How Our Life Experiences Influence Our Gene Expression And Overall Health

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Our environment, the people we interact with, our feeling of being supported, our feeling of being in a community. These all are signals that go in and are picked up by our genes.

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And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. You might be relieved to know that the health of our body is determined by more than our genes. The field of epigenetics suggests that our behaviors and lifestyle can influence which of our genes are turned on or off. That includes what you eat and how you move, along with your thoughts, feelings, and social connections. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctors' Pharmacy about all the things in our environment that impact how our genes are expressed. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Jeffrey Bland about how daily inputs from our environment inform the epigenome, with Bruce Lipton about steps to take to change our beliefs, and with Dr. Todd LePine about the exosome and how chemicals impact our genes. Let's jump in.

I met with my granddaughters and their friends last weekend. We had this deep conversation. I was very impressed about 1:30 in the morning about how they see their attitudes, beliefs and behaviors influencing how they want to be as women of influence growing up. And so it led us into this discussion of epigenetics. That then reminded me to have a discussion with them about this this concept that the energy that we are involved with, that we're exposed to, and the energy that we give off as human beings to others, is an energy that transforms itself into the material influence on the molecular actions of our body and how our genes are expressed. Now, this sounds a little like Einstein with E=MC2, energy and mass are interconverted, that our energy field influences the mass of molecules, it influences our genes and how they're expressed. And that's what I picked up from Dr. Netterman's work in which I talked with him and I said, so you are then finding that our environment, our social determinants, the people we interact with, the sense of fulfillment, our being loved, our appreciation of being alive, our feeling of being supported, our feeling of being in a community, that these all then are signals that go in and are picked up by our genes and ultimately epigenetically modify our genes. And you can actually measure that by looking at these methylation patterns in genes. He says, absolutely. So that sent me onto a trail the last four years that is unrelenting for me because I feel this is the wild card. This is the secret sauce. This is what connects socialization and the feeling of, you know, the anthropology, sociology, psychology, it hardwires itself into biology systems thinking and ultimately how we look at and feel it. And it is all modifiable. That's the beautiful thing. This is not esotericism. This is executable by practicing the right things. We can send the right signals to our genes that modulate these epigenetic patterns in such a way as to favorably express what I call our bliss genes, our goodness genes, our happiness genes, our fulfillment genes, and they can down regulate the expression of our danger genes, our genes that are impaired, that feeling like we're not safe, that we're at risk, and that we need to fight back and be alarmed against the world, which is what happens in places of impoverishment. It happens in people that have social isolation. It happens in people that feel culturally disenfranchised. So we have for all these years, all these decades, we have thought, oh, these people that live in these various areas of what we might consider impoverished areas, oh, they just don't have the genetic potential that other people have. No, it's not that at all. They have an incredible genetic potential that's been impressed by the imprinting of their genes with experiences of self-denial. And then I went and I said, well, hold on, does that also relate to food deserts? Of course. A topic that you have been so eloquent in bringing up to us. And now there's research showing that people that live in food deserts have epigenetic modulation of their expression patterns that then produces an outcome that we call inflammaging, right? They're in an inflamed state because their genes feel they have to fight back against the hostile environment because they're not safe. And when you put all this together, this transforms all of healthcare. This transforms all of medicine. This to me is the thing that we've been looking for that connects together all of these areas into a scientific whole field theory that you can actually measure and prove. We can measure methylation patterns before and after people involved with lifestyle changes. We can measure the effect that diet has. We can measure their effective exercise. We can measure their sleep effects on their epigenome. We can measure what happens when a person is loved versus unloved. In fact, it's interesting that Dr. Epple at UCSF Medical School working with Dr. Blackburn originally on the development of the Nobel Prize in this whole concept of the telomeres. She has found that the same thing holds true with the chromosomal ends, the telomeres, that shorten under conditions of social deprivation and it's tied to epigenetic alteration. In fact, I was then introduced to Anthony Zammitt, who we got to speak at our Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Annual Conference this November. Dr. Zammitt has traveled the world. He's an MD, PhD in many different institutions and now at the University of North Carolina Medical School in psychiatry, but also in the field of molecular genetics. And he has been publishing papers, Mark, that are just truly revolutionary, showing that under controlled conditions in both animal models and in humans, that social deprivation, anxiety, stress, fear, all send signals to the epigenome that completely modulates then the hormonal patterns like cortisol and like the flight and fright hormones epinephrine. So the interface between what you said, Candace Pert's psychoneuroimmunology and the epigenome are now singularly being defined as being mechanistically connected. And this to me is a revolution that now brings all of the field of healthcare, not just knowing more and more about less and less, especially medicine, until you know everything about nothing. Now we're talking about a field theory that combines all these disciplines of thinking into a whole way that we're going to treat the whole person to modulate their genes to be performing at its optimal enlightenment, fun, bliss.

Yeah, it's huge conversation, Jeff, because, you know, it's an empowering conversation. It lifts us up from the possibility that we don't have to succumb to all the ravages of chronic disease that may be traits or tendencies in our family, but we can actually modify how those all happen. And we can also, it seems to me from what I'm learning from literature, that we can actually change harmful epigenetic tags even after we're born by doing modifications in our life and lifestyle. So it's not just like you get these tags when you're young and then boom, you're stuck. But it's also true. And I think you mentioned this in your article that these tags can be transgenerational. So, for example, children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are actually imprinted with changes to their epigenome that lead to increase in anxiety and psychosocial stresses and a whole series of health consequences that are really staggering when you look at, well, how does that even happen? How does a grandmother get insulted by a toxin or a psychological stress? How does that get programmed on the genes? How does that get passed transgenerationally? It's just fascinating. And then it can be untagged. and then you also see that the, the whole idea of epigenetics helps to crystallize the mechanism, as you said, by which our lifestyle and environment and external influences and our relationships and our feelings, everything actually affects our health. We've known for years that stress causes illness, but how? How does it work? And, well, now it seems like we've figured it out, and then we've figured out a way to do it, which is really pretty remarkable. And so what you're basically saying is that there's this control system on our genes, over our genes, the epigenome, which can be modified through various types of interventions to improve the kinds of genes that are being expressed that create health as the ones that create disease. And the things that modify it are everything.

That is so powerful what you're saying, Mark. That just lights me up just to hear you say that because that is why I said this is a discovery that reframes the whole of the global healthcare because healthcare as disease care is built around the premise that medicine is there to rescue people from their bad genes. That there's nothing you can do about it. So whatever we can do with drugs or surgery, this is a whole different model. And in fact, I got introduced again because once you start traveling in this environment, you meet all sorts of other people that are doing work in this area. So Dr. Chantel Martin and his group, ironically also at the University of North Carolina, they've been looking at the socialization factors in the epigenome.

