Understand your health.
Start with better questions.

Lina is 47. She works full time, cares for a teenager and an aging father, and has felt “off” for about two years. She is tired by mid-afternoon. Her jeans are tighter around the waist even though she eats the way she always has. She went to her doctor, had blood drawn, and a few days later got a portal message: “Your labs look normal. No action needed.”

She opened the report. Every number sat quietly between two other numbers. No red flags, no asterisks. Her fasting glucose was 99 mg/dL (5.5 mmol/L). The range said 70 to 99. Her hemoglobin A1c was 5.6%. Her ALT, a liver enzyme, was 38 U/L, under a cutoff of 40.

She should have felt relieved. Instead she felt dismissed. If everything is normal, why don’t I feel normal?

When I review reports like Lina’s with readers and family members, I see something different. I see a fasting glucose sitting one point below the prediabetes line. I see an A1c one-tenth of a percent below it. I see a liver enzyme that would be above the “healthy” limit some researchers have proposed for women. None of this is an emergency. None of it is a diagnosis. But together, it is a story, and it is worth hearing early.

To understand why Lina’s report said “normal,” we need to ask a question most of us never think to ask: Who decided what normal is?

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Personalization begins by understanding those differences. It does not require an expensive panel or a detailed genetic report. A conversation about what someone eats, what they can afford, how they feel and what they hope to improve can reveal more useful information than a long list of measurements gathered without a question.

In this book, functional nutrition means connecting food choices with the functions and circumstances they are intended to support. It includes established nutrition principles and careful consideration of individual variation. Practices marketed under the same label differ substantially in evidence and quality. The label alone does not validate a test, supplement or explanation.

The starting questions are ordinary ones. Is intake sufficient? Is eating uncomfortable? Does the person have a condition that changes nutritional needs? Are food restrictions creating gaps? Is exhaustion making cooking impractical? Is a medication affecting appetite? What matters most to the person now?

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