#47 MTHFR and Epigenetics with Dr. Ben Lynch

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself and in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi and welcome. I am so excited to introduce you to Dr. Ben lynch today. He is a colleague of mine, also graduate of Bastyr University, naturopathic physician and he's also the best selling author of Dirty Jeans and president of the company Seeking Health. So thank you so much for joining me, Ben. I'm so glad you're here.

Awesome to be here, Donnie.

So tell us a little more. Like, before we get to diving in about genes and epigenetics, how did you even get interested in this topic and down this path?

Well, I think it's, I was one of those probably annoying kids that always look up at my mom and dad and say, why? Why, why? And I think that's pretty much it. It's when you. And to give more concrete answer.

I was not happy as a doctor having 80% of my patients.

Become good and healthy again. So was that 20% who are not good, were they not following my recommendations? Were they not compliant? Were they using their condition as a crutch to get attention? Was I wrong? Was I was actually hurting my patients? Was it a combination of all the above? And then when I started digging more and more, I realized that A, it was I was wrong, B, some were not compliant, C, some were using it as a crutch, and D, a lot of it was stuff that I did not know I needed to figure out. And what I realized in that bubble was environmental medicine, which helped answer a lot of questions. And, but then it was also genetics. I started asking, you know, health professionals who've been in the business for 30 plus years, and I'd ask them, I said, you know, you're using this protocol to remove heavy metals and mercury, lead, and it's been, you've been using it for, you know, 10, 20 years with success. But some of your patients I'm seeing are just struggling like crazy. Do you think have a genetic component to it? Like, yeah, maybe, but it's too new. So I think that's, that's where it started for me. It was just seeing patients not getting better. And then when I started looking at the Genetics and having a very rudimentary beginning of some success and some worsening of people from thinking that I knew what I was doing with genetics. But I think it just came back from the why. But, you know, it also, when I started doing precision medicine, or nutrigenomics, whatever you want to call it, medicine became fun again. And it empowered the person on the other end who did their genetics to have an ability to understand why they were struggling with common, everyday ailments and what they could do about it and make some changes. And it got great success.

Well, that's the thing is it's when you kind of dove into this research and, you know, really training us as practitioners, because I did your trainings, I would say it was back in, like, 2014 when I discovered what you were training, because I started asking those questions too, like, you know, what am I missing? And what about this piece of genetics? Because for a long time, right, the belief was that our genetics were kind of set in stone, and we didn't. And even for a while, we believed that genetics was the main control. And I think researchers, when they were working on the Human Genome Project, were thinking, oh, we're going to solve everything by understanding our genetics. And what they ended up finding is, no, actually, yes, the genetics play a role, but it's by understanding the epigenetics that really makes the difference. And so that's where this power is, I think you're talking about is like, it's in the ability to change the effect our genes have on our health that makes it makes this extra tool in medicine.

Yeah. Let me share something, if I may, that I just saw this morning that I'm going to be talking more about, possibly even tomorrow. So there's something called polygenic risk score. And polygenic means many genes risk. Obviously, in score is assimilation of everything. So researchers look at a flurry of all these different genes and see how they're associated with a specific condition. And then they look at a population who's struggling with that condition. They see how many times that gene has a specific variant that is associated with, you know, with that group of people. And then they put all those genes into a bucket, and then they assign a risk score based upon these SNPs. And it's really a good way to get an understanding of a bigger picture of how your genes can influence a specific condition and more specifically, how specific types of genes, that is their mutations or variants, can be contributing to these conditions. And this paper was discussing adhd, which is everywhere, and we have prescription Meds everywhere for it, right?

Yes.

What do you think, Donny? Give me a guess. So researchers found a flurry of different genes and they assigned them a risk score.

For individuals who had adhd. What do you think the prevalence of ADHD was associated with this group of genes?

It's interesting. I mean, I could see where it could be highly correlated because we know a lot of genes that can influence focus and mood. So.

You know, and I think that there would. They probably could correlate a lot with the genes. And especially considering that the more stress we're under, the more likely those genes are going to express and the person's going to experience those symptoms.

True, true. And I like your thinking on that. And so.

Give me a number. What do you think?

Anywhere from 0% to 100% it was.

Increasing their risk based on their genetic variations.

Yeah. Not looking at epigenetics at all. It was purely based upon these many different genes that were associated with.

Adhd. Yeah.

Well, it's tricky because a lot of times the percentage is lower than we would think. A lot of times the genetic risk is 20% or less. But I would think with something as specific as ADHD, it might be higher. I don't know, I'm thinking 40% or.

Yeah. I was actually, you know, excited to find this paper and I was excited to think, okay, I could add something to strategy and that could be really useful for people. 4%.

It was only 4.

4.

Oh my gosh. So not 40%, but 4%. So it's, the thing is like, so that just says to us, it's, it's not about the genes, it's about everything else that influence us.

Yeah, it's the dirty genes, if you're going to think about it in one way. But, you know, so there is, if you're, if you're, if you're living a lifestyle that is so amazingly, say, perfect for supporting your focus and mood and you're doing all the work, possibly this could have a significant impact on you because you've done everything else. But for those of you who haven't done the dietary change, pulled out the pesticides and starting using the blue blocker glasses, I mean, these sexy things right here for. There we go.

Right. I noticed both of you and I are standing at our desks, things like that, where you're making choices in your day to day to really optimize your health. And I think that's the thing is for me, I'm so used to thinking in terms of epigenetics, it's hard for me to not think in terms of epigenetics.

Yes.

And that's what I, I mean for people who aren't familiar with that term.

I think that's when you say dirty genes. Epigenetics is how our environment, from emotional stress to toxins as a stress to our diet to our lack of sleep, to our, these various factors that we're exposed to on a day to day have that much influence on our genes. So it's not just the gene, it's everything that influences our genes.

Yeah, it's your eyes, ears, nose.

Sense of touch, your mindset. All these are really, really important. And we are downplaying right now the significance of even considering genetic testing. And if you are on the fence about it and you still haven't, we all have. Not to put you in a corner and start pointing my finger at you, but we all have work to do in terms of our lifestyle choices. And I don't want to be perfect either. I don't want to be living in a box of totally filtered air and that box be of the cleanest material and not go anywhere. I want to enjoy the world. And so I'm going to be sucking down jet fuel. I'm going to be around people who are sick, I'm going to be around people who are rude or cutting me off on the freeways. You know, I'm going to be in restaurants that serve me food that you know, maybe is spoiled or not so good. So you know, you can't live in a bubble. But at the same time you have to be aware of these things. And then you know, if you are more intolerant to stressors or you're struggling at work or there are certain things that really trouble you but not your colleagues or your other family members. You know, genetics could have a role there. So. But the primarily, you know, as Dr. Donnie is saying, as well as it is primarily your day to day choices.

Yeah. And that's the thing is, and I learned this from you really. So thank you for all of your trainings is that the reason we look at the genes is so that we can become more aware of all these other things in our life.

Because I think what I find when I've. Because now I've been reviewing strategy and results.

I didn't mention that before but Dr. Ben lynch created what he calls a strategene genetic report years ago and just recently developed a genetic test that goes along with the new version of the report.

I've been using your strategy and genetic report for years. And it's really helped me to see what patients response is when they look at their genes. One of the main things I find is people feel this first of all sense of validation and understanding of themselves. And I think there's a lot of value there to just go, oh my gosh, this is my body I live in with my genetics and my susceptibilities. And to learn that those genetic susceptibilities can be turned on by all these various stress exposures. And that's where the purpose of the genetic test is to really help you focus in on your health strategy, to be able to optimize your health using all the other tools we can use.

Yeah, well said. And I love that comment. To focus in on your health strategy. And it is.

You can be told, don't touch the stove, it's hot. Don't stare at blue light, it'll keep you up at night. Or look at your phone or screens. You hear all this all the time, but you become calloused to that information. And I mean, imagine for the first time looking at a completely still lake and seeing a reflection. If you're an animal, or we are an animal, if you think about it or you look in a mirror for the first time and you're really fascinated by it. You know, we laugh at dogs who bark at themselves in glass, but you know, they're, they're trying to figure stuff out. And when you do genetic testing, you are actually seeing yourself for the first time inside of your body, whereas your whole life you've been staring only at your outside of your body. So it's a way to look inward and at the same time, you know, you're not going to really understand much about you from just looking at your skin. I mean, if I'm staring at a car from, you know, you know, 30ft away, I don't know what type of music is in your car. I don't know what type of, you know, stuff is in your car. I don't know if you're into backpacking or, you know, you eat junk food or, you know, you know, you're a clean freak or, you know, what have you. But as soon as I open your car door, I know a lot about you.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing. It's. There's that, that validation that happens and then a kind of a motivation to be like, wow, we don't have to just. Our destiny is not set in stone. You know, based on our family history, we can actually. Yes, you could look at your family history and get some sense of your genetic predispositions. But when we look at the genes, we can, we can understand it to that next degree. And then we can use biochemistry and nutrition and, you know, our understanding of the body to really support these genetic pathways and metabolic pathways, you know, and so I think that's, I mean, not everybody wants to go to that degree, but I think a lot of people do in terms of, with this interest of longevity and quality of life. Right. It's like, hey, if you want to be able to improve your quality of life for as long as you live, and here's one of the ways you can do that. And it's not just like a lot of practitioners will get a genetic test or a lot of genetic software just does, shows your genes and then says an immediate answer, like you have this gene so you're supposed to take this nutrient, or you have this gene, so you're supposed to avoid this food, for example. But the difference with your strategene test and report is that it's not doing that. It's saying. It's more like a thinking, strategizing version of it where we're saying, oh, here's this gene. So these are the things to consider in your environment and here's the nutrients to consider. But you need to look at other testing to know it's individualizing it instead of assuming that the geneall we have to do is look at the gene and have the answer.

Yeah.

