Episode #70: Dirty Genes with Dr. Ben Lynch, ND

Welcome to Better Health Guy Blogcasts Empowering your better health. And now here's Scott, your Better Health Guy.

The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended.

To diagnose, treat or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or or his information to facilitate self treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health related decisions with your own personal medical authority. Hello everyone and welcome to episode number 70 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Dr. Ben lynch and the topic of the show is dirty jeans. Dr. Ben lynch received his cell and molecular biology degree from the University of Washington and his doctorate in naturopathic medicine from Bastyr University. His passion for identifying the cause of disease directed him towards nutrigenomics and methylation dysfunction. Currently he researches, writes and presents worldwide on the topic of MTHFR, methylation defects and genetic control. Dr. Lynch is president of SeekingHealth.com a supplement company oriented towards disease prevention and health promotion. More information about Dr. Lynch and his work can be found at DrBen Lynch.com he lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Nadia and three boys, Tasman, Matthew and Theodore. And now my interview with Dr. Ben Lynch. The impact of genetics in chronic illness has been a hot topic for many years now and if you have this snp, oftentimes it's recommended that you take that supplement. But is that really the best way to approach optimizing our genetic potential? I'm really excited today with the message in Dr. Ben Lynch's new book, Dirty Genes as it aligns with my own thoughts in this realm and also those of my primary mentor, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. And so it's an honor to have you on the show today, Dr. Lynch.

Pleasure being here. Thanks for the invitation.

Thank you. So first of all, how did you get into the realm of dealing with chronic illnesses and into the realm of genetics and epigenetics? Did you have your own personal health challenge that led you into this direction?

Well, I mean we've all had our health challenges, right? And I will say that the very initial health challenge that were the very, I mean we had many, but the first one that introduced me to this whole area of, I guess alternative medicine was being very, very ill in India and then ayurvedic medicine introduced itself to me there. That was my first. Whoa, what's this? You can give me herbs and you know, plants and I'll feel better. So that was, that was number one. But then it evolved and when I started looking at research, and I found this one paper, actually was a video about The Tale of Two Mice, Nova Dr. Randy Jertel's work, and where they talked about how these mice were genetically identical, yet for having heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. And they split the group up into two and gave one methylated nutrients and the other one not. And the ones with methylated nutrients went on through life just fine, despite the dirty genes that they weren't born with. And that was. I literally put my hands on my table and I forgot I was in a rolling chair. And I put my hands there and I pushed backwards. I said, that's what I want to do to myself, to the computer. And I slammed in the back of the wall behind me. But it was so cool because I don't like it when I see people struggling. It just hurts. That was really awesome.

So for those people that are listening and may not be that familiar with the terminology, can you tell us a little about the difference between genetics and. And epigenetics? And then which one of those is more important from a perspective of chronic illnesses and the trends that we see today?

Yeah, this great question. And there's multiple ways to provide different examples. And we can say that the genetics are the keys on your keyboard, and the epigenetics are the words that you're typing that you are typing. And I really love that one because it really shows the expression of the Alphabet, which, you know, you're expressing your genes. When people say, what does that. What's. What's expressing your genes? Expressing your genes is. Your genes are. Are not this thing. These things which turn on and turn off at will, they just don't just randomly do this. There's. When the sun comes up, sun comes up in the morning, then your eyes start sensing that there's light coming in. And then the melatonin levels start dropping and the cortisol starts increasing and the opposite in the evening. So they're programmed to do certain things. Yes, but you are in control of the blinds in your room. You're in control of the screen at night. So you are the one in control of the keys on your keyboard. So the genetics are the hardware of the computer, and the epigenetics are the software that you put into your computer. Which programs do you want to have? I mean, my computer looks totally different than yours on the inside. Maybe on the outside it's identical. Right. But on the inside, it's totally different. So epigenetics is the stuff that's around our genes that allows them to turn on and off, and we are in control of that.

And I think that's really important and hopeful because I think some people get the message that if they have certain illnesses and certain genes, that they're just kind of stuck and that there's not anything that they can do. And so your new book, Dirty Genes, and some have suggested that it sounded like we're kind of stuck with these dirty genes or that something's wrong with us or broken about us, But I don't think that's really what you meant at all. You're really talking about these epigenetic factors and how we then have control over the expression of our genes. So can you tell us a little more about how you arrived at the title Dirty Genes?

Yes, and thanks for bringing that up, too, because the whole title was a war. It was a friendly war. And they wanted me to call the book Seven Deadly Genesis. And did you know that?

I think I heard you mention that on another interview, and I'm glad that you didn't concede to that one.

Yeah. So it was a brawl. I mean, it was. It was, you know, a good political debate, but it took, like, four or five phone calls to turn them over. And so seven Deadly Genes means that, you know, we are destined to our genes, and they'll kill you. And it's like. And seven of them are really deadly, and these seven are not that deadly at all. I mean, if you have deadly genes, you're not born. That's it. So the rise of Dirty Genes came along when I was describing to my team saying, hey, we have choices that we make, and they do two things. Either support our genes or they hurt them. And if we clean up our lifestyle, our diet, our mindset, and then my writer goes, dirty, Dirty jeans. I was like, beautiful. And so when you look at the COVID of Dirty Jeans, it's all dirty up here. Yeah. So you can see the swipe. And that's the. This is the cleaned part. And all it takes is a cloth, you know, just maybe a little bit of water, and you just wipe it clean. And so that's the concept of the COVID And my wife came up with that idea.

Yeah. And I actually like that a lot. And one of the things that was interesting to me is I understood the idea that maybe we have these genetic predispositions that we're born with and that we can, through epigenetics, influence them. What I didn't necessarily realize is we can have certain genes where we don't have mutations or don't have these variants. But if we're still living a lifestyle, environmental toxicity, stress, all of these things that even those clean genes can present or express as if they were dirty. Can you tell us a little about that?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, let's say you buy a member Air Jordans when they're. I mean, they're still around. I'm not a basketball guy really, but we're more of a soccer family. But let's say you buy the best Air Jordans and you think now you can jump two feet and dunk it, right? I mean, that's what Air Jordans do. And you got the squishy pump thing. Well, if you don't tie your shoes, then they don't work very well. So you could have brand new shoe and you have to be tying the shoelace to make them nice and snug around your feet. So even though a lot of people with Air Jordans don't necessarily tie their shoes.

Fashion statement.

But yeah, it's a really, really important point. And let's say someone comes into my clinic and I look at the genetic report and it's pristine. There's no reds, there's no yellows, it's all greens. It's all perfect genes. There's no mutations or polymorphisms, deletions or what have you in the report at all. They say, Look, Dr. Lynch, there's no genetic issues here. What's going on? I'm still super sick. And I said, well, you're super sick because you're not giving the tools that your genes need. And your genes need tools in order to function properly. They need work to do, but they need the right work to do. If you eat a pizza that's just a bunch of carbohydrates and fat, typically with the sprinkling of a little bit of veggies. Rarely, but sometimes that huge amount of caloric, dense, inflammatory food is turning on the genes to put out fires. But if you eat a salad, there's no fire to put out. And you're just providing the building blocks of fiber to nourish your microbiome. You're providing vitamins and minerals for your genes to do work so there's no harmful work needing to be done so they can control on supporting and building you.

When we do SNP testing today, we do something like 23andMe. We run it through Strategene, for example. This gives us information about the potential for an issue, but it doesn't really tell us about how the person may be actually functioning in light of their potential. So where do you see things moving in terms of testing and ways to assess how a given pathway is actually functioning versus the potential? And how often is potential reality?

That's a great point. I'll start with the last question. How often is potential reality? And I will say potential is reality. Every moment of the day, every decision that you make is either going to increase your susceptibility to that weaker gene or it's going to reduce it. So every action you choose, it's going to support it. So I have a gene called mthfr, and it's kind of a weak. It's a weaker gene. It only functions about, say, 30% compared to someone who does not have an alternative gene like mine does. And there are benefits to these things. And I describe in dirty genes why these genes may be beneficial and why we've inherited from our ancestors. So there's actually benefits to these SNPs and polymorphisms. But that's a whole other road. If I make a decision to eat a leafy green salad and avoid folic acid and my thyroid is functioning, I'm on vacation, my MTHFR gene is totally fine. It's functioning at 30%. 30% capacity is just fine. Now, if I drink a bunch of alcohol, I stay up late all night long and I consume a bunch of folic acid and I eat pop tarts, then not only is my MTHFR gene dirty, but there's a bunch of other ones dirty. So that is a very important point. And remind me the first other the.

Testing that shows more function rather than just variants or potential.

