Urine is only potentially useful for a 12 to 24 hour period. It is very inaccurate, especially with larger diet variability. Basically, urine reveals which minerals are excreted from the body not what is absorbed for cellular fuel.

Saliva has no direct correlation with the body's specific mineral content of cells.

Stool has no direct correlation with the body's specific mineral content of cells but can be used as validation for digestive disturbances in some cases.

Bioscanners have no scientifically acceptable correlation with the body's specific cellular mineral content.

Blood Serum or Plasma is not scientifically acceptable, due to ongoing controversy among leading nutritional scientists concerning its exact nutritional implications.

Red Blood Cells only reflect an "approximate picture of an individual's mineral status."* Isolated mononuclear leukocytes (immune cells) yield more precise results, but their analysis is prohibitively expensive for most people. Furthermore, neither type of blood specimen demonstrates actual cellular storage levels over a substantial period of time, meaning over 1 day to 1 week maximum (under ideal conditions). Also, blood does not clearly reflect long term heavy metal toxic exposure, or provide a precise picture of toxics that are accumulating on the outside of the body.

Hair is "the best specimen for the routine screening"** of toxic metals in the body. After 35 years of research, hair has emerged as the most practical method of testing mineral balance in your body."** This specimen also provides the most long term information (6 to 8 weeks on average) about the body's actual retention rates of over 38 minerals, including toxic ones. The Best News is that PNC's laboratories have simultaneously compared hair tests taken from individuals to their urine, blood, saliva, stool, soft tissue biopsies, and calorimetry studies (calorie measurements) and scanners for all nutrients, in order to "sort out all discrepancies, fully correlate results, and extrapolate dependable interventional norms for maximum therapeutic value."***

Clearly, by any standard of comparison, hair can be used as the most complete frontline nutritional screening tool for the detection and correction of all nutritional disturbances.

PNC's long term affiliation with our laboratories makes us the world leader in mineral analysis and balance testing, research and technology. Besides it's own direct research on many millions in it's existing database of people tested in 57 countries, the relationship that each PNC client enjoys with our medical group utilizes the research information generated from an average of 5,000 technical articles published weekly, which support the reliability and advancement of hair-mineral analysis, as well as the latest nutrition and laboratory science literature and internet medical information.

  * James A. Bralley, PhD C.C.N. and Richard S. Lord, PhD
 ** David L. Watts, D.C., PhD, F.A.C.E.P
*** Gregory H. Tefft, D.C., C.N.D.