How often does it backfire, Donnie, for you, when you just look at someone's genes and you don't take in the factory epigenetics, I mean, that's, that's what creating strategene for me, that's what was one of the reasons behind it, is because I was looking at MTHFR basically solely was one gene out of 18,000. And I saw that they had the variant and then I just recommended, you know, that they take methylfolate. And sometimes it worked, sometimes it backfired, and sometimes it did nothing. And, and, you know, what was your experience using genetic reports? I don't know if you used anyone else's or others in the past that just looked at, you know, looking at genes and giving recommendations. And how did that work?

Well, and a lot of what happens is patients will call me after they did that. So they might. Oh, they go, they found out they just were tested mthfr, because it's easy to test MTHFR in regular blood work. Right. So, and sometimes mthfr, it Is kind of, I say it tends to be kind of the tip of the iceberg. It's kind of the entry gene. A lot of people find out about that one first because we can easily do a blood test and go, oh, I have an MTHFR gene mutation or variation. And then maybe their practitioner says, oh, you need methylfolate. Which thankfully now they're more likely to at least know that methylfolate is the correct form of folate to give for that person versus, versus folic acid, which is what the previous suggestion used to be. But then that dose might not be right. They might be coming into me saying, oh, I heard I had MTHFR and I took 5 or 15 milligrams of folate and then I was getting headaches and I'm feeling anxious and I felt awful. Now what do I do? And it's, you know, then I'm guiding them through. Okay, we need to step back and realize that it's not one size fits all. It's not that once you have an MTHFR gene variation that you, that everybody needs a certain amount of methylfolate. It's, it's a very individualized and, and not only that, but MTHFR is sort of the beginning of all these pathways. And so if you start putting in a nutrient at the top end, it's going to affect everything else downstream from there. And so really, and again, I learned this, really from you, Ben, is that we have to work backwards. We have to look at the downstream pathways, make sure everything's open and flowing before we start, and then decide if the person even needs more methylfolate. A lot of times my patients with MTHFR gene variations, it ends up they may not even actually need any extra methylfolate. They just needed to clear out their dirty genes, basically. They needed to clear out the stress and clear out the downstream pathways. Their methylation starts working better again. So it's, I mean that's what I've seen and that's what really motivates me to be able to help people because I mean, it's been able to help people who say, had frequent miscarriages and didn't have anyone to help them understand how to manage MTHFR during pregnancy or people who've had long histories of anxiety, depression or migraines and weren't getting answers or were feeling worse when they tried to take methylfolate. I mean, that's life changing stuff where understanding not just your gene but how to optimize the pathway.

Really makes a difference for people.

Yeah, for sure. And I love the fact too that you, you shared that, you know, the bottom up approach. I mean, it's, it's, you know, kind of unclogging the drain, if you will, is the common example. You know, and it's, it's, it's really important to know that by, anytime you take a nutrient or you do something, it's going to put pressure on a lot of other things. So as an owner of a business, If I make one recommendation to one person on our team, that could affect 15 other people and thousands of customers and it could have been a one minute phone call. So there's a lot of things that you need to understand. That little bit of pressure, forward pressure can put a lot of burden on, on the back end of your genes and also lifestyle. Amazing. I mean, if you just do one little thing. So for example, I had a buddy of mine who was drinking alcohol and his MTHFR gene was born where it wasn't too bad. I mean, it was like a 20% slowdown in MTHFR, but he was drinking quite regularly. And I was like, you know, what with your MTHFR drinking, it's not that bad. But you know, the drinking's put more pressure on it. You know, if you take methylfolate, you'll probably feel better. So he did that, he felt better. And the next time I saw him again, he was like, oh, thanks for recommendation. Now I can drink more. I was like, no, no, it's not what I was talking about. So then he was drinking more and I said, well, you know, just keep in mind that it's still a mitochondrial toxin. You're still poisoning yourself here. I mean, it's helping you, but you're still poisoning yourself. So really you should quit alcohol. And then that, that. And then I said, if, if you quit your alcohol, you're probably not going to need that methylfolate anymore because you've cleaned up that mess. And now MTHFR gene doesn't work as hard. He's like, yeah, okay. So then I, I get a text from him or a call from him like three months later and he's like, you know what? Good news, I quit drinking. And I say, all right, and what's the bad news? He goes, I'm having auditory hallucinations. I was like, oh, wow, all right. And he goes, I was driving down the road and the radio was off, but I heard everything coming out of the radio. I was like, well, have you stopped your methylfolate yet? He goes, no. I was like, well, stop Your methylfolate.

You're overdoing it.

Well, I mean, that's exactly.

It is.

I think a lot of times people say, okay, I have mthfr, so how much folate should I take? And it's to first just understand that it's so individualized and you really want to know your body. And like you're saying it might change over time if your, your stress exposure, say, in the form of alcohol changes, your dose of methylfolate will change, you know, and that's. In some ways, it's so amazing to know how responsive our bodies are, right? To be reminded of that, that our bodies are that responsive to light and darkness and, and sounds and whether we get enough sleep and what we're eating. And, you know, our bodies are so responsive that if we shift what we're exposing ourselves to, it's going to shift how our genes express and how that influences these metabolic pathways. It's really, in some ways, the powerfulness of it is overwhelming. And that's why I think it's also important to have someone to guide you and to take it step by step. You know, it's not a quick fix or something, and it can get really confusing if you're trying to do it on your own.

And that's why I like strategy in the way it is, too. I don't like it when you get something that is a cookie cutter approach. I mean, a lot of labs do it too. I mean, you run organic acids or hormones tests and you see imbalances found by the lab, and then they tell you right on the front to give certain vitamins or, you know, remove certain things, and they give you this summary sheet, and it's so annoying. I always just throw it in the recycle bin when I get those things. And it's because our genes do work. And you may have put more work on your genes in a certain situation. I mean, even driving to the lab to get your blood drawn for your thyroid, you could have had a really crappy morning, gotten a fight with your partner or got cut off in the car, or something happened. It could have really put your thyroid hormones out of whack. And then your blood draw or the lab tech could have screwed something up, you know, who knows? And then your TSH and your thyroid markers were just all a mess. And so you were prescribed at that one instance, something that you're taking now for months, and now you're an anxious wreck. And for me, I need about 400 to 800 micrograms of methylfolate. You know, almost every day. Not every day, but almost every day. And, you know, because I eat a fair amount of, you know, leafy green vegetables as well, and protein. But there was one time I was at a conference in Texas, and I went to a Brazilian steakhouse and went in Texas and went in a Brazilian steakhouse. Meat.

Yes. You gotta try it.

Yeah. And I was there, not Donnie. I was in that restaurant for four hours, and they keep coming by with all these different cuts of amazing meat. I was like, yeah, I'll take that and take that and take that. I had the meat sweats. I felt awful. I had so much protein that my homocysteine levels must have been like 100, I don't know what. And so I ended up taking, I think, like, 10 milligrams of methylfolate in order to get rid of that feeling. And I did it over a period of, like, four hours. I took methylfolate. It felt a little bit better. I had to take another one within, like, 15 minutes because I noticed improvement. And I took another one and took another one because I might. I changed the load of my genes based upon what I ate. So if you have a tool like strategene, or you understand how your genes work, you know that if you put in a lot of burden from protein, that your homocysteine goes up and that if your MTHFR is sluggish, you don't have folate, then your homocysteine is going to get stuck and you can get it unstuck. So it's things like. That is really empowering. Like you were sharing earlier.

Oh, it makes a big difference when you can just know that now that's how you knew what was going on. Like, otherwise, a person might experience those symptoms, but they don't know why, they feel worse and they don't know what to do about it. But because, you know these genes, you know, you are. Where your metabolism might get stuck and you know how to solve it. So it becomes such a tool that way.

Yeah. And it's. It's. You know, I could have had a really negative experience from the Brazilian steakhouse. I could have said, oh, it made me sick. Their food made me sick, and kind of left a bad review on Yelp or what have you. Or I could have, you know, something else could have happened, or I had a horrible day for two days. It could have been fighting with my partners or who knows? But in the end, you know, I realized, okay, what. What's going on right here? Why am I having these Feelings. And I broke it down in biochemistry and you can get to that point as well. It's, it's actually not hard. You get scared when you hear the term, you know, terms that you don't understand. You just back, you know, recoil. You have doctors that say crazy words, you have lawyers that say crazy words. You have stockbrokers that say these words.

Right?

Like, yeah, it's all vocabulary you don't understand. And so you immediately turn yourself off. Just lean into it a little bit. And if you can lean into learning about these stressful situation, these new situations that are happening to you in a way that gives you the power to improve yourself, that's pretty special.

In fact, since we're talking about it, I'd be happy to share my strategy and report so we can really show people what that looks like. Let me see if I can show this up here.

See if you can see it too.

Yep.

Okay. So now this is essentially the beginning of the report. And.

This is showing, referencing the key genes that you talk about in your book Dirty Genes. And the reason you pick these genes is because they're sort of these key core genes that help us, that we also have the most research about, but they also have the ability to have a significant effect on our health and how we feel. And they're interrelated, as we can see from this diagram. And this kind of shows, as we were talking about before.

If we just affect the folate here at the top, it's going to have this big ripple effect down. And so we need to keep that in mind. And then.

For those of you who may not be as familiar again as Ben saying, it can be like a bit of learning a new language, but just lean into it. And it's also a bit of learning the color coding, which I love in this report because you're showing us also the things in our environment that affects our genes. So we're seeing our genes, but we're also seeing what affects our genes. And the things in purple font, for example, that slow down the pathway or the things in orange that can speed up a pathway, you immediately can get a sense of what could speed up or slow down these pathways. You can see from the circles and the arrows how these different pathways are interrelated. Tell us more, Ben, about how you came up with this and what you would like people to see from this beginning diagram.

Yeah, Donnie. So basically what happened was, you know, the first gene, as you said, the beginner gene was mthfr. I just happened to read about it in a paper One day, and I was like, what is mthfr? What does that even mean? So I plugged it back into the research database and it gave me a whole bunch of information.