Great. So I really, really enjoy history. Before jumping into testing, nowadays, standard medicine, conventional medicine, integrative medicine, a lot of people are hot on ordering tests. And there's good reason for it. I mean, testing is fantastic. However, I learned in school and it still should be the norm that 80% of working with the patient should be history. 80%. So. And then 10% should be labs and 10% should be physical, like actually touching the patient and evaluating them. Shocker, you know, and so you can get a lot of information from history. And I do not want to, I don't want people to forget that when you're reading the book Dirty Jeans and you take these laundry lists, quizzes, in the book, that is your history, what's going on, and you can tell if your genes are dirty or not, you work through that and let's say it really works well for you for some things, and other things, you're still struggling, you're just like, wow, I'm doing these things, I'm doing the work, I'm changing my diet, I'm going to sleep better, I'm trying some supplementation and it's just still stuck. It's not working. So then you reach out to labs and then labs, certain labs really, really show you how your genes are functioning. And for example, what's a marker that everybody knows? You think homocysteine or anemias.

Yeah, homocysteine is a good one.

Yeah. So let's hit homocysteine. So homocysteine is a marker that, you know, everybody thinks it's bad. You know, homocysteine is bad. Well, homocysteine is not bad. It needs to be balanced. It's a bell shaped curve. And so when it's right around 7 or 8, your homocysteine is perfect. If it's 2 or 3 or 4, that's not good. And if it's 9, 10, 20, that's not good either. So you want it right in the middle. It's one of like the three bears. So you know, it's. If you order homocysteine, you can see how your, a lot of genes are functioning. And when you look at your homocysteine tests and the results are say 15, which is kind of a little bit higher than the normal for conventional medicine. I think conventional medicine, anything greater than 13 is bad. They don't have anything about. If it's too low, that's an issue. But let's say your homocysteine is 20. That can mean a number of things. That could be you're deficient in B6 betaine, which is trimethylglycine methylfolate or methylbalamin. It can mean any or all of that. Or maybe it could just mean you're deficient in B12. So then you can look at another lab marker like methyllonic acid. And if that's high, well, yeah, you're deficient in B12. And so if you're deficient in these nutrients, these nutrients are what drive the end product of genes. And genes produce enzymes. And it's really the enzymes that get dirty. You can have dirty genetic expression, but the enzymes can get really dirty too from chemicals in the environment testing, like organic acid testing. I'm a huge fan. Stool testing is another one from GI MAPP is another phenomenal, no affiliation. If you have gram negative bacteria in your gut, they're secreting a compound called lps and that can increase homocysteine. That by itself can increase Homocysteine. So it's a lot of stuff.

So I really like the quote in the book that said, that genetic report is a piece of paper showing your genetic susceptibility, not your genetic destiny. Your genetic profile is not you. And I think that's really kind of the message I want to get across. And I think that's the message you really. Or one of the messages you really wanted to get across with the book Dirty Genes as well. Right. You're not stuck just because you have these genes. So the question is, does all of this mean that our ancestors very possibly had the same SNPs, the same variants that we might have today, and that genetically not a lot has really changed, but that our environment, our lifestyle, epigenetically, that that's really the primary reason that our genes may not be supporting us as well as maybe they once did?

Nailed it. And thanks for that quote. I need to isolate that quote and put that all over my website because that's it in a nutshell. You just summarize the whole book.

Yeah, that one's highlighted a lot.

Yeah, yeah. So that's the absolute essence of the entire book in my entire message. And so if you think that you are your genes, you're in trouble. And I had a. There was something that you said. I should have written it down. Sorry, I'm running on like, literally two hours of sleep right now, which is dirtying my genes and my brain.

I was just bringing it back to the fact that maybe our ancestors had this genes, but they didn't express the same way.

Yes. So I was at paleo effects, just. It's all a blur now. About a week ago, and I asked about 300 plus people in the audience, I said, how many of you know where your ancestors came from? Hands went up in the air. Lots of them. How many of you are living in the same place as your ancestors? No hands went in the air. So we have moved from where our genes came from and we have moved from where our genes came from. And when you look at geological time, it was like that, Right? So it's like me going to Indonesia, changing the time zone and the weather patterns and everything. And our genes are thinking, what in the heck are you doing? And so we've inherited genes from an environment that is completely different oftentimes than what our ancestors were in. Plus we have all these chemicals and things around us. So in our lifestyle, computers are fantastic, phones are fantastic, WI fi is awesome in terms of convenience, but there's a lot of things that are around us. Now in autism, you look at autism, the researchers are not finding what is the autistic gene, what's the gene for autism? They're not finding it. What's the gene for Parkinson's? Very rarely. It's like 1% of Parkinson's, there is a gene for it. But I still think epigenetics overrides that one. Possibly, but I'm not sure. So we are our environment and our choices are us, and it all comes down to belief. And I love the statement of if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Yeah. A lot of times people look at a genetic variant and they say, oh, because of this, this function in my body isn't necessarily going to work or be optimal. But my understanding is that many of the functions in the body are controlled by multiple genes, that the body's very complex and that even for a given gene there may be backup genes or backup redundancies within the body. Can you talk a little about that?

Absolutely. Thanks for bringing this up. I think I bring this up in the first or second chapter of the book where, you know, if one highway is closed when you're driving to your job, right. Or you're trying to get to the airport, Siri says, hey, you know, jump off this exit and reroute. Would you like to be rerouted? And you're like, hell yeah, let's, let's do this. So your body is programmed the same way. If there were no alternate routes, we would be dead. Our species would be gone from this planet a long, long time ago. So there is a ton of built in redundancies, tons of them. And you see it all over when you lay out biochemical pathways, there's redundancies everywhere. When you look at a genetic polymorphism or SNP or whatever you want to call it on your genetic report. First of all, it's easy for me to say and it's hard for you to comprehend, but please do not be alarmed, please don't be. It's just showing you that you are you and you are different than your ancestors, the majority of those ancestors. Your variation is. You're just varied. You're different. And that gene was selected for. That particular part of that gene was selected for to have some benefit. And in our current environment, it may not be so beneficial. And you need to know what your choices now have to be for that. So for me, going back to MTHFR again, I inherited that MTHFR from my ancestors. And I now know I need to take care of myself. And I rarely drink alcohol. I mean, very rarely. I went out to wine dinner the other night and I had a glass of wine, which rarely, rarely do. But I was like, what the heck, I'll give it a shot. I'm in California, you know, San Diego, California. This is where wine is from. Right. But I rarely do that because of my potential ability to slow down. And I don't want to slow down.

So what are some of the epigenetic factors that are the most significant in terms of influencing our gene expression, either positively or negatively?

Man, it's a huge question, and it's the common answers. And I'm trying to avoid the common answers because I don't want to just be saying diet, food, sleep, stress reduction and so on. I want to point out that breathing is incredibly important. I think this is one that's really overlooked. A lot of people talk about sleep, a lot of people talk about diet, a lot of people talk about stress. But I don't think enough people talk about breathing. And if you're not breathing well during sleep and you're not breathing well during the time you're eating, you're going to have issues. So I think breathing is kind of the number one place to start. I was reading an article, actually, let me dive down a little bit in the history of how I came up to this realization, which is pretty obvious now. But I was preparing a conference for health professionals about mitochondria, and they wanted to know all about how mitochondrial genetics are negatively impacted from SNPs and polymorphisms and mutations, deletions and so on. So I was looking to get the research. And mitochondrialopathies, or mitochondrial inherited problems, are very rare. The serious ones, they're very rare. And if you have one, you're either dead at birth or. Or it's diagnosed right away at birth. Some can sneak through and affect you later. But I was looking at the research, like, wow, there's really no SNPs in our mitochondria, like MTHFR or CMT or MAO A that kind of reduce the function, at least. I haven't been discovered yet. So I looked at the, how the mitochondria were built and I started staring at that. And the first thing that goes in to the first step of our mitochondria was O2. And I was like, duh, duh. So without air, we're in trouble, and without air we're also in trouble, or without air, we're in trouble. And without water, we're in trouble. So I really want people to understand that breathing is key. And you can learn pranayama and you can do yoga, you can do your meditation, you can do your stretching, and that's what a lot of these ancient medicines do. And then avoidance is a number two. Avoidance is so, so important. A lot of people want to add a supplement to things. I have this problem. So thus I need to take this pill to achieve this outcome. And it's the wrong thinking. It's a completely wrong thing. I tried that and it failed. And I own a supplement company.

Not good for business, is it?

