Hey ,

Thank you for sharing your labs with us! I will start with your last question first. Since your vitamin D is clinically low, your calcium will probably correct itself once you start supplementing. Of course, calcium has to be in your diet as well. If you don’t consume milk products, there are still a lot of excellent calcium-rich foods like seeds, beans, lentils, nuts, leaves greens, salmon and figs. But I do recommend retesting after a while to be sure.

Did you know because you are a B Better member you have access to Fullscript and The Swell Score? These are just like iHerb online stores where you can find a lot of high-quality brand products. You can find the link here.

If you like I could recommend you some high-quality brands I like and use. I will put the link to fullscript to them as well:

Vitamin D/K2
• Thorne has a nice liquid formula: vitamin D + K2 liquid – click here

Magnesium Glycinate
Here are a few options I recommend to my clients:
• Designs for Health is a high-quality brand that has a formulation for people who experience GI discomfort with magnesium supplements. Its a buffered form called Magnesium Buffered Chelate – Click here 
• Pure Encapsulations has this one here
• Metagenics has Mag Glycinate – click here

if you are looking for a liquid form because swallowing pills is difficult you could use this one:
• Pure Encapsulations – Magnesium Glycinate Liquid – click here

Omega 3
High-Quality liquid brands:
• Thorne – Omega Superb – click here
• Biotic Research has a more concentrated liquid form – Biomega 3 – click here
• Integrative Therapeutics has also a more concentrated dose – Pure Omega Liquid – click here

Whey
Thorne has a Whey protein isolate
• This one is without flavor
• And this one is the chocolate flavor

But since your hemoglobin is in the lower part of the reference range (ideal would be in the middle), you could also go for the whey protein isolate from biotics research. It has lactoferrin in it which is a very absorbable form of iron. Besides that, it also contains important immune factors.
• Look here if you want tasteless
• Look here if you want Vanilla 
• Look here if you like Chocolate

Because I live in Europe, my iHerb options might be different then yours. When I look, I don’t see high-quality brands for whey between my options. 

For omega 3, Nordic Naturals is third-party tested and would be my iHerb personal choice.

Thorne vitamin d/k2 liquid is on iherb (again, where I live)

Magnesium glycinate: again no high-quality brands in my options, and with most other options I don’t have experience either. The brand KAL I wouldn’t recommend. I have used it for a while, but when I switched to Designs for Health I could notice the difference immediately.

I hope you have more higher end options in iHerb than I do, but if it doesn’t matter to you where you would order, try fullscript!

,

Being on a high-protein diet and supplementing with creatine can elevate BUN & Creatinine respectively. I don’t know how well you could answer these questions, but it would help to provide you with an answer
• Can you tell me how many grams of protein you consume per day? And what is your body weight? 
• Meat is a source of creatine as well and contains between 1.4 & 2.3 grams of creatine per pound (or 0.45 kg). How much meat are you eating on average?

Cystatin-C levels can help you if you don’t trust your BUN & Creatinine levels. If you have signs & symptoms of kidney disease I would definitely dive deeper.

But looking at your labs knowing you supplement with creatine, I would expect your creatinine levels to be higher in the reference range. They would probably drop a bit without using creatine as a supplement. But again, this is an educated guess.

In this chapter of the book Clinical Methods: The History, Physical, and Laboratory Examinations, they would expect a BUN of 20 mg/dl when people consume an excess of 125 grams of protein.

Again, if you’re experiencing symptoms of kidney disease, I personally would delve deeper and check Cystatin-C levels. If you are unsure but would like to know if your kidneys work fine, I would test them as well.

Hey ,

You are welcome

180-200 grams of protein can raise your BUN levels. However, 100 grams of cooked lean beef give you around 25 grams of protein. Am I right if I assume that the other proteins come from other sources?

If you are eating 180-200 grams of protein in total for athletic goals like increasing muscle mass I can tell you what research shows:

Depending on the study you will find numbers between 1.5-1.8 g of protein per kg body weight don’t give you extra benefits when it comes to building muscle mass. This link will bring you to a 2020 review of 105 studies (done with a total of 5402 study participants) that concludes and I quote:
“The rate of increase in the effect of protein supplementation rapidly diminished after 1.3 g/kg BW/d was exceeded, and resistance training markedly suppressed this decline.”

That doesn’t mean it’s ‘wrong’ to eat more or there are no benefits of higher protein consumption, but the benefits contributing to muscle synthesis become lesser over a certain point.

This information might give you some flexibility in choosing the optimal amount of protein you like to consume!