And then I realized that MTHFR was one gene out of 18,000, and it was connected to another gene called MTR that supported something called methylation. I was like, well, what's methylation? I was like, well, it's associated with homocysteine. It's like, oh, homocysteine. I know. So when you find something that you know, it actually, you feel more encouraged to lean into it, right? So if MTHFR makes your body's primary form of folate, so it's a gene that makes your body's number one form of folate, but you can get that folate from your leafy green vegetables or things like liver. And then the MTHGFR makes an enzyme called the MTHGFR enzyme. And then it uses vitamin B2 as riboflavin. You know, riboflavin. So find words that you understand. And so what got me to making these pathways was, as I'd be reading one paper, Donnie, talking about mtfr, and then it would talk about how.

Homocysteine was, you know, was improved by vitamin B2 because vitamin B2 was a cofactor for MTHFR. I was like, oh. So I took a piece of scrap paper, literally a piece of paper on my desk, and I wrote mthfr. I put a circle around it, and I put B2 right next to it. And then I read another research paper that said mthfr. There's something called pseudo mthfr. So you can have no genetic variant at all in mthfr, meaning it was born perfectly working, but folic acid would slow it down significantly. So then I put, like, this arrow and I like, like, slow sign, and I put folic acid next to the MTHFR gene. I kept doing this, and hundreds of research papers later, I had this kind of sketch on my desk of how all these genes are working and what slows them down, what speeds them up and what nutrients they use in order to function. And then I. And then I showed that rudimentary sketch at a conference, and the doctors just loved it. And. Because when you can't remember all these things, and, Donnie, how many times you've been to a conference, or even you listening or watching, where people are sharing things with you, but you're a visual learner.

I'm a visual learner. It definitely makes a difference.

And you have to see it. And then it Gives you the ability to see patterns or things that you've never recognized before and you don't have to memorize it anymore. So when a new patient walks in or a new family member or friend walks in and you have this pathway in front of you and they're struggling with high homocysteine and say, God, even you, who knows nothing about medicine at all, you could look at a pathway and you could understand why someone's homocysteine could be high. You could, and you should. You should be knowledgeable about that. And so that's what these offer to do, but that's also why it was made. It's just to organize all the thousands of research papers that I and my team have been reading over the years and to do it in a graphical, quick way that gives us an ability to make strategic decisions.

Well, it's made a huge difference for me and my patients. And what I like to call the methylation cycle is the B vitamin cycle, because it's like where all the B vitamins come together, together to make sam, which we see here. Over on the. On the right side of this is Sam that I always say, SAM does all the good stuff. It's, you know, gonna go out and make. And break down neurotransmitters and it's gonna protect our DNA and help us make healthy cells. And it's gonna make. Help us, as you can see here, help make choline. You know, so it's. We need all these B vitamins to make sam, and then it kind of goes from there. And if you. When you're looking at this diagram, what I often recommend people to think of is actually think of this almost as like a spinning wheel. I mean, this process is active. This is not a static thing just sitting here. Like, it looks like right now, it's constantly moving, right? It's constantly circling in our cells, in our body, constantly. And so to just. That helps to see that this homocysteine here in the middle is going to be constantly coming together with the methylfolate at MTR to make, you know, to make these pathways happen. So it's just imagine it as it's actively circling. And then what you did with this new report that I think is so awesome is we can take it. We can kind of dive deeper or almost kind of zoom in by, say if I click on MTHFR here, it's going to take us to all the information about mthfr. Talk us through this part, because this before, I couldn't do that on the report. But now I can. It's like mind blowing.

Yeah. So the first report was just a pathway and we had some information in there, and people would just have to flip a bunch of pages and there'd be some information about the gene. There should be a little bit of information about how the gene might have a specific variant and what that did and what's made that gene work faster and slower. And then that was the end of it. And so what we wanted to do was create a very, you know, take it to the next step. And the next step was, okay, we want to reduce the turning of pages because this report is over 120 pages long now, because we've expanded the information about the specific gene to give you more insight in an everyday terminology about what that particular gene does. Because genes have jobs to do. So you need to learn what the genes jobs are. And so if you learn what the genes jobs are and then you go and do something that requires that gene to step up and do some work, then you need to know how to support it. And if you have another gene that has a different job and you're not leaning in on that particular gene, you're not giving it any work, then you don't need to worry about it right now. So you can just dismiss it at the time. It might come back later in your life to be important, but at the moment it's not. So you need to know what this job is and you need to know how it can perform its job. And then what makes this job easier and will make his job harder. And so for every gene in the strategy report, we give you that insight. What's his job, what allows us to perform, what makes this job harder to perform and what makes the job easier to perform? And then which genetic variants do you personally have which make your own MTHFR employee? Basically, because you're the boss, Your MTHFR genes, it's your employee, and so you need to give it the tools that it needs in order to perform its job as best it can. But you may have hired an employee that isn't so good. Maybe they're a bit slower than you want them to be, but there's some benefits with that. They're not going to make some stupid mistakes, they're going to be more careful. And you may have hired an employee who's faster and they get a bunch of stuff done. But guy might not be the best work. So you have to identify, you know, it's your business, your body is your business, and you have 18,000 employees in your body and you need to know their profile on each one of how to support them so you can have the best, well run company.

I love that. I love that. And you run companies, so you know what, that's, I'm sure you probably apply that in your business too.

We do. We actually have know really good personality tests that we do for everyone on the team and it allows us to understand where you know and how that person communicates and how they function. You know, I'm the change agent. I love change, I love innovation. And that makes sense, right? That's what I do. But my weakness with that is, is I love change and I love innovation, which means that I can put a huge burden on my team because I'm constantly changing and evolving. So we try to do one thing, we build it up and then I pull the carpet out from underneath of them and do undo all the work that they spent a month doing because I changed my mind and that's just not useful. So we all know, everyone on the team knows my innovation, which is great, which is fueling the company. But at the same time I can derail the company. And so I tell everyone, make sure that you're keeping me in line and I'm not derailing you.

Well, and it made me think then that if we take it back to the human body, I mean, having a daily routine makes a huge difference being consistent with like your sleep and your wake time and your eating patterns and your, you know, how you take care of yourself, your exercise and so on. Those daily routines really do make a difference. And it also means that if you, you start to think, oh, I'm going to make this diet change, I'm going to follow this diet and maybe it's too extreme, right? If you go to too long of an intermittent fast, let's say, or too extreme in any kind of detoxification, then it's going to throw off the whole system. So it's a matter of how to get our daily routine set. Not that we don't ever want to make a change, of course, sometimes change is needed, but it's a matter of how do we make those changes while still understanding what effect that could have on the whole system.

Right, which is exactly what Strategene will give you some insights and it will take you months of learning. I mean, this is not something that you can just look at and understand and how to use it right away. Even if you have scientific knowledge, it's not going to be something that you can look at and immediately understand. It all, you're going to find some good takeaway points and walk away and be able to apply those things. But you know, as you're saying, Donnie, it's the usual common everyday things that make the biggest impact. And I remember when I was giving a presentation up in Canada.

You know what, it was one of my first talks about how genes work and how they communicate with other things and environment and our impacts and all that. And, and at the end of it, this wise older health professional, this doc, came up to me and he goes, I just want to say thank you. I said, you're welcome. He goes, no, I mean thank you. I said, why specifically? And he goes, you have shown how the common everyday choices that we tell our patients every day to go to sleep or to wake up or eat this and don't eat that, or don't do this too much or don't do too much of that or add more of this, you've quantified it scientifically, the reasons behind these common everyday things. Don't expose yourself to blue light. You've shown us why right at the genetic level. Eat your leafy greens and take your B vitamins, you've shown us on the pathways and now we can take that tool and show it to our patients who then will clearly visually see that, oh man, I really should start eating my leafy green vegetables. I really should be avoiding the blue light because my gene right there, it's sluggish and I'm going to make it even worse.

Well, and this was, you know, I had a history of migraines for over 20 years and when I was part of me coming to understand MTHFR was me trying to solve those migraines and I had already done a lot of fine tuning as an natural biologic doctor, you know, I was already gluten free, dairy free, you know, working on my adrenal glands and you know, adrenal recovery and you know, so I was doing a lot already, but it was coming to this information that helped me find those last pieces of information I needed to solve the migraines, which I don't get anymore. So it's like if you've been working on a health issue and you feel like I've tried so many things but it's still, the health issue is still there. This can point to things that maybe you overlooked before or you weren't paying as much attention to and then you, you never know when that last couple things that make the difference. I'm showing here my MTHFR because I Have the compound heterozygous. And I'm trying to think what my homocysteine was way back when. But I want to make the point that.

I think you'll agree that as soon as you find out you have an MTHFR gene variation, whether one or two, that the next step is to say, what's your homocysteine level? Because homocysteine, as you were mentioning before in the Super 7, that's where it's telling us how well these cycles, these pathways are working. It can be tested in a regular lab and a regular blood test. It's even covered by insurance. Most cases you can get this information and it's telling you, how is the gene.

How, how dirty is it, how, how well are these pathways running versus just knowing the gene now you know what effect that gene's having on your health.

Yeah, for sure. And homocysteine, like you said, it's covered. It's easy. Every lab does it. It's, you know, it's understood by almost all health professionals. And so it's a. It's a really good one to start out with, and it's a great baseline. The problem is with homocysteine is the normal. The normal is too high. Just because the typical population has a homocysteine of about 11 or 10 or 12 does not mean that's ideal. When you see your lab come back of homocysteine of 10 and it's below normal or within the normal range, rather than don't breathe the fresh air, go see a health professional like Dr. Donney and say, well, is my homocysteine good? The lab says it is, but it's 10 good. And what do you say about 10?

Well, I learned from you that we really wanted more, like around 7. I usually think maybe, I don't know. Mine's at 5.4, which theoretically would be a little low. But I'm curious what you think.

