Function Health Results at 50: 129 Biomarkers and 2 Red Flags

Most people would never put their bloodwork on the internet.

I am doing it anyway.

At 50, I ran a full Function Health panel — 129 biomarkers from a single blood draw — and in the video below I walk through my Function Health results on camera. Every number. The good ones, the bad ones, and two that stopped me cold.

I purchased Function Health at the regular price, just like any other customer. I am not affiliated with, sponsored by, or compensated by Function Health, and I receive no benefit when someone signs up. I mention the service only because it is one of the tools I personally use to measure and track my progress.

The headline was flattering. My biological age came back 3.7 years younger than my actual age. I felt pretty good about myself for roughly ten seconds.

Then I scrolled down. Seventeen markers were sitting outside the optimal range.

You cannot fix what you are afraid to look at. So here it is.

Why I am putting my Function Health results online

For most of my adult life, my relationship with bloodwork went like this: get it done, wait for a phone call, hear the word “normal,” move on with my life.

Nobody ever sat me down and walked me through the actual numbers. Nobody explained what was trending in the wrong direction, or what any of it meant for the next twenty years. I got a thumbs up and a parking validation.

So this time I did it differently. I ran the full panel, I read every line myself, and I am showing you all of it — not the highlight reel. If I only shared the flattering numbers, this whole project would be worthless.

Normal vs. optimal: the difference that changes every lab report

This is the single most useful thing I learned, and it reframes everything else on this page.

A standard lab reference range is not a target. It is a description of where most people who got that test done happen to land. It is built to catch disease that has already arrived — not to tell you where risk is lowest.

Which means “not flagged” and “where I actually want to be” are two completely different bars. You can sit inside the normal range for years while a number quietly walks toward the edge of it. Nothing beeps. Nobody calls.

Once you start reading labs as a trend rather than a pass/fail grade, a lot of “you are fine” results start looking like early warnings instead.

What 129 biomarkers actually covers

One blood draw, one dashboard, and a genuinely uncomfortable amount of information. The panel spans:

• Heart — cholesterol fractions, ApoB, LDL particle number, triglycerides, Lp(a)
• Metabolic — fasting glucose, HbA1c, insulin
• Hormones — testosterone, thyroid, cortisol
• Organs — liver and kidney function
• Inflammation and immunity — hs-CRP and related markers
• Nutrients — vitamin D, B12, ferritin, magnesium and more
• Blood — a full CBC

Plenty of it came back clean. That is the part I would love to lead with. But the whole reason to test 129 things instead of 10 is that the interesting story is almost never in the average.

The two numbers that stopped me cold

1. Triglycerides: 277. Standard labs call under 150 mg/dL normal, 150 to 199 borderline high, and 200 to 499 high. So 277 is not a rounding error and it is not “a little elevated.” It is high, and I had no idea.

2. HbA1c sitting right on the pre-diabetes line. The commonly used cutoff for prediabetes is an HbA1c of 5.7 to 6.4 percent, or a fasting glucose between 100 and 125 mg/dL. My fasting glucose had been creeping up for a while. My A1c had arrived at the door.

Neither of those got flagged as an emergency. Neither of them hurt. And that is exactly the point — this is what the slow slide actually looks like from the inside. It looks like nothing.

Heart markers: why ApoB and LDL particle number matter

Here is the piece I wish someone had explained to me twenty years ago.

Standard cholesterol testing measures how much cholesterol is being carried around. ApoB and LDL particle number measure how many particles are doing the carrying. Every one of those artery-clogging particles has exactly one ApoB protein stuck to it, so ApoB is essentially a headcount.

Those two things can disagree. You can have a respectable LDL cholesterol number while running a high particle count — lots of small, dense particles each carrying a modest cargo. The traditional panel gives you a pat on the back. The particle count tells a different story.

And high triglycerides are one of the classic drivers of that pattern, which is how my two problem numbers turned out to be connected.

The blood sugar connection

For a while I looked at triglycerides at 277 and a creeping A1c as two separate problems on two separate lines of a spreadsheet.

They are not separate. Elevated triglycerides and rising blood sugar commonly travel together because they tend to share an underlying driver: insulin resistance. When your cells stop responding well to insulin, glucose drifts up and the liver keeps churning out triglyceride-rich particles.

That reframe was the best news in the whole report. Two scary numbers, one upstream cause. Which means one plan has a shot at moving both.

My baseline — and what happens next

This panel is not a verdict. It is a starting line, and now it is written down where I cannot quietly forget about it.

The plan I am running is deliberately boring, because the boring stuff is what has evidence behind it:

• Real food — cutting the refined carbohydrates, added sugar, and alcohol that feed the triglyceride problem
• Real resistance training — muscle is the biggest place your body puts glucose
• Enough protein and enough sleep, tracked rather than guessed at
• Then retest the same panel on camera and see whether the needle actually moved

No supplement stack, no 30-day miracle. Just the two levers with the most evidence behind them, run long enough to show up in the bloodwork.

Every number from this panel is going on my Scorecard, and I will update it as the retests come in. If you want the backstory on why I started measuring any of this, that is in the post about everything I got wrong about health after 50.

How to read your own Function Health results

If you are about to run a panel of your own, three things I would do differently:

• Look at direction, not just the flag. A number climbing steadily inside the normal range is information. Wait for the flag and you have waited years.
• Pick two or three markers to actually work on. One hundred and twenty-nine numbers is paralysis. Two is a plan.
• Take it to a real doctor. A dashboard is a starting point for a conversation, not a replacement for one.

The CDC and the American Heart Association both publish plain-English explanations of the ranges I mentioned above, and they are worth ten minutes before your own results land.

Watch the full walkthrough

The video at the top of this post is the whole thing on screen — the dashboard, the out-of-range markers, the heart panel, the blood sugar section, and the moment I saw the triglyceride number for the first time.

Next up: the exact plan. Real food, real resistance training, and then I retest on camera to find out whether any of it worked. Subscribe on YouTube and hit the bell so you catch the retest, and check back here on the blog for the written version.

It is not too late. It was not too late for me at 277.

I am Joe. This is Function Over 50. And we are just getting started.

---

I am not a doctor and nothing here is medical advice. These are my own results and my own decisions. Always review your labs with a qualified physician before changing anything.