No, it's not good for business. It's not good for business short term, it's great for business long term. So avoidance. I want people avoiding things. There's a woman last night. So I was in San Diego at Warwick's Bookstore, which is the oldest independent, family owned bookstore in America, which is awesome. It was an honor to speak there. And I was talking about how folic acid is an issue and so are flu vaccines during pregnancy. And this woman raised her hand, she goes, the only intervention I did with my son, who was struggling with mood issues and cognitive problems and sleep issues, was I removed folic acid from his diet. That means processed food, crappy supplements, and freeing up his genes. So folic acid isn't good. She goes, I got my kid back. So she didn't add anything, she just removed and she got her kid back.

What portion of our genes would you say are influenced by epigenetics? So obviously I'm probably not going to change my blue eyes to be, you know, some other color by eating better. But are most of the genes that are involved in chronic illness presentations, are they genes that can be epigenetically influenced?

I'm totally guessing here, but I would say the vast majority of our genes are relying upon our input to function. And so, yes, we can't change our skin color. We can change our hair color. If we're stressed out because we make a bunch of hydrogen peroxide and gray our hair or lose our hair, but that's not the same. But eye color, skin color, yes, that's programmed. You know, we can affect our own height, you know, when we're growing, we might be genetically destined to be 5, 10. But if we eat super well or we're doing certain things, maybe we're, you know, 5, 512 here, 6ft. I really need to get some sleep here. But yeah, so I really think the vast majority of chronic disease is because of our choices. And yeah, I'll end it with that.

So what are some of the symptoms? When someone comes into you clinically to work with you as a practitioner, what are some of the symptoms that lead you to think we need to look at cleaning up this person's genes? Are there some kind of primary things that make you go, ah, let's do some cleanup here?

Erratic moods, you know, erratic moods is a big one. Blood sugar instability is connected to that, too. I like to look at behaviors rather than looking at symptoms because behaviors drive symptoms, right? So if someone is a night owl, that tells me a lot of information. If someone is a morning person, that tells me a lot of information. If someone eats a lot of carbohydrate versus protein vegetables or healthy fats or healthy veggies, that also tells me things. So I like looking at habits versus symptoms, and I think that needs to be brought back in medicine because everybody focuses on the problem versus the actions which got the patient the problem, first of all. And I, you know, I get that the patient wants to, you know, get rid of their headache and they want to get rid of these things. But I like to look at lifestyles because the moment you spot a problem in lifestyle, then you've identified why the symptoms are there, then you can explain it biochemically and say, look, you're gravitating towards carbohydrates, possibly because you have inflammation, you're stressed out, or you have an infection. Those are the top three. It's just repeating over and over and over. I mean, three things for craving carbohydrates, and about same three things for being depressed. And so it's pretty simple really. When you put all these things, all these conditions and all these symptoms that people have, you can condense them down into underlying mechanisms, looking at biochemistry and genetic expression, and you can just support them super quickly without guessing. And it's pretty remarkable that you can do that. And the pathways that I've designed allow us to do that very fast. And doctors are getting fantastic outcomes very, very quickly. And so what we call why strategene is called strategene is because it's strategic genetic analysis. We don't check every SNP known to man. We check the really strategic, important ones. And we were expanding strategene immensely. And I also did that while I was in San Diego. We're building our own genetic chip, which is going to be far better than 23andMe's and hundreds of clinically relevant polymorphisms, but done on a pathway diagram so doctors can quickly look where these holes are. And so that's what we do.

That was actually gonna be one of my questions because my understanding was about a year ago now, 23andMe actually removed quite a few of the things that people were interested in looking at. And so Strategene, for those people that are listening, is the tool that you have that can take that data and put it into these diagrams and the pathways and give you some understanding about what those might mean in terms of terms of your genetic potential. And so it's good to hear. It sounds like having a different chip than 23andMe is in part to meet that issue that came up when they removed so many of what they were reporting previously. Right?

Yeah. And it's not only that they removed some SNPs, which they did, they removed a lot of them. But what they also did is they never included some very, very significant ones that my research team found. So we found that there's like for folic acid there's a gene called dhfr and it's very varied in the population. And if they have this, that's like you do not take folic acid, you do not touch it. And then we found genes for histamine metabolism. And if your histamine metabolism off, you've got insomnia potentials, irritability issues, eczema, psoriasis, urticarias, joint pains, asthmas. I mean a huge, vast number of conditions. So we have the histamine pathway and strategene and this gene, HNMT23andMe doesn't have the most important variants. It's not there. There's hundreds more like that that they don't have. So I was like, I'm done, I'm moving on.

Yeah, yeah, no. And the histamine and mast cell issue, I think I'm going to ask you about that a little later in our discussion. But that is such a big issue and especially in the population of people that I connect with, which is Lyme disease and mold illness from water damaged buildings, seems like the majority of people are dealing with some mast cell and or histamine related issues. And so I think that's an important area as well. Tell us a little bit about the Super 7. The genes that you concluded for the book were kind of the most important. And then how difficult or easy is it for us to clean up and optimize their function through diet, lifestyle and the things that you talk about in the book?

First of all, it's easy to clean them up. That's also why I picked them. So I'll start with that. It's work. Health is work. As I state in the book too very clearly, health is spelled W, R, R, K. It's not easy, but it's choosing seven genes out of upwards of 20,000 of them or so. Research says there's between 19 to 23,000 genes. Why they can't pinpoint it down, I don't know. But I'm not saying that I could do better. It's just curious why they can't pin it down. But 19,000 is kind of what some research is saying. But out of 19,000, how do I choose seven? Are you serious? The first off is my experience with these seven. My understanding of these seven is very, very strong. And I could. I can pick someone after knowing them for just short period of time what they kind of are, either genetically or epigenetically. And that's without any lab testing. That's just a few questions. Or seeing them just like physically watching them. And so that's really, really important because I didn't want people to be able to have to go out and buy expensive testing. It's expensive. And I'll read reviews on Amazon about books and about health books especially. And a huge complaint is it's so expensive. So I had to figure out ways to be able to neutralize the expense that people have to go through to get healthy, because that's a barrier. So that was another one. So experience was another one. Another factor was for the Super 7 selection was the amount of research that's published. And you can have a very, very important gene like dihydrofolate reductase dhfr, but there's not really anyone talking about it. There's some research, but not very much. And it doesn't. It's not really associated with immediate pressing concerns or symptomology that people are struggling with. So that's out. So I also had to look for genes that are associated with everyday common issues that we all have and we can all have from day to day. You know, one night we might struggle with insomnia. Another night or another day we might be struggling with rhinitis or itchy skin or irritability. So I had to pick genes that affect these things real time, and you can impact them very quickly with your next lifestyle choice. And so when you combine it like that, it's very, very powerful. And then I had about 50 snips selected when I started writing the book. And then I was partway through the book and I changed my seven and I said, God, you know what, as I'm writing this I'm realizing that almost every chapter is like a major body system. So I've got the gut, I've got the liver, I've got the mind, I've got the heart, I've got a few others. And I said God, I really need to get the detoxification system, the antioxidant system, let's get glutathione in there. And that wasn't how it all went down by just giving you an example. So basically by the time you have supported all your Super 7, you've hit every single, well, not every single, but major body systems. So the chance of significant improvement by the time you're done reading the book and applying the silk and scrub methods and the spot cleaning is tremendous because these are everyday issues.

Plus the methods that you outline in the book for cleaning up the genes are not specific to these Super 7. Right? They're cleaning up your genes from a much broader perspective. The things that you do are having a much bigger effect. And so in the book you talk about mthfr, which you've talked about already. In this conversation you talk about COMT dao, which is tied into foods and chemicals and also the histamine issues that you mentioned a minute ago with HNMT MAO A which you mentioned, which is kind of involved in mood swings and mood related issues. The glutathione genes, the GST and GPX you talk a lot about. And then heart, the nos 3 and then the one I was interested in reading about as well was the cell membranes and the liver, the PEMT and how that affect affects our ability to have healthy cells and the whole phosphatidylcholine piece and all of that. One of the questions someone had asked was why was CBS and Suox not in the Super 7? I'm kind of curious your thoughts on those two because those are two of the ones that I for years and years have heard everyone talk about.

