Sleep Genetics (& 3 Ways To Crush A Good Night Of Sleep), Why You Get Depressed When You Get Bored, Personalized Exercise & Diet Based on Genetics & Much More With Kashif Khan Of The DNA Company.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, because of this journey and because of learning that I healed myself and then I healed my mother, like she was literally in bed, did not get out of bed. She now goes to the gym five days a week and has a, like a beautiful full life. I found through my children that there were certain gaps in terms of diet, how they needed to academically, why they were different, you know, how the neurochemicals of their brain drove different behaviors. And so that's when I went to the science team that I found in Mansour.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show. Oh, hey, and one other thing regarding this podcast with Kashif of the DNA company, we actually, when we finished, he said, dude, I forgot to tell you, we found this super cool new thing about kind of like religion versus science and a change in the DNA that occurred some number of years ago. And this is kind of like, you know, stuff I, he, he wasn't sure he wanted to bring it up on the podcast, but I was like, dude, let's put this on the show. So after the podcast seems to be ending, stay on because there's, there's a little bit of an extra addendum at the end that I think you'll really enjoy. All right, here we go. Well, folks, a lot of new science and research and testing protocols have emerged lately in the field of genetic testing and DNA analysis. So I decided it was high time to revisit this topic on the podcast. Cause it's been a while since I've talked about how you can use your genetics to make more informed decisions about your health, about your exercise, about your nutrition, your supplementation, even like your career and your relationships. And there's a lot of research now on sleeping genetic types and parenting and personality types and mood and behavior and cancer, particularly breast cancer and the so called Fountain of Youth and a whole lot more. So I decided to get one of the guys who I know who is extremely well informed in DNA testing on the podcast for you. His name is Kashif Khan and he's the chief executive officer and the founder of a company called the DNA Company. And I've actually, I've done podcasts with the DNA company in the past, all which I'll link to if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com DnaCompanyPodcast that's BenGreenfieldLife.com DNACompanyPodcast but basically they Personalize medicine, they personalize health through giving you unique insights into your genome. And Kashif is going to be able to tell you a lot more about what they do and what he in particular does in the company and what you should know about testing your own DNA. But I also know that he has a super interesting history in terms of how he got interested in all this stuff in the first place. So, Kashif, welcome to the show, man.

It's a pleasure, man. Good to be here.

Yeah. And I think that's a perfect place to kick off, by the way, the history of your experience with DNA testing. I'd love to hear how you got interested in all this stuff in the first place.

Yeah, sure. Well, it didn't happen in the lab or university, so it's not the typical story, but essentially I was sick and a lot of the functional medicine type stories start this way.

Like, yeah, the wounded healer.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And what did I have? I had crazy migraines, which was probably the worst part. Debilitating, where my business partner would literally be driving me home and I'd be stopping to vomit outside of the car while we were going, because that's how bad the pain was.

Oh, wow.

Eczema, psoriasis. I had gut issues on and off depression. And my challenge was that all of these things are being treated as separate siloed problems. There's a pill for this, a doctor for this, a scan for this, when really it wasn't until I dove into my genome, only because the answer to the question, why? Like, I kept asking all these several different doctors, why is this happening? I know what's happening. You're telling me what pill to take and what cream to put on my skin. But can you tell me why? Like, what am I supposed to change? And you get this blank stare, like, we're not supposed to go there.

Right.

It's not in their toolkit and nothing. It's not their fault. They're literally not trained on asking that or answering that question. So I started down the journey myself and found in my genome, first of all, I was disappointed. I got a genetics test done, thinking that there's something, quote, unquote, genetically wrong with me, and there wasn't. I couldn't find a problem. Then I found some brilliant science happening in Toronto, where I actually am, around the world of functional genomics. Meaning how do you apply pathway interpretation? Not just what does each gene do, but what is your body doing? And then what gene is instructing all those processes that we already understand so well. And I found there was a central hub of genes that forget about what version, what snp, what variant, these words. I didn't even have the genes. If your DNA is your human instruction manual, there was a page missing for me. Gone, torn out.

When you say you didn't have the genes, you mean you can literally not have certain SNPs?

Yeah. Well, a SNP is a variant on a gene. So A gene is 20,000 letters long, and somewhere along the line a T is a C instead of the T which is supposed to be. And so now that gene functions differently. Right. What if you don't even have the gene? Literally completely missing. It's missing from your genetic code. And it's something called a copy number variation, meaning you have either less or multiple copies. You can also have additional copies where you're supercharging the activity there, that instruction.

Right.

You're doing it way beyond normal human capacity. And where I was missing this was in my glutathione, or detox pathway.

Is that common, by the way, to have certain genes just missing?

So here's the thing. It's extremely uncommon in terms of the. So of the 22,000 genes that we have that make up our human genetic code, it's not common at all. But the place where it's extremely common is one of the most important places for cellular health, which is why it affects so many people. So your glutathione pathway, the gstt, GSTM and gstp, of those three that are a majority of that glutathione, like, let's find toxins, let's bind them, let's get rid of them. The gstm, in our research we studied, and this is something we'll get into, we had a really unique research model where we sat in front of 7,000 people clinically, and that's kind of the gap that I saw was missing from genetics. Like actually clinically reviewing people and understanding not only their genetics, but their physical traits, how does IT Express? Right. 49% of the people that we studied don't have the GSTM1 gene. Wow. Don't have it. Absolutely missing. And it's very obvious. And I'll tell you why. 40% only have one copy. Mom or dad didn't get both. And less than 10% have both copies of this particular gene. Why? Its primary focus is gut detox. Right. So that first line defense, other things enter your body, sometimes to your skin, but mostly because you eat them and you breathe them. And it's meant to have this kind of first Line of defense to prevent things from entering your blood. Well, up until, what, two generations ago, food wasn't a threat. We didn't need it. Right. What we now suffer from and food leading to so much chronic disease, not only because of the food itself, but all the chemicals and preservatives and everything that comes along with it. Our gut didn't need to have this.

First line of defense.

Okay, so you mean from like an overall metabolic efficiency standpoint or kind of cutting out the need for genes that may not serve one. We didn't really have as high a need for detoxification in our ancestral past. And thus the deletion of that glutathione gene really wouldn't have been much of an issue.

Exactly. The people that survived didn't survive because of this. They survived because of other things. So when they passed their genetic code on, they weren't necessarily passing on this protective measure because they didn't need it.

That's interesting. Okay.

And so it was through that that I discovered not only that gene, but also the GSTT one, which is kind of like the police force in your blood that's going and finding these toxins and getting rid of them. I was also missing that. So where was I during this whole process Is in my office building. There was a manufacturing company downstairs that was putting toxic pollutants into the air vents every day that I was breathing in.

Oh, man.

Yeah. And year after year after that. Now, keep in mind, my business partner was the guy driving me home that didn't have a problem because he had an extra copy of these jeans, and he had no problem drinking paint or whatever he wanted to and just peeing it out. Right. For me, that slow drip of toxic insult caused me to get eczema.

So. Right.

Because all of a sudden, this inflammatory state that you're in, these spokes start to express for the central hub of a genetic failure gap, where you just can't. Environmental exposure or nutrition exposure or lifestyle exposure, whatever that load or trigger is that you weren't designed to cope with.

And so at that point, did you just do, like, one of those CRISPR gene editing things and kind of insert that gene back into your body? Is that the next step so that.

Maybe in 10 years from now, we'll do a part two to this, and maybe that will be the case for now. So that technology, in theory, works. We just don't know how the human body is going to adopt it from head to toe. So, crispr, there's been one human project that was a retinal eye health issue that the FDA actually approved that actually worked. But it's jurisdictionally isolated. It's like in the eye and we don't yet know how to take that thing and make it. You have 50 trillion cells in your body. How do you get them all to adopt this change? That's where we have a bit of a gap right now.

Yeah. And obviously the CRISPR gene editing. I am joking as a matter of fact. I think there's so many things that could go wrong. Didn't they throw the guy in prison? The biophysicist who created a bunch of gene edited babies over in China. I think he actually got in big trouble for that.

He's in jail. He's actually in jail. Yeah.

Playing God might get you in jail. Okay, so with the DNA company then how did you come to get involved with that?

So it was because of this journey and because of learning that I healed myself and then I healed my mother. Like she was literally in bed, did not get out of bed. She now goes to the gym five days a week and has a beautiful full life. I found through my children that there were certain gaps in terms of diet, how they needed to academically, why they were different, how the neurochemicals of their brain drove different behaviors. And so that's when I went to the science team that I found in Mansoor, who you know very well.

Yeah, Mansoor Mohammed. I've interviewed him before because I did my testing with the DNA company and I should tell people this by the way. I did a really fascinating walkthrough with Mansour about my genes and my son's genes and. And you talked about your kids and learning. I found out my sons don't have one of the SNPs that allows them or one of the genes that allows them to create ample amounts of brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is miracle growth for the brain. So they use lion's mane. They also are missing a couple of those glutathione genes and they take glutathione on a regular basis. A little bit of sluggish methylation. So they both supplement with liver. And they kind of have a step up in life now because all of a sudden the things that might have held them back from a genetic standpoint were just basically crushing with targeted supplementation. They just have their own little section in their refrigerator where they grab their stuff and they take it each morning. And it's fantastic because I don't consider any of this testing to be defeatist or discouraging or distressing when it comes to finding out something that's wrong with your body. I kind of find it to be empowering because they can just go out and make the changes and be even better.

