A New Way to Track Health From the Inside Out

Going Pro

When you bump up to the Advanced Home ($249) level, you can get results on hormones (cortisol), inflammation (CRP), and muscle and bone health (vitamin D), which is seriously cool. I don’t know about you, but those are not things I’ve had checked recently, and considering how closely they tie to athletic ability, they’re certainly the types of things many athletes (of all levels) could benefit from knowing. (You can see the side-by-side comparisons of the home kits here.)

If you choose the Fitness ($169) or Performance levels ($299), you lose the ability to take and send your blood sample from home — you have to go to one of about 1,500 partnering labs — but you get a ton of info that can help you with your athletic performance. Both give you everything you would get from the Advanced Home kit, but also provide results on calcium, strength and endurance (hemoglobin, ferritin, creatnine kinase), as well as brain and body biomarkers (magnesium and folic acid). The Performance level provides even more results: strength and endurance (testosterone), brain and body (vitamin B12), minerals (potassium, sodium, zinc, chromium) and inflammation (c-reactive protein, white blood cell count).

Should you be taking more of these? InsideTracker can let you know. Credit: stevendepolo, Flickr

And if you don’t know what half of those biomarkers are, that’s okay — remember, they also come back to you with details on where your results fall and how you can improve anything that’s not already optimized.