The Gut-Gene Axis: Unlocking your DNA to Solve Chronic Health Issues with Jenna Weeks, ND

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'll be speaking with Dr. Jenna Weeks, ND, a naturopathic doctor at the Moncton Naturopathic Medical Clinic in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, and online for people all over the world. She has spent 8 years researching, training, and clinically observing how single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, often underlie patients' diagnoses like anxiety, depression, autism, digestive issues, chronic inflammation, heavy metal accumulation, acne, food sensitivities, and hormonal issues, and has a new book coming out at Christmas on this topic. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. And if you wanna get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, highdeserthealthcoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. Now onto the show. Welcome to the podcast, Jenna.

Hello.

Thanks so much for being with us.

It is a gift and a pleasure.

To be here today.

You've got a beautiful backdrop there of the nature, and I wish I were sitting outside as well, but I have too much traffic noise where I live.

I feel so blessed because this year I finally have a home, and I have my very first garden, and I'm actually sitting in front of it. I've been sitting by it all day. Took the day off to recalibrate my soul back to what is good, right? And what better to do than sit beside your garden to to figure that out.

Awesome.

Could you start us off by describing what DNA is and what it does?

Oh my goodness, that is such a huge, vast question and a wonderful question. Let me see if I can distill that down into something that's going to be useful for any human on this planet. DNA is the instructions. So imagine having a factory and imagine in the factory, there were no persons there that knew what to tell you to do or how to do it or when to do it or all of these different things, it would be kind of chaos or chaotic. Your DNA is the thing that sends down governance from all the levels of your cells to tell you, tell yourselves how they're supposed to work and how they're supposed to be and what they're supposed to make, what they're supposed to do. It's kind of amazing. I think of it like Santa's workshop and all the little elves working together to create harmony inside the body and to sustain life. It's, it's kind of amazing. Yeah. So that's what DNA is and what DNA does as far as I'm concerned.

Okay. So knowing that about DNA, how now can you explain the difference between genetics and epigenetics?

That is also such a phenomenally interesting question that nobody knows the answer to yet, to be honest. And it keeps changing. It's a moving target. And if anybody tells you that they know the answer to that question, they're probably wrong. So long story short, the way that I look at it is kind of like a house and your house has a foundation and your foundation is your DNA and your DNA doesn't really change. And then your epigenetics are kind of like the house above the foundation. You can change the curtains, you can change the blinds, you can change the color. So it can be different than what it already is. Where people get a little confused though, is they think that by the word epigenetics, they mean that they can change their genetics. So a lot of times you can't actually change your genetics necessarily, kind of like a river going downstream. The river can become dammed up and that dam is there, that DNA marker is there. But what we can do is we can circumnavigate around that dam so that we can still have the water flow to the other side as the outcome. So for example, in your DNA, you are born with certain DNA markers. Those things can either be turned on or not turned on. It's kind of like having a horizon is what I usually tell my patients. And underneath the horizon you can have light switches. Just because you were born with a light switch doesn't necessarily mean it's turned on, but maybe through your life you may dip through deficit states and then eventually the light switch can get turned on. And this is sort of where people go like, oh, I never really had that problem before, but now all of a sudden I do and I don't know why. So you have your DNA, it is yours, but there are ways to mitigate the problems that your DNA can cause. And there are also certain ways that you can influence your DNA. And where people kind of get a little bit confused is going, well, can't I influence my DNA by what I drink and what I eat and, and all these different things? Yes, it does work that way because DNA is what we call methylated. Methylation, we go back to that reference of the factory and imagine a conveyor belt and imagine on that conveyor belt you have a Hot Wheels car. And you have a little house where you have a worker who's going to pull the lever down and that little Hot Wheels car is gonna go through. And there's another worker there that's going to put either the windows, the doors, things on the car. And so there's a reason why the conveyor belt needs to be turned on. And then maybe the Hot Wheels goes down a little further, it needs to be painted, and that conveyor belt needs to be turned off. The worker there represents methylation. Of your DNA, meaning methylation turns your DNA on and off. And there's a reason for it to be on, there's a reason for it to be off. Both are beneficial. Not on is better, off is worse. Both are beneficial at different times. And so the way I like to describe it and how we can affect our genes is if we had a worker that's there and they're drunk, or they ate a bunch of crappy food and now their brain is really foggy, then that's gonna change how that lever gets pulled, turned on, turned off, and then that's gonna change everything that comes down the assembly line. And eventually, if the person is really under it, drinking, smoking, crappy food, all that stuff, then that lever gets pulled at the wrong times and now you have messes in your cells, right? So this is how we can affect and change our DNA by making sure that our worker is drinking a green smoothie and they did yoga that morning. And so their body is primed and ready to do the job properly, to methylate the DNA, to make the DNA optimal. To make their bodies. It's my long-winded way of kind of explaining what DNA is, genetics are, epigenetics, and how you can affect your genetics. It's a complicated topic. So I've tried to do my best to give it to people in a way that they can hold it in their hands, use it and digest it and actually do something with it.

Right.

Yeah. Well, now that we have that great analogy, tell me about what a SNP is and how they can influence your health.

Yeah.