What you just described is exactly where I felt that I was personally failed through my first go about around genetics and what needed to be fixed, which was I thought again, when nothing was working, let me find if I have a genetic problem. And the results you would get back is you got an 80% chance of Alzheimer's, you got a 60% chance of prostate cancer or breast cancer, depending who's taking the test and things along that line. Because the interpretation, not the gene testing, anybody can test for a gene, what does it mean? That gap was limited by clinical studies around trying to build a drug. Right. So pinpointing the needle in the haystack, this gene causes something and if we can turn that switch on or off one day it's going to be a multi billion dollar product.

Right.

So that limited interpretation, what was scientifically sort of the regular or mainstream interpretation to this statistical, like you got, you're in the 80% bucket. So that's where things started. Then we realized if we're telling you have an 80% chance of Alzheimer's, we're also telling you have a 20% chance of not getting it with the exact same genetic profile. Right. So what was the difference? The difference was the environment, nutrition and lifestyle habits of the healthy and the sick. Meaning with a genetic propensity you're not born sick. With most chronic conditions, you know, 50, 55, 60 is when they start to happen. Because it takes that many years of making the wrong choices, misaligned to your sort of biochemistry capability based on your genome to then eventually have a problem. So if we understand like you've done for your sons as you described, what exactly they need to be optimal, what are the genetic holes and gaps? That's step one. Here's the thing that they don't do well, this gene instruction is poor, or this one is missing, or this one is maybe a little too strong. Hormonally that could be a problem. For example, here's the things, environment, nutrition and lifestyle. And there's two dials you can turn, remove the load. Here's the thing that I can deal with, so get rid of it. I can't deal with toxins, I shouldn't be around them. Second layer is increased capacity. Let's supplement or let's eat or let's exercise in a way that improves the capacity for the Thing that I inherently don't do well because the genetic code is weak. Now if you take that approach as opposed to genetic step equals 80% chance of Alzheimer's, it's much more functional and actionable. It's taking this thing that's scary. I don't want to know which is commonly what you hear to now that I know, I know exactly what my playbook is. What do I do in environmental lifestyle.

Right.

And that's where we brought it to.

Yeah, it's interesting too. Like a lot of this stuff can be relevant to exercise also. For example, I've done some exercise DNA based testing and I for example, have genes that allow me to recover very, very quickly. And I also have genes that give me a great, great deal of endurance and lactic acid tolerance. And so a couple of things that I know based on that is a, I can do small consistent bouts of training every single day. And I kind of realized this prior to doing the DNA test, but then it kind of affirmed what I thought. I don't do well with super duper big long workouts every few days versus consistent half hour workouts every day. I also have found that I can maintain pretty high levels of endurance without even training for endurance much. Whereas I need to put a little bit more money in the bank, so to speak, from a strength training standpoint because that's when I'm a little bit less genetically adapted for. So you can find some cool things in training as well. Gosh, I mean, you guys have a blog at the DNA company that's fantastic. I know you recently did one on how certain people have supervision that's less likely to decline with age. Some guys have, they're like 25% more likely to get man boobs if they're on testosterone treatment. There was another study that looked at whether you would or would not gain weight when you were in cold weather. And so it's crazy how much biochemical individuality that there is out there when it comes to these, these insights. And also what we can do when it comes to actionable and empowering activities that allow us to fight any uphill battle we might have when it comes to our genes. And so I actually did want to ask you about some stuff I haven't talked about before though on the podcast when it comes to genes. And one would be, you have a history of this that you share with me at one point. It would be the stuff related to mood and behavior and how genes impact things like depression, for example, and what you guys have learned. And you can do about that.

That's the thing that first was the aha moment for me, even more so than helping me get healthier because it was so easy to resonate with when you, when you find out that the way you behave is actually driven by genes that are instructing, to what degree do you experience certain neurochemicals, how long do they last, etc. So you can really map out how your brain at a personal level works. That was a wild moment for me because I'm an entrepreneur, I always have been and I found out I was actually wired to do this. You know, my brain is an entrepreneur brain. And by the way, whether it's we're dealing with a patient or practitioner, we always tell them start with the brain. Because when you realize how personalized you can get in terms of your mood and behavior, it's so much easier to work on the plan and have compliance and know how to structure it. Some people are more reward seeking, some people are more susceptible to anxiety, etc, etc, etc. So if you understand the brain first, you then understand exactly how to build your sort of path to improvement on the healthcare side. So taking depression as an example, like you said, which is something I had, I had it for a certain period of my life, not my entire life. And I believe that context has to be attached to the neurochemicals to equate the outcome. And what do I mean by that when it comes to the dopamine pathway? As an example, the way you experience dopamine pleasure or Reward is the DRD2 gene determines how dense your receptors are. To what degree do you actually experience pleasure and reward? Then there's a gene called mao, which kind of breaks down and metabolizes the dopamine to eventually get you back to normal and compt, which is often spoken on for hormones and methylation also clears out neurochemicals. So once you're done experiencing breaking down, this sort of broomstick comes along and gets rid of it. Right? So I have the absolute minimal density of DRD2 dopamine receptors. I have the fastest possible MAO and the fastest possible comped, which means I feel things way down here and before it's even started, boom, it's finished.

Yeah.

What happens? Well, addiction, depression or achievement. Why? Because you just don't get to feel. So you go find something that gives you that thing and then you constantly need more and more and bigger and bigger and bigger and you become addicted or depression because you don't find something to lean on and you just don't get that Satisfaction or pleasure or reward that the peers around you are getting. And so you fall into depression or achievement because you go down the reward path instead of the pleasure path. And you're doing the same thing you would have done in addiction, more and more and more and bigger and better and better, but you're doing it with reward as opposed to depression.

I actually did a whole podcast with a guy named Doug Brackman about this. He calls it the driven gene. And it is true. You either get depressed or you turn into a super successful whatever, a CEO or an Ironman triathlete, or somebody who just does achievement after achievement after achievement. Because you've figured out a way to alleviate the potential for depression is to just keep on pressing that trigger over and over again with preferably someone positive activities.

We call it warrior genetics. You're designed in this Persona to continue fighting, right? You're designed to constantly have something adverse that you're challenged with. And you go, and if you don't do that, then all of a sudden you. So this is why I've had all three in my younger years. When I was in my teens, growing up in poverty wasn't the best. And for, I think it was my 15th or 16th birthday, a friend knocked on my door with something that I should have never smoked, and I smoked it anyway. And I became addicted, right? Because that, that level of pleasure I had never experienced before. Then all of a sudden, my father passed away when I was in my late teens and I became responsible for my mom and my sister. And I just started working and working and working and working and it was like a switch got flipped. Complete reversal from this addictive, dysfunctional life to like, highly functional and producing like crazy to the point where I built this big business in my early 20s. And I had no clue how I did it. I couldn't remember the last. Right. I just was driven by the need for, you know, supporting my family. And so I went down this reward path. Then as I got kind of call it successful, I felt comfortable. I stopped trying. I brought on a business partner to run the business so I could spend time with the family. I became depressed because I knew I wasn't going to go down that pleasure route anymore. I've been down that road. I wasn't pushing myself from reward. So the option three, door number three is depression. And I didn't understand why. So again, profile is one thing. The context you wrap around it really drives your outcome. So if you understand that, hey, I just can't stop eating Doritos at night, you need to replace it with reward. And eventually the reward will allow you to get that dopamine hit that you need, but you're doing it with another. Another sort of context that's much better and healthier for you. Yeah, and that's so many neurochemicals. We can keep going.

You know, I totally have that same genetic setup, and my wife's the polar opposite. If I don't have something to do that is productive, that is impactful, that is meaningful, I either go in two scenarios. Either a, I turn to substances, whether a glass of wine or marijuana, or something that spins some dials in my brain to kind of keep me entertained from a neurochemical standpoint, or I slip into some type of sad, what you might call depressed out of state. I get kind of mopey. And I've been lucky enough to have so many productive things in life that I can do that I haven't become a drug addict. And I've been able to channel that into meaningful activities that are impactful. But yet there are some times when, whatever, I'm sitting around at night and I got like, four, four hours of time to spend with the family or something like that. And at the back of my mind, I'm like, gosh, I got to do something. I got to be productive, and if not, I got to have a extra glass of wine here. But my question for you is, for someone who's wired up that way, are there also neurochemicals, whether it be L dopa or some type of nootropic or something that alleviate a little bit of that edgy feeling that you get when you're either not accomplishing stuff or you don't want to take some kind of a deleterious drug?

Yeah.

