What Can Your DNA Really Tell You About Your Health? (EP 142)

[0:14] Hello, everyone. Uncle Marv here with another episode of my unhealthy podcast, a show where we look at health and wellness in a little bit of a different way.

[0:25] And today, folks, we are continuing with our discussions about Movember. And you've heard me say this before.

[0:35] We'll spend three hours researching a new truck, 10 minutes deciding whether a health test is worth buying. But we know now that there are tests that you can take your saliva and it will hand you a personalized wellness plan. And we're going to get into that a little bit more today. I'm bringing back a guest that I had previously. You may remember him from an earlier show. I'll have a link for that in the show notes. but Len May, the CEO and co-founder of EndoDNA, a company working on genetic interpretation and personalized health. Len, welcome back, sir. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All right. So this is an interesting thing. I wanted to bring you back. I wanted to find several different angles with which to approach Movember with. And one of those things is just simply the matter of men getting tested. And, you know, we hate going to the doctor. We hate sitting around and waiting and getting probed and prodded and stuff like that. But there's a lot of things that are happening in the world of science that will make testing a lot easier.

[1:49] Yeah, and I agree with you. I hate it a lot because I'm the person that passes out. I'm all tattooed, by the way, but I'm the person that passes out when I get my blood drawn. So I can't stand that.

[2:02] And also, I learned over time that it only captures a moment in time. And in order for you to know about you, you need to be a partner with your practitioner. And that means understanding your genetics, understanding what you're predisposed to, understanding that it's sort of longitudinal care over time. It's not just a one-off. Like when I went to get my blood work done for my physical and I was passing out, the results came back and my doctor goes to me, looks like you have a high glucose level on your test. I was like, I don't eat sugar. It doesn't make any sense. So a traditional doctor will say, I'm going to put you on medication to reduce your blood sugar. My functional doctor, who's into regenerative medicine said, you know what? I think maybe it's the cortisol that was expressed during that blood test that actually showed elevated blood glucose levels because it kind of got out of balance. So if you're worried about it, wear a glucose monitor, which I did, and I don't have high blood sugar. So it's these things of the root cause versus the symptom that we have to start understanding. Right. Now, as I've talked with people over the last year, year and a half, understanding root cause.

[3:27] One thing that i found out is that we're not all the same not all root causes, mean the same thing or individual people and when you and i last spoke we talked about the fact that DNA, is more involved than we think it's not really just genes.

[3:44] But it's our own individual DNA so can you real quickly uh, talk about how DNA influences things like how we age, how we maintain energy.

[3:57] Lifestyle changes, all of that.

[3:59] Yeah, I think it's a great question. And we've always been taught that nothing you can do about it to my genes. And that's absolutely not true. And then the other side of it on the doctor end, they're like, well, we don't care about genetics. We only care what's being turned on, what's expressed, what's now epigenetics. So I think we should care about both. And the reason why is when we're born, we get our, obviously we get our DNA from half from our father, half from my mother. And what happens is there is a circuit breaker of all these different switches. So that your DNA is intelligence. It has encoding and sends messages to your cells to do something. However, only some of them are turned on. The remainder of them are based on our lifestyle. And that's where we actually have control. And when I talk about a lifestyle, these lifestyle.

[4:58] Markers are associated with, number one, the things that we put in our body, our food, our nutrients, our supplements, our minerals, all these different things can actually influence that switch being turned on. So the message goes to the cell and tells the cell to create these amino acids, proteins, et cetera. So you have cellular expression turned on. The second part is your exposure to things like heavy metals, pesticides, all these different things. They can also influence that switch being turned on, that expression.

[5:35] And the third that most people don't even think about is your own neurochemistry. And I just gave a perfect example of my own neurochemistry actually influencing an expression, a cellular expression. And these are the things that we need to understand. So when you have your DNA, DNA is sort of your GPS of life. And it tells you where your own personal traffic jam is. It tells you that, you know, don't go down this road. It's closed or you're there's potholes in this road. So it tells you how to go around and navigate around those things in life. And you're so I can actually drive. I live in L.A., but I'm from Philly. I can get in my car and drive to L.A. 3000. I mean, from L.A. to Philly, 3000 miles without a GPS. I'm going to get there. But there's a cost associated with that. There's a cost of road closures, wrong turns, all these different things. If I had GPS, it would show me exactly what to avoid. And that's what DNA is used for. Now, to measure how well that whatever it is that you're doing in your body, you need to do an epigenetic test. And the epigenetic test is the measure of what you're doing, how it's influencing the expression of your DNA. And that's measured in different ways.

