What color are you?

Just like a blood pressure cuff shows us the health of your vascular system and the little oximeter on your finger tells us information about your O2 Sat rate, the new Biophotonic scanner gives us information about how healthy you are you're your nutritional intake. The scanner uses an array of colors on a scale to show the level of carotenoids in your skin. The colors then correspond with numerical indicators that help us determine if you are at your optimal level. The colors range from red, yellow and orange which means you are sub-optimal in your nutritional intact of antioxidants and then the green and blue mean you are in a more optimal range. The numbers range from 10,000 to 75,000, Dr. Oz was 75,000, which was no surprise.

When Dr. Oz scanned his audience, 80 percent of the people on the show were in the suboptimal range, which means there was a sea of red, orange and yellow. This does not fall far from the national average obesity rate in the U.S., which is around 68 percent. These statistics are frightening to us as health-care providers and we would like to make a difference in these findings here in our community.

The Biophotonic scanner enables us to provide a non-invasive, painless, low cost assessment of your nutritional status. Once you obtain your baseline, then you and your health-care provider can decide what is the best way for you to improve your nutritional health. If your score is sub-optimal then whatever you are doing now you will need to change. You will need to look at your eating habits, your current supplements and your lifestyle.

Everyone is different; some people want to eat their way there, others want to take a variety of supplements to help them. Eating your way there is really the best way to go if you can. To eat your way there you must consume 7-9 servings of fruits and vegetable servings per day and then re-test in 30 days and 60 days to see if it is working. Others know that there is no way they can eat their way there due to their travel schedules or their athletic endeavors, so they decide to use juicing or supplements to help them. There are a lot of high quality supplements and Pharmanex has one that uses a "nano" technology that has a better absorption rate than a lot of supplements and gives you the omegas you need also to decrease overall inflammation and pain in your muscles and joints from training or aging factors. Remember, supplements are merely another tool to help you as you attempt to improve your antioxidant levels.

This nutritional biomarker is just another tool that is part of a new kind of medicine that is emerging and it is called Personalized Lifestyle Medicine. This type of medicine is where you, the consumer, should step forward and realize where you need to make changes in your health and then have the courage and the fortitude to do it. No longer can you be a passive participant in your health care. You must be proactive and preventative in your mind-set and prepare ahead for what is coming. This emerging field is defined by the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute (PLMI) as "an approach to medicine in which an individuals health metrics from point-of-care diagnostics are used to develop lifestyle medicine-oriented therapeutic strategies for improving individual health outcomes in managing chronic disease." The founder Dr. Jeffery Bland describes the "secret sauce" of personalized medicine as a combination of genomics, biomarkers and lifestyle based therapeutics. In the simplest form the idea is that now you can decode your genes, have biomarkers to see where you are at risk and then change your lifestyle for prevention of chronic disease. So what's not to like about that. Now you have the tools to be in charge of your health and now there is no excuse for you to get there.

Sheree DiBiase, PT, and her staff can be reached at Lake City Physical Therapy in the Coeur d'Alene office (208) 667-1988 and in her Spokane Valley office at (509) 891-2623. If you would like to be scanned, call for an appointment, it is $20, and see where you are at with your nutritional health.