Maya was 32 years old when she signed up for Quantify, after a year of struggling to process and recall information, and not getting anywhere with conventional medicine.
Her primary care doctor had ordered a complete blood count (CBC), comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP), and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) to investigate what was going on, but when all of her test results came back normal, she suggested that Maya was “probably just stressed.”
A data scientist at a venture-backed startup, Maya recognized that her 80-hour workweeks could certainly have an effect on her health, but she was also understandably reluctant to accept her doctor’s suggestion that stress alone was causing her brain fog, given the lack of test results to back this up.
What’s more, her brain fog was severe—unlike anything she’d ever experienced.
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.
Feeling that her job was at stake, Maya decided to pursue a more data-driven approach.
In her first appointment at Quantify, Maya’s health coach recommended an organic acids test, to evaluate exposure to toxic chemicals, accumulation of oxalate, vitamin and mineral levels, oxidative stress, and the presence of pathogenic bacteria and fungi.
Test results
Her first time conducting a comprehensive evaluation of her health, Maya’s organic acids test showed abnormally high methylmalonic acid, indicating a significant vitamin B12 deficiency, which commonly causes brain fog, fatigue, depression, and other chronic symptoms.
Not just a lucky guess, her health coach had suspected vitamin B12 deficiency after learning that 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.
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 following her health coach’s recommendations closely.
She eliminated processed foods, sugar, and grains from her diet, increased consumption of fruits and vegetables, started eating animal protein again—incorporating beef, chicken, fish, and eggs into nearly every meal—and took certain supplements, such as adenosylcobalamin (a particularly bioavailable form of vitamin B12), a vitamin B complex, and magnesium malate.
Within a few months, her brain fog had completely resolved, she was back to crunching numbers at work, and a follow-up organic acids test showed a normal level of vitamin B12, further validating the work she had done to address the vitamin deficiency that had unknowingly compromised her health.