He worked out every day, ate what he thought was clean, and even had AI build him a plan. Five years in, his labs were getting worse.
Who he is
Andrew is 47, a business executive in the St. Louis area, married with kids, and on the road entertaining clients two to three weeks a month. Very little rattles him. “I am who I am and I don’t really worry about it.”
He had been disciplined for years. Daily workouts. Interval runs. Eggs, filet, salmon, 24-hour fasts. He’d had more than 100 markers run through his doctor and fed the results into AI to build his own program. And he still felt off.
Energy was low. Sleep was broken, awake for hours in the middle of the night. “Some mornings I wake up and I’m like, let’s go. And some mornings it’s dragons.” His hips were so locked up that standing from a chair made him feel, in his words, 70 years old.
He found Andrew Martin on Instagram and booked a call. Andrew went through the 100 markers he’d already run. A good start, and a fraction of the picture. So we ran the full assessment: blood, urine, saliva, and stool. More than 1,000 biomarkers.
The blood alone read very differently from “fine.” Fasting glucose sat at 104, in the pre-diabetic band. Fasting insulin was 10.5, and his HOMA-IR, the standard measure of insulin resistance, was 2.7 against a ceiling of 1.0. Total cholesterol was 256, LDL 172, and ApoB, the particle count that actually drives heart disease, was 128.
Testosterone was 446 with almost none of it free to use, and his DHT sat below the lab’s floor. Thyroid output was sluggish. His AA/EPA ratio, the fatty-acid balance behind body-wide inflammation, was 31, nearly three times the upper limit. Vitamin K2, which keeps calcium out of the arteries, was close to zero. A DEXA scan put him at 42 lbs of body fat. His VO2 max was 42 against a target above 50.
None of that explained why five years of effort had gone nowhere. The stool test did.
His fecal zonulin, the marker for intestinal permeability, came back at 332 against a ceiling of 161. His gut was leaking. His gut immune marker (sIgA) was more than double its range, which meant his immune system was firing at ordinary food. Total fecal fat was 79.6 against a ceiling of 37.5: the fat he was eating, the raw material for testosterone, was passing straight through him. Bifidobacterium, the keystone gut species, was depleted, and butyrate, the compound that helps regulate appetite hormones, was low.
The food-sensitivity panel showed what his immune system was reacting to: cashews, coconut, barley, and the eggs he ate three or four of every day. Almonds, cauliflower, casein, and beef came back at moderate levels. His “clean” diet was built around the exact foods inflaming him.
Then the toxin screen: atrazine, an herbicide sprayed on corn, soybeans, and golf courses, plus methylparaben and triclosan from personal-care products. All three suppress testosterone or thyroid. His morning cortisol curve was flat, which drives insulin resistance on its own.
Here is the chain. A leaky gut let food particles into his bloodstream. His immune system attacked them, which drove body-wide inflammation. Inflammation drove insulin resistance and pushed his cholesterol and triglycerides up. Insulin resistance stored fat and held his testosterone down. Low testosterone and poor recovery showed up as the fatigue, the broken sleep, and the workouts that stopped paying off. “Geez, I’m off the charts on everything,” he said when he saw it. Working harder was never going to fix a plumbing problem.
Same man, four months apart. Every number below moved without a single hormone or lipid prescription.
Blood values from Vibrant America, fasted draws on March 16 and July 16, 2026. Body composition from his Hume scale. LDL also fell from 172 to 124, TSH from 3.65 to 2.27, and hs-CRP dropped below the assay floor.
“I have a lot more energy. I’m sleeping better. I feel great. And finally, I have a sustainable nutrition plan that works for my lifestyle.”
The awareness stuck, too. “I had never paid as much attention to what I put in my body at all. Now I’m like, oh my god, that’s a lot of carbs. I’ve become very aware, and that’s been very good.”
“He doesn’t give you a generic plan. He uses real data, understands what’s actually going on, and then builds a personalized strategy to get results. For me, it’s been life-changing.”