to check specifically. So what I do with my clients a lot of times is we'll research ahead of time. Because a lot of times the doc will say, I don't know what that one is, or I don't know how to run it.
I just had that happen on Friday. And I have a really good relationship with my doc, and she's very bright. But she said, I don't even know what that is, Haylie.
So I prep for the visit and I go ahead and have the codes ready. So if you're using LabCorp or Quest, I'll look it up with my clients ahead of time so that they don't get faced with that. Because saying RBC magnesium, selenium, zinc, copper — all RBC — is a different, unique intracellular perspective.
Correct?
Angela Taylor
Yeah, that's a different lab. If your doctor just says, run magnesium, run zinc, run copper, it's just going to be serum. It's not going to be RBC.
Okay. But there's a problem even if you do get your doctor to order all these for you. The problem is that LabCorp and Quest draw way too many vials.
So I just went and got labs drawn about a week ago for my checkup. And they drew like 20 vials. Whereas when I get my NutraVal, or my SpectraCell micronutrient panel, or Vibrant America — which also has one — or US Biotech, which I love — all those different functional companies have panels where they test all your micronutrients at intracellular levels of vitamins and minerals, and they only draw about eight vials of blood.
And they get it done with eight vials. And that's way better, especially if somebody already has anemia. Why would you want to take more blood than you need from someone?
So the catch-22 is that your insurance will give you some coverage if you go to LabCorp and Quest, but they're going to draw 20 vials out of you and still not get the same amount of information. So it's hard. Everyone's got to make a choice. Am I going to use this insurance coverage that I'm paying for through my employer? Or am I just going to pay for these labs out of pocket and get no reimbursement?
Haylie Pomroy
I've had a lot of clients lately that are setting up — I don't know if they used to be called HSA or FSA, someone can help me — but kind of like a health savings account from a tax deduction perspective. And I've also seen a lot of the functional medicine labs covered by Medicare.
Angela Taylor
Well, only certain ones. It's like the functional medicine laboratories offer a menu — seriously, a menu — of different tests. And they've managed to get a few of them covered with Medicare.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay. I've just had people mention that. You gave us some vendors that you like. Can you tell me, if we were to say, hey, let's all collectively get this done in 2026, which ones do you like? Give us a couple of options.
Angela Taylor
Okay. So without having them up on your screen, let me just go through some of the different labs.
The innovator in this space was SpectraCell back in the day. So they offer a micronutrient panel. I think that's around 30 different markers, or it might be 22. But anyway, that's still great. And they're all intracellular — vitamins, minerals. They also look at something they call Spectrox, which is like your antioxidant status and your overall immune status. And so that's pretty cool. And that's only two vials, by the way.
All right, now let's move on.
Haylie Pomroy
Do you order those through Rupa in your practice?
Angela Taylor
You can, you totally can. The one company that has taken their stuff off Rupa is Vibrant. So you can't get any Vibrant tests off of Rupa anymore.
Haylie Pomroy
I know.
Angela Taylor
But Rupa Health is a good way to get stuff. If, for example, your physician doesn't have an account and doesn't want to do it for you, then it's a good way to get things ordered. And if you're working with a functional nutritionist who doesn't have ordering privileges in your state, Rupa is a pretty good way to get some of this stuff ordered.
All right, so SpectraCell — that's who we used to use. But then all these other companies said, oh, that's pretty cool, we're going to do it too. So then Genova came along, I think. They offer a NutraVal. That's a possibility.
Haylie Pomroy
That's not my favorite one.
Angela Taylor
It's not my favorite either, but it's a possibility. All right, so then you can go to Vibrant. And they have a really cool panel because they'll run both serum and intracellular for everything.
Haylie Pomroy
Yes.
Angela Taylor
And what's kind of cool about that is you may find, for example, that you have high copper in serum but low copper in the cells. That's something that I've seen. That is very eye-opening, that particular finding in particular.
Haylie Pomroy
So it's funny that you brought that up. I don't know if you knew that I used to work in the animal space, right, many, many moons ago. And I did a project with the black rhinos — endangered species.
And the whole copper metabolism was the issue they were having in captivity. It was the extracellular versus intracellular because of the labs that were being run and how they were formulating feed. But I'm seeing it like crazy right now.
I don't know if you're seeing it more clinically in women. I feel like some of it is the copper in our fungicides. We were having tons of copper delivery in our organic coffee especially. I have some theories about it, but I love that you brought that up because that's made me go, hmm — are you seeing it more, or is it just me?
Angela Taylor
I saw it in myself on my last round of tests. So I was like, okay, I also have copper water pipes in my house. So I was like, okay, I've got high free copper, and I've got low copper in the cells. What can I do about this?
And so I started looking around, and I was like, I think lysine helps to move copper into the cells. So now I've added lysine to my stack in my massive vitamin box.
Haylie Pomroy
That's cool. I try to spread the love around as far as what labs I like, just because I really want to be an advocate — with my consumerism — for people fighting the fight of looking at the body not from a reductionist perspective, like "your white blood count's normal, you're good." But I do like Vibrant for that reason, because they do both the intra and extracellular.
And I find that — again, I probably learned this in the animal industry — we were looking at that really, really carefully, especially in exotics. I did some chimpanzee work. I did some work with the Division of Wildlife. And we were looking — I mean, we're pretty much the only species that doesn't care what we're doing metabolically. And when you're formulating feed, you can't sell dog food or cat food without adding supplements to it. You have to supplement. It's not legal. But in the human space, we don't even care. We just don't care what's happening intra or extracellular when we look at medicine — not in a functional medicine perspective, but in the broad scope of things.
So that's one of the reasons why I'm a little partial to Vibrant. I was kind of bummed when they came off of Rupa. But do you have any others that you like?
Angela Taylor
Yeah, there's one more. US Biotech has a really great panel. And theirs is called the NutriStat.
And you can either run sort of the light version of the NutriStat, which is around $400, or you can run the NutriStat Complete, which I love. And that is around $700, sadly. But it covers a bazillion different markers. I mean, it's so many. And it's only eight vials of blood.
The thing that's kind of cool about the NutriStat Complete is that they run all of your nutrients, but they also run all of your sex hormones, all of your thyroid hormones, your CBC, your CMP, and an organic acid test is part of it too. Because with an organic acid test, you can look at downstream metabolites. So it is complete. But that's why it costs so much.
Haylie Pomroy
I love that. I'm going to go do that. I just want to — you know, again, I'm at UCLA. I have a great hematologist. I run all my labs. He kind of gives me this big book and we get on the computer together. He'll run whatever. But it isn't as comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination. So I'm going to actually couple that up with this one.
You mentioned — hold on, hold on, Haylie, who are you?
Angela Taylor
So one other thing I want to tell you about this US Biotech panel is that they also run RBC for all the nutritional minerals and RBC for all of the toxic minerals. So it is like the most complete panel I've ever seen. But it costs $700.
Okay, so that is unfortunate. And you do have to be very careful — you're going to have to hire your own phlebotomist to come to your house and draw the blood for you. Because you can't go to LabCorp or Quest. They don't have an arrangement with them.
So that's a pain in the neck. And you have to be careful that you tell your phlebotomist — for any of these, when you're having the blood drawn at your house — that they have to let the blood coagulate for 30 minutes before they spin it out. Because otherwise the test will fail.
I've gone to all the trouble to do all this and send stuff off to these third-party labs, and the blood was only allowed to sit in the tubes and coagulate for 15 minutes, and everything failed. And we had to do it all over again.
So there you go, a little more information.
Haylie Pomroy
Now, I love that caveat. Because I think oftentimes — and it depends on the state — it's not as difficult as it used to be to get a phlebotomist to come to the house. And it's reasonable.
I've done it in California, Florida, and Colorado. I can say that for those states. New York seems to be difficult.
Angela Taylor
All right, well, let's talk about this, because people need to know this if they're going to do it. You can just hire a friend of yours who's a nurse to do it for you. So that's who I'm having right now — a woman who is a retired nurse. She still gets her retirement check, but she still wants to keep her brain in the medical field.
She's coming to my house for $40 and drawing my blood, which is really a bargain. I don't know if you're ever going to find anybody that cheap, but I really am lucky that I have a nurse in my neighborhood who will do this for me.
And do you provide her with the tubes? Do you order the tubes?