Well, this is the thing. I just want to break down what you said a little bit more because some people really get it. What you're saying is that every bite of food we eat influences our genes through this mechanism. Our nutrient status, our activity and exercise, sleep, stress of all kinds, our relationships, our love or lack of love, all modify the epigenome in ways that are remarkable and actionable and changeable. and that the process of aging is driven by adverse effects on our genome that we can change. And that we can literally not only stop aging and stop these chronic diseases, but we can literally reverse them. And that's what some of these new studies are so remarkable in showing through the DNA methylation patterns that change with interventions. so, Jeff, given that we now know this mechanism, that we now understand that how our relationships and our thoughts and our feelings and our toxic exposures and our activity and our sleep and our diet and everything influence our genes, you know, how does that change medicine for us? And how do we think differently about what we're doing and what is the potential? And talk about specifically this whole unified theory, because, you know, one of the things I've learned from you is that there is a unified theory of that the whole idea of specialty medicine, all these diseases, they're all linked by a very few common mechanisms and systems in the body, a few common laws of biology. And when those underlying systems are dysregulated and disturbed in the ways that we're talking about through the genome and regulating inflammation and mitochondrial function and detoxification and hormonal regulation and all the ways that our gut function, I mean, our microbes in our gut are listening listening to our thoughts. I mean, get that, right? I mean, you, you got to be nice, those little bugs in there, because they're affecting how you feel and what you think and your disease risks and everything else. So we have this amazing opportunity now to sort of rethink disease from the bottom up. And it's, it's really the ultimate and Upstream medicine instead of whacK-A-Mole medicine, where we're constantly dealing with all the downstream effects. How do we get to the Upstream causes and create a unified field theory so that when we're looking at aging, we're not like, let's find the cure for cancer and find the cure for Alzheimer's and find the cure for, you know, heart disease and find the cure for diabetes. It's nonsense because there, if you get to the root, you get to see how these are all not different diseases. They're all different manifestations of the same underlying phenomena in biology, which is what functional medicine and systems biology speaks to. So how are we then going to look at aging and even disease differently? Because we now understand that there's this imprintome that regulates everything about our health. And how do we start to think about the excitement that I feel as a 62 year old getting older every minute of the possibility of reversing biological age? And by the way, everybody, I literally just ordered, I'm writing a new book on longevity. I literally just ordered every single DNA methylation kit and longevity kit on the market. I have it on my dining room table and my plan is to do them all and see what's going on. and I'll report back on that. But I think that, you know, how, and I want to see how those things can change with actual changing things that I do. Well, you know, what's so fascinating, Jeff, is that, you know, we all learned that there are essential amino acids, that you have to get from diet. There are essential fatty acids that we have to get from fats like omega threes, but there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate that we don't actually need them to live. Uh, and that's why people can go on a ketogenic diet.

However.

I think that there's a piece that's been missed in that, which is that the actual starch itself is not essential. But the components that come with carbohydrates, the phytochemicals in plants, are actually very essential. And you're going to love this, Jeff, because I was at a conference recently and I got to meet the chairman of Mars, Mr. Mars, literally. And he, he was on fire about polyphenols in cocoa, particularly what we get in chocolate and the research they've done on it. And what he said, I, I wish you could have been there to hear it, because it was like, how do we get the, the chairman of a, one of the biggest, you know, food companies out there, which is making a lot of not so great stuff, start to shift his thinking and talk about how these phytochemicals are actually essential.

For health.

They're not, they're not, they're not, you know, just, oh, well, it's nice if you get them, that if you don't get them, that it leads to chronic disease. So we've talked about this before, the long latency deficiency diseases. It's not just vitamins and minerals, it's also a deficiency of the phytochemicals, what we call the phytochemical richness of our diet. I wrote in my book once years ago, Ulterior Motive, talked about the phytochemical index. you know, how do you, how do you start to think about the phytochemicals compared to the amount of calories and the food you're eating and all that is so important. And so it kind of shifts our thinking to, to go, wow, dude, maybe, maybe these aren't optional. You know, maybe, maybe we want to actually regulate our genes properly. We need to include these phytochemicals every single day. And I, I'm a phytochemical fiend at my house, and I think, you know, you'll actually would be surprised at all the shit I put in my smoothie and also the things that I eat, and I, I'm just determine what I'm eating to actually sample from this phytochemical cornucopia of medicines that are regulating our immune system, our microbiome, our brain chemistry, our hormones, our structural system. Everything is controlled by these phytochemicals. So, and it's something I learned from you. I didn't never heard of phytochemicals before I met Jeff Bland or food is medicine or food is information. These are all ideas that came out of you, and I think they're they're now becoming mainstream and they're now becoming understood from a mechanistic point of view in ways that we just never had before. And one of the things I want you to talk about is actually some of the work you're doing at Big Bold Health, particularly around immunorejuvenation and epigenetics and biological clocks and how all that connects. Because we were actually looking at DNA methylation in immune cells, in white blood cells, which is hopefully a good proxy for your other organs. I don't think we know that for sure. But how is your work illuminated? There's ways in which we as providers, as individuals, can change our diet or take supplements to actually help improve and regulate the epigenome to create health and longevity and a long health span. Or as I say, how to die young as late as possible.

Yeah, yeah. So I think, Mark, you're hitting really, again, as you do so eloquently, the tip of the spear. What is this really all distilled itself down to? And to me, this is the aha of my life. This is kind of like, wow, crossing the Rubicon. And because what we've just been talking about here, if we were specifically think about phytochemicals, how have they been described by food scientists and by even the CEO of Mars? How would they talk about these polyphenols found in cocoa? They would talk of them as antioxidants.

And he actually had a very different perspective. It was so enlightened that I literally fell off my chair. And I was like, what? Who are you, Mr. Mars? Really? But it was staggering. and he was incensed about the fact that medicine is ignoring this. He was just furious and he was like, this has to be front and center and everything we're doing and they're putting their Mars muscle behind it, which is exciting.

Well, I think that's good, but again, it's not the point I'm trying to make.

No, I understand.

Let me remake my point. I think we need absolutely to be advocating for phytochemicals as an important component of our diet that have been trivialized and marginalized for decades, not even having pages described in textbooks of nutrition that people studied and became dieticians from or whatever. So I absolutely agree with you. But the question of how they work, that's the aha. Over time, the dominant way that people describe them in hundreds of studies, hundreds, is antioxidants. And I have been saying to myself and lecturers over the years, that's a very trivial way of describing them. That's not how they work. They're not just antiracidity factors. They are specific targeted molecules that signal the messages to our genes in unique ways to modulate how our genes express their function. That is a much more powerful directed natural pharmacology than antioxidants. And therefore, different phytoflavonoids or different members of the polyphenol family have different effects on different cells to to produce different outcomes. Like resveratrol is different than EGCG, which is different than curcumin, which is different than quercetin. They have different impacts upon cell biology. But the basic new aha discovery is that all of these regulate then the epigenome such that they can help put on and put off messages to clear up and rejuvenate our cellular function and give us the full potential of our genetic arsenal of goodness. And that construct of cleaning up a mess in our epigenome is a really powerful concept. And so when we started into this big bold health kind of advocacy to look at the immune system, and we happen to fall into this Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which has the highest level of these immune active phytochemicals of any food that we've been able to discover, and we now find that actually the portfolio of those flavonoids influences epigenetic modulation of the expression of our goodness genes. Now we start to see how you can demonstrate lowering biological age and reducing the clocks that people are measuring to determine whether they're older than their years of birthdays or younger than their years of birthdays. This is a powerful new science that puts all this together to say we are part of how we eat, We are part of the way those plants were growing. We are part of the soil in which those plants were nourished. We are part of the relationship of the planetary immune system to our immune system. This is a holistic view of how we achieve in our own body's health while also renourishing the planet simultaneously. Because they're all signaling together in this process. This is the most powerful orchestration you can ever imagine.

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So the plants have this ability to respond to their environmental stress. It could be either biological stress from organisms like infection or it could be environmental stress like too hot, too cold, not enough water, radiation, whatever, activating these genes then epigenetically that produce these phytochemicals. And now here is the big aha for us because these phytochemicals that they produce are within the family flavonoids and they're members in this family which we're all very familiar with that you've spoken a lot about in your shows over the years, and that's things like quercetin, resveratrol, epigallocatechin gallate and curcumin. And those particular phytochemicals, and here's the closing of the loop now, have been found to modulate the specific controlling features of the methylation patterns of our genome, the Tet and the DMT that we talked about earlier. they actually signal into those hub genes to regulate then how the genes are methylated or demethylated to produce the ability of the genes to express themselves in a healthy fashion under those conditions. And I think this is so powerful because it ties plant health to soil health to human health. when you eat the right plants that have those messenger molecules that create in our body the same exact effects. This is the whole thing that we've been doing with our Himalayan Tartere Buckwheat.

