This month marks my two year vegan anniversary so I thought it would be a good time to get my blood tested. I heard about Thriva home blood test kits though the vegan group on FB but at full price they were a bit too expensive (£69) so when I saw a half price code I bought one. They offer three packages and I went for the advanced which tests your blood sugar, liver function, cholesterol, folate, ferritin and vitamin D.
I made a video of the process and results which I will add to the end of this blog post for anyone interested but to give a quick bit of background info, before going vegan I had really low ferritin levels. I was feeling really ill and so ended up having a food intolerance test which flagged up that I was intolerant to potatoes and mushrooms. After cutting these foods out I started feeling much better but the blood tests through my GP were so hard to understand and I couldn’t really see if my ferritin was going up or not so I left it for about a year.
The lady who did my food intolerance test explained that when you eat foods you are intolerant to, your intestines become damaged which stops you from absorbing vitamins and minerals which can make you deficient.
So I was really interested to see these blood test results having cut potatoes and mushrooms out of my diet (for the most part) for 18 months. And thankfully my ferritin had gone right up! From 6 to 22 which is now classed as normal, I’m so happy about it and it really is proof that the food intolerance test works because nothing I did before that would raise my ferritin levels. I was also low in folate which has gone right up too.
The test is really simple to use and you get given a little tool to prick your finger. You then massage downwards and it will make the blood to come out, you really don’t need much to fill the tubes either, the larger one was about 10-11 drops and the smaller one was about 5-6. You can see me doing it in the video.
I absolutely loved doing this and found the results so simple and easy to understand, you can see each results plotted on a line which shows you where you fall on the low / normal / high scale and it also gives lots of information about why they test for that particular thing.
The blood is tested in a pathology unit then your results are sent to a GP who checks them and gives you a little write-up of your results.
So all of mine were fine apart from my vitamin D which was just under a normal result, not surprising given we live in the UK where the sun rarely shines! I have upped my supplement intake for it though and hopefully will be able to get it up a bit.
I would recommend the tests to anyone, I really thought they were great. If you have really high cholesterol results or really low vitamin results then they give you tips on how to lower / higher them and then suggest you retest in three months to see if it has changed.
As I mentioned above, I did buy this Thriva home blood test so I’m not working with them in anyway, I just thought I would share with you as it’s a really interesting thing to do. You can view their packages here.
And here is the video I made..