Oh, yeah. When you order the test from any of these companies, they send you a collection kit. It's a cardboard box that has the exact number and color of all the tubes — the exact tubes that you need. And it has a FedEx envelope in there with a little sticky label on it.
So you just have the nurse draw the blood. She has to sit there for half an hour. Then she spins it out.
A portable centrifuge is under $100, so she has to spin it out. And then you just stick it in the box, stick it in the FedEx envelope, and drop it in the FedEx box. It's pretty simple.
Haylie Pomroy
I absolutely love that patients and clients are becoming more and more empowered to take these kinds of steps. What you're telling me is going to be absolutely normal, I hope, by 2026 — for people to be able to say, look, I need data on my body before I can make decisions.
I'm going to throw the word out there. I'm going to drop it. But we have people going on a shot. We have people taking medications. And let's not even talk about the pharmacological side effects. Let's just talk about the potential nutrient deficiencies that they create. Making massive medical decisions — even surgery, maybe going in for a knee replacement — without any knowledge about what's going on in their body metabolically. And I think people are realizing that the outcome can be augmented, can be influenced, by understanding your body and appropriately treating it in a kind, loving, and productive way.
You mentioned in our last conversation, when you were going through what that last blood test checks, you talked about a thyroid panel. Can we just talk about what they check and what is important to check? Because so many of my clients come back and say, my doctor said my thyroid's totally fine. And they're losing their eyebrows, they've got cracked heels, they have hydration issues, they've got fatigue issues, maybe they have weight issues. And all they ran was a TSH. And it just breaks my heart.
Genuinely, the doctor on Friday — I said, you know, make sure you add my RT3, my reverse T3. And she goes, what is that again? And again, I say this because I am fortunate enough to have dear friends at a phenomenal institution and bright doctors. This woman's brilliant. And she said, remind me again, what is that? And what is that for? I'm a woman, she's a woman — you know what I mean — at my age, postmenopausal.
And we had a great conversation about it. But what do you like to see in a thyroid panel?
Angela Taylor
All right. So as you said, just having TSH is really not enough to make good decisions. So it would be great to know your free T4 and your free T3.
So T4 is what your thyroid makes. But then to go out and do the work in your body, it has to be converted — T4 converted into T3.
Now, along the way, unfortunately, T4 can get turned into something that you don't want. And that is reverse T3. So reverse T3 sits in the receptor and blocks the action of what you do want, which is T3.
Boy, that's a whole hour lecture that we could certainly have. But anyway, to answer your question — it would be nice to at least know your levels of TSH, free T4, free T3, and RT3 — reverse T3 — and your level of thyroid antibodies.
So that would be what I would consider a panel. And they are now offering a panel in LabCorp, so your practitioner can just tick the box as long as they make sure they tick the right panel.
Haylie Pomroy
Yeah. And add the RT3. Sometimes, depending on LabCorp versus Quest, they have to add on the RT3.
And this is the other thing, guys — and this is what I did again with my doc on Friday. After she had everything loaded, I went over her shoulder and we looked at what she had clicked on. But then when the phlebotomist came in, we re-reviewed it again. And there was one that was missed.
What had happened is I had already eaten, so they didn't want to run the lipid panel. But in that process, they also clicked off the high-sensitivity CRP. There were a couple of things I wanted — homocysteine was another. She had clicked those off too.
It was not intentional. I was very clear and communicated well. The doc was very collaborative. It just gets missed sometimes.
And so we fill out a request for care for our clients and our community where we say, this is what I'd like run, and this is why I'd like it run. And we always say, bring a copy for yourself, bring a copy for the doc, go over it again with the phlebotomist, and make sure when you go downstairs to the lab. I cannot tell you how many times something didn't get checked or clicked, or the doctor wasn't sure what to check or click. For whatever reason, you kind of have to make sure that you're the advocate for that.
When you run thyroid antibodies, do you like to run thyroid peroxidase and anti-thyroid antibody, or do you have a preference of one or the other, or do you like both?
Run them both. I mean, if you're going to run them, why not?
Good idea. You're already checking your blood. Sometimes it helps me — or I feel like it helps me — know how to better support the body if I understand what's going on metabolically with that autoantibody.
In the thyroid panel, a lot of times, if we could look at that from an optimal range perspective, do you have a feeling with reverse T3? I've been taught so many different things — the lower, the better.
Let me start from the beginning, actually. When you say free T3 and free T4, what does that mean when you say "free"?
Angela Taylor
All right. So your hormones generally have to be carried around by an escort. So they have to be bound to something.
But they're not active when they're bound. The hormones that aren't bound are the ones that are active, and that is the free level.
I hope that made sense. If I had my lecture slides, I could show you pictures, but yeah.
Haylie Pomroy
No, that's okay. So you're saying the free ones have not yet bound to the carrier?
Angela Taylor
They have released themselves from the carrier.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay. And is that post-production? They're converted?
Okay. So if you have T4 and it's converted into T3, is there one that we want higher from a free perspective? Is it better to have more free T3 than free T4?
Angela Taylor
Okay. So T3 is the form of thyroid hormone that does the work. So you need to make sure you have enough T3.
All right. Now, I can see questions popping up. Somebody's asking about what is optimal for reverse T3.
I have my labs reference sheet open here that I use when I'm interpreting labs. And so different experts have different opinions.
Haylie Pomroy
It's talked about a lot, yeah.
Angela Taylor
So I'm going to give you two different perspectives. Perspective number one: one expert says that reverse T3 should be below 15. Another expert says maybe it should be between 10 and 25. And a third expert says that the number should be five times your free T3 number. So those were all different optimal ranges for reverse T3.
All right. Now, I saw another question pop up asking about ordering this stuff from Rupa and how do you look it up?
So you have to know exactly what you're looking for. You start off by looking for the company name. The companies that we mentioned today were SpectraCell, Genova, Vibrant, and US Biotech. You start off by looking for the lab name, and then you look for the specific lab test. So in the case of SpectraCell, that would be a micronutrient panel. In the case of Genova, that would be NutraVal. In the case of Vibrant — what is it, Haylie? Do you remember the name of their micronutrient panel?
Haylie Pomroy
I don't remember.
Angela Taylor
Well, anyway, something like that.
Haylie Pomroy
I've used it a million times. I used to use Great Smokies. That's how far back I go on these things.
Angela Taylor
Back in the day.
Haylie Pomroy
Back in the day.
Angela Taylor
And then the fourth one is US Biotech, and that's called the NutriStat.
Haylie Pomroy
And US Biotech is on Rupa, correct?
I think so.
Okay. And Vibrant, you have to go independently to them. But they're really helpful. Yeah.
Great. I have a question. When you said reverse T3 — when we were looking at it metabolically, it depends on where the decimal point is, right? When you said 15 and 10 to 20, certain labs will move the decimal point over. But we used to always look at it as, if we had people that were over 150 or 15, it was a dead giveaway to look for peroxidase and anti-thyroid antibody. There's something going on where the body's immune system, inflammatory markers, or autoimmunity is creating or wreaking havoc.
The other thing that we find in the thyroid is most people are being supplemented with just T4 — Levothyroxine or Synthroid. And long-term — or even short-term in some cases we've seen more recently clinically — the ratios get very off depending on their nutrient status.
And when we see individuals that are on the synthetic form of T4, especially when they're not given some synthetic T3 alongside it, we see the reverse T3 going through the roof. Can you give me a little insight into that? Is it that it's so hard for the body to convert that synthetic form?
So, you guys, what I'm talking about is — a lot of times if the thyroid shows as off, let's say your TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) is elevated. So it's the opposite of what you would think — an elevated Thyroid Stimulating Hormone can mean lower thyroid function. But remember, that's a pituitary hormone. So it's like the pituitary talking to the thyroid.
I always tell my clients, remember, if you have to talk to somebody and you really have to yell, it's because they're not a great listener, right? So that's a high TSH — the pituitary saying, come on, thyroid. If the thyroid's a good listener, the pituitary doesn't have to work so hard to keep your level stable.
But it's a pituitary hormone. That's why I don't think it's the best look at thyroid function on its own. But let's say your TSH was really high and a doc said, oh yeah, you need some thyroid medication, and they gave you just T4.
So as Dr. Taylor was talking about, there are two forms, right? When you just give T4, the body now has to convert it. And they also give you a synthetic form of T4.
I just see reverse T3 go super high once we start peeking at that. What's going on there, do you think?