So what we found, the dopamine pathway itself and the comped pathway itself. You know, we usually focus on context, which is give yourself that thing to focus on. And it doesn't necessarily need to be constant and ongoing. Like you said, like, if you're given that one hour, you're done. Right. It almost even if you can be thinking about it. But there's. There's cofactors that really push people over the edge, and that's where you can really intervene. And one of them is serotonin. So if you also are dysregulated for serotonin, right. Where your receptors genetically, we can determine that they're a little shorter, and so your ability to regulate mood is a little off, and you're hypersensitive to stimulus because of it. So what does that mean? That, okay, we've already sort of talked about part of this Persona and we're just going to build a little bit more on it. So this person is a warrior. Now, not only are they a warrior, but they're hypersensitive to stimulus. And these are the people why I'm calling this out, because these are the people that actually need more intervention. Right. And you're probably the same, by the way. So your serotonin receptors are a little shorter, you're a little more hypersensitive to all stimulus, whether positive or negative. And you're constantly getting pulled to the next one. And you're experiencing at a much higher level of detail than your peers that drives this sort of high functioning anxiety. You're already striving for reward and pleasure. You kind of have this desire to want to do things or you slip into depression and you're experiencing the world in this highly nuanced, detailed level that other people don't see. So every person that's chewing their food the wrong way or making too much noise or telling a funny joke, you're constantly being drawn to the next thing in your work. You're seeing all these details and nuances that people don't see that drives, like I said, this constant anxiousness about you where you need to get things done and everything bugs you. And when you talk to people, they're only seeing the world at 70% and you can't handle and understand why the team can't see things the way you see them at that level. Right. So that's where you can intervene. And serotonin, we know there's so many things 5 HTP, you know, the gene is called 5 HTLPR and 5 HTP helps modulate your serotonin levels. Getting good sleep because your serotonin is produced. And we're going to talk about sleep. Hopefully it's a great thing to unpack when it comes to genetics. Getting sleep because you produce it in the morning, that sort of later half of sleep. So that's where you would intervene. So the dopamine and COMPT itself are harder to sort of manage. I know a lot of people talk about certain things you can do there, but we find that what you can do and the delta value of change is nominal versus things like serotonin and bdnf, brain drive neurotrapic factor, the delta change in outcome is much greater. So if you deal with the CO factors that create the load on top of this warrior genetics like serotonin or again let's go to bdnf. If your BDNF is off and you have this profile, then not only are you this warrior that's striving, but things mean a lot. You give things a lot of weight and there's this constant burden. Everything is a major problem. So not only are you depressed, but the things that are making you depressed are heavy, even though they may not be, because your ability to develop neural connections and these synapses for information to flow through is not optimal. And so you tunnel or funnel into a few select ones and become more of a specialist than a generalist. And so new things are friction for you and old things have a lot more meaning than they should. Right. And so you give this weight to information or to problems that other people don't give. And so that co factor to this warrior personality is where you should focus. And BDNF is so easy to deal with. High grade Omega 3 like you said, nootropics and coffee. I think it's called a coffee fruit extract particular supplement that really works.

Yeah. That's interesting that you say that by the way, because I started using this, I don't want this to sound like a commercial, but this one company called Newtopia, they sent me some of their packaged nootropics. And you fill out this online questionnaire beforehand that kind of customizes your nootropics to you. And some of the blends that they sent, one called Nectar and I think the other one was called Brain Flow, they both had this coffee berry fruit extract in them. And I feel really, really good when I take that in terms of feeling a lot more stable, especially mentally. And it seems to alleviate some of those issues we were talking about earlier. The other one seems to work pretty well for me is one made by Qualia called Qualia Mind. And I don't well with a lot of caffeine, I use the caffeine free version personally. The quality of mind is another one that I've found seems to really stabilize my propensity to either be super duper driven to the point of annoying myself with the hyper productivity or in the absence of those triggering stimuli, a little bit more of a depressed, mopey type of feeling.

Those are excellent examples. They do exactly what you said. So Quality of Mind, amazing product. It literally does that. It stabilizes you so it brings you to the middle. So you're not going to feel wow, right. But you're going to feel like you should be if everything was optimal, meaning normal. So there's no Visceral, Like, I feel incredible, but it's like I don't feel anything bad. Everything's normal today, Right. The coffee fruit extract is going to actually make you feel, wow, my BDNF levels are really high and I feel extra good today for some reason. My mood is amazing. Everything in the world is wonderful. Right. So other things that do that on the BDNF side is, you know, you start your day with a hot shower. It boosts your BDNF levels right there and then the rest of the day is better. Breathing exercises, deep breathing, just pausing three, four times a day, just in through the nose and out through the mouth. Boost your BDNF level. Something so simple, but it doesn't. Low duration. Sorry, I should say low intensity, longer duration exercise like yoga, brisk walking in the evening, you know, that will get your BDNF levels going also. So that's where we kind of intervene with people. It's not so much on the dopamine itself, but it's these sort of cofactors, right?

Yeah.

And then there's so much easier to work on.

That's really cool. I mean, again, it's a perfect example of empowerment. And you mentioned sleep, which I know is another issue that a lot of people deal with. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about sleep genetic types because I think personalization of sleep is really interesting. My wife doesn't sleep as hot as me. I sleep super hot. So I use the chilipad. We recently switched to this mattress called the Essentia mattress, where we each got to go online, fill out a special questionnaire, and her side is set for her firmness, her posture, her back position. Mine is set for mine. And so I totally get the improvement in sleep when you personalize your sleeping environment. But I don't think I've talked much on the podcast about the sleeping genetic types. Can you get into that a little bit?

It's really interesting because we never had any intention to actually solve this problem. So what ended up happening is so nobody ever believed that there was the genetics of sleep, like any sleep genes per se. And nobody was trying to solve that problem. But what would happen is, as we dealt with our patients in that research phase, those first 7,000 people sleep was the very first thing they would all say got better when that wasn't even our intention. And we started to then learn our eyes got open to like 50% of Americans don't sleep properly. We didn't even know that that was a problem. And so we started to dive in. Why are these people feeling better? And it wasn't always the same thing. We find there was kind of three separate buckets that people fell in. There's I can't fall asleep, can't get to sleep on time. There's I fall asleep fine, but I can't stay asleep. I wake up in the middle of the night and in the second half, my sleep just isn't anywhere near the quality of the first half. And I sleep through the night. I don't have any sort of cognition of waking up, but I just don't feel rested. I wake up feeling horrible. Right, so why are those three different things happening or what are they? So I'll break them down one at a time. The first one, I can't fall asleep is highly dependent on your circadian rhythm and your clock. And there's literally a gene called clock, and it's implicit in your ability to manage your circadian rhythm. Tied with, once again, bdnf, brain dry neurotropic factor. If your BDNF is off and your clock gene, and even if your clock gene isn't off, by the way, BDNF is so powerful that if it's off, your body has no clue what time it is, Circadian rhythm is completely broken. That clock doesn't work. So what happens is if you co factor that with blue light, beautiful pot lights that keep our house all night, stress, you know, Netflix all the stuff that happens at night, which we all know we're supposed to avoid for better sleep. But for certain people, it's just so much more impactful. There's some people say, I don't care, I can be on my laptop, I don't have problems sleeping. And then it kind of debunks that blue light is a problem. No, it's a problem for this genetic profile that can't establish its sleep time. So what our ancestors used to do is, and I'm sure you know this already, is they would, they would see fire at night. They would see that deep amber glow, which is why we wear these amber lenses that trigger melatonin production. When our lenses, when our eyes see the world through the amber glow, you start to produce melatonin. I shouldn't say produce. You produce it all day, but you start to utilize it, right? So people with poor BDNF don't do that. Well, they need the signaling, they need the amber glow. Knowing that they're tired isn't enough. So just something as simple as sitting on the edge of your bed and Doing that deep breathing to signal it's time to sleep, right? Avoiding all of the stuff that we already know we're supposed to avoid, like blue light and Netflix and stress. One key thing is resolving unresolved mental issues. Meaning low BDNF tends to cause people to sort of spin things in their head, like, why did I say it? Or why did I do this? Oh, I shouldn't have done this. Oh, I wish I showed up on time. And then you're lying in bed at night with your head spinning.

Both my sons and I do have that, by the way. And I think that it's not why necessarily or the main reason and motivator behind why I implemented these really robust evening habits for a family, like evening songs, evening story time, evening meditation, evening breath work. But we do all of that before bed. My son sleep amazingly, and then me, same thing. I have a notepad next to the bed. I'm doing meditation, I'm doing breath work, I'm doing prayer. And yeah, you do have to kind of pull out a few more stops when you have that low BDMF factor.

You definitely have to. But all those things signal to your clock that it's sleep time, right? And you just need to do a lot more work. Imagine you just have a really dumb clock that can't figure it out and you got to coach it through what time of day it is. That's basically what's happening. So that's bdnf. And I mean, there's tons of things you can do to improve it, but if you do improve it, that problem of I can't fall asleep should technically go away. We've done it in many, many, many people. So the second problem is I fall asleep. And by the way, you could also have a combination of these problems, but we'll deal with them. Sort of siloed. I fall asleep, but I can't stay asleep. So we just spoke of melatonin. We know that's the hormone that gets you to sleep, right? And we know that we sleep in these 90 minute cycles. But there are, if you look at it genetically in terms of circadian rhythm, there's kind of two halves to sleep in terms of biochemistry. So there's the first half, which is your deep restorative detox and all that other stuff. There's your second half, which at some point in that second half, you're meant to wake up. And your body knows this. In this first half, I don't wake up, so it's easy to continue. But in the second Half at some point you're supposed to wake up. So what happens is just like fire and amber glow triggers melatonin activation. This first sort of sunlight coming through the window and piercing through your eyelids, causing a different kind of amber that you kind of see if you ever look at light through your eyelids, triggers serotonin. And serotonin is your wake up chemical. Time to go, right? The brain is now firing. Let's get up and go. So the challenge is if you're serotonin dysregulated, which I'm sure a lot of people listening here are, it's a lot more people than you would think. It's a big percentage. Then in that second half, when we're sleeping in an environment and context that isn't conducive to sleep, meaning that too much light, smell, cold, hot, all these things that can trigger stimulus, your body gets confused and doesn't know, is this the stimulus that's supposed to wake me up or is this something else? And so you're in and out of sleep and you're just, you're dreaming and then you're awake and then you're dreaming and then you're awake. And it's constant struggle of your body literally being in confusion, trying to get the serotonin firing to get you up and out of bed. And some people, if they have something on their mind, will literally fully wake up and start working right? Some people that had a bad day, the prior day, where they're already sort of off on serotonin, they're just going to totally get up. But some people have a chronic every day. That second half just sucks. Right? And that's where you have to do all of the stuff you're talking about, which is temperature, heavy blanket, cool mattress, zero light leakage. You're probably wearing a mask, you're probably dealing with smell and aroma, like every little trigger, zero noise. So it's like literally a baby is in the room. And that's how careful you are the first day on the first child where you had no idea what to do. That level of carefulness around your sleep, you literally need that. And you could also take five htp, which deals with serotonin regulation, right?

