Regular checks can help detect health issues early, making them easier to manage or treat.

Recent evidence shows considerable merit in getting certain tests, especially for men who are 40 or older. Regular testing can help detect health issues early, making them easier to manage or treat.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in Canada, and men tend to develop it roughly a decade earlier than women. Blood pressure (BP) provides an important measure of how your circulatory system is performing. Guidelines published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2025 recommend aiming for 130/80 or lower. The authors of this article, led by Dr. Rémi Goupil, also encourage at-home blood pressure monitoring and note that drugstore-purchased machines are quite good. “In Canada, 90 per cent of BP devices sold at pharmacies are validated compared with only 45 per cent of BP devices sold by online retailers.” Indeed, a check on Amazon.ca showed that their cheapest monitors, in the $20 range, did not claim to be validated or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, whereas more expensive, name-brand ones did. This probably isn’t a place to pinch pennies.

In the 1990s, researchers began to see the benefits of cholesterol screening for people aged 40 and older. Men are more prone to high LDL levels (the so-called bad cholesterol). Estrogen tends to protect women early in life, though after menopause, they catch up. Your family doctor can, and should, order cholesterol testing as part of a regular physical and discuss the results with you. You no longer need to fast for this test; that policy changed in 2016.

The Canadian Pediatric Society also recommends one-time screening of children aged 2 to 10 to detect a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia. This is relatively rare, affecting about 1 in 300 Canadians, but there are significant benefits to treating it early in life.

The third set of tests you should consider is blood glucose and HbA1C blood tests. The Canadian Diabetes Society recommends screening at least every three years for people over 40. On their website, they note that “Your ethnic background is also a factor: being of African, Arab, Asian, Hispanic, Indigenous, or South Asian descent can increase your risk of living with type 2 diabetes.”

This issue matters for Canadian men, who have higher rates than women. Fortunately, there is a simple at-home test for it. You take a sample of your poop, wrap it up, and drop it off at a lab. This FIT test looks for tiny amounts of blood, which may indicate colorectal cancers or precancerous polyps. It detects most cancers, though it can miss early-stage ones. False positives are rare, about five per cent, and are often due to conditions like hemorrhoids.

Most men are familiar with the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test. This has been hugely controversial, with some experts arguing that it does not save lives and may result in false positives leading to unnecessary and invasive procedures like biopsies. The 2022 guideline from the Canadian Urological Association “suggests offering PSA screening to men with a life expectancy greater than 10 years. The decision of whether or not to pursue PSA screening should be based on shared decision-making after the potential benefits and harms associated with screening have been discussed.” One development in this guideline is a recommendation to use additional biomarkers and to consider multiparametric MRI before performing a biopsy in certain patients. The reality is that the wait for this procedure can be long unless you pay for it privately. Like most health decisions, PSA testing is something to discuss with your family doctor and urologist.

Doctors have come up with the term TOFI (thin on the outside, fat on the inside) to highlight that the most dangerous fat is found inside your abdomen. Accurately measuring it requires MRI or CT scanning, but waist circumference is a useful and practical proxy. A measurement of 102 cm or less is desirable.

Reducing visceral fat can be achieved through resistance training, including exercises such as squats, push-ups, and planks, or using free weights, gym equipment, or resistance bands. Modifying nutrition — by reducing refined carbohydrates and alcohol intake and increasing protein — also supports fat reduction. Progress should be tracked by monitoring waist size rather than weight.

Yes, this is something else to add to my daily recording ritual, and it makes a lot of sense.

Tom Keenan is an award-winning journalist, public speaker, professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Calgary, and author of the best-selling book Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy.

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