It's a touch low. I was reading research about this, trying to really dial it in, and it looks like five and six are, you know, five, six, seven are good. Now, if you were, if you were pregnant or you're an athlete, you know, or in your basically really using your body hard, then I would say, let's get your homocysteine up a little bit more, you know, so you don't run out of glutathione. So your sammy cycle keeps purring along. Because we have this mindset about homocysteine. Almost every health professional says it's bad, and every Lab says it's bad because there's not even a low level. No lab tells you that your homocysteine is too low. It's even like cholesterol. I don't think there's a level for cholesterol that says it's too low. And both cholesterol and homocysteine are needed by the human body badly. And if they're low, you're having issues. So I think five and a half is decent, you know, but I would be asking you questions like, you know, are. Are you consuming basically, you know, half of your body weight and protein and a little bit less than that, you know, 80% of your body weight and protein?

Um, no, I do have. I have to calculate the actual grams of protein that I'm having, but I would say I'm usually trying to aim.

A little bit higher on my protein.

Yeah. So it's. It's 0.8 grams of protein per 2.2 pounds of body weight. Um, so. Or 0.8 grams per one kilo of body weight. And so, you know, it's. You can think of it as 80% of your body body weight if you're, you know, doing kilograms. So. And then you, you know, eating protein is one thing, but then absorbing it is another. So, you know, if you're, if you're, if you, if you're eating your food like a snake, not chewing it very well, and then you're drinking a bunch of fluid and you're taking antacids, you know, you probably don't have very much stomach acid, you're not going to be absorbing much protein.

And you're saying that that low protein, how is that going to influence this homocysteine? Just so everybody can see that connection.

Yeah. Go back to your.

Original pathway there.

Okay.

And if you click your.

Whoops.

Oh, yeah.

Yep, that works. Um, so homocysteine, you can see that right there on your, Your pathway. So homocysteine. So the word right above homocysteine is. Is methionine. Methionine is commonly found where.

And meat.

And meat, yeah. Yeah. It's a protein source. So if you're not eating enough methionine, then how are you going to be able to make homocysteine? Right. Because methyonine flows into it.

And by the way, Ben, this. I don't know if you've seen this in the research or in your work, but when I'm working with women who are. We're working on fertility and preventing miscarriages, I often see A low homocysteine.

Yes.

Like less than three. Like, sometimes two or three. And I think it's. It got used up. Or maybe they weren't eating enough animal protein and their homocysteine is just really low. And one of the biggest struggles I find in those cases is how do we keep this homocysteine up? And so we do use methionine for that purpose and making sure they're getting enough protein. Because we don't often hear about that scenario when homocysteine is too low.

No, we don't. And if you imagine the demand on a pregnant woman, I mean, before she was just supporting your own body, which is hard enough, and now she's developing an entirely new organ, the placenta, which is huge. And then she's growing a whole new human. So it's three times the work we're.

Using all that Sam up. Right. It's just burning through.

Yeah. I mean, every single one of those cells of the placenta and every single one of the cells from the baby, you know, protein is involved. Phosphatidylcholine is involved. B vitamins are involved. Homocysteine and, you know, glutathione are involved. So, you know, the mother is becoming very, very depleted. So if you think back and you've been pregnant before and you look back, it's like, God, you know, I was totally drained during pregnancy or I was drained for years after pregnancy, or that's when. After pregnancy is when I got my autoimmune condition. And I. It has been there ever since. You know, you just completely depleted yourself. You know, if you're an athlete and you were. You were competing at a high level in college or, you know, post college, and you're, you know, or a professional athlete, and you're just drained, and you've been drained forever after, and you just can't get better. You depleted your resources, so you've got to make sure that you're not draining yourself of your homocysteine or other things, and you keep supplying. And, you know, if you're an athlete. Yeah. Eat more protein. If you're not, don't.

And it's. It. You know, just to be clear on my case, I don't take much extra methylfolate because that's the other thing is some people might be taking a high amount of methylfolate and deplete their homocysteine.

Right.

And because I know my homocysteine runs a little low, I barely take any methylfolate. I have to more work on the other end of things.

Yeah. And so, you know, you also want to, you know, if, if you're in the bath and the bath was really nice and hot when you first got in there and then it starts to cool down, you lift up the drain, you let some of the warm water out and you start filling it up with hot water again. Right. So you want to, you want to be able to regulate that drain. You want the drain just to keep going. You want to be able to open it and then stop it. And so if your homocysteine is going through the drain of going glutathione, you need to start saying, okay, well how am I going to fix that glutathione? Am I going to try to increase my homocysteine or am I going to try to increase my glutathione some way? So am I going to supplement with glutathione or am I going to, you know, reduce my toxic exposures or am I going to reduce my exercise intensity? I'm going to eat more protein. So you can start looking at your pathway, your strategy and report and start making these educated choices and learning. And you know, I've been doing this for 10 plus years and so I'm able to rattle these things off. But for you, it could be just looking at the pathways and following the arrows and say, okay, homocysteine goes to glutathione. I need to get my glutathione levels up. So how do I do that?

I can show you too. And by the way, as I'm pulling that up, I was going to say that in the blood work, like a lot of practitioners still do, they'll measure folic acid and B12 in the blood work and those are not going to be helpful at all. From my experience, it's like we really need a homocysteine because most often folic acids first of all is just going to show high on the test result. And it doesn't tell you about how these pathways are working.

No, it doesn't. And it's a real shame. It's a real shame. I think doctors Data is the only lab out there that looks at the different types of folate. And I think they still have it. It's called the folate derivative panel.

Yeah. So then you could, if you really want to know the different folate derivatives, you could do that test. But to get that specific, and I have had cases where that made a difference, where we really needed to get to that degree of detail and help understand what was happening with their pathways. But for most people, we can, we can see a lot of it with the homocysteine. And again, we were talking about the scenario where homocysteine is too low.

But there's also a very common scenario where the homocysteine is too high. And I also was just going to mention with pregnant women, as we're saying, it's very common for their folate to be too low. But what happens is with pregnancy we want to, in preventing miscarriages, we want to make sure they have enough folate so it becomes this careful balance of like you're saying with the, with the bath water. I like that. Like, we want to have enough folate for, for all the purposes in pregnancy, but we don't want to have it, you know, we don't want to be, you know, draining it too much either. And getting that balance right, especially in an important time like early pregnancy is so important and it's not something that's well addressed, I find. I really, because a lot of women.

Have come to me, I've had a chance to really develop a systematic protocol to help them through that. But it's just for anyone listening, it's not common for like your OB GYN to be following this at all. I mean, I feel like they should be do a homocysteine before you get pregnant as soon as you find out you're pregnant, you know, like, so we can really monitor this in that really important time.

Yeah. And they've, they've looked at homocysteine levels in various conditions like preeclampsia and preeclampsia. If your homocysteine is high, your risk for preeclampsia is high.

Wow.

So it's. In miscarriage, it's high. So they, they can see it.

And so you, you want to be able to dial that in. And there's definitely a number of dirty genes that you can be born with where there's genetic variants that increase your risk for pregnancy complications and there's genes, you know, and there's ways you can really support that. So if you know what those genes are going into pregnancy and you know that MTHFR is one of them, then you can make some guided decisions, you know, with a health professional to really dial in and tune you so your pregnancy A will be a lot safer and more comfortable for you and then at the same time the outcome will be better. So it's, you know, in long term you're going to have a better result as well. Because I cannot Tell you how many times, Donnie, I've worked with women who were struggling and then we've done some genetic tests and I found, you know, some of the Super 7 dirty and we just cleaned them up and where they had a good pregnancy. I'm sure you've done the same thing.

Oh, my gosh. So it's really, I mean, women sometimes have gone through numerous miscarriages.

And before they figure this out and find someone to help them and when, you know, it's just so heartwarming for me to think about the women and the pregnancies that I've helped them create by doing this, to be able to have that prevent and miscarriage and have a healthy pregnancy. And at the same time, it really comes down to having a healthier mom to begin with, the healthier you are. And this is where genetics and epigenetics can play such a role in creating healthier babies. Right. Like you're actually not only influencing your health right now, getting yourself healthier, but you're also creating a healthier baby for their lifetime.

Yeah. And, you know, when we, if we tie this back into that polygenic risk score that we discussed at the beginning, where 5% was associated with ADHD. Okay. Let's put that in the context of a medical intervention that reduces your risk by 5% of something that's pretty significant.

ADHD. The risk is.

It could be a hassle to have adhd, but it could also be a benefit. But at the same time, a miscarriage, 5% reduction in miscarriage, that's significant. Now, I don't want to be able to, you know, I'm just throwing out a random percentage here. So if 5% of.

Looking at many genes are associated with ADHD, I don't know what it is for miscarriage. In fact, the tool I used to use for that is now gone. But I'm sure there's polygenic risk scores looking at miscarriage. But if, for the same time, go back to when you were a student in school and you had an 85% in class and you had a B, and you're really working hard to get a full ride scholarship, and that's. And it determined if you're going to get a, you know, your grades or not, if you're going to get that full ride and then you got it to an A, you moved that 85 to a 90 and then you got your full ride scholarship. So it's a big difference. So, you know, don't, don't think that, you know, 5% is, can not Be a big deal. It can be a big, big deal. And it can be.

Even more than 5%. It could be less than 5%, too.

But yeah, it's a good point that if you're, I mean, I think especially if you, you know, it's something like a pregnancy that's, you know, like, that's, you know, life changing, you know, and so then it can even make it seem like, you know, a bigger, bigger deal. But at the same time, say it has to do with, like, me with migraines. I mean, they were really taking away from my quality of life. So to be able to solve that was huge. And actually, one of the things that I added at that time was glutathione. We were talking about that a minute ago here, and I was going to show you. This is for those of you who may not be familiar. This is what's called an organic acid report where we can essentially look at how the body's using nutrients. So we get kind of an active look at how these pathways are working and what's flowing through is how I kind of think of it. And, and this one also takes some practice to learn how to interpret these little. I always say these black stars mean the level here looks like the opposite. So this 19 on my glutathione metabolite is actually better than average. And I do take glutathione. So I started taking glutathione and vitamin C because I had figured out around that time that I had been sleeping on a memory foam mattress.

