A Simple DIY Home Test for Molybdenum Deficiency

All you need is $10-$50 worth of equipment, 2-4 days, and a molybdenum supplement.

Molybdenum is necessary to convert the highly toxic sulfite to the highly useful sulfate. Sulfite can cause anxiety, sleep disruption, excessive startle reflex, or mast cell degranulation and pseudo-allergies. Sulfate is needed for detoxification and healthy hormone metabolism. Much of the nausea, sickness, and mental deterioration that can happen in pregnancy is due to sulfite accumulation. You’re likely to run deficient in molybdenum if you eat a lot of meat but don’t eat liver, and in general if you don’t eat beans.

Lab testing for molybdenum status is unsatisfactory. LabCorp and Quest both treat molybdenum tests as if they are designed for the sole purpose of ruling out toxicity.

Even Quest’s ridiculously labeled “Micronutrient, Molybdenum, Blood” reports a healthy or deficient molybdenum level simply as less than the cutoff for toxicity.

HDRI offers a whole blood molybdenum test, but I have found them very difficult to work with, being hit by months of delays.

Here I report a simple DIY home test for molybdenum status that requires no more than $10-50 worth of equipment, a molybdenum supplement, and 2-4 days of data collection. I have tested this on myself and believe that it works, although my validation should be considered anecdotal.

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