Angela Taylor
All right, so this is what Haylie's talking about. Up here is your brain, above the thyroid, and here's your thyroid. So your brain makes the TSH and that yells down, as Haylie just said, and says, I'm TSH — make me some T4.
So hopefully the thyroid will make T4, but if it doesn't, then you take a T4 pill. But the problem that Haylie is telling you about is that it can go one of two ways. If it goes toward RT3, that's the bad way — you don't want that. If it goes toward T3, that's the good way — you want that.
So yeah, if we're just giving people lots and lots of T4, we could just be enabling them to make a ton of RT3. That's bad. So it might be better if we just give people some T3.
But there is a little challenge with that. The half-life of T4 is really long. So when you give T4 to people, the level in the bloodstream stays pretty stable.
The half-life of T3 is quite short, like just a few hours. So when you give people T3, it spikes really fast. I think that's why doctors have for years said, we're going to give you T4 because it'll stay at steady levels in your blood.
But what I would love to see is people taking T3 — maybe just in addition to T4, if that makes the doctor more comfortable — just a really low dose of actual T3, maybe taking that in the morning before you eat, and maybe a small dose again before lunch.
There is one other alternative. At compounding pharmacies, they do offer a sustained-release T3. It's called E4M when they make you a sustained-release T3 — they basically put the T3 in a capsule with something that slows down the absorption.
So anyway, those are a bunch of options. But other options: if you're taking T4 and you just can't get your hands on any T3, you can at least help increase your conversion by making sure that your selenium and your zinc levels are good. And then once you do succeed in converting it to T3, you need to make sure you have enough vitamin A to actually use it at the receptor. And you can exercise. And again, you need zinc. So there you go — there's a bunch of ideas.
Haylie Pomroy
I absolutely love this. Thank you for sharing that.
I had a conversation with a group of endocrinologists. I would say the bulk of them were IFM-certified, functional medicine certified. And a lot of them were talking about the reluctancy around — when you talk about half-life, meaning how quickly the body can metabolize or how long it stays in the body — dosing T3 like you just said, throughout the day, or using a time-released version if people can tolerate that.
And it was interesting because there is a component of reverse T3 that's supposed to be protective. So we don't want it at zero, right? Nothing in our body is there by mistake. But we can't convert T3 back into reverse T3. And so oftentimes when reverse T3 is really high, I've seen some protocols where they'll taper up T3 to get the reverse T3 finally out of the receptor sites, and then settle down on a much lower dose — even if it's Cytomel, which is the synthetic version, but a T3.
So that takes a practitioner who is talking to you, looking at you, and running your labs fairly regularly to transition the body into a better state. Thank you for that. That's a great graphic.
Because I know we're limited on time, I'd really like to touch on two other quick things if we can. A lot of people are talking about iron levels. And I have always been taught — and I know you do this too — we don't just look at serum iron.
Can you talk to me about why we add other things like ferritin, or — I'm going to say it wrong — TIBC? Did I get my acronym right? T-B-I-C?
T-I-B-C.
Okay, I did get it right. My dyslexia. Why we like to look at that, and how that impacts the body metabolically.
So I'll tell you, I have this really interesting thing where the vitamin D that we manufacture works really well for me. If I don't take it, my vitamin D levels go down but my ferritin pops up at the same time. Can you explain to us why?
Angela Taylor
Sure thing. All right, so ferritin is your storage iron. And so I can't just look at your serum iron alone — I need to know your ferritin level too.
Here's why: if your ferritin stores are low, I will probably see a low ferritin number. I see this commonly in menstruating women, especially if they're vegetarian or vegan — their ferritin levels are terrible. And that is bad news for so many reasons.
Okay, now there is a weird thing that the body will do sometimes in times of infection. It will try to take all the circulating iron out of circulation and put it into storage, because the body's thinking is that iron can possibly help the infection to grow. So it wants to starve the infection of iron. It will, on purpose, take the iron and put it into ferritin. And so we will see an elevation in ferritin.
And so this totally correlates. Like, your vitamin D levels aren't so good for whatever reason, Haylie, and then your ferritin goes up. So it's like, okay, that totally makes sense, because now some infection is coming back. And so your body's hiding iron in the form of ferritin.
Haylie Pomroy
And for me, it's cytomegalovirus. Like a lot of our community, it's Epstein-Barr virus, or it can be parvovirus or coxsackievirus. We see a lot of different chronic, historical viral components. But my community is going to laugh at me right now —
We had sold out of vitamin D, and they keep me supplied. I make my supplement packs a month at a time — I make four weeks' worth, so 28 days. And I had just run out. And it was so funny because it happened so fast. And it was, for me — I am susceptible to shingles when that ratio goes off. I know, so fun times over here.
And it's one of those things where I just go, or I could just take my vitamin D. Because over the years of looking at extracellular and intracellular nutritional evaluations, I've learned — like you just said, you're adding more lysine to drive copper into the cell — I've learned that when my vitamin D levels are low, not only does my progesterone drop, but my body starts to hoard ferritin because it says, oh no, here comes the infectious component.
And if I let it go too long, the only reminder for me to go, hey, your vitamin D must be below 60 — if I drop below 60, we have a running joke in my house. I become "all the shingle ladies." You know, it's like, whoa, Merry Christmas, you get shingles.
But I share that because it's so important and empowering to be able to navigate — instead of just saying everything is good for everybody, or everything should fix everything. It's really good to navigate those things individually.
We have a couple more questions, and then I know we're on a tight time schedule. But I just want to ask — what are the things that you run in conjunction with iron and ferritin, and what does the TIBC mean?
Angela Taylor
All right. So if you're going to run an iron panel, you're going to run serum iron. You're going to run TIBC — total iron binding capacity. So you've got to be able to carry the iron around in the blood.
And by the way, copper is needed for iron transport. So by the way, if someone is taking high-dose zinc, they could drive themselves into copper deficiency. And during COVID, people were really hitting the zinc pretty heavy, and you can definitely drive yourself into copper deficiency, which can then drive you into iron deficiency.
Haylie Pomroy
There you go. Yeah. I appreciate it.
So we had a couple of questions from our community. Do you have, from an optimal range perspective for thyroid peroxidase — is that one of those labs that everybody always tells me, lower is better?
Angela Taylor
Yeah. Well, it's true. So your standard lab range is all over the place. I think they've finally lowered it to below 35, which is considered normal according to LabCorp. But for an optimal lab range, we might want it to be like below 10.
Now, what might be some things to look at if you're getting elevated antibodies? You would look at intestinal permeability — so that's leaky gut. The best way to handle that is going to be to go on a very strict gluten-free diet, but also to look at exposure to mold, to EMF, to low vitamin D levels, and to sleep. You know, you've got to optimize everything. It's never as simple as one thing magically fixing your TPO antibodies. You've got to look at it all.
Haylie Pomroy
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I love that you added sleep, mold, and EMF also.
When I travel, I'm less careful about it. And I've realized — you're going to be horrified — my laptop, my phone, my everything is on my bed next to me. And then God forbid you're at a hotel with the alarm clock at your head. And I just wonder why. Not to mention everything else that's probably circulating in that environment.
But I've tried to be a lot better about that this last year. It was a lecture I attended — you know, that really makes such a negative impact in your body. We know for sure. There's a lot of hypothesis about disease and disease processes.
Dr. Taylor, I also want to ask you — you have just recently published an amazing book. Can you just spend a little bit of time sharing where we can find it and what it's about?
Angela Taylor
Oh, sure. It's called the Brain Food Cookbook. It is a paleo cookbook.
Another way of calling paleo is the specific carbohydrate diet — they're very similar. It's really geared towards the autism and ADHD community. But I will tell you that some people who have persistent autoimmune issues, including autoimmune thyroid, will go on something called the AIP diet, which is very similar to paleo. So you may find that some of the recipes are suitable for you.
But of course, everybody has their own foods that they eat and don't eat. So you would need to customize if there's a particular thing that you don't eat.
Haylie Pomroy
That topic is in my book especially — from a pediatric perspective, with our kids that are in our world who have ADHD and different aspects of the autism spectrum. There's a lot of great data in there, and great food. Where can they find this book?
Angela Taylor
Oh, brainfoodcookbook.com.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay, you guys got that — Brain Food Cookbook. We'll post it too. And Dr. Taylor, is it a hardcover book?
Angela Taylor
Well, I ran out of my second print run. So I have about six paper copies back here, but I'm not really selling those anymore because I only have six left. So it's a PDF. It's wonderful.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay, you guys, I'm going to post the link for sure. And make sure that everybody does that.
I've got one last question that we're going to be able to get to. And you guys, keep posting questions — we can get back to these, and they'll be memorialized in our Circle community.
Angela Taylor
And I can answer these very quickly. Do you want me to answer them?
Sure.
Okay. All right. So regarding finding a good endocrinologist in Baltimore — I have not found one. I have trained myself, and as Haylie knows, I teach endocrine at NSU in our functional nutrition area. So anyway, I am not really relying on an endocrinologist because I'm not getting good information from them. But there is a nurse practitioner who I work with in Baltimore who is prescribing for me. And together we're collaborating and evaluating the labs because I can't prescribe.
So if you want to know that nurse practitioner's name, ping me and I'll get it to you.
Next question — zinc. The only way to know what your zinc and copper levels are is to go get labs. And I prefer the labs that tell you both serum and RBC. So you can get a bunch of vials drawn at LabCorp and do it that way, or you can get the Vibrant micronutrient panel, or you can get the US Biotech. And that way you could know what your free and RBC levels are.
Okay. And then the third question — colostrum. If you have a problem with dairy, you can get Mega IgG, which is bovine-derived but from the cow's blood, so there's no dairy in it. Microbiome Labs makes a product called Mega IgG. And that's basically the same thing as colostrum. So go with that and it won't be dairy.
Haylie Pomroy
Hey, this is Haylie Pomroy. And right now we're going to transition into our Q&A portion of the podcast. And you'll notice that we have live viewers asking us questions. They're my Fast Metabolism members, and they get all kinds of amazing benefits — member discounts on my world-class supplements and shakes, every product every day, personalized guidance and support from myself and my team, and even the ability to ask questions of our podcast guests.
If you have questions and want to get them answered, you should absolutely join my membership. And if you go to HayliePomroy.com/member, you can join for free for 30 days. Again, that's HayliePomroy.com/member — join for free for 30 days. I can't wait to see you there.
You guys, we are going to have Dr. Taylor back on. I think it would be really important for us to dive deeper into the thyroid even more. I hope you guys listen to this several times because we went through a lot really fast, but I'd really like to go into sex hormones — estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin — and do that in depth. So I'm going to have Dr. Taylor back. Get your questions ready.
Dr. Taylor, please come back. I really enjoy these conversations. And I think what's so important for everybody out there is just to hear how — I don't know, whenever I attend your lectures, whenever we communicate, you make me feel that it's okay to take control and charge of my health and wellness and my family's health and wellness. Just that kind of, hey guys, we're all going to do this, we can do this — you can get a phlebotomist to come in, these are the labs to run — just walking us through that process empowers us in such a great way.
So thank you so much for coming on. And I really look forward to bringing more subjects in this format again. I will be talking to you soon as well.
Angela Taylor
Sounds good.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay. Thanks, everybody.
When it comes to understanding your health, not all lab tests are created equal. In this episode of Fast Metabolism Matters, Haylie Pomroy sits down with Dr. Angela Taylor, Doctor of Clinical Nutrition, to break down how laboratory testing works within a personalized medicine framework — and why getting the right tests can make all the difference.
Why Personalized Lab Testing Changes Everything
Most conventional lab panels offer a broad snapshot of health, but they often miss the nuance needed for truly individualized care. Dr. Taylor explains how a personalized medicine approach uses lab data not just to identify disease, but to understand how your unique body is functioning at a cellular level.
This distinction matters. Two patients with the same symptoms can have completely different root causes — and their labs will tell that story, if you know what to look for.
The Case for Intracellular Micronutrient Testing
One of Dr. Taylor's key recommendations is obtaining a micronutrient panel that evaluates intracellular levels — not just serum levels. Why does this matter?
Serum levels reflect what's circulating in your blood, but intracellular testing reveals what's actually available inside your cells, where nutrients do their work. A patient can appear "normal" on a standard panel while being functionally deficient at the cellular level. This type of testing offers a far more accurate picture of nutritional status and can uncover hidden contributors to fatigue, brain fog, immune dysfunction, and more.
What Should Be in a Comprehensive Thyroid Panel?
Thyroid health is one of the most commonly mismanaged areas in conventional medicine — largely because many providers only test TSH. Dr. Taylor outlines what a truly comprehensive thyroid panel should include:
- TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone)
- Free T3 and Free T4 — the active and available forms of thyroid hormone
- Reverse T3 — which can block thyroid receptor sites and mimic hypothyroid symptoms
- Thyroid antibodies — including TPO and thyroglobulin antibodies to screen for autoimmune involvement
Understanding how free, reverse, and synthetic T3 and T4 influence physiological function is critical — especially for patients who continue to experience symptoms despite "normal" TSH levels.
Elevated Antibodies: What Markers to Watch
When a patient presents with elevated antibodies, the evaluation needs to go deeper. Dr. Taylor highlights which markers warrant careful attention in this context, helping practitioners and patients understand the immune activity occurring beneath the surface and how it may be impacting metabolism, energy, and overall physiological balance.
Iron, Ferritin, and Vitamin D: A Triad Worth Understanding
These three markers are often tested individually, but their interaction tells a more complete story. Dr. Taylor explains how iron, ferritin, and vitamin D work together to support overall health and metabolic function — and why looking at them in relationship to one another (rather than in isolation) can reveal patterns that individual results might miss.
Low ferritin, for example, can present similarly to thyroid dysfunction. And vitamin D deficiency has downstream effects on immune regulation, mood, and even how the body absorbs and utilizes other nutrients.
Lab Options and Practitioner Guidance
Dr. Taylor also shares practical recommendations for laboratory options available for patient testing, giving listeners and their healthcare providers a starting point for more functional, comprehensive evaluation.
Whether you're working with an integrative practitioner or advocating for yourself within a conventional setting, knowing which labs to request — and why — is a powerful tool for your health journey.
About Dr. Angela Taylor
Dr. Angela Taylor is a Doctor of Clinical Nutrition based in Baltimore, MD. She is double board-certified in both clinical nutrition and functional medicine, and runs a private practice called BrainFood Nutrition. She also serves as Adjunct Faculty at Johns Hopkins University and Nova Southeastern University, where she teaches Clinical Nutrition. Her specialty areas include Gluten-Free nutrition, Autism, ADHD, Sports Nutrition, and Herbal Medicine.
Connect with Dr. Taylor:
- 🌐 angelataylor.com
- 📺 YouTube – The Singing NutriDoc
- 📺 YouTube – Brainfood Nutrition Autism ADHD
About Haylie Pomroy
Haylie Pomroy is the Founder and CEO of The Haylie Pomroy Group and a leading health strategist specializing in metabolism, weight loss, and integrative wellness. With over 25 years of experience working alongside top medical institutions and high-profile clients, she has developed targeted programs and supplements rooted in the "Food is Medicine" philosophy. Inspired by her own autoimmune journey, Haylie combines expertise in nutrition, biochemistry, and patient advocacy to help others reclaim their health. She is a New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet.
Connect with Haylie:
- 🌐 hayliepomroy.com
- 📺 YouTube
- 🐦 X (Twitter)
Listen to the full episode of Fast Metabolism Matters – Functional Lab Markers That Actually Matter to hear Dr. Taylor and Haylie dive deeper into each of these topics and more.
TRANSCRIPT
Haylie Pomroy
Welcome to Fast Metabolism Matters, where we examine the scientific approach to how your metabolism influences every aspect of your life. I'm Haylie Pomroy, number one New York Times bestselling author. For the past 30 years, I have been creating a support system for vibrant health.
I was in my early 20s battling a life-threatening autoimmune disorder when I learned how vital metabolic health is to our whole being. Join me as I share these insights, and together, let's find out why having a fast metabolism matters.
Hi, I'm your host, Haylie Pomroy, number one New York Times bestselling author, research scientist in neuroimmunology. I'm here to tell you that having a fast metabolism matters. What your body does metabolically impacts every single aspect of your life.
Today we're going to talk about labs — what labs to run, what do they mean, what's the difference between intracellular and extracellular values. I have a super exciting guest. It's Dr. Angela Taylor. She is a doctor of clinical nutrition. She's double board certified in clinical nutrition and functional medicine. She's an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, as well as Nova Southeastern here with me.