And toxifying myself.

So that was, I mean, it was good to learn, but it was not a good thing. So I've definitely not been doing that. And it really made me realize, like, I was already eating organic food, but I didn't have organic furniture. And me taking that next step really made a difference on my metabolism, obviously, because then I wasn't hitting. To me, the migraine is like my body's way of saying overwhelm, you know, like, okay, the metabolic pathways just hit their max. I get a migraine, you know, so it's like, how do we keep these pathways running smoothly so I don't hit that, that overwhelm.

And there's many different types of causes of migraines, too. There's hormonal, there's toxicant, there's neurotransmitter that's, you know, too high or too low nutrient deficiencies. I mean, it's, it's, it's a, it's a number of different things. It could be Medication interactions. It could be nutrient, herb interactions.

They're complex, aren't they?

Yeah. That's why I joke, like, these migraines really taught me a lot because I had to address all those different things along the way. And. And so I'm grateful for that, but I'm also grateful that they're not happening.

And you listened. So your body was telling you, donnie.

I'm hurting here. I'm on fire. And you didn't just go and take a painkiller and ignore it and say, shut up. You actually thought about, okay, what do I need to do in order to deal with this? And you troubled your troubleshot through it, and you created a strategy to, you know, that you worked on. And it probably took a while, right? I mean, how long did it take?

It took, you know, really decades. I mean, I, and I didn't learn all this in naturopathic medical school. I was getting migraines all through school and all through, you know, starting in practice and having my daughter and. But it, you know, it took a long time and I would just learn little by little by little, but, you know, it. So, yeah, for people to know that, it just takes time to learn about your body. But it's like the point you're saying, you know, we can, we can choose to see our symptoms as signals from our body that something needs attention. And the more that I chose to see it that way, then it allowed me to dig deeper and go, okay, what is my body trying to tell me? I could go through that process of elimination. But let's touch a bit about neurotransmitters.

This is starting from looking at the metabolic pathways of my neurotransmitters. We see that this number 38, the 5 HIAA, is high. I was mentioning to you. I do take 5 HTP because I know that if I don't take 5 HTP, I tend to get depleted on my serotonin levels. Just to mention that if you're taking a certain nutrient, you're also going to see on these pathways that it's going through. We can see my body using that 5 HTP and breaking down the serotonin. We can look at these. These are really looking at the end.

Metabolites of these pathways. Our body has to make the neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine and epinephrine and serotonin. Our body makes them from amino acids and nutrients, and then the body breaks them down. When we look at these pathways, we're seeing the end of the pathway. I'll switch and I'll show the genes we can see. Here's the genes that are basically influencing how those neurotransmitters are being metabolized. And I'd love for you to share a little bit more about that in terms of how seeing the genes can help us with that.

Yeah.

And I want to ask too.

By taking five htp, was that one of the interventions that you did to support the reduction in your migraine?

Yeah, it was, yeah.

Because looking at your serotonin pathway, I don't want to jump ahead too much, but that's fine.

I can.

You have a reduced ability to make serotonin and you have a reduced ability to use serotonin. So. And low serotonin is associated with migraine headaches, so is having MTHFR variants. So those are two things on your genetic report that shows, okay, your brain might be on fire because of an MTFR variant because MTFR is associated with migraines with aura and then low serotonin associated with migraines and then glutathione deficiency is also associated with migraines. So you're doing two interventions right out of the gate, five HTP and glutathione to support that, plus all the other myriad of things that you also did, giving mattress and you know, gluten free, dairy free and all those other things. But yeah, walk us through your report here and show the metabolites of five HIA and all that.

Well, and this is, this is the thing is on, you know, you, there's so much detail on here that created for us, you know, to like, you're just mention everything from how you make a neurotransmitter to how it is transported to how it interacts with the receptors and how it gets broken down. And so we can get so much detail from here in terms of understanding what our bodies, what the tendency might be. I think it's also important to just, if someone's not as familiar to know that these. A lot of times we think of genetic variants as slowing down a pathway, but that's not always true. Some genetic variants will speed up a pathway and so that just adds another level of complexity to it. Also there's the level of complexity that happens when a gene affects more than one pathway.

Right.

Like comt, for example, being able to influence, or MAO I should say is influencing here, but also influencing on the other neurotransmitters. And I was thinking of COMT and how it influences both estrogen and adrenaline and so you get these, these pathways that are managing more than one substance, you know, so this is where for us, it's so interesting right when we can go, oh, it could be this, it could be this. And if we, if we use this nutrient, we could influence both of these pathways. But we want to take that all into account.

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So anyway, talk us through. Yeah, what do you see here with my.

How would we walk this through? Because we see serotonin in here in the middle and so we see the production of serotonin from tryptophan. Right. Tryptophan is an amino acid. So again we can, you know, a lot of times we think that with amino, with neurotransmitters that it's somehow only influenced by medications. But no, neurotransmitters are made in our bodies from nutrients. And then the tryptophan gets converted to 5 HTP, which is the, the substance that I'm taking in a supplement that gets converted to serotonin and then that goes down through these MAO pathways to get to the five HIAA that we saw on that other test result.

But yeah, tell me what you see here, Ben.

Yeah, so serotonin is one of those compounds that you hear is associated with depression and you hear on TV commercials that if you take this selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, this ssri, then your serotonin levels may increase and your depression may go away.

There's a lot of issues behind that statement I'll just leave alone. But you can actually see there's a gene if you find serotonin in the middle, that SLC6A4 is a serotonin reup transporter. So you hear on all these different medications that they act on this particular gene right here, they slow this particular gene down from working. And so what this particular gene does, it actually pulls active serotonin out of your brain. So by slowing it down, then it's going to keep the serotonin in your brain being active. And so, but what I see here on Donnie's genetics is I always start at the top, so. And then I work down. Well, I shouldn't say, always depends on the situation. But generally speaking, I like to start the top and work down because I want to see here how the production is and because that's kind of what we're used to. Right. If you, if you have a deficiency in something, you take a pill, you take a supplement or you take a medication. So her tryptophan, let's say that she's eating sufficient tryptophan and, you know, then follow the black lines. There's two different ways tryptophan can go. It can go to the left or the right. And then you see 95 and 5. You're like, what's that means? Well, 95% of your tryptophan goes to the left to something was called the kynurenine pathway to actually make niacin. So your body will use tryptophan to make vitamin B3. So if you're low in vitamin B3, you're going to be using tryptophan to do that. And it's also used by your immune system. So you can see that in people who, you know, 95% of your tryptophan is being depleted or being used by the IDO1 and 2 genes. And then you look at the orange, which makes it even faster. Inflammation, immune activation, infection and chronic stress. That's 90% of the American public. Right.

All this tryptophan is just rushing this way.

Yeah. So, you know, it's no wonder that we're depressed and it's, you know, so what do you do? Do you take serotonin or do you take tryptophan? Or do you take a serotonin med? It's like, well, I would be reducing the things that speed up the depletion of tryptophan. I would be reducing my chronic stress or at least attempting to. I'd be trying to find my source of infections, be looking for inflammation and why is my immune system chronically activated? So I'd be looking at all that first, so I wouldn't be turning to supplements. I Wouldn't be turning to drugs. Now, if your depression is really severe and you just can't hack it, then, yeah, taking a supplement like 5 HTP may support serotonin levels. But what I see here, Donnie's, is she has a slower ability to convert tryptophan to the kyrenium pathway, which could be a good thing because it keeps some tryptophan available to the. Right. But if you.

Based on this little purple guy here. Right, yeah. Ido too.

Yeah, yeah. So the purple little bars and these bubbles designates that it's slightly slower than what's found typically. Now, this doesn't mean abnormal or normal or bad. It means what's typical.

The old strategy report had the colors of red and green, which means stop and go or bad and good. We got rid of those colors on purpose because your genetic variants here, we just want to show you that if they're slower or faster, because there's good and bad in both. Having a slower IDO2 gene, conserve some tryptophan for serotonin synthesis. But. And thank goodness that's a bit slower here because her TPH2 gene, which says it's found in the brain, is also slow. So Donnie's ability to convert tryptophan into serotonin is slower, especially if you look at the purple stuff. So if you look at the purple stuff on the TPH2 gene, if she has low vitamin D or darkness or you know that those are going to be problems for her ability to make 5 HTP.

Like being in the winter.

Yeah.

I'm thinking living. Living in New York in the winter is probably working against me there.

Yeah. Or if you're. If you live in the northern latitudes and you go on vacation and, you know, you go somewhere in the, in the tropics where the sun is up higher and you get your vitamin D and the vacation is great. My moods are amazing. Yeah, the environment helps, but you're also getting vitamin D lifting your mood. So, you know, that's. It's important, but so keep going. And some. Some people will take five htp, like, Doc, I feel nothing. I. My moods are the same. I don't feel anything. And then you. It's like, you kind of figure it out and it's like, oh, I'm not taking multivitamin. I don't need any grains anymore. I cut grains out of my diet. So their B6 levels might be low. Maybe they eat a lot of protein depleting their B6. So then you supplement it with vitamin B6 and now the 5 HTP can work. So why is that, Donni?

Because it's, yeah. That B6 is A, is a necessary nutrient for that pathway to work.

Right. So when, when you hear from, from other health professionals, maybe you, you take your strategy report and you go to your doctor and you're all excited, you know, to walk through this with them are like, oh, vitamins and minerals and five HTP and supplements are nonsense. They don't do anything. There's no research and there's no evidence. Well, you know, by showing them this report, first of all, there's, this report is backed with a hundred page bibliography, 100 pages of references. And so when we say that the cofactor or the nutrient needed for that DDC gene is vitamin B6, it's referenced. And so, you know, there's research on that. So vitamin B6 is associated with supporting serotonin levels.