It's phenomenal. And, when you think about the epigenetic regulation and the doorways to it, there's so many, right? There's enhancing the phytochemicals that we eat, it's changing our exposure to toxins, it's dealing with our mindset and beliefs and attitudes. learning how to love and be loved. It's so infinite in terms of the doorways to actually regulate this. And, what's really important for people to understand is that these epigenetic marks are so important in determining our outcomes in terms of health and disease in our life. And, that we now understand actually how to modify them is a massive breakthrough. We know, for example, that if, you know, a baby, you know, mother, grandmother rat is exposed to glyphosate, then two generations down, those marks from the glyphosate are going to cause cancer and endocrine disruption and all sorts of problems. But we also know we can undo those marks through various interventions that we've been talking about, which is, you know, primarily lifestyle. But there are there are medications being explored and other things that can actually regulate some of these pathways. The biological clock thing is fascinating to me because for the first time, it seems like we have a way to start to measure the impact of things, not in a theoretical way and not in a way that is necessarily impossible to do. If we really wanted to be smart about this, we would get 100,000 people in one arm, 100,000 people in another arm of a study. We control the variables and we provide these different inputs and we'd see what happens over 50 or 60 or 70 years of their life, but that's not going to happen. So we have to sort of look at other intermediate ways of seeing how our biology is affected. And so whether it's, you know, work on the DNA methylation epigenome through white blood cells, or whether it's through looking at our immune age, work that David Fuhrman's doing at Stanford, various analytes that are highly correlated with immune aging, or looking at the, for example, microbiome markers, they may be able to be able to do a liquid blood test to actually look at what's happening with the metabolites of your microbiome that are determining your age or risk of disease. So, and there's other levels that we can influence. So at every point of our life, we have the potential to stop and reverse a lot of these changes. And the question now is, what are the implications if just a few simple things, like in Cara Fitzgerald's study, could actually turn back your biological age by three years in just a short period of time? It was a very short study. I mean, what if we took a more comprehensive approach and how does the future look? So before we close, tell us how the future looks. What are doctors going to be testing? What are they going to be doing? What are they going to be recommending? And how is that going to impact the trajectory of chronic illness and death?

So I think you have done such an eloquent job in your podcast in the Doctors Pharmacy over the years in developing this new model. And I want to go back to something that we all have experienced in our life. every human being has a shared experience of some trauma. There is no person that escapes living without trauma. Now, some traumas are much more extreme than others. So if we think about post-traumatic stress syndrome, that's a condition where the genes have been imprinted so strongly by a traumatic event that they're locked into a feed forward cycle of hyper vigilance as it relates to their activation of their immune response and their adrenaline and their cortisol response. So if you go to that, which is the extreme edge, and you say, could we modify people with PTSD? Could we, those people that have had those extreme examples of acute stress that have then marked their genes very heavily with marks that create alarm responses in their daily living, no matter what environment they find themselves. So this is one of the things that Anthony Zamas is involved with his group and looking at. I've been very impressed with his work because he's been looking at a hub gene, which is abbreviated PKB P5. This hub gene is controlling kind of the activity, the glucocorticoid receptor, which relates to cortisol responses. And it's activated in states of post-traumatic stress. So the question is, how does that get turned on and regulated in a hyper-functioning way? And it does so because it gets epigenetically modified and it gets the things that would suppress its activity get turned off. So it just goes kind of wild, it goes rogue. And so can you then modify the epigenetic control of the FkPp5 gene through reprogramming programming the epigenome. And the answer appears to be yes, we can. And what we've learned is the more traumatic something happens, the stickiness of our epigenome becomes more imprinted.

It's hard to change.

Probably we need to be to re-pattern the epigenome. Some things can be put on and off fairly easily.

So just let me stop you for a sec. So you said something huge, which is that there's this epidemic of trauma in our society and it's along a spectrum, right, from severe rape and sexual abuse to just being yelled at and belittled when you're a little kid. And all that gets affected, all of that affects us and imprints on us. How is the science showing that we can undo those imprints? What are the techniques, tools, systems, mechanisms? What is it? It's not eating just a vitamin. How is this working?

Yeah, I think that's why I'm so excited about this because it brings the whole arsenal of the tools that you and I and so many others have been advocating that have been marginalized in medicine. Meditation, stress reduction, behavioral cognitive therapy, exercise, kind of things that re-pattern our view of ourselves, all sorts of things that BJ Fogg talks about with regard to behavior modification. These are all factors that are now signaling to our genes to reestablish a different imprint on these genes that regulate post-traumatic stress. And so you need to use the full arsenal of tools. You can't just give anti-depressants. Anti-depressants are only like a small part of the bigger picture of imprinting these genes that regulate these responses that give us this heightened state of alarm that prevent us from sleeping, that keep us wired, that make us angry, that steal from us our humanness, that we want to be joyful, happy people. And so we're seeing emerge right now, I believe, the understanding of the biology that locks us into these feed-forward cycles of dysfunction and steals from us our ability to be totally human in all the ways that we'd like to be. And then allows us to find ways to actually progress forward with different integrated therapies. And I want to use the term integrated functional medicine therapies, because it's not just out of a pill that are going to be the solutions to these problems. But it's all the things you talked about, the microbiome, the toxins load, the toxic relationships, the things that are all impinging upon our epigenome to create an expression pattern of continued alarm. When you're in a hostile state, you feel like you're in jeopardy at every moment. your body does what it's supposed to do. It's fighting back all the time. And it's armored against life. And those conditions produce all the behavior patterns that we're seeing right now with the fear of SARS-CoV-2 and all the people isolating themselves. And all these things are like the test, like the experiment of what happens when your epigenome is not getting the right message.

How do you change your thoughts? How do you change your beliefs? You know, if you live in a world where everything looks you know, like black versus, you know, rose colored glasses. I tend to be more rose colored glasses. You can look at the same event and two people have this totally different interpretation and have a profoundly different effect on their biology. So one person can experience the same thing and create positive molecules of emotion, and another person can experience exactly the same thing and experience negative molecules of emotions. So in a way, this is a little bit daunting for people because it's okay. If I say, don't eat sugar, people go, I can, I can figure that out. If I say, don't think blah, blah, blah, or don't feel this or do feel this or don't feel more love and less fear. Well, that's easy to say, hard to do. So can you talk about how do we start to translate this science into actionable ways that we can change our beliefs and change our way of thinking and change the way we interpret and filter the world to actually reframe it and actually start to generate the power of our thoughts to create health and longevity?