Today, you guys, we talked about some really cool things. Why you can't just run iron. Why having copper in the blood is very different than having copper in the cell. How all these values can impact the metabolism, and what to look at when you're talking about the thyroid.
Enjoy this podcast. It's extremely empowering.
I'm going to welcome my community — the Fast Metabolism community — here. This is exciting that we're starting to film our podcast this way. In doing so, my goal is to provide you guys with a very unique and special platform to get to ask questions to the people in my world and in our world collectively — at the Institute, through my private clinics, just over the 31 years of clinical practice that have helped me formulate such strong opinions. Opinions that I value incredibly, that I draw on when I'm stuck on a particular client, case, or research question. Bringing that into this community, I think, really enriches our opportunities to find our own unique pathway to health and wellness.
Today, you guys, I'm really excited. I know that in our community, Dr. Taylor, I've talked about you quite a bit. I'm very excited to have you come in and be on this podcast.
Some of the topics that we're going to talk about today are near and dear to my heart personally, and I know are very critical to engage in with all of the people in our world that are going through this journey of either trying to reverse disease, reclaim wellness, or just stay healthy in the environment that we are in.
Today, everybody, I have Dr. Taylor. Dr. Taylor is a doctor of clinical nutrition. She's double board certified in both clinical nutrition and functional medicine. Our paths crossed — she's an adjunct professor at NSU and also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Taylor, thanks so much for coming in and talking to us all about this really important topic.
Nice to be here, Haylie. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. One of the things that I think everybody's getting savvy about — and I personally think COVID shoved this to the forefront — is people are talking about science. They're talking about their body and how they can communicate with their body.
A big component of that is running labs. Is that a cornerstone in your personal practice?
Oh, sure thing. Absolutely.
How often do you run labs with every client? Do you have clients bring labs in? How do you incorporate that in?
Angela Taylor
We do it on a case-by-case basis because we do personalized medicine. If clients or patients come in with some recent labs, then we're going to start with those. If their vitamin D levels are from two years ago, then we're going to definitely ask them to go get some new labs.
Haylie Pomroy
Speaking of going to get new labs — I just had mine run on Friday. I always try to do it at least twice a year. I know I've shared with you that I have an autoimmune disorder called ITP, so I look at my labs at least twice a year personally.
But one of the things that I find in our community is a lot of people will say they go into their doctors and they get their labs run, and everything comes back as normal or in a normal range. "You look great," they'll maybe even be told. And they're like, did you read the litany of symptoms that I'm having that showed that there's got to be something off in my chemistry?
Do you feel confident saying, hey, everybody's great if they just run a traditional CBC or even a chem screen?
Angela Taylor
Well, it's interesting because the ranges that are used at LabCorp or Quest are for the whole entire population of America, of which many people are not in the best health. So what we like to do is maybe even just start by taking those labs and apply optimal ranges, which are much narrower, and those can really give us a lot of good information.
Haylie Pomroy
Do you look at ratios too? Sometimes we'll add monocytes, basophils, and eosinophils and look at that collectively or combined. Do you ever do that or look at ratios? If one's really flirting on the high end of normal and one's flirting on the low end of normal, that's a bigger deal than if they were both right in the middle, or both high, or both low.
Good question.
Angela Taylor
Yeah, ratios can definitely be helpful. Percentages can be helpful. I mean, there are ratios for all sorts of markers. So yeah, we could definitely look at that.
The ratios don't always show up on the paper. So sometimes we'll have to plug them into our own lab template in order to interpret them.
Haylie Pomroy
So if someone's going in and they're getting labs — if you were to say the top five, you can even include a panel, like you can say CBC is one of them — what would be the top five things that a woman or a man, who is either wanting to optimize their health or, like me, trying to stay in homeostasis with an autoimmune disorder, would love to see run?
Angela Taylor
All right. So Haylie, there are two different ways I can answer your question. Number one, I can answer your question with a lab you're going to get from LabCorp with your insurance. But on the other hand, I could answer your question with my honest answer.
So I'm going to go with my honest answer.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay.
Angela Taylor
So my honest answer is, what I really care about is people's underlying nutritional status, because that's what drives everything. So my honest answer is I would actually only have them run one lab, and that would be a micronutrient panel that looks at intracellular levels. That's it. Simple, done. One-stop shop.
Now there are a lot of labs you can choose from. They're all functional because LabCorp and Quest don't do this.
Haylie Pomroy
I am seeing at least a few more add-ons becoming available through them. I mean, it was terrible before — you could never get a full celiac panel, you could never get a methylmalonic acid, you could never get ferritin levels. I was like begging to get ferritin. So I'm going to stick with that for a second, though. In the micronutrient panel, you said two things that made my ears perk up. One, that you said intracellular nutrition. How is that maybe different?
Angela Taylor
All right. So when you go to LabCorp and you get a level on zinc or copper or any nutrient, pretty much — they're just looking at what's in the serum. So what's sort of floating around in your bloodstream. But what we really want to know is if the nutrients are getting into the cells.
So there are certain nutrients that can be run at LabCorp and Quest as intracellular. And I love those. So I'll just list a few of those off for you.
You can look at RBC magnesium, RBC selenium, RBC zinc, RBC copper. So that stands for red blood cells. That's intracellular.
Haylie Pomroy
But that is at a specific lab, so they have to check specifically. So what I do with my clients a lot of times is we'll research ahead of time. Because a lot of times the doc will say, I don't know what that one is, or I don't know how to run it.
I just had that happen on Friday. And I have a really good relationship with my doc, and she's very bright. But she said, I don't even know what that is, Haylie.
So I prep for the visit and I go ahead and have the codes ready. So if you're using LabCorp or Quest, I'll look it up with my clients ahead of time so that they don't get faced with that. Because saying RBC magnesium, selenium, zinc, copper — all RBC — is a different, unique intracellular perspective.
Correct?
Angela Taylor
Yeah, that's a different lab. If your doctor just says, run magnesium, run zinc, run copper, it's just going to be serum. It's not going to be RBC.
Okay. But there's a problem even if you do get your doctor to order all these for you. The problem is that LabCorp and Quest draw way too many vials.
So I just went and got labs drawn about a week ago for my checkup. And they drew like 20 vials. Whereas when I get my NutraVal, or my SpectraCell micronutrient panel, or Vibrant America — which also has one — or US Biotech, which I love — all those different functional companies have panels where they test all your micronutrients at intracellular levels of vitamins and minerals, and they only draw about eight vials of blood.
And they get it done with eight vials. And that's way better, especially if somebody already has anemia. Why would you want to take more blood than you need from someone?
So the catch-22 is that your insurance will give you some coverage if you go to LabCorp and Quest, but they're going to draw 20 vials out of you and still not get the same amount of information. So it's hard. Everyone's got to make a choice. Am I going to use this insurance coverage that I'm paying for through my employer? Or am I just going to pay for these labs out of pocket and get no reimbursement?
Haylie Pomroy
I've had a lot of clients lately that are setting up — I don't know if they used to be called HSA or FSA, someone can help me — but kind of like a health savings account from a tax deduction perspective. And I've also seen a lot of the functional medicine labs covered by Medicare.
Angela Taylor
Well, only certain ones. It's like the functional medicine laboratories offer a menu — seriously, a menu — of different tests. And they've managed to get a few of them covered with Medicare.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay. I've just had people mention that. You gave us some vendors that you like. Can you tell me, if we were to say, hey, let's all collectively get this done in 2026, which ones do you like? Give us a couple of options.
Angela Taylor
Okay. So without having them up on your screen, let me just go through some of the different labs.
The innovator in this space was SpectraCell back in the day. So they offer a micronutrient panel. I think that's around 30 different markers, or it might be 22. But anyway, that's still great. And they're all intracellular — vitamins, minerals. They also look at something they call Spectrox, which is like your antioxidant status and your overall immune status. And so that's pretty cool. And that's only two vials, by the way.
All right, now let's move on.
Haylie Pomroy
Do you order those through Rupa in your practice?
Angela Taylor
You can, you totally can. The one company that has taken their stuff off Rupa is Vibrant. So you can't get any Vibrant tests off of Rupa anymore.
Haylie Pomroy
I know.