[7:05] Messenger RNA, like mRNA, that can measure the expression or things that what's called methylation, which actually shows you that switches turn on or off. So if you bookend that experience, knowing your DNA and knowing your epigenetic expression, now you're actually getting ahead of things that are, you know, turning on and you're not living your life blindly just depending on being reactive to things that are happening to you. You're being proactive in your healthcare journey.

[7:36] So let me ask this. You talked about doing these tests, and we're conditioned to, you know, take a physical once a year or whatever.

[7:47] And you mentioned that they're just a snapshot in time. So if we're looking at DNA, how often do we need to do testing? Is it more? Is it on a regular basis, you know, more than a year, less than a year? Yeah. So your DNA does not, should not change. So you can only do your DNA test once and that's all you need for life. Now your epigenetic test, uh, you should do several times, maybe at least once a year to see what changes have been made based on your genetic predispositions. And, uh, that, that epigenetic test can also show you several different things that are very important for you to track your biological age, but not just your biological age. So I'll give you an example. I'm 54, almost 55, and my biological age is 47. That doesn't really mean much of anything to me. I want to understand what my system age is. So what is my endocrine system? What is my immune system age? What is my cognitive health? So now that I can see and I can target, Okay, well, my cognitive health maybe is, maybe that age is in the 70s. So what can I do? Maybe it's caused by inflammation. What can I do to reduce that biological age of that system?

[9:16] The other thing that's really important is what's called pace of aging. So we have a chronological age. Obviously, we age one year in a year as we revolve around the sun. Your biologically, your pace of aging can be reduced. So my pace of aging is 0.8 of a year. So I'm actually aging less than a year's worth of aging. I'm actually aging eight months worth of aging. And this is the thing that you want to stay on top of with your practitioner so you understand what is being expressed and what's actually working in your body and then what's not working in your body and combine it with all the other blood panels and stuff biomarkers so you can actually, compare what happened last year to what's happening this year and combine them all together.

[10:06] Together the challenge with all this is it's too much information we used to be in a position where.

[10:12] It's not enough information so we're always looking for things now it's too much information so i have doctors that are sitting there with ChatGPT or whatever trying to upload all these files they have dexa scans they have uh you know they have in body they have uh new term reports they have all these reports and they're trying to figure it out and it's overwhelming so by having an intelligence platform, and I'm not plugging what we do, but I'm just saying it allows the doctor to interrogate everything in one shot and understand what is specific to the individual that they may want to do and recommend and what they should be aware of before they're making their recommendation or their treatment plan. So that's when you personalize the actual, the protocol. Okay. Well, you mentioned ChatGPT, and the fact is.

[11:05] There's too much information but yet we are in a time right now where we are just constantly everybody is going to ChatGPT or creating their own ai agent so that they can learn more faster um i just had a friend of mine that got diagnosed with prostate cancer and, you know he went to ai to create a whole list of questions to ask his doctor before he went in there and he realized I probably don't want to ask all of these questions.

[11:34] But it's very interesting that we're so bombarded now with stuff. And even though we are bombarded with stuff, there's still stuff that we just simply can't prevent in life. And it is interesting.

[11:47] I have a question I want to pivot on because along with the information, everybody has a program. Everybody has do these, you know, go to the gym, eat this, and you'll, you know, be like this. And everybody's thinking that if we just follow the same program as somebody else, that we'll get the same results. But yet, I know that two people can do the same program. They can work out the same at the gym. They can eat the same and yet have very, very different results. How does the DNA fall into that category and affect how we can do the same things but have different results? Yeah, it's a great question. and DNA is a big part of it. Think about it this way. 99% of us, maybe even a little higher, are identical genetically. It's that small percentage that's our difference. But that small percentage difference based on what is being turned on and what's being expressed makes a huge difference in individuals. And what I mean by that is something like.

[12:53] What you eat. You know, some people are rapid metabolizers and they can eat different types of food and metabolize it really quickly and excrete that and, you know, receive the nutrients from that. And some people are poor metabolizers. They metabolize differently and slower. So they actually are more prone to weight gain. Some people have a higher capacity for production of different hormones. For instance, some people are aromatizers, slow aromatizers. They're not producing as much hormones naturally. Also, certain types of foods and exercise and activities that you do are more aligned with individuals and you can see in your genetic profile what somebody is predisposed to. Also, your neurochemicals that I talked about. Some people are prone to things like stress reactivity. And if you know this about yourself, things when you're excreting cortisol, it slows down your metabolism, it slows down your digestion. It actually creates inflammation during hours that you don't need to have cortisol. And this is how you process stress.

