Genetics of Training & Performance for Endurance Athletes Ep 26

So what happens is they're going to world champs and they're getting super close, and they— the load is going up and up and up and up. One of them is doing beautifully and everything's going, and the other one gets injured like 3 weeks before world champs. Same training program, same age, same recovery days, same everything. Why? Well, when she joined the company, the first thing we did was we did genetics, and we're like, oh my God, Her recovery was completely different from the other one. She needed so much more recovery than the other one did. So even just basing it off the data of HRV and heart rate was not enough because the genetics for her, she needed that more time off.

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. Get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. Whether you're a new or experienced endurance athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone who just wants to improve your health and fitness, this podcast is for you. I'm Chris Newport, founder, head coach, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and certified personal trainer with the Endurance Edge and the Fueling Edge. With more than 20 years experience in the fitness industry, 18 years in multi-sport, and over 10 years as a sports nutritionist, I'm speaking with athletes and experts about actionable steps you can take to reach and sustain peak performance and health. Let's do it.

All right.

Welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast. I am your host, Chris Newport, and I am here with a returning guest, Yael Jaffe from 3x4 Genetics. I'm so excited to have you back because your first podcast we had with you was extremely popular. So welcome back to the show.

Thanks, Liz. Great to be back. I enjoyed the first one and I have no doubt we'll have a good time this time.

Awesome. Yeah. So today is all about genetics and performance, genetics and training. So we have now put your report in action for a good solid, uh, we're coming on almost a year and it has been so amazing to incorporate this into our practice. I wish every dietitian could learn this before going into practice, but alas, here we are. So I want you to go through, if you would please walk us through your report and how it gives us information about our propensity for fitness, our ability to recover. Um, so walk us through that if you will.

Great. Thanks, Chris. I'm just thinking as you're speaking, I'm thinking, you know, One of the problems in genetic testing is that a lot of companies will— the way they'll answer your question right now is they'll go straight to a genetic test report called DNA fitness or DNA sport, in the same way that they would go to, for example, weight and go DNA diet. So I just want to, I just want to step back for a minute because we've done things a little bit differently, and there's a really good reason why we've done so. If you'll just give me that I just want to explain why I'm not going to answer specifically about recovery and injury. I am going to get there, but I want to take a step back. So, the way that the body works, because when we think about performance, performance is relevant to us whether we are an elite Olympic-level athlete, whether we're recreational athletes. And in fact, performance is relevant to us even when we don't talk about athletics and we're talking about getting out of bed in the morning, looking after our children, getting them to school, making school lunches, performing our work, kind of keeping our energy levels up, having good relationships. So, performance is actually one of the absolute keys to optimal kind of health and productivity. So, just want to put that in context. So, when we built the 3x4 report, we wanted to not only focus on the specifics of athleticism, which we'll talk about with VO2 max and fitness, But we wanted to think like, what are the— where does it begin? Where does it start? Because if you don't, if you don't go right to the root of things, in this case, which is cell function, it doesn't matter what your genes say about how powerful you are or about how fast you can run, how far you can run. So the way we built the report is that we always start at what we call the cellular level, which deals with things like inflammation, oxidative stress, methylation. Detoxification. And if these processes in our body are not working absolutely optimally, it doesn't matter how good your genes are in terms of power training, for example, right? So, I want to put that across. The second level that we look at is around what we call systems. In systems, we look at things like glucose and insulin, hormones, cognitive function. So, brain health, the ability to keep our minds clear and thinking clearly as much as we possibly can. And we look at things even like collagen and joints. So, again, I hope when you hear me say this, you're already thinking to yourself, well, of course, all of that's important when I think about performance. I mean, glucose and insulin, right? How can anybody function optimally without having what we call glucose and insulin homeostasis? Beautiful balance, right? How can we function optimally if our hormones are not in balance? How can we— again, cognitively, we know that mental performance or cognitive function is as important in sports performance as physical performance. So I'm probably telling you all things that you know, but I just really want to kind of bring it back to this. We talk about cardiovascular systems, which again, so much of training, especially our cardiovascular training, is How good is our vascular health? How wholesome and strong are those blood vessels that we have? Our blood pressure, blood clotting. And then eventually, we get down to what we call the energy systems, which is how do I consume calories? What drives me to consume calories? How do I store calories? How do I burn calories? And we could talk about that a little bit later, but again, every part of being an elite athlete or a recreational athlete is what is the kind of food that I'm eating, how much do I need to eat, how do I store it, how do I burn it up? And of course, we deep dive into different nutrients, so different vitamins, and we look at things like iron, and we look at things like choline, B6, B12, right, vitamin D. But then we get to talk about this idea of activity, and we call it activity because we don't want to pigeonhole anyone and say, well, this is only for the elite athletes, or this is only for the people who are interested in getting off the couch and starting to walk around, around the block. And then when we look at activity, we break it up because there's so many different things we want to understand about training and fitness. Can I just carry on? Should I carry on, Chris, or do you want to ask me anything, or should I dive into activity?

