Final Bloodwork Results and Which Markers Moved First

The final bloodwork results from Day 30 are the one part of this experiment I will not type out, because the reveal is the film itself. What I can give you is everything around them: exactly which tests were drawn, on which days, which markers we watched hardest, and which numbers had already moved long before the last needle went in. Dr. Michael Brandon ate 20 Burger King patties a day for 30 days with water and nothing else, and the last draw happened on August 3, 2020, the same day he sat down for a live podcast on how phase one went.

What did Dr. Mike's final bloodwork results actually measure?

A lot more than a standard physical. The final bloodwork results came from a full stack of panels, not one cholesterol check. The film shows Dr. Mike at his baseline draw listing what he wanted back: a complete blood count, thyroid hormones, inflammatory markers and vitamin and mineral panels, in the film at 00:13:34. The same panels were repeated at the end, so every number had a partner to be compared against.

The book adds the full list: hormone and cardiometabolic work, plus liver, thyroid, kidney and inflammatory panels, described in 600 Burgers in 30 Days on page 22. My own line about it in that chapter still holds: “None of the panels that we did are typical of a normal lab.” That was the point. A normal lab report tells you whether you are sick today. It does not tell you what a month of one food did at the cellular level.

In my experience the hardest part was not the blood. It was the logistics. The lab we used refused to be part of the film. No sponsor, no conditions attached to the result.

Why won't I print the final bloodwork results here?

Because the ending is what the film is for. The final bloodwork results belong on screen, in his own face. I can tell you the panels, the dates, the protocol and every symptom he wrote down, and I will. I am not going to hand you the last column of the report in a blog post and call it journalism.

Dr. Mike wrote one line on Day 30: done. The last round of blood work, and a live podcast where I announced phase two. That is the scene the whole month was built toward, and the film shows the moment the report comes out and gets read back to him on camera. What happened to his hormones, his inflammatory markers and his ketones on that last day is in there, in his own face, in real time.

Sit with that for a moment, because the tease is not a marketing trick. It is the honest order of things. Anyone can tell you burgers are bad or burgers are fine. Almost nobody funds four complete test points and then lets the numbers argue back. You can read the whole arc of what his blood did across the experiment in our walkthrough of the bloodwork without spoiling the last frame.

How long did the final bloodwork results take to come back?

Not the same day, and not in one piece. The final bloodwork results arrived in stages. A wide panel is not a same-day report, and in my experience the specialty hormone work is always the slowest thing in the stack. That is why we never built the film on a single draw.

Here is the real problem with one blood test: it is a photograph of a moving thing. So we tested four times, not once. The book lists the test points as before the 600 burgers, after the 600 burgers, after a month of vegetarian and pescatarian eating, and after one more month of grass-finished meat, on page 24 of the book. Three of those four draws had already happened before I handed him anything.

Cost slows things down too, and I learned that the ugly way. I wanted the patties themselves analysed, so we could compare the food to the blood. Every lab either refused outright or set a minimum well beyond what this project could carry. I wrote that up in the results chapter of 600 Burgers in 30 Days on page 131. The meat was never lab-tested. That is a gap in this work, and I would rather say so than paper over it.

Which markers did we watch hardest, and what does the published evidence say?

Four groups: lipids, glucose, inflammation and liver enzymes. We read the final bloodwork results against all four. Those are the ones viewers ask about, and they are the ones where the published research disagrees with itself most loudly.

• Lipids. The evidence says LDL cholesterol rose substantially on low-carbohydrate diets in people of normal body weight but not in those with high BMI, in a meta-analysis of randomised trials in 1,379 participants; the authors note the isolated rise in lean people has not yet been linked to outcomes.
• Glucose. The evidence says up to 16 weeks of red meat intake did not change glucose, insulin, HOMA-IR or CRP compared with less red meat, in a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials limited by short trial lengths.
• Inflammation. The evidence says low-carbohydrate diets lowered CRP and IL-6 slightly more than low-fat diets across 51 studies and 4,164 adults, an effect tied to weight loss, with TNF-alpha unchanged.
• Liver and apoB. The evidence says that in a one-year, non-randomised study of 349 people in nutritional ketosis, LDL-C rose about 10% while apoB was unchanged and liver enzymes fell — a company-run study of self-selected patients, not a clean trial.

Now read that list again and notice what none of it covers. Not one of those trials fed a lean, trained physician 20 fast-food patties a day. The film shows Dr. Mike doing his own arithmetic from label data on camera: about 160 grams of fat, 50 grams of it saturated, 700 milligrams of cholesterol and 180 grams of protein per day, as he states in the film. That is his estimate, not a lab assay. Individual results vary, and his are his alone.