Yeah. That's actually what we put in the Kion sleep product, which I kind of created to scratch my own itch because I have that issue also with sleep. And there's one other thing that I don't use it because I'm a side sleeper and I haven't found a way yet to make it Kind of work with me as a side sleeper. But there's something called the Ebb Sleep System. I talked about how I have that chilipad that'll circulate cold water underneath me while I'm asleep. But the Ebb Sleep System, it actually is a forehead cooling device that's been shown to alleviate anxiety and insomnia related to some of the genetic issues that you were talking about. It seems to kind of shift the blood flow away from the frontal cerebral area, where you would tend to have a little bit more of a thought rumination. And, yeah, it basically cools. Your racing mind is really, really interesting. And again, I have used it before to kind of fall asleep a little bit better, but it kind of slides off because I roll over during the night and sleep on my side. But it's kind of interesting, especially if you're able to sleep on your back.

Yeah. And if you're hot, that makes a lot of sense because I don't know what the exact number is, but I think it's like 60% of your heat you release through your head. So if you're overheating yourself, then, yeah, your head would be the central place to counteract that. But along with the mattress cooling pad, which is optimal, I've started using one. It's made a huge difference for me.

I should interject, because I know there's some scientists who are going to be screaming through the microphone, you don't want to do that. To cool the body. There's these things called. I think they're called arteriovenous anastomoses in the feet, in the hands, and in the head. And when you cool them, paradoxically, it actually causes the rest of the body to upregulate temperature because it's under the impression that your kind of, like, the appendages are at risk. I know it's counterintuitive, but what you actually want to do is keep the hands and feet and head from getting too cold if you want the rest of the body to stay cool. Now, of course, that needs to be paired with the idea that if you keep the head cold, you can also eliminate some of the rumination or racing thoughts. And I think probably the best way to do this would be if you're going to keep the head cold. And I realize this is kind of getting super into the nitty gritty weeds, but you'd want to, for example, wear wool socks or keep the hands warm so that your body didn't get the impression that it needed to warm the core. If that makes Sense. So I just want to mention that to people. The parts of your body you wouldn't want to cool when you're trying to sleep would be the hands, the feet, and the head. And if you do decide to cool the head, put on some wool socks or something like that.

That makes a lot of sense. The number one thing that we end up helping people resolve their sleep with is actually hubby pulling on the blanket. When you're in bed with the hubby all night and there's a struggle, the skin, it's head to toe. That sensitivity of the blanket moving when you aren't moving, constantly waking you up, especially in the second half, where they're also in their wake up phase and they're probably moving a little bit more. So literally just having two separate blankets where their movement doesn't interrupt yours.

Yeah, my wife and I like to snuggle too much for that. So I do sacrifice sleep for relationship and snuggling. Meaning, like. Like I'll often roll over and be halfway on top of my wife and she'll wake up and push me off and then I'll wake up and she's tangled on top of me. And we don't sleep with two separate blankets, but it's a battle slash. This cuddly, snuggly relationship that we both really enjoy. And so we spend kind of like half of the evening tangled up with each other like a pretzel, but we kind of like it.

Well, there's a whole world of benefits of that too. So then the third bucket, which we didn't talk about, is the people that sleep through the night but wake up feeling not so rested. Just the genetics of that. And what did we learn? So we know that sleep is when all your recovery happens. So all that, the detox and the glymphatic drainage, the lymphatic drainage, the recovery of all the abuse your body took the day before. And if you are like myself and so many other people that are not optimal in terms of detox or methylation or glucuronidation or antioxidation, like all these multiple pathways that deal with recovery and removal of environmental insults. Well, are you also sleeping on a memory foam mattress that is chock full of chemicals that every time you roll over, you're popping little air bubbles and off gassing and breathing them in? Is there mold in your home? You know, do you have some kind of cheap carpet that you just laid down that's off gassing some kind of. Which could also be a hormone disruptor? By the way. So the people that wake up feeling not so rested, we found over and over and over again that their detox methylation pathways were not the best and there was some kind of environmental airborne exposure and it was often their mattress. That was usually the number one thing that they were then breathing in for the next eight hours at the exact same time where their body's trying to recover from all of what they dealt with the day before. But they already aren't wired to cope with all of that. And so there's a struggle where they don't actually get the rest, they don't actually get the recovery and they wake up feeling horrible. And so taking some detox supplements right before you sleep, and we can get into details on what those are.

Oh, really? You take detox supplements before you go to. Because I mean, obviously I was thinking make sure you're sleeping on a clean mattress and you've done a mold remediation in your home and taking care of EMF and stuff like that. But you're actually recommending people take detox supplements before they go to sleep.

Yeah, there's two unique times that I take detox supplements. One is before sleep and one is before I go on a flight. I know you've done a lot of work on EMF and all of what the plane can do to slowly kill you.

Right.

And I find that when I support my detox pathways that I just feel a lot better. You know, you're going through those scanners at the airport, so you're not directly counteracting the EMF and all that, but you're supporting what happens when the cells and you have poor cellular health. There's already a load and I already don't detoxify well. So what I already don't do well, now I'm in a worse terrain because there's so much other stuff I have to deal with.

Right.

So I support that. So when I say detox, I make a very specific cocktail for myself based on my genome, which is nac, milk thistle, Alpha lipoic acid. I think there's some selenium in there. So I don't actually take glutathione. Some people take like a lipozone glutathione. What I find is because my glutathione pathway is so poor that glutathione actually overwhelms me. We have patients that have been bedridden because their naturopaths gave them rightfully so it seems intuitive that give them glutathione because glutathione pathway doesn't work well. While if you don't have the genetic instruction telling glutathione sort of what to do, or telling that process what to do, you're also going to be binding onto minerals and nutrients and everything else. It becomes chaos. Literally. Somebody that we know, by the way, mutually was bedridden for a month, and we've found that the particular reason was because of this, that they took a glutathione IV at their natural path.

Oh, wow.

That literally put them in bed, which it seemed like the right thing to do, but it was for them genetically, it was horrible. And that's what actually put them in bed. And, you know, we had to go. There's other ways to go about it. But, yes. So I do take that detox supplement before sleep to help my body do what it doesn't do. Well, innately, it just gives it some extra support.

Yeah, yeah. And I know you're in Canada down here, the FDA has cracked down on an acetylcysteine, and I believe they removed it from being defined as a dietary supplement. So it's a lot more difficult to get now. But there's often, obviously, other things. You mentioned milk thistle. There's dandelion, there's activated charcoal. I know the company, Quicksilver Scientific, they make some pretty good detoxification compounds. And I, a lot of times have recommended that when you go out to eat and you don't know if the food that you've had is laced with vegetable oils or you've had an extra two or three glasses of wine. But that's interesting that you're actually using it to enhance sleep when you've found that people seem to sleep through the night, but then when they wake up, they're still groggy or have a poor sleep score. So. So that's interesting to note. So it's so fascinating. There's multiple reasons that you might not be able to fall asleep or can't stay asleep, or you sleep through the night, but you wake up feeling not rested. And I think some people might struggle with all three. But this hopefully has given people a lot of little things they can do to personalize their sleep routine. I know obviously the genetic test that you guys do could help to elucidate which type you are if you're more than one type. There's obviously a lot of other things that you guys get into on the DNA test, but with the time that we have, I wanted to make sure that. I asked you about a couple of Others I've been thinking about. I'm working on a parenting book right now, shameless plug, BoundlessParentingBook.com and you had mentioned to me that you've looked a little bit into this idea of applying genetics to parenting and personalization. What do you mean by that?

So that is my personal legacy, I can tell you that. We don't do it commercially. It's not a product that we sell. But the more patients we see, the more I realize that the earlier we could have got to them, the better off they would have been. If you're dealing with prevention, the day you start is the best day to start. Which in the earlier that could have been, the better off you would have been. So my belief is a child is born. Guess what, parent, here's your child's instruction manual. Here's exactly how they're wired hormonally, cognitively, diet, nutrition, you know, how do they sleep cellularly, how do they deal with oxidants and everything else. It would make that job so much easier. And I know this from personal experience because I solved my own problems at home through my kids journal mix. And I'll give you a couple examples. So my middle son, we had a lot of challenges with homework, right. And you go to the usual suspects of like, oh, no discipline, no motivation, behavior problems, why doesn't he care? And then I realized, you know what, I have his genome. Let me just take a look at what's actually going on. And whenever we look at things genetically, we're not ever looking for that problem in the genes. We're just looking for the red flags and then trying to see how they relate to that problem. Right. We're always reverse engineering so we don't pigeonhole ourselves. So what I found was, and it was so glaringly obvious, I don't know why I didn't see it just innately, just from dealing with it, him was that he had the absolute worst starch metabolization gene. So the amy gene had the worst. He could not convert starch into glucose. Horrible. His insulin response was also horrible. So there's a gene that we can see. But his fat response, by the way, was amazing. His ability to convert fat into fuel. So he's an ideal candidate for a keto diet, as an example.