We still do, that's why I was asked. They still talk about it and you know, some things die a slow painful death and that's unfortunate. And CBS is one of these things and CBS is a very important gene. I mean there's a lot of research on CBS and it's extremely important. But the majority of the research on CBS is actually a slower cbs. The research is talking about how the gene contribute. It's the number one associated gene with familial hypohomocysteinemia. So familial high homocysteine so genetically related high homocysteine levels is. Number one genetically related gene is cbs. That's important to know, right? It's not mthfr. MTHFR also affects homocysteine, but CBS is numero uno for homocysteine. But I didn't think that that was so important because I could also capture homocysteine with mthfr. So there's no point to bring cbs. And CBS is kind of the gatekeeper between homocysteine and glutathione control. So MTHFR deals with methylfolate and methylation and the glutathione deals with the glutathione detoxification system. CBS is the REG is kind of. Its function is dependent upon MTHFR and glutathione needs. So when you discuss both of those genes, there's no need to discuss CBS anymore. It's done. And when you also discuss dao. DAO was my gene for infections. Because if you have a gut infection, the likelihood of having high histamine in your gut is pretty telling of pathogenic bacteria having a party, generating a bunch of histamine that can lead to an infection and then that can increase cbs. CBS is an important gene, but a lot of people talk about the 699 variant and how that it's faster and you've got to reduce protein. You can't take vitamin B6 and you're peeing out taurine. And I looked on organic acids and my urinary taurine is high. And your amino acids, you got to take molybdenum every day of your life. Now you got to have a low protein diet your whole life. I will tell you, so many people got hurt from that recommendation. So many. I had clients who couldn't breathe anymore. They had tightness in their chest, they couldn't breathe because they were lower protein. They were taking a bunch of molybdenum and they're avoiding all sulfur containing supplements. They couldn't breathe anymore. Why is that? Because CBS and the CTH gene run underneath. They make hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is a really, really important gasotransmitter to allow blood flow and to allow breathing. One of my first recommendations was start eating cruciferous vegetables, start eating some protein and take some MSM or N acetylcysteine and they breathed.

Wow.

So you can't make recommendations based on SNPs. It's just, it is not possible. We all want to do it, including me, but you can't And I'm actually.

Glad that that's the message now because I remember years ago, even with my own health, with Lyme and mold illness, and I took my results and I put them into, at the time, a popular website, and it suggested about 60 different supplements that I would need to take every day to optimize my genes. And I just thought, yeah, that's not a path that I want to go down. You talk in the book about how these SNPs have potential bad qualities, but they also have good qualities. And so that was another thing. I hadn't really gotten that message clearly, until I read the book. There's good qualities for each of these as well. And so I'm curious, as you work to clean the genes and optimize their expression and the bad things about these genes potentially, or the symptoms that are being created by them start to resolve, do you lose the good things as well?

You could? Yes, absolutely. Let's give some examples here. I love hitting mental stuff, so let's hit C on T and anxiety, right? So if you have a slower COMT gene, then your susceptibility to higher levels of dopamine, higher levels of estrogen are present, and higher levels of estrogen give you beautiful, glowing skin. You have strong bones and you're more fertile. And then if you have higher levels of dopamine, you are happier, you're alert, you're type A, you're driven, you're getting stuff done and you're not putting yourself in addictive behaviors. You don't need the alcohol to feel happy, you don't need the smoking cigarettes or you don't need to go shopping all the time and you don't have attention deficit issues. When your slow comt is balanced, what I just described is perfect, right? That's what we want. Now when your CMT is even slower now you have more dopamine and too much estrogen and you can have estrogen related cancers, you can have horrible pms. When that time of the month comes, you're even embarrassed and you're like, guys, family or friends, it's coming and leave. That's a really unfortunate situation. We joke about it all the time, but it's actually a really serious problem that women, many, many women struggle with. That has to be addressed. If you have pms, that is not a good thing. It's not to be taken lightly either. The other side, for dopamine, if you've got a ton of dopamine now, your type A personality and you're driven, your happiness and you're no desire for addictive behaviors turns into anxiety, it turns into insomnia, it turns into irritability, and it turns into headaches. It turns into dopamine, quinone, which increases your risk for Parkinson's. And that's all a problem. So slow goes from. Let's call that really perfect. One intermediate. That's great. And then too slow can cause those problems. And then let's say you start cleaning that up and you say, okay, I have a slow cmt. Based on my quiz, I'm going to eat my protein in the morning, a solid amount. Afternoon, I'm going to eat a bit less in the evening. I'm basically just going to have a salad with maybe a sprinkling of nuts and some healthy fats. And that's because protein is a building block for tyrosine, which is a building block for your dopamine. So I tell folks who are struggling with a slow CMT to reduce their protein intake so they can fall asleep better. And it works really well. Simple lifestyle change that nobody talks about. It's just reducing your protein and you do really well. And Dr. Sage Wheeler of Sage Med here in Seattle, he brought up that point and it's like, wow, that's a brilliant point. It works really well. Now you can take magnesium. Magnesium is a cofactor for this. Now what's going to happen is their PMS goes away and their dopamine levels normalize, and they're doing great. What do they do? They stay on the same diet. They stay on the same diet because that's what worked. Now they're starting to get symptoms of depression. They're not sleeping as deeply, and they can't really focus very well anymore. What's happening? Their dopamine levels are clearing out too quickly now. So it's always. You always got to check in with yourself. Every time I wake up in the morning, and probably I don't even know how many times a day I check in with myself. Probably 30 times a day, I will check in with myself. How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? And then I'll tweak, I'll eat something or I'll move or I'll go get a supplement or I'll change my activity. I will constantly check in with myself. And that is so not done. Everybody's so outwardly focused that you never tune into yourself. And that's something I talk about in the book constantly. Because you can quickly go from a slow comt to a fast cmt and then you do this yo yo effect and you will experience that when you are starting in the book and you will have this yo yo effect. But as you get better and better, you are going to start seeing those trends and you will just be like this. We will always have the yo yo but it won't be these huge dips and valleys.

People seem to really identify with their snips and I would even say maybe over identify. And I've often wondered if that in and of itself that fear around their SNPs is not an epigenetic influencer that then kind of perpetuates the cycle and influences the way their genes express. What are your thoughts on that?

100%. I love your questions. Yeah, 100%. Because there's a test for family planning called Counsel C O U N S Y L and they look for very high risk, you know, genetically inherited conditions. They look at the future mom and the future dad and you know, when you have sex and you, you have a baby and they look at the percent risk that this child is going to inherit something really serious like sickle cell anemia or, you know, whatever and whatever, it's inherited, you know, PKU disorder, what have you. And then what happens? And they talk with it, talk with the geneticist and say you have, you know, a 40% chance your son's going to have a, or your child is going to have PKU and you have a 5% chance for this really rare mitochondrial disorder that they'll die within six months. Well, what do we do? There's nothing you can do. Why would you even want that test is my opinion. So if there are mitochondrialopathies, like serious mitochondrial disorders in your family, and your family is dying in their 20s or 30s, all throughout the line, then yeah, I can see that being useful actually in Europe, they're actually extracting not just the egg from the woman, but they're extracting the mitochondria and they're putting in good mitochondria back into the egg from a different donor. So that mitochondrialopathy is gone. That's pretty cool. There's actually something you can do about it and that's, that's neat and I think that's really powerful. But I do think that we should not be looking at our SNPs if you are going to be looking at them with a fear or confusion. Just do not even look at your genes yet.

How much of a role does environmental toxicity, heavy metals, chemicals, pesticides, EMF exposures, how much do those things dirty our.

Genesis Man, I think that's the biggest one. I think it's. I'm gonna shoot from the hip, but I will say that, you know, food's really, really important. You know, but what's in our food, right? So. But it's. It's hugely poor. I'm not gonna put a statistic on there. I'm just gonna say. Because it'd be meaningless. But I would say it's very, very important. And I'll say that, you know, my specialty when I was in school was environmental medicine. And I had the fortune experience to work with leading environmental medicine docs. The top in the doctor, top in the world. Dr. Bill Ray, environmental Health Center, Dallas. And he's still going to this day.

He's amazing.

Yeah. And so being able to work with him for a couple weeks in his clinic in Dallas was eye opening. And its environment is massive. And that's why the ABCs of Clean Genesis free bonus chapter that I have, letter A is avoidance.

So carrying on the toxicity theme. Water damage, building illness, mold illness, mold exposure. That seems to be a fairly common issue, unfortunately, at least in the people that I'm seeing in the Lyme community and the chronic illness community. Thoughts? Similar impacts on genetic expression living in a moldy house.

Let me take a moment here. Yeah, okay.

Yep.

All right. We have a whole appendix on it. So it's huge. It's really huge. And it has to be sussed out. And I was working with a very famous Hollywood movie star, and she was struggling, right? She was just struggling. And, you know, so I was like, well, what are we doing here? And so I said, have you had your house checked with mold for mold? She goes, yeah. And I said, well, when? She goes. About a year, two years ago, I said, great. I said, have you remediated it? No. I was like, did they find stuff? Yes. Can you send me the report? Sure. I got the full report. I looked through it and said, it's in her closet. It's in her living room. It was, like, in six different places. And it was the sprinklers in the yard that were causing issues. They were spraying on the building. Have you talked to your landscaper to fix the sprinklers? No. It's like, okay. So, you know, and I'm bringing this point up because you can often find a problem, and sometimes a solution to fix it is difficult and expensive. I'm sorry. You have to do it. You have to do it.