[14:14] It's all in your genetic mapping. People that are prone to stress and some people on the flip side are prone to depressive states. And these are the things that you need to know about yourself. When I was talking about your potholes in the road, these are the exact potholes in the road. So if you're doing the same thing, expecting the same results, we're all individuals. It's impossible to follow an individual. Now, there's guidelines that probably are good for most people. you know, sleep, uh, as you know, good, get, get called good quality sleep, make sure you're putting good things in your body. Uh, you know, food, all those other things, but even food, there is, uh, there's a series of genes called cytochrome P450. Uh, so they're known as CIP genes, CYP450. Each one of those genes produces an enzyme that helps us metabolize something. Now, I can have an enzyme that metabolizes lactose fine. You can have an enzyme that doesn't allow me to metabolize lactose. So now when we're eating dairy, you're creating inflammation in your body where I'm not. Same thing with gluten. I'm not talking about people that have celiac disease. I'm just talking about this notion of understanding that you have these genes that produce different things that allow us to react to things that we're inputting. differently.

[15:37] All right. Well, Len, we packed in a lot of information here. We started to get a little technical. Let me ask if you can do this. I asked you to come on and kind of tailor this to Movember where we're really, you know, most of the time Movember focuses on prostate care, focuses on testicular cancer, men's health.

[16:00] Suicide prevention, and stuff like that. How can we apply what you're working on to Movember. Yeah, you have to get ahead of things before they become problems and diseases. So, you know, talk to your doctor and make sure that your doctor is actually screening for all these things, doing genetic testing, looking at epigenetics, looking at something called pharmacogenomics. Pharmacogenomics are extremely important. I was just at a medical conference, and they said that most conditions, adverse effects that they see happen from either contraindications between medications or wrong dosing. Ask your doctor, have you ever done something called a PGX test? And that tells you how your body interacts with different medications and how there's contraindications between medications. So this is the conversation we need to have with, you know, with our practitioners. And for men in general, you know, you have to look at certain things as, you know, I'm getting older in my mid-50s, we're going through andropause. What can we do to maintain the things that we need to do in our bodies?

[17:15] You know, getting good quality sleep, draining that lymphatic system, making sure that we have good heart and cardio your health, but good sleep will do that. Reduces all the stress hormones that we've, you know, engaged with during the day. Helps with your immune system. Also, weight management. We're very focusing on these peptides with GLP-1s, but are we actually reducing, our muscle mass? Are we reducing our bone density? So, understanding what is the purpose of all these things. And when we sleep, we actually reset our ghrelin and leptin levels. Ghrelin is the signal for feeling satiated, hunger. So, how do we make sure that, you know, if we're not getting good quality sleep, we may feel like we're hungry, but we're not really hungry. So all these different things that we have to be aware of, we are empowered to take action over our own healthcare journey. Our doctor has hundreds, maybe thousands of patients. We are our own most important patient and taking action and being empowered will help us with that healthcare journey.

[18:26] All right. Well, Len, thank you very much for coming on and doing this i know it was a quick episode and uh there's so much more we can get into i want to encourage listeners uh Len s website uh endodna.com I ll have a link to there, and that will basically uh give you a starting place on you know looking at your DNA and you too could be somebody that uh, chronologically 54 55 but yet the body is uh, what is it chronologically 55, biologically 47. Is that what you are? That's it, yeah. All right. I have to go check and see what I am.

[19:05] Probably not as nice a gap as yours. All right, folks, that is going to do it. Like I said, I just wanted to get some people on here to give you some quick things to think about for Movember. This is the takeaway here. More information, obviously, is not always a complete answer, as Len said. Figure out what a test can tell you and who can help you make sense of it. And take a good look at your DNA. hey, we are all different and our environment is different and affects us in different ways. So this Movember, don't let buying a test become a substitute for having the conversation. That's what we're doing here. Learn more at movember.com. Check out everything in my show notes for links. Support the work around all the stuff that we've talked about, prostate cancer, mental health, suicide, and just simply getting a big grasp on your health before something goes wrong, as Len said. So thank you all for tuning in. Take your health seriously. And until next time, live healthy and be happy.