Which numbers moved during the 30 days, and which barely budged?

The fastest movers were not labs at all. They were sleep, performance and his own handwriting. The scale did almost nothing. Plenty had shifted long before the final bloodwork results came back.

On Day 8 the 3D scan showed him up half a pound after 32 ounces of water on the commute, which he read as about the same weight he started at, in his journal on page 47 of the book. Performance told a different story. At the Day 14 retest his best long jump was an inch shorter than his worst baseline jump of 8 feet 5 inches, and his mile came in about 20 seconds slower, on page 52. He wrote on Day 19 that his heart-rate variability had been cut in half a week in, and was only a little over halfway back to baseline by then. Then Day 29, the last fitness test, in five words: “Well, that was freaking miserable!”

Sleep is where the crew got surprised, and where I want to be careful. His Fitbit logged just over six hours on Day 4. He felt far worse than that number suggested. On Day 9 it claimed he fell asleep at 12:15 when he had been out before 10. Both entries sit in his journal in the book. The evidence says Fitbit models detect sleep with high sensitivity but low specificity, so treat consumer sleep data as a rough estimate, per a systematic review and meta-analysis of wristband accuracy. The symptom pattern, though, did not fade the way the literature suggests it should: the evidence says the cluster people call keto flu, catalogued from 60 online self-reports, mostly peaks in the first week and settles. His did not settle. That is the tension the last report had to explain.

What was it like to hand a fit doctor his own final report on camera?

He had made a prediction at the baseline draw. The film shows him saying “I’m expecting inflammation panel to skyrocket” before a single patty, at 00:14:09 in the film. By the end he had stopped predicting anything. His Day 24 entry is the whole mood of that last week: “Not upset, not happy, not sick not well, just ready to move on.”

The film suggests — and this is an interpretation, mine and his on camera, not a measurement — that the report mattered less as a verdict on fast food than as proof that a healthy, disciplined, well-tested body can be moved a long way in 30 days by one variable. He volunteered for that. I planned to do it myself. He insisted on being the test subject. That is why every lab, scan and fitness test in this project is his, and none of it is mine. If you want the experts who argued both sides of that report, we mapped them in every expert in the film.

Frequently asked questions

No, and that was deliberate on my part. The book carries no numeric lab values for Dr. Mike anywhere in it. It describes his post-month labs in words. It walks you through every panel we drew and why, day by day, in his own journal. The reveal itself — the report being read back to him — lives in the film, on camera, where you can watch his face while he reads it. In my experience that is the only honest place to put it.

Here is the real problem with a lone blood report: it reads like a verdict when it is only a question. So take it back to the doctor who ordered it and make them walk you through each line, reference ranges included. A single marker outside normal is a question, not a diagnosis. Trends across two or three draws tell you far more than one snapshot. Bring your own notes on food, sleep and training to the appointment. Context is most of the work, and it is why we tested this experiment four times instead of once.

No, and I will not claim it does. This is one fit physician, one month, one food, measured closely — a case study, not a trial. It shows what happened to him under observation, with symptoms and performance recorded daily. Read it as a well-documented n of 1 that should make you curious about your own numbers, not as a verdict on anybody’s menu.

The Bottom Line

If you aren’t testing, you’re guessing. That is the whole reason this experiment exists, and it is why I will not reduce a month of measured human physiology to a headline number in a blog post. You now know what was drawn, when it was drawn, which markers moved before the last draw and which sat still. The final column belongs on screen, where Dr. Mike reads the final bloodwork results himself.

So go find out. Watch The Keto Project on Prime Video and see the last report get handed over, or start with the prequel and read his journal in his own words in 600 Burgers in 30 Days. If you want the lipid conversation first, we broke it down in keto and cholesterol, and the protocol itself starts on Day 1. You have the questions. What will you do with the answer?

Sources

• Increased low-density lipoprotein cholesterol on a low-carbohydrate diet in adults with normal but not high body weight: A meta-analysis
• Effects of Total Red Meat Intake on Glycemic Control and Inflammatory Biomarkers: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials
• Effects of low-carbohydrate diets, with and without caloric restriction, on inflammatory markers in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials
• Effectiveness and Safety of a Novel Care Model for the Management of Type 2 Diabetes at 1 Year: An Open-Label, Non-Randomized, Controlled Study
• Accuracy of Wristband Fitbit Models in Assessing Sleep: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
• Consumer Reports of "Keto Flu" Associated With the Ketogenic Diet