Absolutely.

You have to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. Agree. Let's talk a little about infection. So you mentioned the GI map. I know in the book you talk about microbial overgrowths in the gut being significant in terms of their influence on gene expression. What about things like Lyme disease? Can you talk a little about Lyme and gut infections and how that influences our expression of genetics?

Man, you know, it's Lyme and gut infections, and infections in general are massive, massively important on our genetic control. And that's also why at the end of spot cleaning in the book, I say, look, if you've done the soap and scrub diligently and you've done this spot cleaning diligently and people are super diligent, there are a lot of people who are putting in the work. If you are still struggling after all this, it's mold, environmental toxicity or infections. I am very clear about that. This book is not going to cure everyone by any means, but it's going to give you a lot of insight of how your body works and it's going to give you insight if you're still struggling, what you should continue doing and looking for. Infections are massive and Lyme is a huge problem. A dear colleague of mine, Dr. Darren Ingalls, just came out with a book called the Lyme Solution, which is a must read for people. Dr. Ingalls just. He recovered himself from mold, from Lyme. Here's the deal. There's something called the cell danger response. Are you familiar with that?

Robert Naviel's work?

Yes. Amazing guy. In fact, I just saw him yesterday for a couple hours. His work Cell danger response. If you're unfamiliar with that, Google Cell danger response PDF, download his paper, read it and be blown away. So your genes are always acting on your behalf, whether you know it or whether you disagree because you feel like crap. You're depressed, you're inflamed, and you have headaches and you're reacting everything. It's because your genes are trying to support you long term and also short term. And sometimes, you know, fires have to be fought before you sit down and have a cup of tea. So, you know, infections do that. Infections pull resources away from normal restorative homeostasis and perfect neurotransmission in order to kill the Lyme, in order to kill the gut infections. And so you will have mood issues because of the inflammation and you'll have mood issues because of the, you know, the immune dysfunction. But it's not even dysfunction. It's upregulated because it's trying to kill something. If you're not spotting Lyme or you're not spotting the infections in your gut, you're going to be really, really struggling. I will throw a word of warning here. You order an organic acids test and they will look for yeast overgrowth and some mold from foods. They'll look for clostridia and bacteria and so on. Let's say you do the DAO quiz in the book Dirty Genes and you score 8 out of 14 or whatever. The score is high dirty dao, which is a sign of high histamine from foods and so on. And you're reacting unfavorably to foods. If your organic acids comes back and it looks okay, either you didn't do your organic acids right or you need to get the GI MAP test done or both. The GI MAP test is far superior than organic acids test. Organic acids gives you a quick snapshot to see where other directions you need to go. And it's just really good and easy that way. But GI MAP test is definitely a more serious test to get down to the bottom line of the gut.

Yeah, I like that one a lot as well. So when we look at mthfr, some people talk about the body potentially intelligently down regulating methylation as an adaptive response to viruses to potentially other factors. So do you think the body in some cases does intelligently down regulate methylation as a protective mechanism?

Well, I know it does, and so do the thousands of researchers looking into it. And I know it because I've read these researchers work. You know, I didn't discover it, I just read it. And I also experienced it over and over and over and over with clients and doctors cases and so on and my own self and my kids, my family. So 100%, you know, it's, it is associated.

And then one of the things that I've also observed is that if you start supporting methylation too aggressively, that that may either lead to a detoxification reaction or some people have suggested possibly the activation of certain viruses like Epstein Barr virus. So can you talk about that possibility?

Correct. Yes. Or a flare, an autoimmune flare. We put a lot in the bucket of detox reactions. When it's in a reality, it might not have anything to do with the detoxification systems at all. It might, but I think we put a lot in that bucket and I think we need to be careful with putting things in that bucket because not everything is a detoxification reaction like liposomal glutathione. A lot of people get reactions from that. It has nothing to do with the detoxification reaction.

Is it because of their Sulfur response.

It could be sulfur, it could be oxidized glutathione, it could be oxidized cysteine. There's a number of things.

Great.

Remind me again, just talking about the.

Potential for detox reactions and activation of certain viruses if we start over supporting methylation.

Yeah. So viruses use our machinery to survive and thrive. And there are some viruses, if we are methylating, they become inactive. I believe hepatitis B and hepatitis C is one or two. But Epstein Barr, from my understanding, when we have methylation on board, it can have a heyday in a party, so. And is that always the case? You know, it's tough when you, when you have such a broad statement of saying that methylation supports the inhibition of viral spread of hepatitis, but it increases the viral spread of Epstein Barr. I think that's too reductionist. I don't think it's that simple. I think there's way more complexity to it. But we are seeing that Epstein Barr can be activated from methylation for sure. And so that is an issue. I also state that as someone struggling with an autoimmune disease or chronic infection of any type, I believe that if someone is struggling from a chronic infection, methylation is not the go to route. I learned that the hard way. I mean, I slared people over and over and over again and doctors slared people over and over again. And it wasn't until I read Dr. Navio's paper on the cell danger response, which I really encourage you all to read, like 20 times. I probably read it more, and I need to read it again, is that when methylation is slowed down, there's many reasons for it. And one which I'll mention is it's called the decarboxylation of same. So same can go down towards, you know, donating methyl groups to make your cell membranes and to support the reduction of your neurotransmitters and getting rid of harmful estrogens and, you know, making your carnitine and your thiamine. It does a lot of important things. But when there's infection on board or the immune system is going bonkers, there's a process where Sam gets called decarboxylated. And nobody talks about this except for Dr. Navio. And decarboxylated. Same is when your same gets pulled to the side and it goes down a different route. And it actually works in tandem with arginine to make polyamines in order to suppress and calm the immune system. So when you start providing methyl donors to individuals who have autoimmune disease, then there's all this same around and some will get carboxylated and others will come through. But you know, it's the body starts flaring and adenosine levels also go up for autoimmunity. And adenosine also also keeps the immune system down. So there's so much yin and yang going all the time. And anytime we are messing with the body's inherent and beautiful understanding of what it needs to do and we screw up that process, we are going to react. So we have to really understand that the body is working on our behalf and our job is to identify what it's trying to do and help it. And then we remove the issues that it's trying to do. Maybe it's trying to fight an infection and we can help remove that infection. Maybe it's inflamed and you can help remove the inflammation. Maybe that's from overeating, maybe it's from not sleeping right. Maybe it's from over training, maybe it's under training. Maybe it's stress from your hosting parties. There's a dear friend of mine, Alessandro Ferretti, had a great case where someone was really, really inflamed and doing poorly with their exercise, but they appeared that they were happy and all these things, it was like this facade. He measured his HRV and his hrv, his heart rate variability, was just tanking over a certain period of time. Alessandro found that it was tanking during the time of. Every time he hosted guests. He goes, I love being a host. And Alice Hunter goes, no, you don't. No, you don't stop being a host every time you're a host and you have all these parties, you're serving, serving, serving others and you're doing a disservice to yourself. You're killing yourself. Wow. So that was a really remarkable case. So things like the Oura ring, which I have here, this.

I thought that's what you had on. I was going to ask.

Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. It's really, really awesome. And then you monitor 24 hour glucose and Alessandro, Freddy, you should bring on. I can introduce you if you don't have his contact. But you've got to be monitoring your 24 hour glucose. I don't, but Oura ring has been kicking my butt telling me my sleep has been crappy. But sometimes your schedule is overpacked.

Yeah, that's awesome. So let's talk a little. Coming back to the folic acid conversation. So I've seen supplements that claim to be whole foods that list folic acid. And my understanding is that folic acid is always synthetic and always bad. So can you talk a little more about whether or not my understanding is correct or not? And then why do we not want folic acid and why is it bad from a methylation perspective?