So a SNP is a single nucleotide polymorphism. The way that I'd like to talk about it with people is I usually get them to imagine a computer system and behind the computer screen, inside of the software, there is zeros and ones and the zeros and ones are running the show. And behind the scenes, if you have a line of code and you, if you have a zero where there's supposed to be a one, you could have a little glitch. Maybe another line of code, another glitch, another line of code, another glitch in another area. And so depending on how many glitches you have in which different areas, that will determine how fragged your system shows up on the screen. And so our body's DNA, our SNPs are kind of like that. We could have an A where there's supposed to be a T, a C where there's supposed to be a G in our DNA base pairs called adenine, cysteine, thymine, and guanine. I usually just say red ball, blue ball, yellow ball, green ball. If you have a green ball where there's supposed to be a red ball, glitch. Yellow ball where there's supposed to be a blue ball, glitch. And then when we take that whole thing and put it in the framework of thinking about a giant Plinko board— so remember The Price is Right— and we think about putting that Plinko chip in at the top of the board and it filters down through, and it falls down through a slot in the bottom, and you might get $500, you might get $1,000, you might get nothing. Your body's like that too. You put food or drink in, drugs, alcohol, whatever it is, it filters down through pathways and those pathways, out of them you get certain things that get made. So the pathways are pathways for vitamin A, pathways for B vitamins, pathways for vitamin C, D, E, zinc, feel-good brain chemicals, hormones, and also your gut flora and your collagen. So if you have a little bumper representing a little glitch in any one of those pathways, then you can't necessarily have made what you wanna have made out of that pathway, and then that will have its own set of issues with it. Just a real quick example of that so people can have an idea. A lot of times I see patients in my practice that will have a bumper in the pathway of vitamin A. So that's a SNP, a single nucleotide polymorphism in your vitamin A. And what that means is that they don't necessarily convert beta carotene into active retinol. And when that happens and you don't have active retinol, but what's active retinol's job in Santa's workshop? Active retinol's job is to make sure that skin cell turnover happens. So if you don't get skin cell turnover, then these are my people who have acne, psoriasis, dandruff, eczema, dry eyes, cracks in the corners of their mouth, cracks in their heels and their feet, and they will never ever know it unless we do this testing, find out and go, oh yeah, no wonder you have those issues. You don't make your vitamin A properly. So let's, look at supplying your body with what it's been missing all along in a safe, healthy way through a practitioner and the right dose and the right kind. 'Cause vitamin E is also very dangerous at high doses. For everyone listening, you don't go supplement with it willy-nilly, but then we can start to see changes that we've never been able to see in the body before because we're finally giving that individual the raw materials that their body's been missing all along.

And since you brought up the vitamin A example, and I know I actually have that SNP, So beta carotene comes from fruits and vegetables, right? Whereas the active form, like retinol palmitate or whatever retinol forms there are, come from meat, don't they?

Yes, absolutely. Liver's the highest form of vitamin A, the active form of vitamin A. So that's definitely where you would want to source that, or possibly through supplementation because you're right, when you're consuming carrots, that's beta carotene. Those orange foods. But if you don't have the enzyme because you have a little SNP, it doesn't necessarily convert into that active form. So then you wanna be consuming the active form again in right dose because vitamin A can be toxic for the liver and can cause birth defects in childbearing women. So we just wanna make sure we're dosing it specifically correctly. And anything said on this podcast today is for information purposes and never meant to diagnose or treat anyone.

Got it.

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So can you tell us about some SNPs that could impact gut health?

This is my favorite topic of life and the reason why I wanted to come on your podcast in the first place and shout this from the rooftops because The amount of lives I've seen this change has been unprecedented. It's been incredible. And I just wish that more people had this information in their hands so that they don't have to suffer because if you go to your doctor, unfortunately, if you show up with a bunch of gut issues, they will give you a diagnosis of exclusion, which is IBS usually. And they don't know what that is and they don't know how to treat that. And that's okay. Because every aspect of medicine or anything has its limitations, even naturopathic medicine, right? So good on everybody for doing the best that they can where they're at. And your genetics, the two gene mutations that I would just love to talk about today. One of them is called a FUT2 gene mutation, F-U-T-2, not Footloose or not.

F-U-T-2.

Have you ever heard of that one?

Yeah, I was gonna ask, cuz I've had my own DNA done by the DNA company and I'll, I'll ask you about mine after you're done describing it.

Awesome. Do you have a FUT2?

I have AG.

Okay.

So you're at AG and so heterozygous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So yeah, generally the one that I'm speaking of, it is an AA, a non-secreter. So what does that even mean? What I'm gonna get everybody to imagine that is listening is imagine the wall of your intestine like one of those spongy bath mats that has those finger-like projections that are really absorbent. That's the side of your intestinal wall. And then just above that, usually I draw a picture and I put these little microbes and then just above that in the sky, I put a little Pac-Man and that Pac-Man is spitting out what I usually call glitter. But really what it is is that little Pac-Man is your red blood cell and it's spitting out a carbohydrate that's meant to feed your gut flora. And if you don't have a FUT2 AA non-secretor SNP, this is what happens. If you have a FUT2 AA non-secretor SNP and it is active, meaning that that light switch is triggered in you and you're having signs and symptoms of digestive disturbance, then what can happen is that red blood cell doesn't necessarily make the carbohydrate to feed your good gut flora, which means that you don't really have your good gut flora. It's crazy when I say that. I had one patient that was one of my very first patients ever, and she was trying to figure out the root cause of her MS. And she came to me and she had done a stool test, and her stool test showed no good gut flora, no bad gut flora, no flora. She was working with another doctor down the hall at the time,. And they put her on a high-dose probiotic and 6 months later retested her stool. No gut flora, no good, no bad.