Well, let's step back one second. And I said, the function of the brain is to put the chemistry into the blood. And I said, yeah, but where does it get it from? I said, the picture in the mind. I go, the mind. Yeah, the mind has a misleading character. The mind sounds like, oh, there's one mind. I go, no, there are two minds. And this is where the whole world gets screwed up because we say the mind. Well, yeah, my mind. I should have consciousness and I want to be healthy. Then how come I'm not healthy? I got that in my mind. I go, because here's the problem. There are two minds and if you don't get this, then nothing makes sense and I'll give you the reason why. The brain is a computer. That's what I was finding out. The cells are miniature chips. The body's got 50 trillion chips but when you put all the chips together, that's called a computer. So I say, so what's the point about this computer? I say, let's go back to the old days when you would buy a brand new computer. You spent a couple thousand dollars, okay? and the point about it is simply this, is that you get a brand new computer. You just took it home, $2,000. I say brand new. I say, push the start button. The screen lights up. That's called booting up. It's booted up. The screen's lighted. And I go, now do something. And you go, I can't do anything. I said, you just bought a brand new computer. What do you mean you can't do anything? Before you can use a computer, you have to put programs in a computer. I go, oh, but the brain is an organic computer, just like the Silicon one you use. I say, we need to put programs in so we can use a computer. So I say, when do the programs come in? I go, ah, the programs start coming in in the last trimester of pregnancy. The fetus is reading the environment. I say, how can the fetus read the environment? It's inside the womb. It can't. I go, Remember, the fetus is nourished by the mother's blood. I go, yep. That's why in the old days when I was in medical school, we say, what's the role of the mother? Eat well, take vitamins and supplements, exercise. I go, oh, is that all the mother has to do? Well, in those days, it was the belief the genes are going to control it, the mother just had to nourish it. In the new day of epigenetics where environmental signals are important, all of a sudden I say, blood has nutrition and blood has environmental signals. The emotional chemicals, anger, love, jealousy, whatever ones you want, they're chemicals that generate those experiences. So if the mother is having an experience, then the blood from the mother is going to go into the fetus. By the last trimester, the brain is now booted up. But now, guess what? It'll read pattern. if the mother has periods of anger, then the chemistry of anger comes in periodically. That's a pattern the fetus will learn that. If the mother's happy, then good, happy, loving chemistry comes to the fetus and the fetus is happy. So all of a sudden I say then the first programming occurs even before you're born. Because while you're in the womb, your brain is downloading programs because the mother is head start program. She sees the world in which the fetus is going to live. If the world is war-torn, there's war and violence, and she experiences that, then the chemistry that goes to the fetus is the stress chemistry, which will cause the body to build up like an athlete and become a fighter, like a street fighter. So all of a sudden it goes very importantly what it says is simply this: what's the mother's perception of the world? If she feels safe and happy, then the baby is getting information: I'm safe, happy, grow, be in love. If she's angry or she he's afraid, then the fetus is afraid. Does the fetus know why? No. The fetus has the chemistry of fear. It's just the chemistry. It has no vision, but it knows that out in that world, the mother is giving information that it's not safe. And if it's not safe, then the genetics has to change to make a body that will fight to survive versus. Okay, so that's when the programming starts. But it really kicks into gear.

But, but Bruce, how do, how do, how do people like change their thoughts? Because I think, you know, what you're saying is very empowering, but it's also very scary. As I listen to him, like, wow, my beliefs, my thoughts are changing my biology and making me sick or healthy.

Yeah. How do I use that information in a practical way? Like, the big part that we didn't get to is I said there were two, we have the, the programming is the equivalent of putting a program in a hard drive in your computer. It's built in. Now it's a program. Okay? And then when the conscious mind, that's the creative mind, the subconscious mind, the hard drive, is the habit mind. It's got habits or programs. Programs are habits. And so I learn from experiences. I create programs in my hard drive. But when I'm conscious, the conscious mind is like the creator that types on the keyboard. I can type in all the wonderful messages. I want to be healthy. I love life. I'm going to get a great job. I'm going to find a great relationship. I say, oh, that's conscious. That's creative. That's cool. I say, what about the subconscious? I say, no, the subconscious programs didn't come from you. They came from your experiences in the environment during the development. When you're born, was your father a happy person or an angry person? Is your mother, you know, you, how do you, why do I need a program? I'll tell you why I need a program. I have to fit into a family. I have to fit into a culture. And I go, yeah, but cultures change over time. And I go, that's why it's not genetic. You have to learn culture. I say, how do you learn? I say, how does an infant learn? They can't read a book. They can't go to school. And here's the secret. For the first seven years of your life, your brain is not operating with creative consciousness, which is right behind your forehead. It's operating off of hindbrain hard drive. And I go, so why is that important? Because the hard drive is downloading experiences. I say, how? Watch your father. Watch your mother. Watch your siblings. Watch your community. In a state of that development, and the brain is in a vibration state, let's back up. You can put wires on a person's head and read the brain function, its energy vibrations. A child's brain, if you put the EEG on the child's brain, up through age seven, it's not functioning at the higher vibration of consciousness. It's functioning just a little lower. It's called theta, theta vibration. I go, so what's theta? Theta is hypnosis. I go, so what does that mean? I say, for the first seven years of a child's life, the brain is not using creativity. The brain is in hypnosis. I say, what is it doing? Observing how a father behaves, observing how a mother behaves, how a community behaves. It observes and in state of hypnosis downloads the pattern.

Totally, it shapes our whole worldview and beliefs and subconsciousness.

So how do we sort of undo that as we get along? I can't get to that yet because first you have to find out, well, if I have a conscious mind, it overrides the program because I'm creator, then how come as Quantum physics said consciousness is creating our life experience. Then how come the world looks like the way it does, violent, tearing apart, chaos, all this stuff? It's like, where's that coming from? I go, that's coming from the subconscious. That's not the conscious. The conscious is, I want to be in love. I want to be healthy. I want to be happy. I go, then how come we're not living heaven on earth? Because that's what the conscious mind would create. how come we have this problem? And here comes the answer to the most important part that you didn't even know what the question was. Here's the answer. And the answer is this. The conscious mind can type on the keyboard, just like on your computer. You can put the data in, you can create whatever you want. You can type on it. But the conscious mind, and here it goes, can think. So what? I say thinking is inside. I say, Mark, today's Tuesday. What are you doing on Thursday? It's not written in front of you, but I bet you in a minute you could go, oh, Thursday I am, and you have a picture in your mind. And I say, well, wait a minute. Then when you were using your conscious mind, you were back up one second. Body is a vehicle like a car. It moves around. It's got a steering wheel. okay. When the conscious mind, it's got its hands on the steering wheel, looking out the window, it will drive you to wishes and desires. And then I go, yeah, but the conscious mind can think. The hell does that mean? It's not looking out the window. The moment you start thinking, you're not looking out, you're looking in. I say, what if you're driving the car and you start thinking? You start thinking, I go, then you're not looking out the windshield. I go, and I go, don't worry. You know why the subconscious is programs. It knows how to drive the car, and it's a million times more powerful. The computer than the conscious mind. So guess what? You don't even have to pay attention to the road. The subconscious mind will drive it. Okay, so I go, wait, every time you are thinking, then the conscious creative mind is no longer looking out the window. it's looking inside. So every time you are thinking, then the conscious mind is not controlling the vehicle. I go, but I'm still here. I go, the subconscious has got programs. And so the moment the conscious mind is thinking, the subconscious mind autopilot takes over. Now I'll tell you where the problem is. Where the programs come from in the subconscious mind go from other people. Did they answer what you wanted? Did their behavior match what you want in your life? Probably not. Did I go, therefore, then here's the point. And this is it. Of all the things we talk about right now, Mark, this is it. 95% of the day is the amount of time a person spends thinking. I go, well, wait a minute. Then 95% of the day I'm not driving the vehicle. I go, nope. 95% of the day, the subconscious programs. But they came from other people, good programs, bad programs, 60% of the programs we downloaded during that development are disempowering, self-sabotaging and limiting beliefs. And I go, but you're operating 95% of the day from those programs, not from the creative program, because the creative mind is thinking the biology is taken over by the program. For 50 years, I've given the same story, Mark, so I'll give it again, another 51 years, here's the same story. you have a friend, you know your friend's behavior very, very well, and you know your friend's parent. And one day you see your friend has the same behavior as the parent. So you, you, you got a volunteer. You go, hey, Bill, you're just like your dad. Back away from Bill. I know exactly what Bill's going to say. You know it too, because you were there. Bill will go, how could you compare me to my dad? I'm nothing like my dad. And I go, here's the reality. Everybody else can see that Bill behaves like his dad. Yeah. The only one that can't see it is Bill. I go, explanation is simple. Bill was programmed by his dad in the first seven years, knows those behaviors. Those are programs. And then 95 of the day Bill is thinking, so he's not controlling. So the father program starts manifesting. He can't see it. Bill can't see it. I go, why not? He's not even looking at his own behavior. He's thinking. So he's not even seeing. his own behavior, but everybody else does. And everybody else says, well, wait, that's the same as his dad. And then Bill goes, what are you talking about? Why? Bill's the only one that didn't see it. And I go, you ready for this one? This is the killer. We are all Bill. Every day, every one of us is spending 95 of our time thinking and turning over the control to the subconscious. I go, was that a good program or bad program? Well, 60 are negative. So, you know, and do you see it?

No.

So you become in, it's invisible to you to see your participation. All you see is it's not working. I wanted to be happy and I'm not. Well, that person did this to me and this person screwed me here. And that, and you're blaming all these people. And the idea was, hey, you didn't see you were the one that started the program because you're the one that was playing the negative programs and they're responding to it. and I go, that means most people have no understanding of personal responsibility. Most people are victims. I'm victim of this, I'm a victim of that. And I go, no. So are you running your life? I say, yeah, but are you running it with the conscious creative mind, wishes and desires, or are you running it with the subconscious mind habits and programs? The answer is 95% of the day you're running it from the programs. A very important point. Remember, the consciousness controls the genetics. Everyone's thinking, cancer is caused by a gene. I go, that's a big BS, that means belief system, a big belief system story for this reason, and that is this, there is not one gene that causes cancer. There's not one gene, you have that gene, you get cancer. No, not one. I said, well, we're not even the.

BRCA gene, you know, even though it's a very high rate of cancer, it's not 100%, which means the environment has an impact.

That'S what the point is.

50 years ago or 60 or 100 years ago had less cancer than they do now because of environmental influences of our diet and environmental toxins for sure.

Well, thank you because that's exactly where the issue comes down to, the issue comes down to this. Where did the cancer come from? I can tell you, ready? They followed the fate of what happens when a baby is adopted into a family where there's cancer running in that family. the baby, adopted baby, will get the same family cancer with the same probability as any natural siblings, except the adopted baby has totally different genetics. So where did the cancer come from? Being in the family in that first seven years of programming, cancer is a program. And you can change cancer by changing the program. But if you believe the cancer is genetically controlled, which means you have no control, then you all of a sudden say I'm a victim and then you want to kill all the cancer cells because that's the technology. And I go, the cancer cells are not the problem, they're the symptom. That's the result of a problem. And so you can kill all the damn cancer cells you want, but you never got to the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem was something that caused a cell to become cancer. and all of a sudden we go back to the consciousness and the programming. And the same thing, diabetes type two, 100% environment, 100% environment. And I go, so why is this important? Because as you've been talking about, let's get away from the idea that I am a genetically programmed individual. No, I'm a creator and I'm creating this. And the emphasis is how? through the blood, the chemistry, two parts, nutrition and information. And the idea about it is this. If you fail on the nutrition, it's like the machine will break down. That's what the function is. If you don't take care of the car, it breaks down. When you look in the junkyard and you see all the cars piled up, I say, is that because they were built wrong, genetically incorrect? I go, no, no. it was driver error that put those cars into the junkyard. It's driver error that's responsible for 99 of disease on this planet.

So, Bruce, this is really powerful work. I mean, it's just elucidated the, the sort of beautiful ways in which, you know, our environment, our beliefs, our attitudes, our thoughts literally speak to every cell in our body. And, you know, it's, it, for me, it's sometimes can be a bit daunting because, you know, if you, if you are in a negative spiral or if you you know, beliefs that you feel like are so rigid, you have to be able to learn how to rework your thinking. You know, I recently had a friend go to Hoffman, which is a sort of a, I don't know, it's a seven day intensive reworking and reparenting of yourself and reprogramming of your brain from your childhood trauma. And it was just profound to see how it helped him to kind of re-shift some of the automatic ways of thinking and automatic ways of being that he had. Now, there are many ways to do this. There's many approaches. There's many programs. There's Byron Katie. There's, you know, my friend Shelley Lefkoe's work, which is amazing. Hoffman therapy. There's a lot of ways to get to this. Medicine ceremonies, MDMA assisted psychedelic therapy. But I think it's an important thing to realize that your health depends on your mindset and your way of seeing the world and your beliefs and your attitudes. And it's not a Harry Potter kind of spiritual concept. It's actually physiology and biology.

It's chemistry. Yeah. Yeah.

And I always, you always say the greatest Pharmacy is the one between your ears. And I think we don't have real Pharmacy. The only real Pharmacy. Well, there's other pharmacies.

It's a real Pharmacy for this reason. If I take a drug and the drug affects me, that means there's a receptor that is tuned to that drug. I go, well, if you have a receptor on your cell tuned to that drug, do you think it was put on that? Sell waiting for the pharmaceutical company to create the drug. I say no. If you got a receptor for the drug, that means you already make that drug.

That's right.

If you're not making it, then it's not the, the problem is why is that drug not working? That's right.

I mean, the receptor for mushrooms or LSD or MDMA or... Change consciousness.

You get out of it.

Cannabinoids or pot or cannabis are all in your brain and that's why they work. So you already have these. We actually have endogenous, meaning our own molecules that regulate these pathways. We just have to learn how to activate them. Yeah.

The whole idea about it is that if you're taking a drug, first thing is this, the only reason that drug works is because you already have a receptor for that drug. And if you already have a receptor for that drug, then by definition, you already manifest or can manifest that drug. And then you have to say, why is it not working? I say, what's your mindset? why do some people, why do people get sick? A lot of them. I'll give you a simple reason. They go in their life, okay, it has to do what is the program? Let's start with that. How do I know what my programs are? I say, why? Well, you weren't in the last trimester of pregnancy. The fetus had no conscious awareness of what was going on. It downloaded programs, but not being aware. You're born, you were programmed a whole year from zero to one by what? Watching, downloading. I say, okay, tell me the program you got when you were zero. I don't know. I wasn't there. I go, no. Okay, you program another whole year from one to two. Tell me the program that you got in them. I wasn't aware of what was going on. Two to three at the end by near three, you can start to remember some images that come in. Okay. so I'm going to tell you right now, simple fact, what are your programs? And the answer is most people have no idea what the hell their programs are, why they weren't there. But then here comes the beautiful resolution. 95% of your life is from the program. So your life is a printout of your programs. And I say, so what does that mean? I say, look at your life, very simple right now. Just look, I say, the things you like, that come into your life. They come in because you have programs to acknowledge and support those. But here's the one, the things that you want and you have to work hard. You have to put a lot of effort into it. I'm going to make it. I'm working hard. I'm working hard to make it. I go, why are you working so hard? And the answer you ready? Simple. The program you downloaded doesn't support that. And so you're trying to override 95% process from a million times more powerful processor from 5% from a small conscious processor, mathematically it doesn't work. And therefore, look at your life right now. You want to know what the programs are? You're manifesting from the program. So I say, don't worry about the things that come into your life that you like because that program is already there. So don't have to deal with it. But you have to start looking and say, I'm not successful in relationship. I'm not successful in health. I'm not successful on my job. And I go, we have been led to believe that I'm just a victim and these things are happening to me. And I go, no, that's your own program. And so I can tell you right now, you want to see what your programs are? Look right now, whatever you're struggling to accommodate or to create, that struggle is not because the universe won't give it to you. That struggle is your program doesn't support that conclusion. So now you have an idea of, I have programs that aren't working. And now, of course, you know, if I wait here, I think Mark will ask me a question, how do you change those programs? But I'll wait until he asks me that question.

Well, I really love it. So just tell us quickly, because we have to wrap up. I wanted to sort of just quickly, how do we change that program?

Okay. The first thing of understanding is what is the program? again, look at where the struggle is. But then you want to put in a new program. And I say, well, there are three ways to change the program. I say, what are they? I say, the first way is how did you get the programs in the first place? In the first seven years, your brain was operating at a lower vibration than consciousness called theta. Remember, some of us old enough remember the old days, a hypnotherapist would have a watch and he'd swing it back and forth. And as he's swinging and you're supposed to watch it go back and forth, he would say, you,'re getting tired, you're getting sleepy. I said, why? Because when you're awake, you're functioning from the higher vibration of consciousness. But the moment you fall asleep, guess what? It drops down to the next lower vibration, theta. So if you can be in theta, that's what the hypnotherapist is trying to get you to relax. if you can get into Theta, then it's hypnosis and you can download, just boom. So I go, number one way of downloading, get in state of hypnosis. How do you do that? I say, fall asleep. Why? The moment your Consciousness disconnects for the evening, the moment it disconnects the next period of time, a short period of time, the brain is operating in Theta hypnosis. So if you put on earphones or earbuds, with a program you want to be true in your life and you can get them self-help programs. And I say every night you put the earphones or earbuds on and start the program. The moment you fall asleep, you don't hear the program, but the subconscious does. It's in a state of hypnosis. So repeating this every night, it's called self-hypnosis by repeating this every night, you have to do it a number of nights because it's not in theta for a long period, but long enough to make a change. And all you, I love it. What's the, how hard is it? And I say, well, to learn fall asleep, I go, oh, okay, that's not too much work. You know, all I have to do is fall asleep. And the earbuds are going to play a program that my subconscious will pick up. Repetition of that will change the program. So that's called self-hypnosis number two, that theta phase ends by age seven. But you still learned habits. You learned how to drive a car, play an instrument, drive a bike, ride a bike. I say you learned a habit after theta. I go, how did you do it that way? So number two, repetition, practice. The new age phrase which always makes me laugh is fake it till you make it. Meaning you're not a happy person, then all day long say to yourself, as many times you can, I am happy. I am happy.

You know, I always say that you can actually, act into your feelings or feel into your actions, right? So if you actually can change your actions, your feelings will change, right?

Right. And make it permanent. You just repeat it because that's how a habit is formed, repetition. So repeat the new habit. Repeat it and repeat it and one day you wake up, you don't have to repeat it because now it's downloaded and once it's downloaded, you never have to do it again. That's the beautiful part. So that's number two. First one, again, is self-hypnosis. Second one is repetition. And the third one is a new version of psychology called energy psychology. You've listed a couple before, Mark. One I use is called psych-k. They basically represent super learning. What the hell is super learning? I go, maybe you've seen somebody read a book where they just move their finger down the page. As fast as they move that finger down, they read all the words. That's super learning. Well, if you can engage super learning, then you can rewrite a program in minutes. You can walk away 10-15 minutes later with a whole new way of life. It works. But you have to get into that super learning and there's processes that could get you there. One of them is called Cook's Hook Up. And so it basically says three ways to change. At night, put the earphones on self-hypnosis. During the daytime, repetition of what you want to be true. Just keep repeating it. Just keep repeating it. Number three, engage one of the energy psychology modalities. And let me just offer the public on my website, simple, bruce Lipton.com under resources. I got 25 or more different energy psychology modalities. Mark brought up a few of them. I've got those on the website. Go check it out. There's a little paragraph about this process and then a website. And I say, why is it important? And the answer is this. you want to take control of your life, you've only lost it because you invisible subconscious programming and that's manifesting in your life. Use any of those three processes and you can rewrite those programs and become powerful. Let me just close with this. I want to take your time. There's a movie called the Matrix and it's listed as science fiction. I go, no, no, Matrix is a doc, it's a documentary. I go, what do you mean? Well, the premise is everybody's been programmed. I go, that's not a premise, that's a reality. Everybody's been programmed. The Jesuits knew this program and told their followers and nobody understood what they were saying. They said, Give me a child until it is seven and I will show you the man. What did they know? They knew that the first seven years, give me the child till it's seven, was programming and the rest of the life of that person, 95% comes from the program. So give me a child till seven, and I'll show you the man. And then they created Catholic school. And where the programming started. And the point about all this is, if we understand this and you start to recognize the truth of what we're talking about, then what would happen? Like in the movie, the Matrix, they said you can get out of the program.

Yeah, that's what you're offering, right?

How can you get out? Yeah. And I go, falling in love. is the same as taking the red pill in the Matrix.

I love that.

Get out of the program. I say, why? And here's the simple reason. Why do you play the program? Because conscious mind's thinking. I say, what happens when you fall in love? I say, you stop thinking. You stay what is called mindful. Why? You waited for this person to show up. They're here. This isn't a time to think and disconnect. It's time to be here. Be here now. I go, what happens? When you fall in love like that, you stop playing the program. I say, then what is the result? 24 hours, 24 hours your life went from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You meet this person, you fall in love, 24 hours later, oh, life is beautiful. It's heaven on earth. It's the honeymoon. I go, that is what would happen if you stop playing the program. the honeymoon is a creation from the conscious created mind, not from the program. And so when you stop playing the program, heaven on earth, I go, guess what? You could have this your whole life. It's only when you start thinking again that the programs show up and throw a monkey wrench in. So what if you rewrite the programs we just talked about? And I say, well then guess what? Whether you're paying attention with your conscious mind or you're thinking and the subconscious takes over, but if the subconscious has the same program as the conscious wishes, then whether you're thinking or not thinking, you're still playing wishes and manifesting heaven on earth.

The exposome is the term for the sum total of all the toxic exposures that we get in our environment. And they can be both internal and external toxins.

And they can be a thought, can be a toxin, right? Very good. If you have a bad inner dialogue, Excellent. It's literally talking to every aspect of your body.

Excellent, excellent point. I actually didn't actually have that in my outline.

It's literally everything that happens to you and watches over you your whole life is what you're exposed to throughout your life.

Exactly, yeah. And even the stuff that you don't even know, which is the in utero exposure, you know, there's, you know, a lot of like some of the children who go have parents or the mother who's in a very stressful environment, those stress hormones of the mother actually the epigenetics gets transmitted to the child. So these kids who are born in war-torn countries, they actually have epigenetic stressors. They've actually shown that the epigenetic methylation of people that are brought up in war countries have a different genetic exposure. Yeah, yeah. So the exposome, there's a paper in science that actually goes over this. And when I first read this paper, it sort of sort of put a light bulb on me to really sort of change the way of how I think of how is it that we interact with all of these environmental toxins. Now, the good news is that our body is able to detoxify. That's really a good thing. In fact, a lot of studies have shown that the people who age well and longevity is oftentimes associated with how our body deals with toxins. And I call that the George Burns Right. George Burns had two martinis and a cigar and he lived to 100. So, he had good ability to detoxify. And my father, my father was a dentist and he was like George Burns. He liked his martinis and his cigars and he was exposed to mercury as a dentist and he lived in 94.

And he was actually quite healthy. Reminds me of UB Blake was a famous musician. He said, he lived to be well over 100. He said, if I don't know I.

Was gonna live so long, I would have taken better care of myself. Right. Exactly. Right. So we define the exposome is that sum total of both internal and external toxins. Now, unfortunately, today, we take the environment of toxins.

Or influences, not just toxins. People think of toxins like pesticides, mercury.

But it's really everything that happens to you. Everything that happens to you, exactly. Inside and out. Inside and out. Endotoxins and exotoxins. So we actually live in a pretty toxic environment now. There's a lot of air pollution. depending on where you live will determine your risk for asthma. When you live in more of a city where there's particulate matter from cars and diesel fumes, you are can be more susceptible to breathing issues. Your water, very, very important. I mean, our body is 60 to 70% water. So, what type of water are you drinking? Does it have, you know, some of the chemicals that leach in? I think there are there's over in New York, there's a, I think it was a case where they had some flame retardant that was being used by the military that seeped into the water systems and now the people have to get bottled water.

Most tap water in America is full of all sorts of chemicals.

Oh, Michigan had that big scandal with the lead in the water.

Yeah, Flint, Michigan. But, you know, just the average water in America, there's 38 contaminants according to one study I read, including everything from from pesticides, flame retardants, antibiotics, hormones, prescription medication. Because when you take the birth control pill, where do you think that goes? When it's metabolized into your urine and then where does that go? And then it gets all cleaned up and used again as your water supply.

So, we are definitely exposed to enormous amounts of these compounds.

Right.

And the concept in mainstream medicine is that, you know, the way they study toxicology is that you've got to give a certain to get cancer. And if you give that dose and you don't get or give a dose and you don't get cancer, then it's safe. So we can use it, right? We can just use these chemicals. That's an old way of viewing toxicology. And what we're finding out now is that toxins at very low doses, things like BPA, which is bisphenol A, are actually endocrine disruptors. So two of the compounds that I find that potentially had one of the biggest impact in terms of very small amounts having a big impact are things like Atrazine.

That's a pesticide.

Atrazine is actually an herbicide. Atrazine is an herbicide. And there's some fantastic work. If you go onto the internet and you Google Tyrone Hayes and Atrazine, he did some work showing that low doses of Atrazine, which is used in corn, actually has endocrine disrupting molecules and it can actually cause a male frog to turn into a female frog. That's not normal. I wonder if that's why we're seeing.

A decreased in male fertility. And a lot of these are estrogen molecules. They're like estrogen. And, you know, we study them, like you said, in a lab and you get one chemical and you see if it's safe. But things combine together and become synergistic. Yeah, absolutely. It's not like one plus one equals two. It's one plus one equals 100. Exactly. It's like, for example, if you take Tylenol, that might be okay. If you alcohol, that might be okay. If you drink alcohol and take talent at the same time, even the normal.

Amount, you get liver failure. Exactly. It's a case report. I remember reading that in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The guy was, you know, having one or two martinis and popping Tylenol, and he had liver failure. In the normal dose, not like overdosing. Yes. Right. And it's one of the most common reasons for admission in hospital with liver failure. So I think we have to be really conscious of all these combinations of exposures. And I, you know, when I think about the exposome, I think of of our diet, I think of our thoughts and feelings and our emotional brain speaking to every cell in our body and our immune system. Our perception. Yeah, our perception. Even your thoughts influence your microbiome. So, there's little bugs in your gut are changing and listening to what you're thinking. Not to put pressure on you, but if you have a negative inner dialogue, it's probably not benefiting your health. Absolutely. And of course, there's your our environmental exposures, right, which we talked about, all these environmental toxins both from pesticides and chemicals in our food and the air and the water and more. And then of course there's our internal toxins, right, which can be produced by bad bugs in the gut, so your microbiome influences everything. And I think what I learned in medical school is that, you know, your health is sort of determined by your genes. Like, you know, you're at risk for diabetes, you're at risk for Alzheimer's, you're at risk for this and that, autoimmune disease. But turns out it's the exposome that is thing that determines 95% of what.

Happens with your health in terms of chronic disease. It's not your DNA. Exactly. And I, you know, you're in control. It's what your DNA is exposed to. Exactly. And I, I, you know, we do the genetic testing here, and there is this concept or this idea that your DNA is your destiny. You know, heart disease runs in my family, diabetes runs in my family, Alzheimer's runs in my family. And there may be a genetic predisposition. And my analogy to this is a loaded gun. Genes can be a loaded gun if you have genes that maybe push you in the direction of one biochemical pathway. It's good to know that. But a loaded gun doesn't kill anyone until you pull the trigger.

Yes. So environment loads.

Environment.

Environment pulls the trigger.

Exactly. Genes load the gun. Absolutely. And, and then what we've also found, this is really interesting, is that things that we thought were strict Mendelian genetics, like Huntington's Korea, they've actually studied the genes of people who have Huntington's genes, and they do not clinically manifest Huntington's disease.

Yeah.

So there's more to it than, than, you know, we really fully understand. so genes are important, but they're not the, the main thing. I would venture to say that when you look at things, you know, from a number standpoint, it's probably 70 to 80% is environment and 20, 30% are genes.

Yeah.

And, and, you know, in one, in one of the studies I read on the exposome, they said 95 of chronic disease is driven by the exposome. And, and I, I, you know, I think I heard a guy say recently that it's, it's not your DNA, it's your dinner that matters most. And I that is a great quote because it sort of speaks to the fact that we can't change our genes, but we can change how those genes are turned on or off or expressed. And the exposome is essentially is talking about what our biology and our genes are exposed to over the course of our lifetime and how that influences the course of our health. And in functional medicine, and here at the Ulchewala Center, the things that we do really well are look at the exposome. So tell us more about, you know, what are the kinds of things you think of when you're looking at a patient to assess their exposome and how that's contributing to their health.

Well, you know, we mentioned earlier about your experience with heavy metals. So heavy metals can be disruptive. And so we oftentimes will look and assess for heavy metal toxicity, have a heavy metal burden. So when we check for heavy metals, guess what? Everyone has them. We all, we all have, we all have exposure.

I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a negative heavy metals. I did, I did it a few times. People who are, are vegans and never eat fish and they've always never done that.

Yeah.

I have no fillings.

Yeah.

Very rarely do you ever see and probably are good detoxifiers. Yeah. And then you just. But almost everybody else has some.

A small amount.

A small.

A small amount. And some have a lot. And they're. They're. They're in the environment. So, you know, burning of coal. You know, coal gives off mercury and it gets into the water. So you. In lead. In lead. Yeah. So you get some exposure. So heavy metals disrupt enzymes in the body. They disrupt detoxification enzymes. So things like mercury, lead. aluminum, arsenic, cadmium for cigarette smokers. In fact, some of the first time I actually learned that is when I had a patient who was a heavy cigarette smoker and I checked heavy metals and the cadmium was off the charts. I'm saying, where's this coming from? And it turns out that cigarettes, the tobacco, for whatever reason, it accumulates cadmium and you see heavy cadmium in cigarette smokers. So heavy metals can be a source of toxicity.

They can cause all kinds of symptoms, right? So, give us some general symptoms that you'd see in a patient with heavy metal toxicity. Because when you go to your regular doctor, they're like, what is your lead and mercury and arsenic and cadmium and aluminum levels? They're not checking that, right?

Yeah. Well, the other thing that's also interesting is that when you look at metals, there's this whole theory now about neurodegenerative conditions. And, it's thought that metals play a role in what's called metallo-stasis. So metals disrupt the folding of proteins. So when you have excess amounts of metals in the body, it causes proteins to misfold. And misfolded proteins are tied in with a lot of neurodegenerative conditions, including things like ALS, things like Alzheimer's. And there's an interesting study that just came out this past week, and I'll send you the paper, about the role of excess iron. So we think iron is good. Well, guess what?

Not too much.

Too much iron is not good. And especially free iron. Iron is a very reactive metal. I was a chemistry major, so I always liked to always look at the chemistry. So when you look at- that explains it all.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm a science nerd. So when you look at metal- I.

Was a Buddhism major.

And so iron is reactive and it reacts with oxygen. So when you leave, you know, something metal metallic outside, it rusts because it, it oxidizes with, it interacts with oxygen. So our bodies actually keep iron wrapped up, and we keep that in the molecule called hemoglobin. We wrap up iron. And if you don't, if you have free iron in the body, you get the Fenton reaction. Basically, your body starts to rust. And I've seen this in patients with hemochromatosis. So when you have hemochromatosis, which is a genetic condition that causes you to not be able to get rid of your your iron, which is a metal.

Which is- About 10% of the population has some degree of that.

Exactly, yeah. And, what happens is iron is found in all tissues because blood is in all tissues. And, when that iron can't get detoxified, you build up iron in your liver, your heart, your pancreas, and your brain. And, your joints. And, guess what? You rust.

You get a rusty brain.

Exactly. You can develop- in fact, one first time I had your pancreas. Exactly. You get diabetes, liver failure, heart, cardiomyopathy, you name it.

Heart failure.

Exactly.

So, dementia.

Dementia. Exactly. That's a mess. So, we call it metal trafficking and looking at the role of metals is really, I think, important. Aluminum also, excess amounts of aluminum has been associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's. And again, it's probably related to these.

Metals actually causing proteins to misfold.

So, we shouldn't be using that aluminum deodorant or cooking from those aluminum pans. or aluminum, you know, antacids, soda cans and. Yeah, but like the.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

Antacids often have aluminum. Exactly.

Yeah.

There's a lot of aluminum in us for. So, so heavy metal. So we, we see heavy metals as one of the big exposure areas.

How, how, for example, would we assess someone's heavy metals? Because we do the, you can do the urine provocation testing for, for heavy metals, which is, you know, what we do. a lot in patients with provoking them with dmPS and.

Or dmsa.

Or dmsa. Exactly. Yeah, you can do that. You can also assess it in the blood. And there's, and there's different. Like, when you check Mercury, there's two different forms of Mercury. Mercury takes organic and inorganic Mercury. And, you know, organic Mercury tends to.

Accumulate in the hair. So you can actually assess.

That's more from, like, fish, for example.

Fish.

Yeah.

Like methyl Mercury. Right, right. So you can assess it in the.

Hair, you can assess it in the blood, you can also assess things in.

And they sort of, each of them give you a different perspective.

And inorganic is from your fillings.

From fillings.

And from pollution.

Yeah.

You know, the thing is people say, oh, you got these silver fillings or no problem. The dentists say they're great. But, you know, you and I both know that when we've seen these patients, they do have high levels of inorganic mercury. You can look at their tests, and it does affect their health. And you remove the fillings, the mercury levels come way down. I've seen this over and over again, and then patients feel better now. now, this is not well accepted as a thing in dentistry, except if you look at what most dentists do now, they moved all the way from these, quote, silver fillings, which are mostly mercury.

Yeah.

Without saying they're bad. It's like, well, they're not bad, but.

We don't do it anymore. There's too much of a liability. It's, it's a, it's a can of worms. So, so basically, this is, if they were to admit that there's a problem, because once you remove mercury from the.

Tooth, it now becomes a toxic waste product.

And it's fully regulated. Fully regulated.

Yeah.

That's interesting. So ask your dentist. It's fine in your mouth. Yeah. But remove But now it's a toxic product. Yeah, that's interesting. Ask your dentist, if mercury is so safe, then why can't you throw it in the garbage and why do you have to dispose of it by the regulations set forth by the EPA as a toxic waste? I always thought that's an interesting point. If you can't answer that, then you shouldn't be putting it in your mouth. So we can look in the blood, we can look at the urine. The problem with the typical blood test is if you haven't had a current exposure, your body clears it after 90 days. and it doesn't necessarily get rid of it, it might store it in your tissues, in your liver, in your muscles, in your brain, and so you can't really tell, and that's why this challenge test can help pull it out. Exactly.

And then we get a real more accurate view of what's happened over the course of your life. And the big thing, this is a clinical program, I'm sure you've seen this, is lead. Now, we tend to have less lead toxicity now because we're not using lead paint, we don't use lead and gasoline, we don't have lead pipes, or at least unless you have old buildings. But I have seen this in a few patients, especially in women, men where in menopausal women, after menopause, they'll have accelerated bone loss. So lead gets stored where? In the bone. In the bone. Yes, in the bone. So as a woman goes through menopause and she's had a body burden of lead and it's sort of sitting in the bones, and all of a sudden you're now digging up the bones and you're peeing, when you go through menopause, you pee out your bones. That's how you do it. And we can, you can just do a test called bone resorption test. which checks for the collagen breakdown products of bone. And, when you see increased bone resorption, you know that they are peeing out their bones. And, when you see high levels of lead, you know that they're actually getting exposed. It's like dripping lead out of the body.

I mean, not actual bones coming out of your urinary tract. It's just a breakdown product.

Well, it's not a breakdown product.

But, that would hurt.

But it's sort of like, you know, it's like, you know, when you get osteoporosis, where do your bones go? You literally pee them out.

Well, speaking about the bones, digging up the bones, there was a study I read years ago that they had to dig up this graveyard in Europe and they had to remove the bones and put them somewhere else. And so what they did was they decided to check the bones for lead and they compared that to today and they found there was a thousand times more lead in the bones of modern people than there were 300 years ago. Wow. Yeah. So it's in there. That's, that's incredible. And I think that, you know, Mercury is also one of those factors that is just so common because it comes in our diet, it comes in our fillings, it comes in pollution. And it's probably one of the most undiagnosed things I've ever seen. And I, I certainly became an expert in it not by sort of design, but because I got really sick for mercury poisoning. And that's what led to me to have this, you know, chronic fatigue syndrome.

And kind of figure this whole thing out. And then, you know, what's the old, the old term is the mad hatter. Remember, you know, in Alice in Wonderland, the mad hatter.

Right.

Well, they used to use mercury when they made hats. And what they found out is that when you got mad, if you had enough mercury, it affected your brain. You'd be, yeah, you'd have delirium and.

And other symptoms because it has a brain. the other thing about these problems with toxins is that they don't manifest the same in everybody, right? So they might make you crazy, they might give you autism, they might give you Alzheimer's, they might give you chronic fatigue syndrome, they might give you an autoimmune disease. They might cause weight gain. I had a woman who was a fitness trainer and ate perfectly and she had these 40 pounds she couldn't lose. And I took her history and thought she might have some mercury issues and we tested her and she had very, very high levels. and we treated her and over the course of the number of months without changing anything else just by treating her mercury, her weight dropped 40 pounds. Wow. Wow.

That's amazing.

So it can, yeah, because it's, we know that there's these compounds called obesogens, which are environmental toxins that cause obesity. They disrupt your mitochondrial function, your energy production, your hormones and metabolism.

So really, it's important to really dig deep. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make.

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