Okay, yeah. So these companies that are claiming that folic acid is food based or what have you, you know, my understanding of the food based supplement industry is, is cloudy at best. Oftentimes it's not really from food at all. You only need to have like 10% of the ingredients from food in order to claim that you're a whole food supplement. So 90% of that supplement can be synthetic, whatever. So you got to be careful. There's a lot of marketing nonsense in the supplement industry. I've looked, I own a supplement company and I, I looked at whole food derived ingredients for my products and we have pure greens. And pure greens is a true whole food because it's food in there. And herbs and so on. That is a whole food product. But these whole food claims, I'm not going to name names. What they do is they take the synthetic folic acid and they throw it into this yeast fermentation thing and they do their thing and then they say it's folate. Now is it? I don't know. I'm skeptical. I don't know. That's one. And then the other one is there's a lot of confusion. People think that folic acid is folate and they think folate is folic acid. But a car is not a car. A Ford is not a car always. It could be a truck. Right? They don't make motorcycles, but not yet. That'd be scary if Ford made a motorcycle. That was a weird thought. But folate is an umbrella term. It's an umbrella term. So just know that you, if you say the word car, you're just thinking that this thing with wheels and you don't know. But if I say BMW M series or what have you, then it's more specific. So when you say folate you're giving a general term and you should be referring to what's natural in the environment. When you say folic acid, you should be only referring to the synthetic man made nutrient that was designed and developed because we strip the useful natural folates from food. And we did that in the industrialized era when it was starting so we could keep this bread on the shelf for a long period of time. When we first did that, it's like, wow, why are these women Infertile. Why are all these kids being born with neural tube defects and birth defects, internal heart issues and hypospadias? And what's going on here? And it's like, oh, wow, we stripped all the vitamins from the food. There's no bran, there's no middlings, there's no vitamins in there anymore. So let's keep processing it, but let's make a synthetic nutrient and throw that in there and call it good instead of going back to whole food. Stupid. But folic acid is completely synthetic, has no physiological effect on the body at all.00. It has to be processed by a gene called DHFR, which is super slow in humans compared to rats. And that's a huge problem.

And you mentioned that it has no physiological effect on the body, but isn't it true that it can block the pathways for methylfolate?

Great point. Yeah. It has no physiological benefit to the body.

And it has some detriment, potentially.

It has a lot of detriment. Has a ton of detriment. So because what happens, we know that if we're sitting in the car in a garage or we're exercising or breathing a car exhaust, we know that's bad, right? Because hemoglobin binds, or carbon monoxide binds to our hemoglobin 400 times stronger, 200 times stronger over oxygen. So if we're in a carbon monoxide rich environment and we have carbon monoxide alarms in our home, probably in your home too. So if your carbon monoxide levels reach a certain amount, alarm goes off. You're like, oh, I got to open the windows and get some air in here. Well, the same thing goes with folic acid. Compared to folate, when you eat a leafy green salad, your body gets real natural folate. When you eat liver, it gets real natural folate. And it loves you for that. It will bind that folate from those foods and it will bring it in the cell or it'll carry it around and deliver it somewhere. When you eat folic acid, the body's like, wow, that stuff's really cool. It fits on the folate receptors and it fits on the folate binding proteins. The body just sucks it up. It just grabs it and absorbs amazingly well. Absolutely. Your body will transport it and receive it super well. But then the body will like, wait, what the hell is this? What am I supposed to do with this? And it's confused. It's like slow motion. And then you eat a salad. And then the receptors and the transport proteins of the folate it's like, no, hold on. You can't get on here yet. I'm still dealing with this folic acid. Sorry I'm so slow, but I'll get to you in a second. It's super slow on the body. And so you. That's the. That's a massive misconception because they did studies on the absorption of folate, folic acid. They didn't do studies on how effectively it's utilized by the body. Huge difference.

So you mentioned the green leafy vegetables. That was one of the things that I was excited about, and you've talked about this for a while, that that's one of the best things you can do to support methylation is bring in the green leafy vegetables. So I think that's really exciting. But the question that I have is, as you look at these oats tests as well, how often do you find that people have oxalate issues and thus have to be more particular about which green leafy vegetables they introduce in their routine?

Yeah, I'll have to. You know, there's. The whole oxalate issue is kind of like the CBS issue to me now. And, you know, I was. I was on the oxalate train for a while, and I was thinking, wow, maybe there is something to this. You know, there are genetics, genes that are dirty. I think it's ag X T or A X G T. I forget what it is. But it deals with oxalate metabolism. And there are people who have this gene, and it does work a lot slower, but it's super rare. It's like less than 5%, I believe, of the population that have this. When you have it, your oxalate levels are really high and you have recurrent kidney stone issues. When you have high oxalates, you get calcium oxalate buildup and they get in the tubules and areas of your kidney and they form stones and they hurt like hell and they get in your bones and your joints. And you can have vulvodynia as well. Histamine is also vulvodynia. So vulvar pain in women, it's horrible, excruciating, I'd imagine. The whole oxalate issue. A lot of people are saying it's my genes. Hogwash. A lot of people are saying I have to be on a low oxalate diet. Well, yeah, you do. I believe that, but it's not the solution. It's like the low histamine diet. You know, Yasmina elkinstam of thelowhistamineshef.com switched her website from thelowhistamineschef.com to healinghistamine.com because she realized it's not about cooking with low histamine foods or eating low histamine foods or drinks, it's about healing histamine. So it's not about a low oxalate diet, it's about healing oxalates. So where are the oxalate healing oxygen metabolisms? Why is everyone having oxalate issues? The gut, it's again, the gut. If you have low stomach acid, you're going to have oxalate issues. If you have sluggish, dirty pmt, you're going to have oxalate issues. If you're going to have a microbiome that's dirty, especially with yeast overgrowth, you're going to have oxalate issues. So, you know, if you're consuming a vitamin C or eating a ton of spinach or making these green smoothie drinks that are all the rage now, you're probably going to have some oxalate issues. These green drinks, they can be very, very problematic because they overwhelm the microbiome. I mean, you're putting like what, this much spinach in there and then you're putting this much cabbage in there and you're putting this much other stuff in there and nuts and seeds and you just like this oxalate and you blend it. You're like, wow, I'm doing my body good. Your microbiome was like, wow, you just ate enough food for a cow and I can't handle it. Right, you flare. The green drink era is awesome. I'm all for it, but man, you got to watch the amount. It's all dose dependent. Again, if you have high oxalates, organic acid tests will spot it. The problem that I have with the organic acids test is they, they put too much emphasis on the genetics of it. You know, when you read the Y on the Great Plains test, they have like this whole page of the genetics of oxalates and then you need to go to Mayo Clinic and get those oxalate genes. Well, I'll tell you that in the strategene test that we're developing, we are going to put some oxalate genes in there. We will, but they're not going to light up very often.

So it sounds like the green leafies that you talk about for methylation that separate from the green drinks, but the green leafy vegetables that they're fairly well tolerated in most people.

Yeah, I mean, spinach is super high oxalate and others are too. But I don't remember the other ones offhand. But I would eat spinach and I would react very unfavorably. I mean, I would have one spinach leaf and I would react. I was like, what the heck? Then I learned it was oxalates. And so I started taking specific probiotics and I'm much better now. It's still dose dependent. I can tolerate some oxalates now. And here's the other deal on these low oxalate, low histamine types diets. I've been studying the microbiome pretty hard these days because I developed a probiotic for degrading histamine and it works amazingly well.

Probiota Histaminex for those. Yeah, I like it a lot too.

It's amazing. But that's a whole other thing. I'll tell you that. My reactions to histamine. So I had gluten the other day. I'm testing this probiotic like crazy really hard. And so this is what you need to understand with things like probiotic histaminex, where I could not even take a bite of gluten or dairy before. Now I can eat dairy and now I can eat gluten still. I can't eat like, I don't eat pizza anyway, but I don't eat that much. But I'm testing it. I was at this amazing farm to table restaurant in San Diego off the Torrey Pines golf course. Gorgeous restaurant. And they said, would you like some fresh bread? It's like, God of all places, I'm going to eat bread. I'm going to try this. I said, which one do you want? I said, I'll take all three. I ate all three over a period of a couple hours. I had no reaction. I had no physical histamine reaction. Where before I would get all hot, flushed and my tongue would burn and my feet would sweat. I know too much information, but there you go. I didn't have any symptoms. But later that night I go to bed and I look at my oura ring stats. The next morning my heart rate was like 60 until about 3am and then it finally dropped. My heart rate is typically 48 in the evening. That was histamine. So I did not have any reactions, but my body was still not liking the gluten. So you have to be careful that when you're taking supplements that yeah, you're getting rid of the symptoms, which are awesome and allows you to consume them. But you also have to know that it's dose dependent.

Let's talk a little bit about phosphatidylcholine. So you talk about this in the book, relevant to pemt, its importance in cell membrane health, bile production, digestion, so many things. And so the body creates phosphatidylcholine from choline. Many people take phosphatidylcholine as well. So I'm interested in your thoughts around how we optimize our production of phosphatidylcholine. And then is exogenous phosphatidylcholine potentially harmful in any way?