What? Okay.

They put her on another round of soil probiotics, tested again, same thing. No gut flora. They put her on kimchi, sauerkraut, kefir, you name it. No gut flora. 3 stool tests in, no good, no bad. She came to see me. We did her genetics. We found that she had a FUT2 SNP.. It was like a holy hell and blue moment. Both of us cried in my office because we were like, wow, we finally understand why this is happening. Once we were able to see that, we were able to give her the specific nutrients that feed her gut flora and the specific probiotic that she would be missing. And we tested after 6 months and sure enough, finally gut flora. It was a beautiful day. This has had such an impact on so many of my patients, especially with IBS. I remember one man came to me and he said, I'm 50 years old and finally I'm pooping the right way for the first time in my entire life. Every day, 2, 3 times a day. He's like, that wasn't ever a possibility for me. He was somebody that went the other way and was 5 or 6 or 7 times in kind of diarrhea. And then my other patients sometimes with this gene mutation will have constipation too. So it's just a, a real blessing to learn about this one and assist it.

Yeah. So as I mentioned, I have the AG, not the AA, so I have maybe one part of it that's working right and one that's not. And I have autoimmune SIBO, so I'm curious if this gene could have impacted my getting SIBO in the first place when I was exposed to food poisoning.

Yeah, let's talk about this one. It's been my experience that the root of SIBO, which is such a big statement to make, but I remember being in naturopathic medical school like 10 years ago and I remember SIBO being a really big, huge thing coming down the pipe and learning about it and hearing that SIBO is really resistant in some patients, but not in others. And whenever I heard that, that was always a big red flag for me. And I'm very much a why person. Well, why is that? I want to know why. So I put my investigative cap on and sure enough, somewhere down the line, I kind of figured it out. And what I learned is that the people, the patients that are resistant for SIBO treatment, where they've treated SIBO and it keeps coming back, they have what's called a COL1A1 or 5A1 gene. Are you familiar with those ones?

No.

Okay. Put on your hat. We're gonna go for a journey that's gonna change your life. So long story short, with a collagen gene mutation, what happens is we're supposed to have collagen made in our body in a way in which it's a strong cross-linking fiber. And if we have a collagen gene mutation, then what can happen is that cross-linking fiber can sort of have holes in the mesh of it. I figured this out about a year and a half ago because I have these gene mutations myself and I still had digestive issues and I still could not figure out where they were coming from and why and why they wouldn't just finally subside. And I went back to the drawing board, looked at my genes, and I dug deeper and I found out, oh, I have this double collagen gene mutation. Okay, well, where else is collagen in the body? We know it's in the ligaments and tendons and joints, and we know it's in the skin and the hair and the nails. Well, where else is it in the body?. And I did some research and found out that 98% of your intestinal wall is made up of collagen. Oh, how interesting. Okay. So theoretically, if I have a collagen gene mutation, I don't make my collagen as well as I should. I probably have mesh in my intestines that has got holes in it. So leaky gut, chronic leaky gut. So then we can let bad bacteria in and we can let good bacteria out. And it just all becomes kind of a mess that we call SIBO.. And these are the people that generally tend to be resistant to treatment because the holes in the mesh never get addressed. People think that the holes are caused by the SIBO and the bacteria being bad and it's causing leaky gut. But 9 times out of 10, my patients have collagen gene mutations underlying this and their net was leaking from the beginning. So if we can look at that, see that, pop that hood, find those collagen gene mutations, then we can address the root cause of the issue, which is a collagen synthesis issue, and support the body in making the collagen properly, not just taking collagen supplements, but doing things to supercharge collagen production, then things start to really change and take hold in a better, amazing way.

Yes.

Life-changing.

So I know vitamin C is one of the necessary ingredients for collagen production. What else is involved?

Glycine, proline.

Hmm.

So generally speaking, I will use some combination of that. Depending on the human anatomy and what their needs are and what concomitant factors exist for them and what's safe and what's not for their body.

Mm-hmm. And I know that there are different types of collagen.

Is there a particular type of collagen that's specific to the gut?

Yeah, so there's collagen 1 through 5, and collagen 1, 2, and 3 are more specific to the gut. There is some collagen number 5 in there. There's a little bit of 4, but those other ones are the main predominant ones to focus on. So if you're looking for a collagen to support you in that way, then you would wanna look in those areas.

1, 2, and 3.

And if you're just taking those basic collagen peptides, that would include all types, right?

Most of the time, yes. It's usually collagen type 1 and type 2.

Okay. Yeah, I was just curious about that. And with glycine, this is something I've been sort of pondering of late because both of my parents, I test them regularly, like once a year they do their metabolomics or NutrEval or whatever it is, and they're always deficient on glycine. And glycine is one of the building blocks of glutathione. So I assume I probably got their genetics and I'm probably deficient in glycine too. But now thinking, okay, glycine is related to collagen and we're deficient in glycine. That might be sort of the triple whammy for our family.

