Zinc's Intimate Relationship with Testosterone: in both genders.

Zinc fingers!

As we age, our pancreas often makes less digestive enzymes.

As we age, our parietal cells can also age.

Parietal cells live in the stomach.

They require the most energy of ANY cell in the body, even more than the brain or heart. They contain almost half of their cell volume as mitochondria.

Aging itself is a tsunami of increasing stressors.

Stress and aging reduce parietal cell production of stomach acid and other digestive enzymes.

So as we age, we can start to digest critical minerals — less well.

Even if we supplement!

Running red blood cell levels (RBC) of minerals is the best assessment.

Serum levels are not near as helpful (they are buffered so don’t “show” deficiencies as early or as clearly as serum levels of minerals. Beware, most docs are trained to only run serum levels of minerals).

As we track RBC zinc levels as we age, zinc levels are often not robustly in the higher quartile of the RBC zinc levels.

The normal and optimal ranges of zinc are: