Do you have problems with your health and think it might be tied in with B12 deficiency or excess? Are you looking to understand if you have the right amount of B12? More importantly, if your body and tissues are getting the right amount of B12. In this video, we're going to look specifically at this question and understand whether or not your body has the right amount of B12. We're going to look at a couple of different ways to test for B12. Obviously, we have the serum B12 test, homocysteine, methylmalonic acid, and even the MCV blood test. All these tests help inform and triangulate and understand whether or not your body has sufficient levels. So we're going to look at all those tests and how they inform us on whether or not your body has the right amount of B12.
** B12 Book: Dont B12 Deficient : geni.us/rTQTvd (Amazon) **
B12 Testing Resource
00:00 Introduction to Vitamin B12: Importance and Testing
01:45 Understanding Serum Vitamin B12 Test
02:56 Exploring Additional Tests: MCV, Homocysteine, and Methylmalonic Acid
04:15 The Reliability of Methylmalonic Acid Test for B12 Levels
06:46 Summary and Further Resources
So how do you know if you have the right amount of B12? Well, B12 is super important for the human body, and there are a lot of deficiencies in B12. Or another way, how do you know if your body has the right amount or a sufficient amount of B12?
So what we're going to be covering here is more so the testing and analysis of B12 via blood work and not so much the symptom patterns and things like that that you might suspect when you have a B12 deficiency or insufficiency.
So the simplest way to test for your B12 or understand what your B12 levels are in your body is to do a serum B12 test. So the serum test is a simple blood test that you get for; it just says B12, and it's a reliable indicator when your levels show out low. So typically, a low level is going to be somewhere around 300 nanograms per deciliter, but even if it's less than 500, it may be suggesting that you have insufficient levels or your body actually does need more B12. And this is because sometimes B12 gets bound up in the blood or in the serum when it's floating around, and it's not able to get into the cells or into the tissues where it's needed. This can lead to a level that actually looks okay or looks normal, but inside the cells, it's actually not in sufficient quantities. And there are actually studies looking at this, showing that some people even have 700, 800 nanograms per deciliter, but their intracellular B12 is actually low. So what other tests can we use or rely on to give us an indication that we need more B12?
Well, there are actually three different tests that I would look at, and one of them is called the MCV blood test. The other is called homocysteine, and then the last one, which we're going to spend the most amount of time on, is called methylmalonic acid. The first two, the MCV and homocysteine, I've spent a lot of time on in other videos.
And I'll just briefly mention them here. MCV stands for mean corpuscular volume, and it's basically the size of the red blood cells. And I discussed this in this video here. But the level of MCV does go up when you're deficient in either B12 or folate. Both of these nutrients are needed in some capacity in order to make DNA base pairs. When that happens, the cells get stuck in the larger phase, and they're not able to divide efficiently through mitosis. When they're not able to divide efficiently, they get released earlier in this larger stage. When you do your CBC blood test, you'll see a high or high normal MCV level. Similarly, an elevated homocysteine can also be indicative of a deficiency or inadequacy of B12 or folate. And you can find more details on this kind of testing and elevated homocysteine in this video here. But what are you going to do when you want to know for sure if it's the B12 or the folate?
Well, one option is to look at methylmalonic acid. Methylmalonic acid is derived from Methylmalonyl CoA, and it's an intermediate in the breakdown of certain amino acids, as well as odd-chain fatty acids. And basically, this conversion is catalyzed by an enzyme called methylmalonyl CoA mutase, often referred to as MUT. So, this methylmalonic acid test is a more functional analysis of your B12 levels because B12 is essential for the proper functioning of this methylmalonyl CoA enzyme. B12 works as a cofactor for this enzyme, allowing the conversion of methylmalonyl CoA to succinyl CoA in the absence of adequate B12.