And I love that because I, you know, I mentioned to you before that I, I've been helping people with balancing their neurotransmitters since neurotransmitter testing came out. I think that was probably in, I don't know, 2004 or so. And so I was already using amino acids to help people with balancing their, say, their serotonin levels. And then when we start to be able to see this, then it makes it so much more detailed for me to work with so that I can really fine tune a person, person's plan. But so many people, yeah, like you're saying, they'll say, oh, I was just taking five htp, but I didn't, I didn't feel any better or I felt worse. And, and it's by understanding these pathways that we can really fine tune it and make sure they're, you know, really optimizing the levels. But I never give up on this. This is the thing I notice is that, and I think you share this with me, we're not giving up on the possibility of optimizing your neurotransmitters. We're instead of looking at it like, okay, if there's an issue, let's solve the issue. Let's figure out what do we need to do differently to help you get the benefit of it.

Yeah, for sure. And this allows you to develop, you know, the why you know and understand it. And that's really, really empowering because it's frustrating. You know, you read a book, you know, like Mood Cures or Dirty Jeans or something, and you learn that 5 HTP can be helpful. And then you try it and you know it doesn't work for you, but then your sister tries it and she just. Gosh, she's off the charts happy. You're like, what the hell? So, you know, you can figure that stuff out by working with a professional like Donnie or others, and, And. Or really sitting down with your strategy report, but it is harder. So let's say, okay, let's say you've got the 5 HTP and the vitamin B6, and your serotonin levels are good. But having a good amount of something doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work. If you have a good amount of lettuce in your fridge, that doesn't mean that dinner is served for your family. You've got to pull it out of the fridge, you got to wash it, you got to chop it, you got to put it in bowls. You got to get them out downstairs, and then it's got to go in their mouths and they're fed. You know, it's. It's a lot of work. So just because you got a lot of serotonin now you got to. It's got to be carried. You got to literally carry it. You got the groceries in the car. Now they got to be carried into the house, then they got to be put in the fridge, and then, you know, once in the fridge, they can be turned into a meal. So serotonin gets carried by this gene called SLC18E1, as you can see here. And it's got a speed bar there of orange. So Donni has an enhanced ability to carry serotonin. That's a good thing in her situation. And it's important to look at genes.

As a community. Your genes do not act alone. It's a team sport. You're not playing singles tennis here. You're playing football with, you know, 100 people on the sidelines. You actually have 18,000 people on the sidelines. So, you know, I like that. Yeah. If you look at this, if you scroll up again, you can see you got IDO1 2 TPH1 and 2 DDC18A1. All of these are working in concert with each other in order to get serotonin to the brain. Now it gets to the brain now with the transporter, but you look at her serotonin receptors, almost all of them are slower except for the HTR2A. And that's just a typical speed. So intermediate is a typical speed. And again, none of this is bad. None of this is great. It's just information. You know, if I walk into your car and I see that you've got, you know, hiking boots. And I walk into my wife's car and I see that she's got dog beds. It's different. So her serotonin receptors are a bit less receptive to serotonin. So thankfully, she's able to carry more serotonin to the brain. And thankfully, her IDO one is a bit slower so it doesn't get all sucked down to the chironeur pathway. But what else slows the serotonin receptors, Donnie, that's so common everywhere?

Hmm, let's see. So, well, stress for sure.

Yeah. But look right on the serotonin receptor in purple.

Ah, the purple one. Oh, pesticides.

Yes.

Yes. There we go. That's.

Yeah. So this is. You know, you could be doing all this SSRIs. You could be taking all the five HTP. Maybe you're even taking Mercuna PRU. That's dopamine. You know, you could be doing all these different things, but you still have mood problems. And maybe you don't deal with pesticides, but your neighbors do. Or maybe you don't filter your water and you're drinking it, you know, or maybe you go to work and you work where they just use pesticides. Or maybe you stayed in a. In a resort in the tropics where they just bombed your room to kill all the bugs, because the tropics are notorious for bugs. And if you go to a place where there's no bugs, hello, you got pesticides.

And that's the thing. I mean, I, from a young age figured out I'm super sensitive to pesticides and other chemicals. So I had to. I kind of learned again from these migraines. I had to be really careful to the chemical exposures to be able to be feeling good. No, it's such a good point.

Yeah. And I really like working with the orange and the purple stuff before I have anyone put anything in their mouths. And if, you know, if. And ideally, when you read the book Dirty jeans for about 200 pages, I keep repeating myself, please don't just take a supplement.

Just do the work. Do the work. Because you got to find your baseline first. If you take a supplement, you don't know what that baseline is. And you can be like my friend who was drinking and kept taking the supplement and then stopped drinking, was taking the supplement and then he got auditory who's hallucinations.

No. Yeah, I love that. Like bringing it back to what I call care, you know? C for clean eating, A for adequate sleep, R for reducing stress activities and E for exercise, you know, like get your care going so that you kind of cleaned out this purple stuff.

Before you start trying to work on these pathways. It's going to make working on the pathway so much easier. Right? Because then you don't have all this purple stuff jamming things up.

Well, I mean, imagine if you have to write an essay, you know, for work or for school, and you've got honey on your fingers and you need to type, you know, a four page essay with honey on your fingertips. How's that going to work for you?

Very messy, you know, are you going.

To, oh, I'm going to drink more caffeine and I'm going to take some Ritalin or I'm going to just have bright lights shining in my face. I'm going to have my favorite music on. No, you go wash your fingers.

Yeah. So simple, right? Sometimes we think it's got to be harder and sometimes it comes back to these simple things that all of a sudden our body works better and we.

Are trained, we are marketed to incessantly to consume. You know, commercials teach you to consume. I have a supplement company, you know, I should be pitching. Take our 5 HTP supplement, take our anti inflammatory, do this, do that. No, no, no, I don't want you doing that. I want you doing, you know, following Donnie's care method and then finding your baseline and then tweaking with the supplement as you need to, because that's optimal. You're not going to be optimal for by living a life of not taking care of yourself and just swallowing supplements. It's just not going to work. You might be better, but you're far going to be far away from optimal.

It's so true. Thank you for sharing that. And you're passionate about it because I think this can really be eye opening in that way, you know, where you start to see, oh, okay. It's, you know, these things that maybe I've been procrastinating doing are, you know, right here in front of me as, you know, really important. I was going to share. Here's my, here's my actual serotonin level which is. This is on a recent report. Well, they actually show a prior one here too, which was from about 6 months ago. And again this is with taking about 100mg of 5 HTP.

And this categorizes it as high. But to me that's actually, I mean maybe it's a tad bit high, but it's not extremely high. Sometimes people worry about that too.

Yeah, let's Take this for a second. Okay. You know, how are you feeling?

Feel good?

Yeah. Okay. You have migraines?

No.

Hey, you know, so that, that is important. So. Because if you go to a health professional who's not as well versed in this as Donnie is, and it says, hi, they're going to tell you to reduce possibly your 5 HTP down to 50 or possibly stop it or maybe what have you and alter what's really working for you. But if you remember what Donnie's serotonin receptors are, they're not very receptive to serotonin. So by having more 5 HTP and more serotonin in our brain, those receptors are more likely to actually bind. Some of that. Because if I'm throwing you.

And your eyes are closed and I'm throwing you one ball to catch it, what are the odds of you going to catch that ball? Pretty low. But if I throw, you know, 10 balls at you all at once, you have, you know, increased odds, you know, so in your hand is a receptor, and the serotonin is the ball. And so by Donnie's serotonin levels being higher, her serotonin receptors, which are not receptive very well to serotonin, you know, it's. It's enhancing her brain. It's finally being somewhat normal for her. So these labs, when they come back and they say, oh, that's high. Well, it's high for in what situation? Which individual? That is not precision medicine. That's not individualized medicine.

It makes such a difference. And here with the MAOs, I mean, we saw that my 5HIAA was on the higher side. Right. So it's showing what's coming through.

Yeah. And it's. If you look too at the black lines and then you look at the words in the parentheses, every single word that's on these pathways is important. Every single word word has been, you know, thought about carefully. How do we put it? Do we put it and do we. Can we have. We have a word? Do we remove it? So if you see major and minor, that means that's the primary route or the.

Or the secondary route where the body gets rid of things. So the main route that your body uses to get rid of serotonin is the major route through Mao A and ALDH2. And the minor route is the opposite Mao B and ADH1B. And so if one of these routes is plugged, your body has built in redundancy. It's beautiful. Your DNA has built in redundancy in the codons. So it's really Important that you understand that if your body is plugged in one area, it has backups. So otherwise we'd be extinct as a species a long, long time ago. So, you know.

Right. Brilliant.

Yeah, it is brilliant. And that's the other thing, Donnie. When I was making this pathway, I would get super excited. So if you go to click the SAM at the bottom. Mm. So I want to share examples so you can see.

Where is it?

So if you look at the MTR.

Gene over here on the left.

Yeah. You can see in purple. Inflammation slows mtr. If you look at the CBS gene down below.

Inflammation speeds up the CBS gene.

So it's going that way.

Well, yeah. The CBS takes homocysteine, goes down to glutathione. Right.

I look at MTR and CBS as a valve. It's a gate, so it directs where your homocysteine goes. So if you have high inflammation, your homocysteine is going to go through the CBS to make glutathione. It's not going to support your methylation cycle in terms of doing other things. It's going to say, okay, you're inflamed. I need to make glutathione to put the fire out. And it stops the methylation cycle from making sam. I was like, wow, that's so smart. Because why would you. If you have a burning building, why would you buy furniture and go put furniture in there? Yeah, you got to put the fire out. So the body has been designed. And so when I read these research papers, I was like, inflammation speeds up cbs. You're like, okay, that's interesting. And then you read another paper, maybe a month later, inflammation slows down mtr. Okay. I would forget that inflammation speeds up cbs, and I'd be thinking about it on mtr. But then when I look at it together, I was like, oh, my God, it's a decision tree.

