Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Red Pillar Healthcast. My name is Dr. Charlie Faganholz and here with everyone's favorite nurse practitioner, Lauren Johnson. And we have another guest this week. Seems like it's a theme that we're starting to get guests on this show. And we've had some good feedback. So we have a very good guest today. A close friend of ours has a lot of knowledge.

And Lauren, why don't you do the honors of introducing our guests for this week?

Okay. So we are talking with Emily Morrow today. She is a functional nutrition therapy practitioner.

And she is just a wealth of knowledge about blood chemistry and I have learned a lot

from her myself. I think that her course and her knowledge on blood work, I think is a great

avenue for conventional healthcare providers to get into a more functional space to really be

able to see the body through a more optimal function.

So we are very excited to chat with you today. Emily, tell me, like, how have lab ranges

changed from where they were 40 years ago? Why are we seeing this? Why are, why is everyone going to the doctor and say, and they say your labs are normal?

Yeah.

I think that that's the biggest thing that we are trying to get people to understand is that

normal isn't optimal because when you think of blood work where it was years and years and

years ago, they create those reference ranges based on statistical

analysis. So normal equals average. And that's something that I think people need to really start

to think about. So when they're looking at those reference ranges on their blood work,

that is based upon the average health of our society. So as that population becomes more chronically ill,

more disease, as we see those numbers climb, those reference ranges are going to get more skewed.

And unfortunately, now when you look, chronic disease is the leading cause of death and

disability in the United States. It causes seven out of 10 deaths every single year.

And so that's cardiovascular disease, arthritis, diabetes, asthma, cancer, COPD.

Those are just some of the reported chronic illnesses.

And that is the population that they're creating those reference ranges on.

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