A keto diet. And possibly also the use of special salivary amylases like digestive enzymes when he's consuming starch to increase the breakdown.

Exactly. For sure. So they needed that additional support. He wasn't innately doing it himself. Right. So how does that relate to homework? Well, when was homework? Time was after dinner, after we were eating our South Asian Pakistani rice and naan meals every day. That was giving him an extreme carb crash where he had no mental function. He was just brain dead. It was that simple. We were just. He was eating the wrong food and trying to work when he was in this extreme carb crash, which would have been struggling, yelling at him, fighting with him, telling him he has a behavior issue for years and years and years. So that's a very simple one. Then you can get into things that are a lot more complex. My niece, you know, she had this issue where. So my niece, my sister and my mom live together. And my mom called me saying, your niece is having an anxiety attack. She can't breathe. What do we do? So I have a friend that's a pediatrician who lives close by. I called him. I actually went over there. She literally couldn't breathe. And he said that this sounds like anxiety. It's going to calm down, you know, if it happens again, let me know. So sometime later, my mom called me again and she said, it's happening again, but you got to come over here because this time she fell over and she hurt herself. We think she may have broken something because she can't walk.

Oh, wow.

I took her Canadian. You know, healthcare system is amazing because it's free, but because it's free, it's overloaded and it's slow. So we spent, I think it was six or seven hours at this urgent care facility. Every test, every scan, looked at the X ray. No breakage, no nothing. And the outcome was, if it happens again, let us know. At that point, I knew what that actually meant is if it happens again, she's getting a prescription for an anxiety pill and we're going to diagnose her with this condition. And you're going to have to just live with knowing that's what she has. Right. So silly me, you know, we're busy. I went back to my office and started working and didn't do anything about it. Even though this is my own niece, I started helping other people, kids instead of my own, as my work. So it happened again, but this time my mom called me crying, saying, your niece ran away from home. And just to paint the picture completely out of character, she is the most innocent, sweet girl. She doesn't even leave the home by herself. Not because of any restrictions. She just doesn't want to. She's just so sweet and innocent.

Right?

So it made absolutely no sense. I said, there's something wrong here.

My mom said, no.

There's a no. She says, I can't take it anymore more. I have to go. That was the note. And I remember the word. It's like, burned into my brain because of also, by the way, my genetics of dealing with trauma. I imprint a little bit more. We can talk about that later, too. Anyway, so I went over there and like, I thought she had. My mom lives in a condo building. I found my niece downstairs. She hadn't even left the building because for her, that was far enough. And so I got her in the car, went for a drive. I said, what's wrong?

Is it.

Is it like, bullying? Is it a boy thing? Is it social media? All the usual suspects? And she said, I actually don't know. I just needed to get out. And I realized she was just fighting with herself, you know, she just needed to get out of that environment to see if she could feel different. And she didn't. That's when, literally on the spot, I called my office and send me her reports. And there's something else going on here, you know. So I looked at it, and the first thing that was glaringly obvious is what was. And I sort of, you know, put two and two together. I said, wait a second, Mom. You've been calling me like clockwork every 30 days. This must have something to do with her menstrual cycle, right? So that was one. So I looked at her hormones, and yes, at the beginning of the female menstrual cycle is when you have the least hormones, right? You just finished clearing everything out and now you're starting to again. That's the circadian rhythm of the female hormone cycle. And when I check the text messages and calls from my mom like clockwork, at the beginning of her cycle every month. So when I looked at her hormones, she is more androgen dominant. So she's more testosterone, leaning towards testosterone, less estrogen, which we can very well map out genetically how you make your hormones. And so that valley for her was a lot deeper because she already didn't make enough female hormones to begin with, right? So now we found there's this young lady who has this very deep sort of drop in hormone levels, which may cause some kind of anxiety or mood and behavior issue during those first few days. But why did it happen in these three months since she had been having a cycle for two years already? So this was going back two winters ago when we were in the middle of COVID and she was being homeschooled prime lockdown time. And she didn't go outside for three months, so she got zero vitamin D. Of the 22,000 genes in your body, 2,000 require vitamin D to function. So 10% of your human biochemistry is dependent on this one micronutrient. And we know it acts more as a hormone. And I believe it's been rebranded a vitamin, because if everybody had enough, we wouldn't be sick. You know, it's a little bit too potent and powerful. But the vitamin D pathway is highly complex. It's not just like, do I get it and metabolize it? No, there's step one is you need to take it from the blood or, sorry, from this, from the sun or from food and get it into the blood. That's one gene. Then you need to transport it to the cell where it's used. That's a second gene. So when you go to the doctor and they tell you you have enough vitamin D, that's often not enough of the picture being painted. That's just one step of three. Then once it gets to the cell, there's a VDR gene which binds it. It's the binder that connects it to the cell. And the reason why vitamin D has this complex pathway is because it's one of the few that's toxic, that you can overdose if you get too much. And our ancestors did have too much, they spent most of their time outdoors, unlike us, so they mitigate the utilization of it. So there's these steps. So she was suboptimal in all of it. She didn't metabolize it, she didn't transport it and she didn't bind it. And now she was getting zero. So that compounded this hormone dysregulation and her ability to manage her hormonal circadian rhythm, which added a major clue as to why did it happen. Now, step three, like her uncle, she's wired as a warrior. So she had no dopamine zero. And now she has hormonal imbalance already causing mood, behavior issues. Vitamin D, slim to none. So she is, you know, now compounding whatever she's feeling. And where did it express this anxiety response? Because she was already teetering this chronic, high functioning, ongoing anxiety because she was constantly on the line of feel good, not feel good, feel good, not feel good. And now we have a crash.

Yeah.

So this thing happened on this day three months in a row, which, if I didn't know this, I would have put her on the anxiety pill and it would have made total sense because what she was expressing as looked like nothing. Other than an anxiety response, which you think is a mood and behavior or mental health issue. And how many young women today are on some kind of mood and behavior pill? In the United States, there's a huge boom for young women on some kind of pill that are maybe taking birth control pill to balance their hormones, or on anxiety or depression or some kind of pill only because they haven't understood what their body's doing with all the chemicals and hormones they produce. What did I do for her? Very simple. The first few days before her cycle, she was on a high dose, 10,000 IU, vitamin D. But it was split because keep in mind, if I gave her that 10,000 IU, she wasn't able to transport it and bind it fast enough. So we split it into like 3,000, 3,000, 3,000 by sort of 2 or 3pm so by the afternoon she had had three doses because she doesn't transport it fast enough. So we gave her a little by little and some L Theanine to boost her dopamine levels. And that's why one thing that I missed, you asked about dopamine. That's one thing you can do. L Theanine, just boost your dopamine levels. Makes you feel good.

Right, I know. That's also in my sleep product, by the way.

Wow. Amazing. It makes a lot of sense, right? It makes a lot of sense. For that reason, the very next month, she didn't have the problem. Toronto had the longest COVID lockdown in the world. So she was still in lockdown for several months. She has not had the problem since. And it's been two years, well, one and a half years. Right. So now imagine not knowing this. Right? And it was so simple to fix. So simple. The biochemical pathways are complex. That is all hard to understand. And nobody knows. And then I went and talked to the pediatrician who was a good friend of mine, and said, here's what I did. What do you think? And he was silent. And he said, what you described is exactly what's needed, but it's not in my toolkit.

Yeah, well, I think, like, there's some people that might kind of cringe at the idea of testing your child's genetics because it might wreak just slightly of some type of, I don't know, ethnic cleansing, ubermensch type of scenario where we're trying to create the perfect embryo and the perfect child. And I in no way endorse actually something like embryonic testing and sacrifice of a child due to the fact that they might be born with some type of issue that doesn't really agree with me ethically. There's something about it just turns on my spidey senses versus just bringing children into the world and taking care of them and loving them no matter who they are and no matter what their genetic and health predispositions are. But then at the same time, it's like you've just described or what I've noticed with my sons or another thing I did with my sons, because one in particular had some of the genes that, similar to mine from a serotonin and BDNF standpoint, cause one to ruminate heavily on issues or on problems or on arguments or disagreements. And so I go out of my way to make sure that he has processed fully any type of disagreement, any type of struggle, any type of stressor, because I know that based on his genetic type, that's the type of thing that will really kind of build up and accumulate in him and eventually manifest as either disease or health issues or bitterness or emotional issues, et cetera. So again, it just comes back to the fact that this stuff is so empowering and can be so empowering for parents and for children as well. Now, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the report itself because obviously I think a lot of people know, especially those who have gotten DNA tests, you get typically some kind of a PDF printout that walks you through everything. I know you guys have stuff like that, but in terms of the actual reports, tell me a little bit about what someone's getting in the report, because from what I understand, you even have a personalized podcast where the AI via audio interprets your DNA results for you so you can sit back and listen to listen to it, get into what someone would actually get if they were to run a DNA company report on themselves or someone else.