Oh my God. I love conversing with people like you who can see the web of the big picture and understand how it's all interconnected into a constellation that actually makes sense for your own self and also your whole family unit. That's what I find to be the brilliance of genetics is that it allows us that span of understanding, I guess. So you hit it right on the nail with glycine. My question for you is, how's your sleep?

Not great. I wake up in the—

well, I also have hot flashes, but let's talk about it for just a second.

Yeah.

'Cause the people will probably be helped by this. So imagine a bicycle that has a funnel on the front of it. And imagine a shelf next to you, and on the shelf you have collagen, vitamin C, glycine, proline, and some B vitamins and different other things that make up what you need to make collagen. And so imagine you're taking those ingredients off the shelf, putting it into the funnel, and you're biking to spit out a ribbon behind you that's supposed to be a solid ribbon of collagen, but your ribbon has a bunch of holes in it. So then you keep needing to take ingredients off the shelf and keep pouring them in the funnel because it's not really getting made properly, right? So eventually you're using up your resources. When somebody walks into the room from another department department and they say, hey, do you got any glycine in here? We need it for the sleep department. Then the glycine isn't available. So that's actually what happens. And this was a secondary discovery when I figured this out, was that my patients who have a lot of sleep issues that have these collagen gene mutations, their glycine is being used up by the collagen gene mutation. So it's not available to dampen their brain at night to make them go into a deep restful sleep. Figure this out. They sleep like babies. Most of them. It's been a really wild and wonderful discovery, that one. And the other discovery that I made through this was that this is the root cause of fibromyalgia, in my opinion. I know that's a very huge, bold statement to make, but I have had so many patients come back after being on gabapentin for 12 years, 5 years, 7 years, 3 years, and they're no longer on their gabapentin because they no longer have pain. Because their gut is no longer leaking poo particles, which ignite their inflammation, and the body shoves that inflammation to the joint spaces cuz that's the safe place for it to go. They just no longer have those issues, right? And the same with arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. We've been able to gain so much traction for those patients and as well autoimmune thyroid conditions, because again, poo particles roaming around in your system, rogue, will create inflammation in your whole body.

Wow. That is interesting. And I know that SIBO is very much correlated with fibromyalgia and is often a precursor. So if you see this common root in collagen issues around both of them, that would make sense why they're connected.

Oh, hallelujah. You get it.

Yeah. And I was gonna say about the glycine was I think one thing that often happens in the world of supplements is people, they go, oh, Oh, well glycine is a great supplement for sleep, right?

That helps sleep. Well, it will help sleep if you were deficient in glycine.

If you weren't deficient in glycine, it probably won't, won't be a mover for you.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, that's where I have completely dedicated my life to understanding genetics because when I was in naturopathic medical school, it was so wild because they were like, curcumin, this is the number one thing. Everybody take curcumin. It's so good. And I would take it and I would feel like absolute garbage or they would say this particular herb, valerian or whatever it is, is for anxiety. And I would take it and I would feel so anxious. And so I started going, I'm not made like everybody else. I need things that are individually for my own specific snowflake make and model of body. And then I had to think, well, there must be other people out there. And so I thought I can't in good conscience prescribe to people things knowing that maybe it's not going to be the right fit for their body unless I know what the right fit for their body is. So this is where genetics allows us to peek through that window for that specific make and model of body and give that specific make and model of body what it needs and understand its little recalls and the things that it needs extra support with, right?

Yeah. And so back to the collagen one. So you said COL1A1 or 5A1, is that what will appear if we have gotten our DNA done or are we looking for specific letters or mutations on those two genes?

Generally speaking, the COL 181581 should be enough information to tell you. I'm not really sure exactly what all of the companies are gonna illustrate. I know for my own self, the way that I go about it is I go through usually Ancestry, 23andMe, and I take that raw data.

Mm-hmm.

And I put it through my third-party medical reporting software, which is called Pure Insight. And that's where I gain all of the backstory on my patients. So I'm not really sure all of the different DNA— yeah, there will illustrate that.

Yeah, no, I've taken people's SNPs and put them through Genetic Genie and what you get is this homozygous, is this heterozygous, you get that kind of information. So I guess it would probably appear like that. One thing that I did find out when I did my DNA through the DNA company, which was with the Ancestry and the 23andMe, you can have group data. You can have mistakes essentially because they're doing it en masse versus much smaller batch or individual. And I found out that when I put my 23andMe through Genetic Genie, I had APOE4/4, which is correlated with a higher risk for Alzheimer's. And then when they did it through DNA Company, I found out it was only a 3/4, so it was not quite as bad. And so I'm curious. If there is something on there that's kind of disturbing, do you send people for secondary testing to confirm?

Yeah, generally speaking, I do. I don't think any test really in the world is fail-safe.

Mm-hmm.

Just being realistic. We're humans, we're doing the best we can on this planet. So 9 times outta 10, I do feel like it really matches like 99.5%. When I speak to my patients, they're just like, yeah, this is so me to a T. So in terms of discrepancies, I don't really see a whole lot of them and at a clinical level.

