Maya was 32 years old when she started experiencing difficulty processing and recalling information.
A data scientist at a venture-backed software company, she had developed an extraordinary ability to make sense of whatever amount of data the marketing team could throw at her, often translating seemingly incomprehensible information into useful customer insights that would inspire new growth strategies for the company.
She felt a significant responsibility to get everything right—that the company’s success was contingent on the accuracy of her reports—so when she started struggling to focus on, analyze, and recall things that had previously come easy to her, Maya quickly became concerned about her ability to maintain the quality of her work.
At the extreme, she would make errors in her calculations that she or someone on her team would notice weeks or months later, that would require a complete restart of the project.
More often, she would find herself staring at an empty code editor, unsure as to why she opened it.
Spreadsheet mode
Feeling that her job was at stake, Maya started tracking her mental acuity in a spreadsheet.
Her brain fog wasn’t consistent—some days were better than others—so she wanted to evaluate whether there were factors within her control, such as diet, exercise, and sleep, that might be contributing to her decreased cognitive performance.
A few months in, while the spreadsheet helped Maya to record and visualize how she felt on a daily basis, she ultimately couldn’t identify any patterns.
It seemed like the severity of her brain fog was uncorrelated to whether or not she ate healthy, exercised, or slept well, and that her attempt to figure out what was going on didn’t actually produce any meaningful data that she could do anything with.
Enter Quantify
Recognizing that she needed more and better data than she’d be able to produce with her spreadsheet, Maya signed up for Quantify after discovering the company in a Google search for tests to investigate the causes of brain fog.
After getting matched with a certified health coach specialized in cognitive function, completing a health questionnaire, and meeting with her health coach over video chat, an organic acids test was ordered for Maya, to evaluate exposure to toxic chemicals, accumulation of oxalate, vitamin and mineral levels, oxidative stress, and the presence of pathogenic bacteria and fungi.
Vitamin B12 deficiency
A few weeks later, she received her test results, and her health coach explained that her organic acids test showed abnormally high methylmalonic acid, indicating a significant vitamin B12 deficiency, which commonly causes brain fog and innumerable other cognitive symptoms.
Her health coach added that the most likely cause of her deficiency was her diet—Maya had strictly followed a vegan diet since her twenties—given that diets that don’t include animal protein are almost always lacking in vitamin B12.
To address her vitamin B12 deficiency and optimize her cognitive function, her health coach continued, Maya would need to eliminate processed foods, sugar, and grains from her diet, start eating animal protein, and take certain supplements, such as adenosylcobalamin (a particularly bioavailable form of vitamin B12), a vitamin B complex, and magnesium malate.
Recovery
Maya knew that she wouldn’t be able to get enough vitamin B12 from her plant-based diet, so she had taken a multivitamin every day since starting the diet that included some amount of vitamin B12.
What she didn’t know, however, is that not only was she not taking enough, but she also wasn’t taking the right form.
She had taken just enough cyanocobalamin (the least bioavailable form of vitamin B12) to function, but she had likely been deficient since going vegan a decade ago, despite a lack of obvious symptoms of deficiency.
Thrilled to finally get answers, Maya started eating animal protein again, incorporating beef, chicken, fish, and eggs into nearly every meal, and taking the supplements her health coach recommended.
Within a month, her brain fog had completely resolved, she was back to crunching numbers, and she reported that her cognitive performance at work was actually better than it had ever been.