And that's the other kind of half of what we thought was broken, the first half we've been talking about so far this entire hour, which is interpretation. So people have been getting genetic results which are literally that here's your gene results. Data is dumb unless you know what question to ask. So just a bunch of data doesn't help. You need interpretation, which is the kind of anecdotal stuff we've been talking about. So that's what's in the reports. The second problem with genetics is it was too hard to use. So the reports were designed by the PhDs doing the analysis and the science, which is great for them, but a consumer, it should be as simple as what's wrong and how do I fix it. If it's not that easy, it's not designed properly. I learned this myself again from the struggle of trying to use genetics for my own benefit. And none of it worked unless I had some brilliant scientists sitting in front of me that could analyze each thing. And then I was also dependent on did they miss something, was their interpretation different or their experience different than the guy down the street who's going to tell me two different things? Right? So what we built was this sort of self navigable platform. And the first thinking there was I shouldn't have to look up a bunch of genes and then figure out what they mean. I should be able to look up the problem I'm suffering from and then understand what genes drive that. So when you look at our report, it doesn't, it doesn't say DRD2 gene and then go to, it says anxiety, depression, addiction, burnout, procrastination, empathetical versus logical behavior. Like it gets into all the mood and behavior traits and then you can see within that trait how do you rank what genes drive that. So the science is also there if you want to geek out and learn why we're saying what we're saying. But most importantly, there's recommendations. There's recommendations. And by the way, we work with, with a mutual friend on this. So Dr. B.J. fogg. Oh yeah, yeah. So you know him well, right. So we said, hey, we figured out what's wrong, we figured out how to fix it. Like here's the thing, like for example, we said bdnf, you know, coffee, fruit extract. Right. So we figured out what works for the thing. But we don't know how to get people to actually adopt these behaviors and change their behaviors and make it stick. Like how do we get them the benefit, the outcome. So Dr. Fogg took all of our reports and before we published anything, he put in there, very simple to understand. Here's the habits you need to build, here's the behaviors you need to remove, here's the behaviors you need to add. And it reads so easily when you read it. It's kind of like I already knew that. Right. And it should be that easy. So that's the other thing. So we speak to the problems. You can look up the problem. The genes are also there if you need to know. But it's easy to understand in the context of the problem. And then the recommendations are there in the context of each problem as opposed to overarching general, you don't know why you're being told this stuff.

So you can pick.

Pick a specific thing you want to work on, and it's all there. The second thing, as you alluded to, is we realized even then, some people need to dive deeper into the actual science or genome to understand their overarching story or how these pieces all come together or why what we're saying, what we're saying. So that usually required some kind of PhD or scientist sitting there and saying, here's your genome, here's what I think. So what we did was we took every possible iteration that we could think of, and we recorded it all in a studio. And now our AI pulls on all the audio files that are relevant to you and gives you a personalized podcast. And so you can sit there and it's hours of content that will tell you about your results. Yeah, it's awesome. I've been through my own, and even though I already know this stuff, it kind of reminds me of things here and there. I go back to it once in a while, because again, the farther away from things, the less of it you use. So I go back and listen to every once in a while, and it's as if you have a PhD in front of you, reviewing your results for every single gene. And we did it this way because it's hard for us to train other clinicians to think like us, so it wasn't scalable that way. It's hard for us to do this for everybody because we don't have enough of a team. So we built the AI that can scale it through technology as opposed to people, and that's what it looks like.

Yeah, it's a pretty cool report. And I've done the testing with you guys. And again, I'll link to it in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com DNACompany podcast because I had Mansour walk me through all of my genes and all of my son's genes. So if people want to kind of get a little bit more of an insider glimpse into a lot of the stuff that gets tested, they could listen to that episode. Even though we gave a pretty good overview here, too. And it's just so simple. I mean, it's just, you do your saliva, you can do it. Well, I don't know. Can you do it anywhere in the world? I mean, I know USA and Canada, but we obviously have people listening in other places. I think you can do it pretty much anywhere.

Yeah, there's certain countries where there are restrictions, but as an individual, it's usually not a problem. But France is very sticky on sending samples out. Mexico is a little tricky. Vietnam, for some reason is very tricky. There's three or four countries, but again, individual one kit here and there doesn't really ever get stopped.

Yeah. And then logistically, I know that some people who may have heard our previous episode with Mansoor, they might have gotten the old version of the test. You can totally upgrade to the new DNA company portal because there's a whole bunch of new stuff on the back, back end, new insights, those podcasts we were talking about, a whole bunch more. They're giving all my listeners 50% discount who've already done the test, who want to upgrade to the new portal, and then also anybody who hasn't gotten tested yet. Usually it costs 3.99 to get tested and I think you guys are doing it for like 50 bucks off. So it's like 349, which honestly, for the amount of information is crazy. You get a lot of actionable insight and you learn a ton about your body. And the cool thing is with this stuff, unlike a lot of other tests, it's like, like you do it once and it's obviously, unless again you do some type of crispr DNA editing, it's not going to change. So you don't have to do this test every year. You just do it one time and you got everything you need. So I'll link to it in the show notes, but I think it's something like BenGreenfieldLife.com, the DNA company or the DNA company or you could just go to the shownotes at BenGreenfieldLife.com DNACompanyPodcast and I'll link to everything that Kashif and I talked about, as well as previous podcast episodes like my podcast with Doug Brackman of Driven and my podcast with Monster Muhammad of the DNA company and some other genetics type of podcasts that I've done. Kashif, I want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing this with us. I mean, we barely even scratched the surface of all the new stuff that you guys are doing over there, but it's pretty cool and I think you guys are some of the best in the business when it comes to DNA testing, especially when you want comprehensive analysis of pretty much everything on the planet that could be going on in your body. So thanks for coming on and sharing all this with us today, man.

It was a pleasure, man.

Great to be here. Great to help and help people learn. And we're here if anyone has questions. Just reach out. You know, we're here to help educate.

So awesome. All right, well, thanks so much. And again folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Kashif Khan from the DNA company signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com DNACompanyPodcast have an amazing week.

Welcome everyone. We're going to dive into something that can be controversial. We're looking at human evolution and why I say controversial because depending on where you look and what you follow, science says, yeah, it's very clear there's a path to how we got to who we are. And it's evolutionary in nature, meaning that we are inheriting the genes or traits or legacy of our ancestors, not only as family but also as species. Meaning that there's cross species, evolution. Religion and some other groups say that, well, that's not what happened. We showed up the way we were and we didn't come from any other species or animal etc, and we came to this planet the way we are. So what's the truth? Well, it's not only did we evolve and is there proof of it, but it's also, are there different ways that evolution could have happened? And we're gonna, by the time we get through this, you'll understand a little bit more about what I'm thinking and what we're saying. For example, the belief right now is that evolution is linear, that we today are the best that this planet has ever seen, we started from something lesser and you can go back however many billions of years you want and that continue to progress into who we now are. So that's the belief that there's this upward trajectory of evolution and we keep getting better and better and better. And in the future there's also going to be our lineage, our progeny that will be better than us. Is it possible that evolution or this changing species is more cyclical? Maybe it doesn't continue to go up in a line. Maybe it goes and there's a plateau and then there's a replacement. Maybe there's something else altogether that happens. And that's what we're going to explore here today. And the really cool thing is that there's hints in our DNA, there's clues that are telling us what happened. There's still science that needs to be applied to it. There's still sort of adoption and belief that needs to be spread. But. But I have some thoughts here on what our DNA is saying. So first of all, we do see evolution in animals. It's clear that there's Things going on and future generations adopt, learn, change from their ancestors. And I put out a post once on social media about how elephants are being born without tusks. So what's going on there? The elephants without tusks are the ones that are not being hunted for their ivory. And so as an evolutionary and sort of, you know, safety of the species function, the next generation is being born without tusks. And it's the parents or ancestry without tusks who survived to begin with. They weren't hunted, so they're passing down their genes. So we do see evidence of next generations changing because of what the current generation experience. You can deny that certain genetic code is passed on and things change. Meanwhile, I don't think the question has to be so broad that is evolution real or not? It could be. Hey, we've seen evidence of evolution in animals or plants, but does it happen the same way in humans? Maybe it's a different question. We know, and I've said this before, that around 200,000 years ago, we changed. And what do I mean by that? I mean that there was some occurrence of who we became versus the species that was there before us, the primates. That should have taken millions of years if you're going down the evolutionary path in order to change the way we change. Which means that our brains became 50% larger. So if you compare us to the primates from who we think we came from, or the Neanderthals, whatever, our brains became 50% larger seemingly overnight. This does not speak to an evolutionary path. This speaks to a rapid change. Something else happened. Our current brain capacity is the same of those people of 200,000 years ago. There was a flip, a switch that was flipped and we changed. We also developed new features cognitively. A lot of this is driven cognitively. When you look at how we're different, you know, our neocortex became a lot larger, which allowed for certain traits and certain activity. There's certain human features that appeared seemingly overnight again at that time, around 200 to 250,000 years ago. So we then start to ask, how did this happen at the same time, you know, what changed? And there's science that speaks to this. So there's plenty of published research out there that talks about how things change at that time and what actually happened, which doesn't speak to, again, a long term evolutionary roadmap versus a rapid change, some form of intervention. Where did that intervention happen? We don't know. We don't have the answers to that. But what we do have, the Answers to is that the research is now pointing to something changed. And here's what changed. So human chromosome number two, it seems as if there was a fusion that happened. You can literally see a pinch if you look at human chromosome number two. And there was a fusion that happened and we still don't know how or why or what drove that. So there was primate genetics. That's true. There was primate genetics, but then there's human genetics. That looks like a fusion of the primate genetics. So it's not like the primate gene evolved into who we are. It looks like the combination of these two primate genes fused and created something new. So you see this pinch and it's a gene editing. If you look at the way it was done, it was done for the purpose of stability, meaning that this was meant to exist long term and continue. And it was done right. So we are just now starting to discover CRISPR technology that can do this. We know it's true, we do know that. Gene fusion editing. And I'm going to get a little more into that, that is possible. We don't know how it happened then.

So what's the outcome?

Like I said, we now have a larger neocortex with a sort of more powerful brain function. There's a gene called TBR1 which is responsible for 76% of this size change in our brains and our neocortex, which leads to things like, like sympathy. We feel things that the animals around us don't feel, compassion. So we can actually treat people in certain ways or understand or come to them with sympathy or empathy and have this compassion about us that you don't see in other animals. Emotions in general. So the way we feel, the way we filter this, this experience that we have through feelings is unique to us and unique to our brain capacity. The, the huge number of emotions and the variability and the nuances and how we can feel is unique to us. If you look at something like a reptile, well, they have in the serotonin gene, which we also have this reptilian response where they don't have a. Maybe they have a fight or flight. There's 100 safety snake is sitting on the ground and then attack and there's nothing in between. There's no consideration, there's no I don't feel right. There's everything is good and then snap and attack. So obviously humans are evolved way beyond that. We can have many layers of emotions in between the safety and that decision of it's time to attack. And it actually takes a lot to drive Us there. We do have reptilian genetics in us in terms of that reptilian response, that serotonin response, that ultra sensitivity to stimulus and stimuli that may cause us to react to certain things. But in general, we can feel all the nuances in between. So we now look at that and we also see that we don't know what we look like before we know that. We also know that this fusion, what we're talking about, never happened before. So this one point in time, this 200, 000 years ago when this happened to us, and ever since then, it also never happened again. So this very unique nuance of evolution, which is this ongoing ladder of continued improvement versus a very purposeful change where these chromosomes were fused, we still don't know how it happened, which created a ripple effect of this cognitive power, namely the neocortex expanding in size, you know, a 50% larger brain, which leads to capacity, computing power, and certain genes that are driving this in us, namely that TBR1 gene. So again, we don't know what, like what we look like before. We don't know if this has ever happened. And we haven't been able to find any other case of this in history. And we also can't find it ever happening again. So very unique circumstance would this happen. So the interesting thing about this fusion is usually what happens is some of you have heard of telomeres. So telomeres are these sort of caps to your genes. And you could actually use your telomeres to understand your biological age. If you have been abusing your body, if you have been, you know, under toxicity, stress, lack of sleep, the things that lead to aging, outward aging that you can see. Well, you could actually measure your telomeres. There's tests you can do, certain blood tests that will tell you how worn down your telomeres are. There's literal end caps to your DNA that are meant to be that sort of rubber or bumper that absorbs all the damage image. That's usually where these changes happen, right? You'll see evidence of sort of a cut, slice fusion connection. That's naturally what our genes will do. But this fusion that happened 200,000 years ago happened right in the middle. It was a splice. So you literally see a pinch connection and this splice that puts them together, which again, today we are just starting to utilize CRISPR technology for this purpose. And we have not yet to date done this in humans, and in fact, we're struggling to do it in animals. There's isolated sort of jurisdictional products that have been done. I know that about two years ago, maybe a year ago, FDA approved a trial for some condition of the eye where we were able to splice and edit and fix this particular localized problem. But head to toe adoption, where you are now a different version of yourself, your genetic code and every one of your 50 trillion cells is now different. That we have not accomplished, but this is what happened to us. So again, we did change, we certainly changed, but we did not. If you look at things the way that we look at them for 200,000 years ago, and you apply what evolution is meant to look like, we haven't done that. So there was a rapid change overnight, and then we continue to then be those people. And of the genetics of 200,000 years ago. So that's what we see. Another area, we see it human chromosome number seven. So the Fox P2 gene has been completely stable for 75 million years. You see it, you go way back. It's of, you know, call it primates, Neanderthals, you go way back. We then somehow created this new snip in the gene and that snip made it possible for our brain to connect with our tongue in a way that created complex language. So this just happened again at that same time. So at the same time where this fusion happened, where you connect these two primate genes and all of a sudden you have this human chromosome that looks different. We also had this happen where there was a stability created around this particular gene, snp, that allowed us to speak the way we speak, to develop language, to sing. Animals don't sing. Animals don't. They will mimic, they'll mimic sounds, but they truly can't sing the way we sing. They cannot adopt complex language. They will mimic again sounds and sound as if they're speaking, but they cannot adopt and use complex language. So this also happened 200,000 years ago at the exact same time. This rapid change, which was not adopted from any particular species prior to us. Again, it was like a switch that was turned on at that time. So how do we know this is true? Well, we know that we're able to extract fossils from the earth and now test the DNA. How do we look at, you know, dinosaurs and other things, even plants and trees, we have the ability to look at old DNA and understand it. And we know that when we look at DNA of that time, there was this change and prior to it was completely different. What we don't see is 200,000 years.

Ago, all of what I'm talking about.

And then maybe 3, 4, 500,000 years ago, some slight path towards that, or a million years ago, some changes towards that. We don't. What we see is a completely different picture pre 200, 250,000 years ago, and post again, a change, not an evolution. So do we then not evolve? Well, I mean, I myself talk about warrior genetics and I myself talk about how I am like my ancestors who lived in the Middle east under high levels of stress. And so I adopted what's called warrior genetics. I thrive with reward. I strive and drive myself with seeking reward and winning and challenges. And that is very clearly inherited from my ancestors. But it's not what we think to be evolution, meaning my answers. My ancestors didn't change me. My ancestors gave me certain versions of genes which their predecessors also had the options of. Three versions of the DRD2 gene, which determines how well you bind dopamine. There's three potential outcomes for that gene. You know, slow, medium, fast, how, how well do you.

We look at the alleles of A.

And G and is it the aa, AG, or gg? And you can then determine to what degree do you bind dopamine, how hard dense are your receptors. So again, that's not evolution because you didn't change something. You didn't change somebody's dopamine levels, you didn't change somebody's receptor levels. What you did was you gave them an allele, a version of and one of three options which were the same options that have always existed. Now, depending who you mate with, who has the AG or GG or aa, you then each pass on one version of that gene to your children. And I happen to get passed on both of the fast versions. But with my children, if my wife is a, A or ag, she could potentially give them back one version of the slow. And that sort of tennis match can keep going for generations or multiple and keep changing and keep changing. That's not what we call evolution. So evolution is a continual improvement and a continual, ongoing. I'm changing because of what my ancestors did. I'm now a better version of that species. What we're actually seeing and what we sort of refer to it and assume as evolution is this warrior genes that I have, which is I am a warrior, I strive, I thrive, I drive towards reward because of what my ancestors did, but only because both sets of my ancestors passed beyond these same version of these genes. It's not because they went through something and their genes changed and now they give me a better version, a software update. That's not what happened and that's not what Happens. What happens is you get a version that that person used and they're now in the context that they're matched to. So if they were fast, gg, low dopamine receptors, you know, fast clearance, so they move on quickly and they can shift gears quickly, well then they're naturally going to fall into a context where that's how they thrive. They will be the warrior as opposed to the accountant or the thinker in the back of the room. They're the person that's out there making change front lines. So we look at these contexts and we kind of see, we look at it backwards. That person was a warrior under stress, so they passed on their warrior genetics. No, it's because they were a warrior that they were able to fit in that context and thrive in it. And then they pass those alleles on versions, not an evolution of the gene. So in that context, you know, what we often call evolution is just selecting what version of the gene that is best for us because of our context. And then depending on again, who you have your child with, what do they have and what is also getting passed on, you can go right back to where you started. It could be a never ending loop. So a really cool example of something different now is epigenetics. And I'm going to give you a cool example of this where what I just spoke of is what version of what gene do you have? Which is how we believe evolution happens. There's also epigenetic expression. So how do your genes actually express and if you can pass that on to your children, then did they evolve? Did they change? Are they a new version of themselves? So what's actually going on there? I'm going to give you an example. So we all know that for some time the British ruled India. The British, if you, if you look at it in today's terms, and this is shocking and most people don't hear this, but There was approximately $40 trillion adjusted for today's dollar taken from India, $40 trillion of assets stolen by the British through the British India Company. But if you think about that amount of wealth, I don't know where you can compare today, but India was the richest country at the time, largest economy in the world. And slowly that sort of got chipped away at and $40 trillion of assets left. So what did that leave the country with? Well, it led to famine, it led to nearly 40 famines in this short window of while the British was ruling India. So people went from living this life of luxury that the world hadn't seen to being constantly struggling with even finding food. So what happened is their bodies adjusted to storing fat. And this is not a question again of evolution. Where did the people pass on this ability and now humans store fat? Or is it that the people that had the ability to store fat survived and their children thrived? So what actually happened? We also then have to adjust for their ability to not put on muscle because muscle requires calories. So in order to maintain muscle mass, you need more calories. Now, if you go look at India today and you look at what the population looks like, they look very different than some other countries. Of course, when you come here and adopt a North American lifestyle, I'm in Toronto, things change. But if you go to India and look at a young man in India, you're going to see a very slim, wiry frame, very light, lean on the muscle for the most part. I'm not talking about everybody, but for the most part. And that was an adjustment of who survived well to people that needed less calories. And so they passed on the genetics of the ability to survive with less food and that required less muscle mass. So the people with more muscle mass would need more calories, didn't do so well, and maybe weren't able to have children. So again, it's not a question of people changing as a. As in. As a civil, as a. Sorry, as a genotype, but more as that genotype is what passed their genes on. So that leads to what we see as evolution, meaning that now all of a sudden, this population is different, entirely different. This one pocket is now proliferated and become the majority, because that's who was able to survive in the context that they were in. So it's not that everybody received these genes, is that those people had children and those people passed their alleles on. We also find in Indian people the epigenetics of trauma, because of so much struggle and pain and hunger that happened for so many decades in the epigenetic code. And this is different than genetics. You see the expression of trauma, you see that there's a lot more metabolic disease in South Asian people. What we see is that the need to fast and the need to have less calories is how this population now thrives. And so fasting is a big part of the culture. Low calories is a big part of the culture. And again, until you leave the culture. But decadence is also still a big part of the culture. And this is why you see that in the city that I'm in, in Mississauga, we have the largest heart center In Canada, the largest heart hospital. It's also the hub of where all the South Asians live. And we're told that genetically we have bad hearts, so we've evolved into having bad cardiovascular health. The truth is we've evolved into having bad metabolic health because our ancestors didn't eat for so many years, generations. So who we came from, the people that survived, which is partly why I have warrior genetics. People had to fight to survive. These people and who they pass their genes on to, the children, including myself, are not designed for high volumes of calories. We were designed for very little. We were designed for lean muscle mass, for storing fat. That's why it's such a struggle for South Asian men to lose their bellies. It's, you can do everything right and you still have that fat on the gut. It's challenging because these are the genes that survived and thrived. And so the genes didn't change. What we see as evolution is the genes changing, instructing a certain type of person to become the population now, right? So that or a certain trait, I should say, sorry, for a person to become who the population becomes. What's actually going on is who survives passes their survival mechanism on and you become like them, the alleles that you get from mom and dad. And guess what? If we go into a different context, if it was evolution, and why do I say all this? Because if it was evolution, there would be a constant continual improvement in that path. You would not be able to go.

Back.

But we can, because like I said in the context of reward and my warrior genetics, and in this context of storing fat and in this context of people with lean muscle mass surviving and thriving, well, when the ancestors start to eat more and when I start to not need to be a warrior, or when I start to have a relationship with somebody who isn't, their allele is going to be the one that wins, right? We're no longer in a position of, you know, of needing to sort of thrive on less food. I'm no longer in a population where everybody is fighting in a warrior, so I may end up up having a child with someone who doesn't have those genetics and then that allele gets passed on. So if evolution happened in the way we believe it happens again, this is why I asked that question in the very beginning. That is it truly. Is it truly this ongoing forward trajectory of improvement, this ladder that we keep going up of getting better and better and better, that's what evolution means. Or is it more cyclical in nature where things are being utilized for whatever is our current reality, meaning our genetic code. And the people that thrive pass their alleles on and on in another layer. Because we have so much diversity and so much movement, alleles keep mixing. And so there's kind of this option pool of three genes, three gene variants per gene for the most part. Many, many genes. And there's combinations of different people you can create, right? And now depending what mom and dad gave you, you become who you are. So if you look at this much bigger picture, let's, let's, let's go like you know, 20,000 foot view. How cyclical can this get? When you look at little clues that we have in history, you look at the Sphinx in Egypt. The Sphinx, as everyone knows, is that famous, you know, tourist attraction where there's a cat like body with a human face. And we think that this happened a couple thousand years ago when the Egyptians were powerful. And we believe that's when the pyramids were built, built by the Egyptians for whatever purpose. We're still trying to figure that out. The level of perfection that they were able to work at. We still as humans today can't do that. Then you start to think, okay, there was this constant evolution. You know, Egyptians were who they are and we became a better version of them because we become smarter and better and faster. So meanwhile, when you look at the Sphinx, there's an anomaly that, that is known by historians, but we don't talk about because there's no explanation that fits science and the current scientific narrative. And again, there's more clues that point to the type of stuff we've just been talking about. When you look at the Sphinx, the wear and tear around the base is water damage. The Sphinx is sitting in the middle of the desert. The last time that there was water to that degree was pre 10,000 years ago, probably closer to 20,000 years ago. In fact, it's believed there was an ice age that maybe wiped a population out. So then this begs the question. Well, if there was, if the Sphinx existed when water damage was possible in that area of the desert, well that means they were there between 12 to 20,000 years ago prior to the peak of that Egyptian civilization that we now know of.

So who built the Sphinx?

And is it possible that there was civilization on earth that was more intelligent than who we are today? Because they did figure out how to build pyramids that we cannot figure out today. They did figure out that with perfection. When you got to the top, that all that peak was optimal. Those stones that are the size of buses being placed in outmost like optimal perfection that we can do today, we don't have the tools to do that today. So was there or were there people prior to us that because we believe that evolution happens in an upward trajectory, there's a ladder that we keep climbing. Can it happen more cyclically? Is it possible that there was people that existed 20,000 years ago, before the Ice Age, that were far more advanced than us in technology? They were able to do things like build pyramids that you found. We find them in different places of the world. They're, you know, in South America, they're in Egypt. They're now being found under grass mounds that have been completely covered by forests. And how, why and how did this happen? And the really cool thing just to dive into this, we're moving away from DNA. But, but if you look at that time where the Sphinx. Sphinx was and if you look at astral maps or the stars and you calculate back to about 10 or 12,000 years ago, the Sphinx actually would have been facing a, it would have been facing an exact constellation that actually mirrors this sort of lion like image. It would have been literally facing. It doesn't do that today, by the way. It doesn't do that 2000 years ago also at the time of the peak of the Egyptian population. So there's these clues that point to perhaps we don't evolve in a straight upward ladder. Perhaps it's more cyclical. Perhaps something happened 200,000 years ago that caused a change like we discussed that we no longer, or I didn't even, shouldn't even say we, that a population was no longer like who it was, or we appeared and got engineered into who we are, or there was some kind of rapid conversion. Again, the why and how we don't know. There's no. And this is why science is struggling with even looking at this, because it's so counterintuitive to what science believes to be true. It also speaks to some force that is outside of what we believe brings us down that evolutional path. And that's also why science is afraid to look at it. Because there's things that you can't explain and there's things that maybe are explained through, you know, the energy of the universe, through religion and God depend. You can go down any path, there's multiple paths you can go on that that could explain this in other ways beyond our current narrative of how animals evolve. And so this isn't being picked up on in terms of deeper research, but there's plenty of publications to tell us that this is exactly what happened. So if this happened 200,000 years ago, how rapidly did those people evolve and what level of technology did they get to where potentially the Sphinx and the pyramids are much older than we think, and that was only 20,000 years ago. How many times did this happen? How many civilizations were there that we don't know about, for whom? How many ice ages or how many natural disasters wipe them out? And then we rebuild and we come back. And then we rebuild and we come back. And what we're doing to ourselves today with climate and, you know, social and war and everything that's going on in the world, Doomsday clock is in the worst position it's ever been. Now, I want to give you bad news, but that's where we're at that. So is it possible for this to happen again? That if this is what happened, might it happen again? Might we reach some peak and then start over again? Whereas we believe we're just going to keep getting better and better and better and better. So there's evidence, like I said, of evolution. You can see in animals that they inherit, like I gave you the example, the elephants, they inherit the survival traits of their, of their ancestors in an evolutionary format where they keep getting better. We haven't seen evidence of this in humans. And this is the bigger question. It's a different question. In humans we see something very different. We are the same, like I said, we haven't changed from 200000 years ago. There was a flip that was. There's a switch that was flipped. We became who we are. 50% larger brain, larger neuroco cortex, the ability to process emotions, the ability to sing and speak. We became who we are. At that point, physical features and traits also changed and just overnight became true, which weren't there, didn't exist prior to. We also know that there was a fusion that happened that is hard to explain. So these two chromosomes came together and we were a new entity that was unlike anything prior to us. So how did this all happen? That's the question we now have to answer. But that starts with science. Even on believing that this is true, the publications again, the science is there for each piece, but you have to stitch it all together and understand that possibly there was a different path. So those are my thoughts on evolution. This is what I believe to be pertinent in terms of if you're trying to discover and understand what actually happened, that again, it wasn't this path of constant improvement. It was something much different. And the things that we see that are nuances or hints towards evolution today. They are sort of, as I said, getting versions of genes from the people who happen to be your parents who thrived in that past context. But those other versions of those genes still exist on other people. And so you may end up, your next layer of progeny may end up right where your ancestors started. There's no upward trajectory. It's just a constant exchange of genetic traits that keep making us different. And based on your context, you either thrive or you don't, because you're either wired it for wired for it or you're not. And just like I told you about what happened in India, you went from the most successful country in the world, historically the biggest economy ever, to abject poverty and 40 some odd famines in a very short period of time that led to a certain genotype and phenotype surviving and thriving. And now that's leading to a whole other phenomenon where today evolution, if you look at it that way, South Asian people have crazy metabolic health and cardiovascular diseases because they're not designed for food, they're designed for starvation. That will change because again, the right people for that right context will survive. And all of a sudden they will be the people having children and dominating, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's how we look at it. I'm sure you're gonna have questions. Go ahead, reach out to us. I hope to bring some experts on the topic in to discuss this a little further because it's such a deep topic and I hope I haven't offended anybody because it is controversial to some regard. But this is just me reiterating what I've learned and seen and I hope that's helped you in some way or the other. Again, questions, please reach out. I'm happy to dive into this deeper. Thanks for joining us.

Today. More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed and often outside the box approach to discovery the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.