Yeah. So you get your phosphatidylcholine. It's methylation. So the route from choline to get to phosphatidylcholine is a long one. It requires multiple sami's to make that happen. I don't know how many I know. Once choline gets to phosphatidylethanolamine, then there's three samis to convert phosphathanolamine to phosphatidylcholine. That's three methyl donors, three methyl groups, which is quite a bit. Carnitine synthesis is the same. Carnitine synthesis is very demanding on methylation, but nowhere near the effect of bustylcholine. So methylation is a reaction in the body. It's basically taking a methyl group and it just moves it and binds different things. It's a very, very important process. And it's just changing. Once a methyl group, a carbon and three hydrogens binds to something, it changes its function. And once that methyl group has been donated, whatever donated it becomes, it could become homocysteine at some point. So it's. It's an important process. But anyway, phosphatidylcholine, over about 80%, depending on papers you read, about 80% of methylation is used to make phosphatidylcholine and creatine. So that means 20% of methylation goes to carnitine and dopamine elimination and histamine elimination, you know, and uracil to thiamine. And, you know, it's. It's 20% for everything else. It's like, really? Wow, that's crazy. So if you are supplementing with phospho, choline or creatine, in effect, you are conserving 80% of your methylation, which is a very huge point. And you might need to rewind that and hear that again. But it's like if I bought a cake for a birthday party then, and my wife comes home and goes, oh, I need to bake a cake. I said, no, you don't. Here's the cake. She has all the flour, the eggs, the milk. I mean, she has all the stuff still in the kitchen. She doesn't need to use any of it. So methylation is the same thing. You don't need to, you don't need to make the phosphylcholine anymore because you've taken it. Now when you take exogenous phosphylcholine supplementation, it can be very, very life changing and powerful. Do not use soy because it's genetically modified. I'm not a fan of GMOs at all. There are companies that say, oh well, it's so processed, there's no GMOs left. I don't care, I don't care. It shouldn't be used. There's many companies that use sunflower based phosphatidylcholine. So look, for that there are major benefits. I mean, you start getting your gallbladder working again, potentially you start getting less pain because your cell membranes are starting to actually become cell membranes again versus this mess of leakiness and spilling their contents and triggering your immune system constantly. But there are, and I discuss in the book, Dirty Genes. I'll just throw this out there too. 90% of pregnant women are deficient in choline and that's not good. Pregnancy is not a folic acid time. It's not just about sucking down 800 micrograms of folic acid and you're good. It's not about taking a gummy for convenience. A gummy prenatal and thinking you're doing yourself good. Because if you see a prenatal, it says 800 micrograms, you think, oh, that's good, I've got my folic acid. Neural tube defects are not a folic acid deficiency, they're a methylation deficiency, period. Congenital heart defects, adhd, autism, pre diabetes in kids, all these issues in kids. It has nothing to do with folic acid, has everything to do with methylation.

I'm glad that that was your response to taking PC because I had a good tablespoon just before we started this conversation.

Oh, nigh. So did I. But what I will say, and I talk about it in the book, I love getting PC with liposomal glutathione and liposomal vitamin C. Taking phospholid choline is great, but watch out because if you are low serotonin, that high phosphylcholine that you just consumed that phosphylcholine, an inflamed individual. So you look like a very healthy guy. In inflamed individuals, there's a gene that will break down the phosphatidylcholine really rapidly and it'll break it down into choline and then these folks will get high acetylcholine. And there's research that shows high acetylcholine in relation to serotonin is where depression is. Well, it's not that simple. There's many other things. Your mind of your own or mind of your own book by Dr. Kelly Brogan gets really into the whole serotonin SSRI issue. That's a great book. But if you have inflammation and you take phosphatidylcholine, watch out for depression. So if you are taking phosphatidylcholine, you are getting symptoms of depression. Stop taking phosphatidylcholine. Stop. And there is a product called uridine U R I D I N E that you can get on Amazon or elsewhere. My company doesn't make it, but it helps bring in. It helps absorb choline. So when you read the reviews about uridine on Amazon, people say, well, I can bring my choline supplementation back and I don't get depressed anymore. So that's pretty cool. So I do talk about that in the book in the PEMT chapter in the spot cleaning section. But then you'll have to make sure your serotonin is on par 5 HTP work on that too. And then also so many other things.

That I could talk with you about forever. But I know you've been very generous with your time, so I want to move into the solution piece. So in the clean jeans protocol, you have this two week soak and scrub and then the two week spot clean and then this keeping clean for life and just continuing on with those things. So can you just give us, at a high level, talk to us about the soak and scrub and the spot clean. What's the difference between those two?

Yeah, so on the whole two week thing, so I, you know, see books have, you know, their main title and then they have their subtitle, right? So they wanted to call this a 30 day breakthrough program. I was like, are you serious? No. You know, seven deadly genes, a 30 day breakthrough program to not kill yourself. I'm gonna buy that book. I love you publishers. No, you don't clean your genes in two weeks. You know, it's. I had to, I had to do that to give people something to work with. But the end Of So the silk and scrub is basically, let me back up the majority of the book. I tell you over and over and over and over and over again that you can't supplement your way out of sickness. You can't. So the soak and scrub is literally a soak and scrub. You're taking time soaking and you're scrubbing. You're putting in the work to clean yourself up. And that is lifestyle change after lifestyle change as bad habit gone to new habit in. It's understanding what's going on. It's avoidance of chemicals, it's spending time, it's rekindling your hobbies again. It's keeping your cell phone off in the morning and off in the evening. It's closing your computer at night so your melatonin goes up. I walk you through what I do in my own life. I walk you through my own daily routine, the book as well, and what I do for the week. So it gives you like a real life example of what I typically do. Do I do it every day? No, of course not. You know, I got up at three in the morning this morning to catch a flight and I went to bed at midnight, you know, so, you know, there's, there's times where, you know it's not ideal and then that's the reality. And the reality is, you know, you can't live in a bubble. You can't live in a perfect life. And I'm totally fine going to bed at midnight because I served a lot of people while I was in San Diego. It was incredible. Will I do this routinely? Absolutely not. Because I know that will kill me and then I won't be able to serve very well. The point of the soak and scrub is to get you to understand to, hey, you really have to do these things and you can't supplement your way out. It's not a two week period. It's. And I tell you at the end of Silk and Scrub, look, what I tell people to do is kind of like baby steps in the movie. What about Bob? Have you seen that movie? Yeah, phenomenal movie. And so this is a guide. This is not a curl up by the fire and read it. I mean, do that the first time. Read through it. But it's a lifestyle guide. So when you find something that really resonates with you and say, I want to apply that lifestyle change, put the dang book down and work on that for a while. Make it a habit and one step at a time. And then when you say, wow, that really worked, I'm feeling much better. Maybe it's your mouth taping at night, maybe you're mouth breathing. And that was the only change you did because that's easy to do. And he's like mouth taping. Yeah. So Mike Mutzl High intensity health talks about that.

Yeah, he got some comments about that. People that didn't what he was doing. Putting tape on his children or something.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's a useful tool.

It is. And so just this is not something that you read and you do everything at once. You do that, you'll fail. You will fail and you will say, this book didn't help me. And so just do one thing at a time, don't rush through it. And with spot cleaning then is so spot cleaning is where you take a quiz again. And in that quiz you see how dirty your jeans are, the seven of them. And some jeans are going to be dirty and some jeans are going to be really dirty and some jeans might not be dirty at all. And then you're like, oh, I'm going to clean the dirtiest one first. No, no, no, no, you don't do that. There's a way in which you tackle your dirty jeans and I'm going to leave that to you to discover in the book to figure that out. But if you go in the wrong order, you'll be unsuccessful. And so it's a really important point. And the spot cleaning is further lifestyle changes, dietary changes, and then supplement recommendations. At this point, I don't think I recommend any supplements in the soak and scrub.

So the whole point then is by the time you get to the spot clean, the fact that you've already introduced the soak and scrub, many of the things that you might have answered in the questionnaire at the beginning might already have improved before you even need to start doing the spot clean. So that's getting very, very specific about the things that may need some additional support. But that's kind of the icing on the cake. And the cake is really the two week soak and scrub. That's really the meat of the whole.

It is. Because you know, for example, if you know your MTHFR is dirty, you know, you take the MTHFR quiz and it's dirty and you're like, oh, okay, my MTHFR dirty. And you're like, I'm going to skip the silk and scrub. I don't care what he says, I'm going to skip the silk and scrub and I'm going to go right to spot cleaning. And I warn you over and over in the book, if you skip, soak and scrub and you go to spot cleaning, you will fail. You might get lucky, but you might fail. So don't get mad at me. You're taking folic acid, you're eating processed foods, and you're taking your usual supplement because you didn't even read it. You bought the book and you went.