No, certainly dive into it. As you're talking, it's just making me think of all the things you're mentioning. There's probably been some sort of ergogenic aid either legally or illegally presented for that. Like, people have used insulin as a doping, uh, mechanism, you know.

That's right, it's an antibiotic steroid, right?

We've got—

it's an antibiotic steroid.

Yeah, we've got these, you know, take this athletic multivitamin and you're gonna be better. So yeah, please, please continue.

And cognitive function, right?

Right.

Cognitive function is an ergogenic aid. Yeah, totally. So we could— that's interesting, we could talk about that. And now we can talk about this interesting thing around— remind me that we come back to this.

Yeah, we're going to be here all day.

It's about when we've done genetics on some— I'm just telling you so we don't forget about it because I want to talk about activity. Some of the greatest— when we've like tested like Olympic-level athletes, we often find in the cognitive mood some really interesting addiction genes.

Interesting. You say that because we're just finishing up the Olympics right now. And there's such a focus on mental health.

Mental health. So, so let's, let's come back to it.

All right. I've got it. I've got to start here.

Yeah. Sometimes. Okay. When those genes are actually even more powerful than the activity genes. All right. We're going to come back to it. Yes. All right. So what do, what do we look at in genetics of activity? So let's start off with the first concept. The first concept is is the idea of fitness potential, what we call training response. In fact, we could call it all kinds of things, training response, fitness potential, or we could use the word VO2 max. What we understand about this is no matter who you are, you're born with a baseline potential, right? So, most athletes are born an Olympic athlete, right? So, you have to be born with a baseline. That means that when we take a whole bunch of us at the age of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, right, before we started our Olympic training, and we measured that baseline, whether it's VO2 max or it's lactate threshold, all those different physiological ideas, you're going to see a difference in those that have that increased genetic potential. That means when they start their training, they're already ahead of the game. So, there's, for some of us, when we start training for a marathon, we start with 2 kilometers, then 4, then 5, then 10, and we have to take our time and increase. And because our adaptation to that high distance, that greater oxygen requirement, that greater muscle contract, all those things, is slower, and there's others who just fly through those, right? They started like 10Ks, and 10Ks is their little trot. So already we have a baseline potential, and then as we train, all those things are going to improve. Our lactate threshold, our VO2 max, all of those things are going to improve. Now, how much those things will improve will depend on our genetic potential or our training response. If I started at the same level as Olympic athletes, which clearly I don't, and I did the same training as them, they would improve so much more doing the same training as I'm doing because of their genetics. So, the great thing is, is we don't need to be Olympic athletes to improve. So, if you're just like me, I call myself a committed recreational athlete. I'm never podium, right? But I am a very committed recreational athlete. So I start on a baseline that's not very, very low, but it's kind of average. And then I do all this amazing training, which I choose to do based on my genetics. We can talk about that. And I see an improvement in my VO2 max. I see an improvement in my 5K time. I see an improvement in my swimming times. The great thing about genetics is we always improve on our baseline, but our genetics gives us some idea of where we started. And where we can finish. So that is the concept of training response or fitness potential, but it's relevant for every one of us. Okay. We just want to be realistic that we're not going to podium, right?

Right. Yeah. I think that's interesting how, um, in the way that I use this is that there are so many different people who have very specific like training windows. You know, oh, you need 12 weeks to train for a half marathon, you need 20 weeks to train for a marathon, you need 6 months to train for an Ironman. And the way I interpret that is we all need a little bit of a different amount of time to train for these things based on our baseline.

That, that's exactly— well, you did it much better and much quicker than I did, but that's exactly the idea. This idea that there's a training, a training program for a specific distance is insane because we are so different genetically in how we're going to respond to that training load. Okay, so exactly as you described it, and this is obviously personalized medicine right there.

Yes, okay, love it.

So let's talk about the next thing. Um, let's talk about injury. So some of us doing the same training program are more likely to become injured Even though we're doing the same training, and we might be doing everything right. We can do some functional training, strength training, cardio training, and yet we're all becoming— we're getting injured. And when I talk about injury, I often talk about those kind of collagen injuries. ACL, Achilles, the plantar, like the ones that really kind of set us back 6 months, right? Rotator cuff.

Perhaps more itises and soft tissue injuries.

More of the itises, yes. Which tells you something already, right? The itises have usually got inflammation in their word.

Yeah.