Angela Taylor
But Rupa Health is a good way to get stuff. If, for example, your physician doesn't have an account and doesn't want to do it for you, then it's a good way to get things ordered. And if you're working with a functional nutritionist who doesn't have ordering privileges in your state, Rupa is a pretty good way to get some of this stuff ordered.
All right, so SpectraCell — that's who we used to use. But then all these other companies said, oh, that's pretty cool, we're going to do it too. So then Genova came along, I think. They offer a NutraVal. That's a possibility.
Haylie Pomroy
That's not my favorite one.
Angela Taylor
It's not my favorite either, but it's a possibility. All right, so then you can go to Vibrant. And they have a really cool panel because they'll run both serum and intracellular for everything.
Haylie Pomroy
Yes.
Angela Taylor
And what's kind of cool about that is you may find, for example, that you have high copper in serum but low copper in the cells. That's something that I've seen. That is very eye-opening, that particular finding in particular.
Haylie Pomroy
So it's funny that you brought that up. I don't know if you knew that I used to work in the animal space, right, many, many moons ago. And I did a project with the black rhinos — endangered species.
And the whole copper metabolism was the issue they were having in captivity. It was the extracellular versus intracellular because of the labs that were being run and how they were formulating feed. But I'm seeing it like crazy right now.
I don't know if you're seeing it more clinically in women. I feel like some of it is the copper in our fungicides. We were having tons of copper delivery in our organic coffee especially. I have some theories about it, but I love that you brought that up because that's made me go, hmm — are you seeing it more, or is it just me?
Angela Taylor
I saw it in myself on my last round of tests. So I was like, okay, I also have copper water pipes in my house. So I was like, okay, I've got high free copper, and I've got low copper in the cells. What can I do about this?
And so I started looking around, and I was like, I think lysine helps to move copper into the cells. So now I've added lysine to my stack in my massive vitamin box.
Haylie Pomroy
That's cool. I try to spread the love around as far as what labs I like, just because I really want to be an advocate — with my consumerism — for people fighting the fight of looking at the body not from a reductionist perspective, like "your white blood count's normal, you're good." But I do like Vibrant for that reason, because they do both the intra and extracellular.
And I find that — again, I probably learned this in the animal industry — we were looking at that really, really carefully, especially in exotics. I did some chimpanzee work. I did some work with the Division of Wildlife. And we were looking — I mean, we're pretty much the only species that doesn't care what we're doing metabolically. And when you're formulating feed, you can't sell dog food or cat food without adding supplements to it. You have to supplement. It's not legal. But in the human space, we don't even care. We just don't care what's happening intra or extracellular when we look at medicine — not in a functional medicine perspective, but in the broad scope of things.
So that's one of the reasons why I'm a little partial to Vibrant. I was kind of bummed when they came off of Rupa. But do you have any others that you like?
Angela Taylor
Yeah, there's one more. US Biotech has a really great panel. And theirs is called the NutriStat.
And you can either run sort of the light version of the NutriStat, which is around $400, or you can run the NutriStat Complete, which I love. And that is around $700, sadly. But it covers a bazillion different markers. I mean, it's so many. And it's only eight vials of blood.
The thing that's kind of cool about the NutriStat Complete is that they run all of your nutrients, but they also run all of your sex hormones, all of your thyroid hormones, your CBC, your CMP, and an organic acid test is part of it too. Because with an organic acid test, you can look at downstream metabolites. So it is complete. But that's why it costs so much.
Haylie Pomroy
I love that. I'm going to go do that. I just want to — you know, again, I'm at UCLA. I have a great hematologist. I run all my labs. He kind of gives me this big book and we get on the computer together. He'll run whatever. But it isn't as comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination. So I'm going to actually couple that up with this one.
You mentioned — hold on, hold on, Haylie, who are you?
Angela Taylor
So one other thing I want to tell you about this US Biotech panel is that they also run RBC for all the nutritional minerals and RBC for all of the toxic minerals. So it is like the most complete panel I've ever seen. But it costs $700.
Okay, so that is unfortunate. And you do have to be very careful — you're going to have to hire your own phlebotomist to come to your house and draw the blood for you. Because you can't go to LabCorp or Quest. They don't have an arrangement with them.
So that's a pain in the neck. And you have to be careful that you tell your phlebotomist — for any of these, when you're having the blood drawn at your house — that they have to let the blood coagulate for 30 minutes before they spin it out. Because otherwise the test will fail.
I've gone to all the trouble to do all this and send stuff off to these third-party labs, and the blood was only allowed to sit in the tubes and coagulate for 15 minutes, and everything failed. And we had to do it all over again.
So there you go, a little more information.
Haylie Pomroy
Now, I love that caveat. Because I think oftentimes — and it depends on the state — it's not as difficult as it used to be to get a phlebotomist to come to the house. And it's reasonable.
I've done it in California, Florida, and Colorado. I can say that for those states. New York seems to be difficult.
Angela Taylor
All right, well, let's talk about this, because people need to know this if they're going to do it. You can just hire a friend of yours who's a nurse to do it for you. So that's who I'm having right now — a woman who is a retired nurse. She still gets her retirement check, but she still wants to keep her brain in the medical field.
She's coming to my house for $40 and drawing my blood, which is really a bargain. I don't know if you're ever going to find anybody that cheap, but I really am lucky that I have a nurse in my neighborhood who will do this for me.
And do you provide her with the tubes? Do you order the tubes?
Oh, yeah. When you order the test from any of these companies, they send you a collection kit. It's a cardboard box that has the exact number and color of all the tubes — the exact tubes that you need. And it has a FedEx envelope in there with a little sticky label on it.
So you just have the nurse draw the blood. She has to sit there for half an hour. Then she spins it out.
A portable centrifuge is under $100, so she has to spin it out. And then you just stick it in the box, stick it in the FedEx envelope, and drop it in the FedEx box. It's pretty simple.
Haylie Pomroy
I absolutely love that patients and clients are becoming more and more empowered to take these kinds of steps. What you're telling me is going to be absolutely normal, I hope, by 2026 — for people to be able to say, look, I need data on my body before I can make decisions.
I'm going to throw the word out there. I'm going to drop it. But we have people going on a shot. We have people taking medications. And let's not even talk about the pharmacological side effects. Let's just talk about the potential nutrient deficiencies that they create. Making massive medical decisions — even surgery, maybe going in for a knee replacement — without any knowledge about what's going on in their body metabolically. And I think people are realizing that the outcome can be augmented, can be influenced, by understanding your body and appropriately treating it in a kind, loving, and productive way.
You mentioned in our last conversation, when you were going through what that last blood test checks, you talked about a thyroid panel. Can we just talk about what they check and what is important to check? Because so many of my clients come back and say, my doctor said my thyroid's totally fine. And they're losing their eyebrows, they've got cracked heels, they have hydration issues, they've got fatigue issues, maybe they have weight issues. And all they ran was a TSH. And it just breaks my heart.
Genuinely, the doctor on Friday — I said, you know, make sure you add my RT3, my reverse T3. And she goes, what is that again? And again, I say this because I am fortunate enough to have dear friends at a phenomenal institution and bright doctors. This woman's brilliant. And she said, remind me again, what is that? And what is that for? I'm a woman, she's a woman — you know what I mean — at my age, postmenopausal.
And we had a great conversation about it. But what do you like to see in a thyroid panel?
Angela Taylor
All right. So as you said, just having TSH is really not enough to make good decisions. So it would be great to know your free T4 and your free T3.
So T4 is what your thyroid makes. But then to go out and do the work in your body, it has to be converted — T4 converted into T3.
Now, along the way, unfortunately, T4 can get turned into something that you don't want. And that is reverse T3. So reverse T3 sits in the receptor and blocks the action of what you do want, which is T3.
Boy, that's a whole hour lecture that we could certainly have. But anyway, to answer your question — it would be nice to at least know your levels of TSH, free T4, free T3, and RT3 — reverse T3 — and your level of thyroid antibodies.
So that would be what I would consider a panel. And they are now offering a panel in LabCorp, so your practitioner can just tick the box as long as they make sure they tick the right panel.
Haylie Pomroy
Yeah. And add the RT3. Sometimes, depending on LabCorp versus Quest, they have to add on the RT3.
And this is the other thing, guys — and this is what I did again with my doc on Friday. After she had everything loaded, I went over her shoulder and we looked at what she had clicked on. But then when the phlebotomist came in, we re-reviewed it again. And there was one that was missed.