Okay. And so any other SNPs that specifically relate to gut health?

The ones that really surprised me were B vitamin gene mutations. I had never learned anything, 8 years of schooling, numerous days, hours of research and everything. And I had never heard anything about necessarily B vitamins. Playing a huge role in digestive health. And then whenever I would treat the SNPs for B vitamin gene mutations in my patients, they would come back and say, wow, I used to be so constipated. I would go once every 3 days and now I'm going 3 times a day. This has never happened in my life before. And whenever we would do their genetics, I would always start them on one thing at a time. And so B vitamins are generally the thing I start people on first because you need to kind of unkink the hose in the system. And from the moment they start the B vitamins, they're like, I really notice a difference in my bowels and my body in that way. I'm like, yep, there it is. Okay. And now there's more research coming out that activated B vitamins play a really big role at the junction cells of the intestinal wall and helping to facilitate energy movement peristalsis through the intestines, which is really kind of amazing.

Hmm. And so is this the famed MTHFR we're talking about?

Yes, there is the MTHFR as part of that, which is never to be negated. It's so important to know about the MTHFR gene mutation. What I've learned though is that generally speaking, when people have one or two MTHFR gene mutations, they'll generally always also have a B12 gene mutation, maybe a couple of them, B6 gene mutation, and also a choline gene mutation. The way that I kind of make it make sense to my patients is I just say B9, imagine kind of like a figure 8, and on the figure 8 you've got B9 in one place and B9 kind of makes B12 in the middle, and then B12 goes on to the other side to make B6, and B6 makes choline, and choline makes B12. And so they all kind of facilitate that infinity symbol of helping and making, facilitating each other. If you have a gene mutation mutation in one of them, then you kind of have a gene mutation in all of them. And that whole cycle goes on to do methylation. And that whole methylation thing that we were talking about, kind of feel like being like Pee-wee Herman's Playhouse, like methylation, like it's such an important word for humans to know, learn, understand, have in their dialect, be able to speak about. But that methylation again is that person standing there at the helm of your DNA literally turning your DNA on and turning it off so that it works properly. This is why it's so key to the function of your whole entire body to have that B vitamin cycle, that methylation cycle working properly. And when we have gene mutations in there, that's when things go kind of crazy and off-kilter and haywire. And that whole B vitamin cycle goes off to make feel-good brain chemicals too. So when that doesn't work, we'll be deficit in serotonin and dopamine. And that's where a lot of people think that they have anxiety, they have depression, they have ADD, they have all these different things. And really they just have a B vitamin gene mutation, bunch of them deficiency. And when we kind of sort that out, those other issues, the volume on them turns down a lot if that's the root cause of what they're dealing with.

Mm-hmm.

And what are the other genes that might show up on mutations related to B vitamins?

Those are the ones. B6, choline, B9, B12. I can talk a little bit about what they do. And if you have those gene mutations, what happens if they're not working properly?

Okay.

Let's go with choline first. Choline is— I'd lump it in with the B vitamins because it kind of hangs out with them, but choline is so important to your liver function and metabolizing fats in your liver. A lot of my patients will go and they'll get scans randomly because their intestines are doing something strange, and then inadvertently they'll find out that they have fatty liver. Then their doctor will say something along the lines of, well, it's not really that bad, so we're just gonna wait and watch and monitor it and see what happens. And if you do that, eventually it will get worse. When it gets worse, then it can actually turn into bad thing. So I don't know why that's exactly the way we go about doing it, but that's how it works. And so what I really want people to know about there is that often what will happen is that there is an underlying gene mutation or two of them in your choline genes. So these are MTHFD1 and PEMT2. If you have a gene mutation in either of those, then what can happen is The way I describe it is like this. If you had a cold slab and above it you had a screen and that screen was warm, and on the screen there was a chunk of butter, and through the screen little droplets of butter were dropping through and landing on the cold slab below. This is kind of what happens in our liver when fat passes through it. And choline is the nutrient to heat up that slab below to allow the fat to keep rolling through your liver.. But if you don't have the choline, that slab doesn't get heated, it doesn't get metabolized, those fats don't get emulsified, and then they just build up in your liver. And so then that's what's causing the fatty liver. But when you go to the conventional medical system and you're not really drinking a lot of alcohol and you're not really eating a lot of fatty foods, they're like, well, it's non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and we have no idea why it happens. Well, actually it's a choline gene mutation. And when you know this, you can do something about it. I had a patient who came and they had an 80% fatty liver, age 27, and it was causing their brain to have so much brain fog that they could hardly function or work. Once I saw their genes, once I realized what we were dealing with, we were able to give their body what it had been missing all along. And within the right dose, right form, right kind, right timing, and right combination of choline and other factors, within 3 months— I thought it was going to take 9 months, 6, maybe a year for this to happen. But within 3 months they went back for another scan. No more fatty liver from an 80% fatty liver.

Wow.

Tell me that's not wild.

Yeah. Would somebody who has fatty liver because they're doing the bad stuff like drinking and eating sugar, could they take choline or other cofactors and help with it?

Are they going to?

Well, maybe, maybe they're willing to take a pill. Maybe they're not willing to stop eating sugar, but they're willing to take a pill.

In good conscience, I can't really say that because my take on life is don't put yourself in that position to begin with. Yes, maybe the cards are stacked against you and yes, maybe there are things that you can do to support your body better, but one of the best things you can do to support your body if you do have fatty liver is to not drink alcohol and not cheat.

Sure, sure. But say my 80-year-old parents, they made it this far. They don't have cancer. They don't have heart disease. They're drinking their 2 drinks a day and that's going to happen. They're going to be eating desserts a few times a week. That's going to happen. That's never going to change. They're in their 80s. They made it this far. So would choline be a good supplement for somebody who, I mean, I don't know that they have any fatty liver, but I'm just curious in that sort of scenario.

That one's crossing an ethical boundary in me.

Okay. That's fine. You don't have to answer.

The reason why I say that is cuz a patient of mine the other day said something along those lines where they, they went to their doctor and they were eating a bunch of ice cream and a lot of Lay's potato chips. And the doctor put them on a statin, which totally depletes your nutrients and is actually really not a healthy substance. Some, some drugs are not mean and some are. Anyways, this is a mean drug, a statin. And the doctor just said, well, eat your chips, eat your ice cream. Just take the statin. It's all good. In my soul, I cringed and I just said, no, don't eat the chips. Don't do the thing to your body. And I get that the parents are old. They made it to 80. So maybe they just eat whatever they want, do whatever they want. And that's their prerogative.

Yeah, no, I mean, I also am sympathetic to the fact that there are some people really have binge eating disorders, they have really complex issues around trauma and ACEs and everything else such that it's not even within their conscious to control not to eat the wrong things. Like some people have fatty liver and may always have fatty liver. You gotta work with people who are imperfect.

Yeah.

Is that kind of a case then? Maybe.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

That's a good, good topic to explore really. Thank you.

Yeah.

Hey, this is Lindsey here. Just letting you know that if you're tired of dealing with digestive issues, like bloating, indigestion, soft stool, diarrhea, constipation, reflux, IBS, IBD, or the numerous health conditions that come about when your gut is off, like brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, fatigue, mental health issues, or complex conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS. That's my specialty. With my 3 or 5 session gut health coaching packages, we'll discuss different stool and functional medicine tests to find out the root cause of your symptoms. I'll interpret the results and provide clear explanations, empowering you to make informed choices for your gut and overall health. And together we'll develop a customized action plan based on your test results so you can find relief and regain your health and vitality. I come from a functional medicine perspective, trying to incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research and educating you on protocols used by functional medicine practitioners, but devoting lots of time and support to my clients the way a doctor simply can't. If you're interested in a 3 or 5 session coaching package, you can sign up for complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session. Or if you can only afford one appointment at a time, you can book an initial 60-minute consultation. Links for those are in the show notes. Now back to the show.

You mentioned, okay, what we were just talking about, choline. How about the other B vitamins you were talking about?

Oh my gosh, pick one, either one you wanna know about.

Folate. Let's talk about folate.

Folate.

Okay, so that's your MTHFR gene mutation, methyltetrahydrofolate reductase. Okay, so what does this mean? Why do we care? Usually what I tell I tell people is that Clark Kent needs a phone booth to turn into Superman so that Superman can take the riffraff out, make the hearts of people happy, keep people happy so they can keep reproducing properly. In your body, your folate, just plain old folate, needs an enzyme inside of your body to work, which is a reductase, methyltetrahydrofolate reductase enzyme, in order to work, in order to turn into— so Clark Kent needs phone booth to turn into Superman. Your folate needs the enzyme to work in order to turn into activated folate to then take and bind to excess hormones, excess heavy metals, excess plastics, toxins, pesticides, you name it. So if it can't do that, then those things can roam around our body and create havoc. That whole methylation cycle again goes on to methylate your DNA. So that's part of it. Methylfolate makes a lot of the methyl groups that go on to methylate DNA. And then it makes, like I said, your feel-good brain chemicals, serotonin and dopamine. And then the other thing it does is it makes the cells on your cervix divide and grow properly. So women who have abnormal PAPs a lot of times will have B12 and B9 gene mutations and not ever know that this is actually part of the root cause of why they're having their abnormal PAPs in the first place, because you need activated B vitamins to turn that the cellular turnover on the cervix, the same as you do to make a baby. And so women with NTHFR gene mutations as well sometimes will have a history of miscarriage or premature birth or abnormal births. The way that I kind of describe that to people is if you are making a cake, you need resources to make the cake. If you don't have enough resources, then sometimes the cake has to come outta the oven sooner.

Right.