It's amazing. And at the same time, I mean, speaking on inflammation, some. And maybe there's a good. One of the. One of the diagrams on here is a good way to show it. But when the body goes into kind of, like, too much inflammation, then it can kind of, like, almost build up on itself.

Yes. Yeah.

And that can be an issue for some people. Right. Especially if that's sort of how their genes are predisposing them to this kind of compounding inflammatory pathways. And this is where these results can help us break those cycles where people kind of. Right. It's like one inflammatory thing on top of the next. Inflammatory thing.

Yeah. It becomes a cascade of.

Long term, it's a problem, short term it's great. But long term, persistent inflammation is very, very depleting. I mean, imagine if you had, you know, every single day at your work was, you know, putting out fires, you know, you had a major customer complaint, or you had to recall all these things, or you had to do all this. Your business isn't going to be able to produce anything. You're constantly fixing broken things. And so your business is going to be going, it's going to be losing money, it's going to be struggling, and it might even go out of business. But if your business doesn't have all those fires and it's doing really well, it can actually grow and innovate and make things. Your body's the same way.

Yeah. And it's in. It's so being able to, like, say if sometimes people ask what information can they get from a genetic report? Say, if they already know they have, say, insulin resistance or diabetes, or they have hypertension, or they have sort of conditions that indicate to us that there's some inflammation happening and some stress on the system already. And then they're thinking, well, first of all, how can I use this report to solve this? But also, how do I then navigate my decisions in life in terms of additional stress I might expose myself to, you know, like. So anyway, just I wanted to get your impression on that and how that, how this could help those people get out of that burning building, so to speak.

Yeah.

First you have to understand that your body is going to shift its focus. So, for example, if you're sick, it's really interesting that.

Sickness is infection and it's an inflammatory process. And your body is going to create resources to fight that infection and to increase the inflammation, to get rid of the infection. Right. So they all work in concert.

And.

And then in terms of making neurotransmitters, that's not the priority right now. You know, your body doesn't care that you're sad. It cares that there's an infection. And in fact, by you being sad, you're more likely to stay home and not spread the illness to other people. So, you know, evolution is kind of cool if you think about, you know, different ways. And I don't know if we are depressed because, you know, we've learned to isolate ourselves over, you know, the millennia or it's just because the body can't keep up with the resources it needs. But I think just having a general understanding of that, you can only do two things. You know, Or a few things. We have two hands, so, you know, I can, I can't type and be having this conversation at the same time. I mean, I could try, but either the conversation wouldn't be very good or my typing wouldn't be very good. So your body has to make those decisions too. So do you want to fight the infection kind of okay, or do you actually want to get rid of the damn thing and then move on?

But if you look at your report, really just look at each pathway and look for words. So if you type control F on your computer right now, so control F box will pop up and you can type inflammation.

Let's see. Yeah, here we go.

You mean as like a search, right?

Uh huh. And then hit enter.

Okay.

It's thinking, there we go.

Found on 21 pages. And you can see everything's highlighted on the pathway right in front of you. So at a quick glance you can say, okay, inflammation is in purple here, here and here. And it's an orange here. Huh. Okay. So my serotonin, my MAO agene is increased, but all the other ones are slowed. And you can do that on each report. And you can also click on the left, you know, if you want to read about certain things. Okay, yeah, go back to the, go back to that thing again. So now it's on, it's found on the histamine pathway. So what's inflammation doing to my histamine pathway? It's speeding up.

The production, the elimination of the main route. And then it's slowing down my gut. Inflammation is slowing it down in the dao and you can just keep looking through there. So it's only on 21 pages. It's not going to take you that long to understand the significance of inflammation systemically in your body in various different pathways.

And then you can. Yeah, then like we talked about, start with how do I, what's causing that inflammation? How do I reduce it so that again, it kind of clears that out of the space so everything else starts working better again.

Yeah. And this is a really beautiful way to figure it out. And you know, I've been approached. It's like, well, Ben, can you really make me a summary sheet please for strategene? It's like, you know, I, I really want to, but the human element is so important with this because there's so many different things that you could be struggling with, or maybe you're not struggling, you just want to improve it. So if I make your strategy report and say, oh, these particular genes have increased sense of risk of anxiety. These reduce your sensitivity to caffeine. But I don't know all the epigenetic controls. So I could be having. It could actually be a thousand question questionnaire, and I would still be wrong.

It really is that individualized. I hear you and I agree with you. And it's. And it's a process, right. Like we can, we want to start with, you know, at the top and kind of work through. And it's. And little by little along the way, you end up learning about your body and what's working. And as you start feeling better, then it takes fewer and fewer tweaks. And, you know, we go through what I call, like first getting out of stress mode, you know, because when we're in that stress mode where there's the toxicities and the stress, emotional, physical, you know, stress happening, then we know it's going to jam up all these pathways. So we got to get out of this, clear out all that, the stress first, the various stress sources, and then we want to rebalance. How do we get these pathways balanced and get the right nutrients so that things can flow well? And then it becomes about resilience. How do you, what do you do to maintain that over time? Like in my case, you know, where I've found, hey, you know what? You know, I'm going to take some 5 HTP regularly because it helps me maintain. Another person may not need 5 HTP all the time to maintain their resiliency, but I find that it's helpful.

I'm interested because here we can see that serotonin goes down the pathway to melatonin, which you were mentioning before about light exposure at night and how that can turn off our melatonin production.

One of the ones that I was seeing.

On this other test result, on the hormone result is that my melatonin is pretty low. I was like, what? Where did all my melatonin go? Because I sleep in a dark room and I sleep in a regular schedule. But I haven't been using my blue light blocking glasses. So what I should do is start using the glasses and then redo this test and see if it gets better because. Right. My serotonin should be converting over here.

Well, let's look at that. And so this is another reason why we don't give you, you know, just general recommendations like most tests, because just a situation where, you know, Donnie's serotonin levels are high on her labs and she's supplementing with serotonin to feel good for her at 100 milligrams, that's her. And we could look at her pathway and make some sense of that. Now we get a lab and says our melatonin is low. And let's look at this. So nightlight reduces the production. So this particular gene, asmt, it cannot make melatonin from N acetyl serotonin. So she can have all the serotonin she wants, but if she has exposure to nightlight, this ASMT gene works with your eyeballs. So, you know, you have to be, you know, in the darkness for it to turn on. And there's a great poem out there that I forget that guy's name, Silverstein.

What is it? Turn on the dark. I'm afraid of the light.

I love that. And my son and I always joke about that. Still to this day, I love it. Turn on the dark. I'm afraid of the light.

I definitely need to turn on the dark a little, little earlier in the evening, it looks like.

Yeah. And then look at asmt. What is. What else? You know, low stress speeds it up. If you're watching a psychological thriller on Netflix on your laptop, you know, right before bed, you know, with no blue light filtering, and you're freaked out, or you just got in a fight with someone or you're worrying about the next.

Day, no hope for my melatonin. In that case.

Done. Done. You know, and then the elimination can be sped up too, with these various genes down here. So go ahead and click, click asmt. Let's see what that advanced thing means here.

So notable variation. It's where I like to go. I like to look in the blue box, blue blocks. Those are the glasses. So if you look at the notable variations here, so there's three variations found, and there's one snip where it's slightly faster.

And that's that little dial, right? That's show for the. Right.

Okay.

Yep. So it's a 20% faster activity than typical. Then there she has another one that's 10%.

Lower than typical. And then there's a. If you look at both instead of singular, which is where research is going, this is way more effective. So coherence of one allele for each of the two appears to decrease activity more than having a single allele alone. And she has both.

Oh, my gosh.

Isn't that interesting? So this is also why a lot of genetic tests on the market are nonsense. Because if you have a genetic variation, a you don't know if it's faster or slower. It just says it's, you know, you have a variation and Then you're assuming it's slower, but you don't know. They don't tell you. And then it also doesn't look at the combination of these particular singular SNPs because they haven't done the research to try to find a haplotype. In Donnie's case, she would have been very, very confused. If this one SNP increases at 20% and the other one reduces to 10%, then are you thinking, okay, mine's 10% faster if you average it out. That's not how it works. You can't do that.

Genes are not math. They depend on shape. If your gene has a variant in one section, then it has another variant in another section.

Genes are pulled in different shapes. Every time you have a variant, it could change the shape. The function of the gene changes. She has one here and another one here. Looking at both of them can change the shape differently. It's a shape changing for her. It matches her genetic report here that she has a variant here. And if you can, if you read them through here, now what cleans it.

Mm.

Right. So now these are all the things that you want to try to do. So considering Sammy before bed. 5 HTP Extended Release Melatonin, blue blocks, glasses, the current. Pleasant, healthy touch. You know, cat on the lap. I saw you had a cat. You know.

Yes.

Checking out our conversation earlier.

So all these things are going to.

Be helpful, going to be helpful to get the gene working better, since it's. Then it's a little bit slowed down.

Yeah. And if you scroll up, you can see the dirties, you know, exposure to artificial light, emotional stressors, aspartame. So if you're drinking diet soda and not sugary soda because, you know, like, sugar keeps you up. So now you're drinking Tab or whatever else with aspartame in it, that's going to slow down the ASMT gene.

Well, so it makes sense. And.

What I end up thinking is, no wonder I've ended up in my life paying attention to so many of these things that clean the genes because I feel like my body kind of forced me to in order to feel good. I had to figure out each of these things and go, okay, it did.

And it's, you know, you can look at that and say, I struggle with migraines my whole life, or I struggle with, you know, staying asleep my whole life. And that could be a problem. But for you, you lean into that and you said, okay, body, I'm going to help you out here. I'm going to open the door I'm going to look inward, I'm going to see what I can do about it. Instead of taking anti migraine meds which suck, they don't really work. And then, you know, you could be throwing melatonin at yourself but you know that, that may or may not help. But you ended up making life changes which made your body work better. And you know, so that's why I don't have the red and green colors on the report anymore, you know, because I want people to understand that it's not bad to have these things. You just need to change your lifestyle to how it best suits you.