What had happened is I had already eaten, so they didn't want to run the lipid panel. But in that process, they also clicked off the high-sensitivity CRP. There were a couple of things I wanted — homocysteine was another. She had clicked those off too.
It was not intentional. I was very clear and communicated well. The doc was very collaborative. It just gets missed sometimes.
And so we fill out a request for care for our clients and our community where we say, this is what I'd like run, and this is why I'd like it run. And we always say, bring a copy for yourself, bring a copy for the doc, go over it again with the phlebotomist, and make sure when you go downstairs to the lab. I cannot tell you how many times something didn't get checked or clicked, or the doctor wasn't sure what to check or click. For whatever reason, you kind of have to make sure that you're the advocate for that.
When you run thyroid antibodies, do you like to run thyroid peroxidase and anti-thyroid antibody, or do you have a preference of one or the other, or do you like both?
Run them both. I mean, if you're going to run them, why not?
Good idea. You're already checking your blood. Sometimes it helps me — or I feel like it helps me — know how to better support the body if I understand what's going on metabolically with that autoantibody.
In the thyroid panel, a lot of times, if we could look at that from an optimal range perspective, do you have a feeling with reverse T3? I've been taught so many different things — the lower, the better.
Let me start from the beginning, actually. When you say free T3 and free T4, what does that mean when you say "free"?
Angela Taylor
All right. So your hormones generally have to be carried around by an escort. So they have to be bound to something.
But they're not active when they're bound. The hormones that aren't bound are the ones that are active, and that is the free level.
I hope that made sense. If I had my lecture slides, I could show you pictures, but yeah.
Haylie Pomroy
No, that's okay. So you're saying the free ones have not yet bound to the carrier?
Angela Taylor
They have released themselves from the carrier.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay. And is that post-production? They're converted?
Okay. So if you have T4 and it's converted into T3, is there one that we want higher from a free perspective? Is it better to have more free T3 than free T4?
Angela Taylor
Okay. So T3 is the form of thyroid hormone that does the work. So you need to make sure you have enough T3.
All right. Now, I can see questions popping up. Somebody's asking about what is optimal for reverse T3.
I have my labs reference sheet open here that I use when I'm interpreting labs. And so different experts have different opinions.
Haylie Pomroy
It's talked about a lot, yeah.
Angela Taylor
So I'm going to give you two different perspectives. Perspective number one: one expert says that reverse T3 should be below 15. Another expert says maybe it should be between 10 and 25. And a third expert says that the number should be five times your free T3 number. So those were all different optimal ranges for reverse T3.
All right. Now, I saw another question pop up asking about ordering this stuff from Rupa and how do you look it up?
So you have to know exactly what you're looking for. You start off by looking for the company name. The companies that we mentioned today were SpectraCell, Genova, Vibrant, and US Biotech. You start off by looking for the lab name, and then you look for the specific lab test. So in the case of SpectraCell, that would be a micronutrient panel. In the case of Genova, that would be NutraVal. In the case of Vibrant — what is it, Haylie? Do you remember the name of their micronutrient panel?
Haylie Pomroy
I don't remember.
Angela Taylor
Well, anyway, something like that.
Haylie Pomroy
I've used it a million times. I used to use Great Smokies. That's how far back I go on these things.
Angela Taylor
Back in the day.
Haylie Pomroy
Back in the day.
Angela Taylor
And then the fourth one is US Biotech, and that's called the NutriStat.
Haylie Pomroy
And US Biotech is on Rupa, correct?
I think so.
Okay. And Vibrant, you have to go independently to them. But they're really helpful. Yeah.
Great. I have a question. When you said reverse T3 — when we were looking at it metabolically, it depends on where the decimal point is, right? When you said 15 and 10 to 20, certain labs will move the decimal point over. But we used to always look at it as, if we had people that were over 150 or 15, it was a dead giveaway to look for peroxidase and anti-thyroid antibody. There's something going on where the body's immune system, inflammatory markers, or autoimmunity is creating or wreaking havoc.
The other thing that we find in the thyroid is most people are being supplemented with just T4 — Levothyroxine or Synthroid. And long-term — or even short-term in some cases we've seen more recently clinically — the ratios get very off depending on their nutrient status.
And when we see individuals that are on the synthetic form of T4, especially when they're not given some synthetic T3 alongside it, we see the reverse T3 going through the roof. Can you give me a little insight into that? Is it that it's so hard for the body to convert that synthetic form?
So, you guys, what I'm talking about is — a lot of times if the thyroid shows as off, let's say your TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) is elevated. So it's the opposite of what you would think — an elevated Thyroid Stimulating Hormone can mean lower thyroid function. But remember, that's a pituitary hormone. So it's like the pituitary talking to the thyroid.
I always tell my clients, remember, if you have to talk to somebody and you really have to yell, it's because they're not a great listener, right? So that's a high TSH — the pituitary saying, come on, thyroid. If the thyroid's a good listener, the pituitary doesn't have to work so hard to keep your level stable.
But it's a pituitary hormone. That's why I don't think it's the best look at thyroid function on its own. But let's say your TSH was really high and a doc said, oh yeah, you need some thyroid medication, and they gave you just T4.
So as Dr. Taylor was talking about, there are two forms, right? When you just give T4, the body now has to convert it. And they also give you a synthetic form of T4.
I just see reverse T3 go super high once we start peeking at that. What's going on there, do you think?
Angela Taylor
All right, so this is what Haylie's talking about. Up here is your brain, above the thyroid, and here's your thyroid. So your brain makes the TSH and that yells down, as Haylie just said, and says, I'm TSH — make me some T4.
So hopefully the thyroid will make T4, but if it doesn't, then you take a T4 pill. But the problem that Haylie is telling you about is that it can go one of two ways. If it goes toward RT3, that's the bad way — you don't want that. If it goes toward T3, that's the good way — you want that.
So yeah, if we're just giving people lots and lots of T4, we could just be enabling them to make a ton of RT3. That's bad. So it might be better if we just give people some T3.
But there is a little challenge with that. The half-life of T4 is really long. So when you give T4 to people, the level in the bloodstream stays pretty stable.
The half-life of T3 is quite short, like just a few hours. So when you give people T3, it spikes really fast. I think that's why doctors have for years said, we're going to give you T4 because it'll stay at steady levels in your blood.
But what I would love to see is people taking T3 — maybe just in addition to T4, if that makes the doctor more comfortable — just a really low dose of actual T3, maybe taking that in the morning before you eat, and maybe a small dose again before lunch.
There is one other alternative. At compounding pharmacies, they do offer a sustained-release T3. It's called E4M when they make you a sustained-release T3 — they basically put the T3 in a capsule with something that slows down the absorption.
So anyway, those are a bunch of options. But other options: if you're taking T4 and you just can't get your hands on any T3, you can at least help increase your conversion by making sure that your selenium and your zinc levels are good. And then once you do succeed in converting it to T3, you need to make sure you have enough vitamin A to actually use it at the receptor. And you can exercise. And again, you need zinc. So there you go — there's a bunch of ideas.
Haylie Pomroy
I absolutely love this. Thank you for sharing that.
I had a conversation with a group of endocrinologists. I would say the bulk of them were IFM-certified, functional medicine certified. And a lot of them were talking about the reluctancy around — when you talk about half-life, meaning how quickly the body can metabolize or how long it stays in the body — dosing T3 like you just said, throughout the day, or using a time-released version if people can tolerate that.
And it was interesting because there is a component of reverse T3 that's supposed to be protective. So we don't want it at zero, right? Nothing in our body is there by mistake. But we can't convert T3 back into reverse T3. And so oftentimes when reverse T3 is really high, I've seen some protocols where they'll taper up T3 to get the reverse T3 finally out of the receptor sites, and then settle down on a much lower dose — even if it's Cytomel, which is the synthetic version, but a T3.
So that takes a practitioner who is talking to you, looking at you, and running your labs fairly regularly to transition the body into a better state. Thank you for that. That's a great graphic.
Because I know we're limited on time, I'd really like to touch on two other quick things if we can. A lot of people are talking about iron levels. And I have always been taught — and I know you do this too — we don't just look at serum iron.
Can you talk to me about why we add other things like ferritin, or — I'm going to say it wrong — TIBC? Did I get my acronym right? T-B-I-C?
T-I-B-C.
