The Problem With Normal Vitamin & Mineral Blood Tests

Nutrients in the body are primarily stored in tissues rather than in the blood. For instance, less than 1% of the body’s magnesium is found in the bloodstream, while the remaining 99% is stored in bones, teeth, and soft tissues.

Your blood maintains a homeostatic balance, meaning that when nutrient levels in the blood drop, the body compensates by pulling nutrients from its tissue stores to restore balance.

Our body does this to keep everything running for as long as possible. But it also means you can be deficient in a nutrient in the tissues without it showing up in the blood. In fact, for minerals such as potassium, which are essential for survival, your blood will be the last place to show a deficiency because if levels drop too low, you die.

This is why most blood tests appear normal, even when there are clear signs of an existing nutrient deficiency.

Why You Need A Hair Mineral Analysis

How can you expect to gain a good understanding of your mineral levels if you test a substance that contains less than one one-hundredth of your body’s total levels?

You can’t.

And it also doesn’t matter how accurate your blood testing methods are because your sample simply isn’t representative of the bigger organism.

That means you need to use a test that more accurately represents what’s happening in your body, specifically in your tissues.

This is where hair analysis comes into play. As the name suggests, for a mineral hair analysis — sometimes also called HTMA (= Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis) — a hair sample is tested. The hair is then burned, and the remaining minerals are analyzed.

Unlike blood tests, which show what’s circulating in your veins at a given moment, a hair analysis is less influenced by daily fluctuations. Instead, it provides an average mineral level over the past two to three months, depending on the length of hair you send in.