Oh, I love it. I mean, I think that that's, you know, just even if doing a genetic test helps us realize that, you know, then that's huge. That's useful.

Yeah, it is. It reduces the self shaming that we all do and it reduces your feeling bad when other people say, oh, you're such a wimp, you can't do that. You know, and when people congratulate you or you're such, you're so awesome, you can do this, you know, well, you know, maybe your genes have something to do with that and you have an advantage and you're not going to tell them that you're just awesome.

And I, you know, the boys were in the hot tub the other night and it's, it's winter here and it's cold and the lake that we live on is 48 degrees Fahrenheit, so it's really, really cold. And they're like, hey dad, this kid hasn't jumped in the lake. He's not doing contrast. You got to force him to go jump in. I'm like, no, we don't do that. You know, I'm not forcing anybody to jump into freezing cold lake. And you know, if he can withstand the peer pressure from having six, seven other 18 year old boys, you know, he's listening to his body and he's not jumping in the lake. And so I support that. And by the way, this kid has asthma. And so if you have contrasting quick temperatures from hot to cold, you could have an asthma attack. And maybe this kid has learned that, but he doesn't want to say it. So don't force others to do things if they're easy for you, it may not be easy for them.

Wow, that's, I mean, and I think that's a big realization and also I think there, luckily now there is more and more acceptance of, you know, like, oh, I'm going to make these diet changes or Avoid these foods or choose organic or choose to go to bed at a healthy time. You know, for a long time we, it would almost be looked down upon to make those statements, you know, and choices. And I'm glad that more and more that's becoming the norm. You know, that, hey, that makes sense in some ways. Going through a pandemic where we've been home, it's like giving people a reason to say no to things that they felt like they couldn't say no to before. And I don't know if you've seen that too.

I have, I have. I mean, there's been a lot of good from this pandemic. A lot. There's been a lot of terrible. But you know, hopefully there's been a lot of wake up call as well. You know, there's. The real pandemic is the ill health of the population. To me, that's real pandemic and really.

Bringing light to that, you know.

Yeah.

And it's not being done enough and that's a shame. We're marketing a quick fix instead of the long term slog of self improvement.

But anyway.

Oh my gosh. Well, is there anything else you wanted to mention here, Ben, before we wrap up for this? Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, by the way, for your insights on my case and showing us how to, to use your strategy system here.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's always fun and I always learn a lot too, doing these things. And it gives at the same time.

You know, a realization that what I'm doing matters, which is always good because I'm sitting here alone in my office. You know, I have a big team, but, you know, they're everywhere else. And so I'm alone, literally in my office, which I like. But it's nice to see the tool that you've developed over years actually become useful and useful for your patients. So thank you for using it. And I'm excited for people to learn strategy and I'm excited for people to.

Lean into fear of learning biochemistry and looking at themselves inwardly. It's scary to lift the veil of who am I? And you think that the genes define you, but they don't really define you. You define you. But when you understand your genes, you're able to be you in the most efficient and healthiest way possible. Because if you're going against how you're built, then it's not so good. I mean, if you're a four wheel drive car.

You know, cruising on a highway and you have terrible gas mileage, it's super noisy and uncomfortable and rigid and you're bouncing everywhere. You know, all the other smooth cars and the Priuses and the Teslas are going to be laughing at you, you know, but if you start going on the beaches and rough terrains and going on these bumpy rough roads and through mud and sloppy and you're performing and it's starting to be really fun, you know, you just maybe need to be driving a different road that you've never even been on before. And I think that's what genetic testing can do for you.

Oh my gosh, I love that. And I often use the analogy of sometimes people realize that like I'll say, oh, it's like you're, you're in a sports car. Like to know that, like, hey, if you're in a sports car then that, then that helps you understand that you're going to, you're going to feel every bump in the road and you need to, you know, there's different cautions you might take and there's different things like you're saying there might be, there may be a different road you can go down. You didn't realize. But it also means, hey, I have these precautions I need to take because you know, it's, you might, you're more likely to, you know, need hit a tight corner and need to be responding to it, you know, or stress in the road. So it's, you know, just being able to get that information about yourself and then be able to use that in your life to make choices is, is.

Powerful and you don't have to avoid those roads completely either, you know, and it's, that's really cool because I remember when I was in Australia in the outback, there is this four wheel drive truck club and they go on all these crazy adventures out in the outback and just beautiful out there. And we're in this old station wagon. A station wagon with a clearance of like 6 inches. I walk up to these guys and these amazing decked out Land Cruisers with my American accent and say, hey, you know, I want to take this station wagon out on one of these tracks.

And they, they're actually really cool. They're like, oh, you know, we'll give you some breakfast and then we'll, you know, you can drive down to my ranch and we can make some modifications to your station wagon. And so we went and we got the tractor, they lifted the butt, butt end of the.

And they shoved a bunch of tennis balls in the shocks and we actually gained like 6 inches of clearance.

Oh My gosh.

Yeah. And then we did this four wheel drive track in a station wagon because we made some modifications. So use genetic testing to do some modifications.

You know, I love it and you know, I'm glad we got to show today some of my, you know, the results because it's, I think you want to use the genetic test result testing with knowledge body combined, like it's not going to work to just guess, you know, you need, yes, you can look at the genetics and kind of see how you can clean things up. But when we have the actual information, what is my serotonin? What is my melatonin? Now then you can really actively use the genetic information in a whole new way.

Very, very good point. And with that, both of us are skilled health professionals. So you really need, you have your strategy and then skilled health professional. And so they can help guide you to determine which labs to run. Because here's the other thing is that you could have your genetic testing and you could order a slew of lab testing and it could all be just worthless. It's not the right testing for you. Or it could be really useful, but in your situation right now, at times zero, it's not important. They shouldn't even order that test. And you just blew a thousand bucks. So it could also save you a ton of money. So, you know, we're currently working on, you know, a lot of wholesale training or health professional training through our wholesale department so doctors and health professionals can learn how to best support their patients and their clients. And so having folks like you, Donnie, on the team to help refer patients to is really awesome. So thanks for helping out people. And if people are looking for a trained health professional too, I know this is on your podcast, but I'd be awesome to take snippets of it too and share it with my audience. So if you could share, you know, how patients, if you're even accepting new patients, I don't know. But how do they find you?

Oh, thank you. And definitely what I based on what you're just saying there, what I always recommend is we start with a session where I get to know your case. Because like you're saying, it doesn't help to just order the same tests for everyone. We need to look at your case and then decide, okay, we need a strategene test, but what other tests do we really need based on your health issues? And then once we see your strategene report, then we might see, oh, here's these additional tests we need to help really get the information we need to fine tune, you know, and kind of work down that pathway that way. So I don't give, I don't suggest the same test for everyone. I suggest like the basics and then let's from there decide which tests are important. And people can find me at my website, which is drdonnie.com that's either d r d o n I.com or spelled out-o c t-o r d o n I.com and I'm also on social media under Dr. Donnie Wilson. And my podcast is How Humans Heal Podcast, which is where this interview is going to air. And I do accept new patients, I have certain number of new patients I can accept each month. And I especially love these cases where patients are wanting to fine tune their health and understand conditions that they haven't been able to solve so far and really be ready and willing to say, hey, what am I doing? What am I eating? What's going on in my environment that I could possibly change? And I just haven't figured it out yet. And how can I use nutrients in a way that's going to shift not only the way I feel right now, but how my health is going to turn out in the future. Because these same things that we're talking about as like hey, this could improve your mood or your energy or your, your sleep in the moment. Those same things end up preventing heart disease and diabetes and cancer and dementia in decades to come. So it's like.

That'S the amazing thing to me is what we can do now to improve your health now, but it ends up improving your health going forward too.

That ties into a great statement too that I interviewed a guy, um, he was an elite athlete, run one Ironman's multiple times and so on and trained for years and just destroyed himself, literally destroyed himself and took years to get him back, self back and he ended up doing it. And I keep forgetting his gentleman, his name, but he was in the dirty jeans summit and I asked if you could share one thing with the audience, what would it be? He goes easy. One question, what would your 80 year old self say? Whatever you're doing right now.

I love that statement.

I think about that all the time. Just have family history of.

Heart disease, cancer and of course they likely have some of these same gene variations that I have. And being able to say, wow, here's the things I'm doing now to solve migraines that are going to solve other issues going forward and to, you know, it's hard to find practitioners who can work, I think at this level of complexity. But it just so happens that my brain loves that I like to look for patterns. I like to look for how to solve things. And so this is just, you know, to me, it's. It's fun and exciting. And so I'm so grateful for you to have had some of that in your personality too, that you created this, this way of analyzing it so we can actually use it for our health benefit.

Yeah, yeah. It's been fun. And thanks for inviting me on and sharing. And I love all the things that you're doing as well. So keep going.

Thank you, Ben. Thank you so much. I'll catch up with you soon.

Sounds good.

Those of you who've been listening to Dr. Ben lynch and I talk about the strategene report and how helpful it can be to understand your genes and how that could influence your health, I wanted to let you know that I've opened up some additional appointment spots, especially both for those of you who may already have done your strategene test and you're looking for someone to help you interpret it and understand what additional tests may be useful for your case. And I've also opened spots for those of you who would like to do a strategene test and then work with me to review your results and guide you from there. So I have. I'll share the link with you here so that you can go ahead and sign up for one of those appointments. I call it a quick insight consultation. With me you can choose to add on the strategene test if you haven't done it already. And when you do this through this link, you are going to also receive my gift to you, which is my Stress Warrior book because especially after listening to this interview with Dr. Ben lynch, you heard how important it is to address your stress in order to address your genes. So I wanted to make sure you have the tool, this tool available to you called the Stress Warrior book, which you will receive as a gift from me to help you on your way as we do your quick insight session and review your strategy and results to really help you optimize your health going forward. I look forward to meeting with you soon.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal.

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