Okay, I did get it right. My dyslexia. Why we like to look at that, and how that impacts the body metabolically.
So I'll tell you, I have this really interesting thing where the vitamin D that we manufacture works really well for me. If I don't take it, my vitamin D levels go down but my ferritin pops up at the same time. Can you explain to us why?
Angela Taylor
Sure thing. All right, so ferritin is your storage iron. And so I can't just look at your serum iron alone — I need to know your ferritin level too.
Here's why: if your ferritin stores are low, I will probably see a low ferritin number. I see this commonly in menstruating women, especially if they're vegetarian or vegan — their ferritin levels are terrible. And that is bad news for so many reasons.
Okay, now there is a weird thing that the body will do sometimes in times of infection. It will try to take all the circulating iron out of circulation and put it into storage, because the body's thinking is that iron can possibly help the infection to grow. So it wants to starve the infection of iron. It will, on purpose, take the iron and put it into ferritin. And so we will see an elevation in ferritin.
And so this totally correlates. Like, your vitamin D levels aren't so good for whatever reason, Haylie, and then your ferritin goes up. So it's like, okay, that totally makes sense, because now some infection is coming back. And so your body's hiding iron in the form of ferritin.
Haylie Pomroy
And for me, it's cytomegalovirus. Like a lot of our community, it's Epstein-Barr virus, or it can be parvovirus or coxsackievirus. We see a lot of different chronic, historical viral components. But my community is going to laugh at me right now —
We had sold out of vitamin D, and they keep me supplied. I make my supplement packs a month at a time — I make four weeks' worth, so 28 days. And I had just run out. And it was so funny because it happened so fast. And it was, for me — I am susceptible to shingles when that ratio goes off. I know, so fun times over here.
And it's one of those things where I just go, or I could just take my vitamin D. Because over the years of looking at extracellular and intracellular nutritional evaluations, I've learned — like you just said, you're adding more lysine to drive copper into the cell — I've learned that when my vitamin D levels are low, not only does my progesterone drop, but my body starts to hoard ferritin because it says, oh no, here comes the infectious component.
And if I let it go too long, the only reminder for me to go, hey, your vitamin D must be below 60 — if I drop below 60, we have a running joke in my house. I become "all the shingle ladies." You know, it's like, whoa, Merry Christmas, you get shingles.
But I share that because it's so important and empowering to be able to navigate — instead of just saying everything is good for everybody, or everything should fix everything. It's really good to navigate those things individually.
We have a couple more questions, and then I know we're on a tight time schedule. But I just want to ask — what are the things that you run in conjunction with iron and ferritin, and what does the TIBC mean?
Angela Taylor
All right. So if you're going to run an iron panel, you're going to run serum iron. You're going to run TIBC — total iron binding capacity. So you've got to be able to carry the iron around in the blood.
And by the way, copper is needed for iron transport. So by the way, if someone is taking high-dose zinc, they could drive themselves into copper deficiency. And during COVID, people were really hitting the zinc pretty heavy, and you can definitely drive yourself into copper deficiency, which can then drive you into iron deficiency.
Haylie Pomroy
There you go. Yeah. I appreciate it.
So we had a couple of questions from our community. Do you have, from an optimal range perspective for thyroid peroxidase — is that one of those labs that everybody always tells me, lower is better?
Angela Taylor
Yeah. Well, it's true. So your standard lab range is all over the place. I think they've finally lowered it to below 35, which is considered normal according to LabCorp. But for an optimal lab range, we might want it to be like below 10.
Now, what might be some things to look at if you're getting elevated antibodies? You would look at intestinal permeability — so that's leaky gut. The best way to handle that is going to be to go on a very strict gluten-free diet, but also to look at exposure to mold, to EMF, to low vitamin D levels, and to sleep. You know, you've got to optimize everything. It's never as simple as one thing magically fixing your TPO antibodies. You've got to look at it all.
Haylie Pomroy
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I love that you added sleep, mold, and EMF also.
When I travel, I'm less careful about it. And I've realized — you're going to be horrified — my laptop, my phone, my everything is on my bed next to me. And then God forbid you're at a hotel with the alarm clock at your head. And I just wonder why. Not to mention everything else that's probably circulating in that environment.
But I've tried to be a lot better about that this last year. It was a lecture I attended — you know, that really makes such a negative impact in your body. We know for sure. There's a lot of hypothesis about disease and disease processes.
Dr. Taylor, I also want to ask you — you have just recently published an amazing book. Can you just spend a little bit of time sharing where we can find it and what it's about?
Angela Taylor
Oh, sure. It's called the Brain Food Cookbook. It is a paleo cookbook.
Another way of calling paleo is the specific carbohydrate diet — they're very similar. It's really geared towards the autism and ADHD community. But I will tell you that some people who have persistent autoimmune issues, including autoimmune thyroid, will go on something called the AIP diet, which is very similar to paleo. So you may find that some of the recipes are suitable for you.
But of course, everybody has their own foods that they eat and don't eat. So you would need to customize if there's a particular thing that you don't eat.
Haylie Pomroy
That topic is in my book especially — from a pediatric perspective, with our kids that are in our world who have ADHD and different aspects of the autism spectrum. There's a lot of great data in there, and great food. Where can they find this book?
Angela Taylor
Oh, brainfoodcookbook.com.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay, you guys got that — Brain Food Cookbook. We'll post it too. And Dr. Taylor, is it a hardcover book?
Angela Taylor
Well, I ran out of my second print run. So I have about six paper copies back here, but I'm not really selling those anymore because I only have six left. So it's a PDF. It's wonderful.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay, you guys, I'm going to post the link for sure. And make sure that everybody does that.
I've got one last question that we're going to be able to get to. And you guys, keep posting questions — we can get back to these, and they'll be memorialized in our Circle community.
Angela Taylor
And I can answer these very quickly. Do you want me to answer them?
Sure.
Okay. All right. So regarding finding a good endocrinologist in Baltimore — I have not found one. I have trained myself, and as Haylie knows, I teach endocrine at NSU in our functional nutrition area. So anyway, I am not really relying on an endocrinologist because I'm not getting good information from them. But there is a nurse practitioner who I work with in Baltimore who is prescribing for me. And together we're collaborating and evaluating the labs because I can't prescribe.
So if you want to know that nurse practitioner's name, ping me and I'll get it to you.
Next question — zinc. The only way to know what your zinc and copper levels are is to go get labs. And I prefer the labs that tell you both serum and RBC. So you can get a bunch of vials drawn at LabCorp and do it that way, or you can get the Vibrant micronutrient panel, or you can get the US Biotech. And that way you could know what your free and RBC levels are.
Okay. And then the third question — colostrum. If you have a problem with dairy, you can get Mega IgG, which is bovine-derived but from the cow's blood, so there's no dairy in it. Microbiome Labs makes a product called Mega IgG. And that's basically the same thing as colostrum. So go with that and it won't be dairy.
Haylie Pomroy
Hey, this is Haylie Pomroy. And right now we're going to transition into our Q&A portion of the podcast. And you'll notice that we have live viewers asking us questions. They're my Fast Metabolism members, and they get all kinds of amazing benefits — member discounts on my world-class supplements and shakes, every product every day, personalized guidance and support from myself and my team, and even the ability to ask questions of our podcast guests.
If you have questions and want to get them answered, you should absolutely join my membership. And if you go to HayliePomroy.com/member, you can join for free for 30 days. Again, that's HayliePomroy.com/member — join for free for 30 days. I can't wait to see you there.
You guys, we are going to have Dr. Taylor back on. I think it would be really important for us to dive deeper into the thyroid even more. I hope you guys listen to this several times because we went through a lot really fast, but I'd really like to go into sex hormones — estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin — and do that in depth. So I'm going to have Dr. Taylor back. Get your questions ready.
Dr. Taylor, please come back. I really enjoy these conversations. And I think what's so important for everybody out there is just to hear how — I don't know, whenever I attend your lectures, whenever we communicate, you make me feel that it's okay to take control and charge of my health and wellness and my family's health and wellness. Just that kind of, hey guys, we're all going to do this, we can do this — you can get a phlebotomist to come in, these are the labs to run — just walking us through that process empowers us in such a great way.
So thank you so much for coming on. And I really look forward to bringing more subjects in this format again. I will be talking to you soon as well.
Angela Taylor
Sounds good.
Haylie Pomroy
Okay. Thanks, everybody.