So mature birth, or sometimes the cake just doesn't work. And so that can be the miscarriage, right? With— we don't have enough of those proper resources. But again, if we can find out that this is what's going on, then we can mitigate this before women ever go into their birthing era and facilitate there being more healthful births as well. B vitamins play a crucial role in energy metabolism. Just making energy. And so I have a lot of women who will have gone through giving birth and they'll say, I've just never been the same since. I just have not gained my energy back. And this will be 10 or 12 years later. And they just feel flat like a pancake in the morning. They can't get out of bed. And then at 10 in the morning, their energy's the sort of okay. And then 2, 3 in the afternoon, it dips. And then 8, 9, 10 at night, they're really tired. But then 11, 12 at night, they start to wake up again. And this is called a reverse curve on your adrenals. And your B vitamins are intimately connected to your adrenals. And so this comes back to these women having underlying B vitamin gene mutations and never knowing it. And when they go to make a baby, they use all their B vitamins to resource making that baby. And then once that's done, they've got nothing left inside their body to replenish with. So then they, they are low on energy going forward. It's just the way it is. And we give these women the things that they've been missing all along. They start to literally feel like someone turned the lights back on in their body and they're coming back to life and they have energy and they're finally sleeping again. And they actually have a zest and a joy for life again, as opposed to just dragging themselves barely through the day. Those B vitamins are huge, right?

And then of course they put folic acid in most of the B vitamins, which is not the active form, or I'm sorry, the prenatal vitamins. I meant.

Yeah, that is something for every, everybody to be very aware of that the statistic on it is that about 44, 47% of the population have an MTHFR gene mutation. That's not taking into consider as well the other B vitamin gene mutation. So in my experience, it's somewhere closer to around 70% of people may have one or more B vitamin gene mutation, which means that they're working at a deficit for resources, for energy.

Yeah. And so most people need to be looking for B vitamins that have methylated folate of some sort. Yeah.

So here's my little rule of thumb. This is how I find a B complex on the shelf, which is really hard to do to find a good one. But everybody knows what B12 is, right? Like just B12. Yeah, I know.

B12.

B12.

Okay, cool. So the way that I describe it is the ABCD rule. Rule. So I will tell if a product has integrity, integrity meaning that it has activated forms of things, if it follows the ABC rule. So you get an A if you look for B12, right on the back of the bottle, look for B12, and if next to it you see a C word, B, don't do it. So that C word will be cyanocobalamin, and that's the non-active form. You wanna see any other word next to your B12. You wanna see the real word is methylcobalamin. And then you go and look at your folate.. And if it's just a simple word, folate, folic acid, simple word, no complicated word next to it, don't do it. You want a complicated word. You want L-5-MTHF or L-5-calcium-methylfolate or one big complicated word.

Okay. Is there one like Metafolin or? Yeah.

Metafolin is a trademark name that a company uses. So yeah, something like that.

It's also methylated.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. And does it matter if the B6 is P5P or is?

I prefer if the B6 is P5P, that'll be the activated form of B6 as well. But I also prefer to know if people have a B6 gene mutation before they take a B complex, because if they don't have a B6 gene mutation, I won't leave my patients on B complex longer than one bottle to rebolster their body because B6 actually can build up in the nerve tissue and cause numbness and tingling in the hands and feet if it's not needed.

Yeah.

I've, I've come across many clients who have to use B complexes without B6 because they're deficient in other things. And what's the name of that gene for B6?

There's two of them that I know and work with intimately, and one of them is called NBPF3 and the other one is called CBS, cystathione beta synthase.

Mm-hmm.

So those are two different kind of things. One is you have a problem just even making or having enough B6 around and BPF3, and then CBS uses B6. So if it's going too fast, then you can use up your B6 too quickly.

Mm-hmm. Isn't there a fast and slow CBS?

Yeah, there is. It's really weird, but in my experience, most of the time it's going fast, but most of the research that's out there is on the slow one. In terms of percentages, I would say 12% of my patients have the slow one and the rest of them have the fast one. And the fast one then is generating too much ammonia in their body. And that, you know, just for anybody listening, if you go to the doctor and you have panic attacks, they will basically tell you, and the literature tells you that there is no real known cause for panic attacks. Nobody knows why they happen. If anyone's ever had a panic attack, I really haven't, but I've seen people have them. It looks like the most worst terrifying, most horrible thing on the face of the planet. And then to not have an answer or a conclusion as to why that's happening would also be horrifically terrifying. So this is why I want to share this. I would say 80% of my patients who have panic attacks, 88%, I would say, have panic attacks, have a CBS mutation in which their CBS gene is making too much ammonia. And that ammonia crosses the blood-brain barrier and acts like a poison in the brain. And then that sends off signals to the body to dilate blood vessels, make heart race, make breath shorter, brain fog, vertigo, dizziness, digestive issues, brain racing towards all the problems that you can see because that's what happens when our fight or flight gets ignited. And these people really, what's going on with them is that they're having an overdose of ammonia in their body. And when we can figure that out and we can change that, change their diet, we remove the sulfur foods that are spurring on ammonia because we know that that gene mutation's there for them, then it literally changes their panic attacks. I don't have one patient that doesn't have panic attacks that no longer has them once we figured out this.

And so the sulfur foods, are we talking like garlic, onions, cruciferous vegetables, or like meat? Yeah.

So the whole situation with the CBS is that essentially what's happening is that you are supposed to be able to convert sulfur through cystathionine beta synthase into active glutathione. With this gene mutation, what happens instead of it going to glutathione, instead it gets shunted over and turns into ammonia. And so the idea is to put in less sulfurous foods to make less ammonia. So your sulfur foods, the highest concentrations are going to be your onions, your garlic, your broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, green onions. So those are the highest amounts. What I then tell my patients is to try to avoid those ones, and then I give them a list of all of the foods that contain sulfur, and I just ask them not to 2x, 3x, 4x, or 5x them all at the same time if they're gonna eat them. So they can still eat the meat, they can still eat the cheese, they can still eat the cashews and the almonds that all have sulfur in it and the eggs, but just not eat them all in combination to overload the system and push that ammonia.

So there's more sulfur in garlic and onions than there is in meat. I mean, cuz I'm just thinking you might have a clove of garlic in your food, but you're eating 4 ounces of meat.

I'm just curious, like proportionally, is it really the potency of the medicine of garlic is stronger.

Okay. Got it. Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah.

No, I, I actually had somebody with a CBS mutation relatively early on in my coaching and amazingly figured this out. I don't know how I did. I, I ran his DNA and this thing popped up and I started just Googling everything and then I was like, this guy's got too much ammonia. Well, I knew he had too much ammonia cuz I had done an organic acids test and so I was already working on clearing his ammonia, but then we figured out that the mutation was a part of it.

Then you knew why.

Yeah. I mean, I think I found an incredible post by Dr. Jockers that explained the whole thing and I'm like, okay.

Dr. Jockers is amazing for the CBS mutation, for sure.

I wanted to ask quickly about SNPs that might influence autoimmunity.

Oh yeah.

Okay.

So SNPs that may influence autoimmunity, the ones that come to mind first are actually IL-6, interleukin 6, interleukin 17, IL-4 as well, TNF-alpha. When I see this in a patient's report, I'll ask them, Are you experiencing autoimmune conditions? Is this part of your picture? The collagen G mutations are very much a foundation for this because again, if you have poo particles leaking around through your body, your body's immune system's gonna be ignited continuously. It's like that bouncer that's just always on and like, what, what, what's wrong? Uh, uh, never gets a chance to sit down and not be on. So they're hypervigilant. And then with the IL-6 and the TNF-alpha, these sorts of things, what happens is you have a Th1 immunity. And the way I like to describe this to my patients is imagining a wall and imagining green blobs on one side and blue blobs on the other. Your green blobs represent Th1 troops. They fight things kind of outside of your body, like colds, viruses, all that fun stuff. The Th2 are like the blue blobs inside, and they fight things inside of the body, and sometimes they can fight your own tissues. So you don't really want too many of them around in case they kind of misfire or hit something wrong. So we want more green guys than blue guys. And essentially what can happen is the green ones can jump over the wall and turn into blue, and then you have too many on the blue team raging havoc inside of your body. And sometimes that is needed when there are triggers like those poo particles kind of roaming around. So again, it's removing the insult, but we can also apply things like plant sterols to help facilitate the blue ones jumping back over and turning into green. So that's also part of the possibility. And as well as antioxidants, because if the antioxidants are not working, for example, your SOD2 or your GSTP, your glutathione, or your NQO1, those are your main janitors of your body. And if they're not working properly, the way I kind of describe it is you're supposed to have ushers to take people to their seats. But if the ushers aren't there, maybe the bouncers get involved, but the bouncers, that's not their job. So then maybe they start getting like rowdy or feisty or think that somebody's causing a problem when they're really not, that kind of thing. So if we can put the right things in the right place to do the right jobs, meaning the antioxidants are just taking care of the poo particles flying around or any other insulting inflammatory things going on, then the immune system doesn't necessarily have to get involved.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I'm sure there's way more detail than we can possibly cover in this hour-long podcast, but let me just ask you where people can find find you and you do do virtual consultations, right?

Yeah, I do. I work out of New Brunswick, Canada, but I do work online and I just have people sign a waiver form, basically absolving any liability because again, insurance only covers so far of the world. So as long as people are okay with that, then I'm okay to work with them. You can find me online at dr.jenna.nd on Instagram. And also you can Facebook me, Naturopathic Dr. Jenna Weeks, and I should come right up and all of my contact info is there. You can also find me a little bit on YouTube. And if you are in Canada and you have Bell TV, you can watch me on TV because we have a TV show out called Health Your Home that I single-handedly spearheaded to help people understand what things they're doing in their homes that may be sabotaging their health. Shameless self-promotion. Hopefully this year around Christmas time, my book called The You Code, meaning the code of you, your DNA, will be out and be more deep dive into all of the things we've touched on today with more solution-oriented focus.

Awesome. Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing that, so I hope I'm on your list to get the notice when that comes out.

Oh yeah.

If you wanna be on my early readers list, we can totally do that.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing all this really interesting information with us. I appreciate it.

You're so welcome. I hope that it helps any human on this planet feel better, cuz ugh, we don't need to struggle so hard.

That is for sure. Thanks.

You're welcome.

That was an amazing conversation with so many great insights, and I was so impressed by Dr. Weeks' knowledge that I'm gonna have her go over my DNA with me, and her rates are very reasonable.

So I definitely recommend you check her out. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can buy supplements at a discount from my Fullscript dispensary. Order tests at a discount from my Rupa Health Lab store, or use my affiliate links to iHerb, which is available worldwide, Bulk Supplements, or Amazon. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my Gut Healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com, as well as follow me on X, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today, and here's wishing you all the perfect stool.