Right to the quiz.

And you took the quiz and you're like, it means you've already dirty. You go to spot cleaning. How do I fix it? Eat leafy greens. No, I don't want to do that. I didn't take methylfolate. Boom. First day you take it.

Wow.

I got my life back. Sweet. I don't have to do anything. Three days later, irritable joints ache, insomnia. Week later after that, it's getting worse and worse and worse. And you're like, what in the hell? This book sucks. It doesn't work. No, you didn't put the work in. You tried to cheat. And the body is responding because you're giving it gas on a fire. And you will fail. So I'm telling you that I don't mean to be a punk, but it is work. Health is work.

I like the message, though, because the prior message, at least what I heard for years, was, take a pill for every potential ill. And what you're saying is, no, you need to put the foundation in place first and then look at the smaller subset of things that you then need to more specifically support. And to me, that just makes a lot more sense.

It does. If your house is on fire, you're not going to buy a new bed and put in the house. I mean, it's common sense. It's just total common sense. And when you're ill, your body is somewhat on fire. So you add new furniture by taking a pill and it goes up in flames. And it might actually enhance the flames or it might put the flame out entirely, but you actually need that fire that is fighting infections. You need the fever to fight infections. So by you introducing something to stop, Dr. Joseph Pizzorno said it, the best standard conventional treatments are anti everything, antibiotic, antacids, antihistamine, antidepressant. It's like brakes on everything. Anti.

Anti life.

Yeah, they just. They shut everything down. But the body is working in a way that is trying to support you. And naturopathic medicine is all about understanding that acid reflux is a result of something going on, that depression is a result of something going on, and fevers are a result of something going on antirheumatics and antipyretics and anti everything. It's like anti itch. Are you serious? Stop already. So you can't be just putting the brakes on by swollen pills.

If we look at all of the different nutritional and dietary recommendations or options that you present in the book, like the green leafy vegetables, eggs, other things, do we know which of the foods would affect the largest number of genes in a positive way? Are there three or four really important? You have the Super 7 genes, but are there maybe the Super 3 or 4 or 5 foods to support those Super 7 genes?

That's a great question. So there's I don't know how many recipes are in the book. There's like 20 plus recipes in the book. And I don't know if it's the first book that was ever done this way or not for recipes. But you know, how many times do you buy a recipe book and it's just generalization. Cook this, eat that, and it doesn't work that way. So the recipes in dirty jeans are tailored for you personally and you can modify them and I teach you how to modify them. That's a really, really important point because a lot of recipe books just they will milk you sick. They got the green smoothie for oxalates but you have mthfr but you can't tolerate that. And maybe they've got this high histamine food but your dao is dirty and they've got this high protein dinner but you're slow comt right. Or you got a pemt and it's a high fat dinner or a meal. You got to understand how the genes work and how to clean them up. In terms of the foods, leafy greens are huge for me. Really, really big. Eggs are also good. But leafy greens are high oxalates. Eggs can be high sulfur. A lot of people are also allergic to eggs because they overdid them. I'm a huge fan of beets. Beets are super high in oxalates, but the beet greens are really high in oxalates. The beets themselves are less. The red part are the yellow part. But we have a ton of beet recipes in dirty jeans and that's because my wife is Russian and a lot of the recipes in the book come from my wife. So you're lucky. So you're basically having dinner in my home.

Nice.

Yeah.

Because I think if I remember correctly, for each recipe you then kind of link it back to which of the genes it's the the most supporting of. Right?

Yeah. And then if you. And it's. Maybe there's a proportion of the recipe that's, you know, you know, that calls for quite a bit of chicken breast. And then I'll just tell you, you know, if you're slow, slow cmt, don't use as much chicken, you know, add more greens or add more fat, you know, so it's, it's. You learn this way and it helps a lot.

So if people want to learn more about the book, obviously it's fairly easy to find. It's on Amazon. It's lots of places. Do you want to mention any other. I think you have a website around the book as well. Is that true?

We do, yeah. Dirtygeens.com and it just will direct you to the different places where you can buy it. It's in all bookstores. It's basically in all libraries. I was in some podunk little town in Maine, which is pretty cool. A colleague snapped a picture of dirty jeans being in this tiny little store in rural Maine, which is neat. But if you say, well, I want to see, I want to learn more, I want to get some for free, go to drbenlynch.com, put your email in there and you'll get the bonus chapter, which I really wanted to be part of the book, but it was already 300 and some pages long and we couldn't put it in the book. But the bonus chapter is phenomenal and it goes, it walks you through the ABCs of clean genes, and it's basically a paragraph for each letter. It's an easy read. And you can start with A and you can practice that. Then you get the B, which is breathe, C is chew, D, I forget, and you can find the rest. But it is a really, really good bonus chapter and it gives you a lot to work with.

Awesome. Very good. So the question that I always wrap up with are, what are some of the key things that you do on a daily basis in support of your own health?

Tuning in. I would say tuning in is a big one for me. I am very, very aware of how I'm feeling right now. I knew I was going to be on this podcast. I landed on the Runway and I was like, I'm exhausted. I took some liposomal glutathione, liposomal vitamin C. I took a bunch of phosphatelcholine, probably two tablespoons of that. Plus I've got my electrolytes, I'm fasting. I haven't eaten anything today, and I'm still perfectly fine. Being fat adapted is really really important. If you're like, what is fat adapted? I don't think I talk about it much. Mike Mutzl talks about fat adaptation. I did a YouTube channel interview with him about being fat adapted. But there's many, many things. But I would say I'm working on two very important things that I am not so good at. One is meditating every day in the morning. Research shows that if you meditate a minute a day consistently. So a minute a day consistently is way better than 30 minutes twice a week. So that's 60 minutes in a week compared to seven minutes in a week. But seven minutes in a week is far superior than 60. It's the consistency that outweighs it. So if you think you don't have time to meditate, you do. And I am still trying to get in the habit of that. And it's hard when your routine is so different, when you're flying from place to place. No excuse. I should still do it. The other one would be consistent sleep. I'm working on my sleep and I don't bring my computer at all into my room anymore. So I'm good there. I still bring in my phone. That's going to be the next thing. I'm not even going to bring my phone into my bedroom anymore. Done, gone. And then the next one, one more. I know you said three. This is really important is belief. You have to believe that you can. You have to. If you believe that you can't or you believe it's too hard, you're right and you won't succeed. So you've got to believe in yourself 100%. If there's trauma, there's underlying trauma that's, you know, you have self doubts or, you know, you just can't break through that. I totally get it. I mean, trauma has to be addressed. And Dr. Keisha, yours, I believe, out of Issaquah, Washington is someone to really look at for trauma. Mastin Kipp was also really, really good with trauma. Trauma is a really, really important thing to dive into. Even though it's super painful, it's traumatic to address trauma. But if you do not address trauma, it doesn't matter that you read dirty jeans and 20 other books. The trauma is underlying it all and you have to fix it. That is a weak point that I am starting to realize myself more.

Those traumas and emotional conflicts are themselves epigenetic influencers of our gene expression. Significant ones. I was really blessed and fortunate to start with my own Lyme journey, working with Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt about 12 years ago now. Fortunately, haven't needed to see him for many years, but we still see each other at conferences and such. And that was one of the messages I got from his work very early on was we can't just deal with the infections and the toxicity, but that emotional stuff has to be deeply explored. And that really was a big piece of my journey. So I totally agree with that. So this has been one of my favorite funnest shows in a long time. I mean, you give us so many resources and people to listen to and connections. I think the book is a book of hope. I think that oftentimes when we talk about genetics and SNPs, that it's not a hopeful conversation. And so that's what I appreciate from the message that you're putting out there. So I just want to thank you for the book, thank you for spending time with us today, all the great information. Just appreciate everything you do and just want to honor you and say thanks so much.

Well, thank you and thank you for interviewing all these other folks to help people out too. So I appreciate what you're doing.

Thanks so much, Dr. Lynch.

Thank you.

To learn more about Today's guest, visit DrBen Lynch.com that's Dr. Ben Lynch.com Dr. Ben Lynch.com or DirtyJeans.com that's DirtyGeans.com thanks for your interest in today's show. If you'd like to follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you can find me there as BetterHealthGuy. To support the show, please visit BetterHealthGuy.com donate if you'd like to be added to my newsletter, visit betterhealthguy.com newsletters and this and other shows can be found on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify.

Thanks for listening to this Better Health.

Guy blogcast with Scott, your Better Health Guy. To check out additional shows and learn more about Scott's personal journey to better health, please visit betterhealthguy.com.