Homophobia is defined as a ‘dislike of or prejudice against homosexual people.’ I would rather you turn your attention to a dislike or prejudice of another word with the ‘homo’ prefix in it…Homocysteine. If you want to change your future health outcomes, I would encourage you to create homophobia for homocysteine.
I was delivering a recent workshop on the Thyroid and I was asked, “if you could only test for one value, what would it be?” This was difficult to answer as your lab values interconnect so much and to base anything on one value is lazy and ignorant. But to play the game with the audience member, I said I would test for homocysteine, not an analyte directly used to measure thyroid function.
Here’s why.
Homocysteine, when in a nice range of 4 – 8 umol/L is a good thing. This range is definitely tighter than what you see on a standard lab panel of 0 – 15 umol/L. Why do I like a tighter range? Because of what homocysteine indicates and contributes to when it’s elevated and I don’t want to wait until it’s outside the ‘normal’ ranges before action is taken.
Homocysteine is actually a middle step in the formation of the amino acid cysteine, which is a precursor of one of the most power antioxidants in your body in glutathione so to be low is a bad thing as well. Homocysteine is actually a good thing. But often times too much of a good thing has the opposite desired effects.
Homocysteine is one of those scenarios but takes it up a level too. Homocysteine has been called the single best indicator of your longevity and quality of life. It’s not just an indicator of many disease processes like cardio-vascular disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Auto-Immune disease, diabetes, Hypothyroid, Osteoporosis, liver disease, hormone imbalance, autism, and anemia, to name a few, but a massive contributor to them.