So why are some of us more prone to injury than others? So injury is an interesting idea. The two key concepts that define injury, just to simplify because obviously it's always more complicated, is the concept of oxidative stress and inflammation. So when we exercise and we train, these are two of the processes that get, I could say, ignited. Inflammation is a natural response to training because training is actually pro-inflammatory. Exercise is pro-inflammatory, but in a healthy way up to a certain level. So, that pro-inflammatory response we get from exercise is actually really healthy for our bodies until we're training a high amount, and then it becomes too much of a load, too much of a load of inflammation. And Inflammation and what we call oxidative stress, which is the kind of creation of all these free radicals in our body, again, a very normal, healthy, and natural process until we have too much of it. And the two of them work together. The more oxidative stress we have, the more inflammation we have, and vice versa. And when we get too much of these two processes happening and we don't— the body isn't able to resolve it, bring down the inflammation, bring down the oxidative stress, we increase our injury risk, and that's usually when we see an injury happening. So, how we are able to manage inflammation and oxidative stress is based on a whole lot of things. It's based on our training load, what is the training we're doing and how much are we doing. It's based on how much recovery time, and we'll talk about recovery time just now, how much recovery time And it's based on our nutrition because nutrition aids those processes a great deal, and very, very much based on our genetics, on our genes. So, if we can understand our genetic susceptibility to injury risk, we can make some really good decisions with our coaches and our nutritionists. We can plan our training very differently. The difference between kind of the load, high load, and then kind of a lower load, days off and rest days, and of course functional training. If we have a sense as well of where those weaknesses are, as you say, the itises, what is the functional training we can do to strengthen our body in those places to be able to prevent those injuries from happening? So, you know, the runner who only runs— we've all made that mistake— and never does any other training other than running is almost invariably going to get those those injuries, but some will take 3 years to get the injury and some will take 20 years to get the injury. So how do we, how do we minimize that injury risk? So that's, that's the concept of injury. Very genetic, very, very genetic. And then the next one, which is very, very closely associated, is recovery. So I'm one of those people who cannot train 6 days a week at a high load. And if I do, a whole lot of stuff start happening. One is that I am very susceptible to injury. The other thing is my energy levels after a certain amount of time would just dip. So, I cannot sustain such a high intensity of training. So, I've discovered for myself that I need to take a certain number of rest days or very important, put in very low load days. That's quite a mouthful. So, really, if I have a very intense training day, then the next day I have to have a low day. But we're not all the same. And so being able to understand how much recovery time you need— and I know there's a lot of apps. I've got my Oura ring on, which gives me a lot of insight into recovery. The Garmin— they're all giving insight. But you cannot only have that insight without having the insight of genetics as well. Does that make sense?

Mic drop, by the way. So— and the reason why I say that is because our population in particular is a slave to their watch. And whether it's their Garmin or their Oura Ring, or I had one gal in fact who had multiple devices and she had like data overload. She was so stressed out about it. This device is telling me this from recovery and this device is telling me this. I said, you need to just, you need a data detox. Like just let it go. Right. So, um, and this concept of increased recovery and it's Okay. To not have to train all the time. In fact, it's a benefit to you.

It's a benefit because we know that the true growth and the strength and the fitness comes in the off day, not the training day. And that's still really hard to get through to athletes, right? So I'll tell you a great story. We have, um, in my team at 3x4, we have two extraordinary athletes and they both go to world champs triathlon. They both like world-class. Athletes, and they both follow the same training. They're the same age, and they both did the same events, and they both got the same training program from— I won't mention the brand, but from one of the elite training organizations that, you know, there's training programs, lots of data, right? And it runs off the— runs off their Garmin. Okay, so what happens is they're going to World Champs and they're getting super close and they— the load is going up and up and up and up. One of them is doing beautifully and everything's going, and the other one gets injured like 3 weeks before World Champs. Same training program, same age, same recovery days, same everything. Why? Well, when she joined the company, the first thing we did was we did genetics and we're like, oh my God, her recovery was completely different from the other one. She needed so much more recovery than the other one did. So, even just basing it off the data of HRV and heart rate was not enough because the genetics for her, she needed that more time off. And since she's been able to do that and actually kind of go back to her training program saying, I'm not, I'm actually not, I'm not doing it. I know I need a day off, um, has, has changed everything for her in terms of performing better and also less injury, obviously.

That's fantastic. That was something I learned about myself too in my, in my report. I was like, oh man, this is why I need so much sleep. This is why I'm sore when the person next to me is not sore and we've done the same exact thing. So, you know, uh, I'm not going to hobble through life anymore.

No, no, we're not. We're not going to beat ourselves up. And I'm the same. Like I just, come to terms with, um, and I do use my Oura and I do use my Garmin, but I also have, I have my genetic information. So I take all of that and kind of put it together. And now suddenly I really have, I mean, that is, that is true insight, right? And that as you, as a practitioner working with, working with your athletes, you now have this other layer of insight, which, which is incredible.

Right. Awesome.

All right.

Okay. So we've done our adaptation or fitness potential, injury recovery. Where, where to next?

Now we're going to talk about endurance and power, and I'm not going to talk about them separately because actually we shouldn't talk about them separately, right?

Okay. Yeah.

So, okay, so here's going to be another— so initially when I started in genetics, I spoke about them separately and I said, when I look at your genes, I look at your endurance potential. I look to see how far and long you can go, whether it's running or cycling or swimming or walking or hiking. How long can you go? And I want to see what your potential is to be able to do long distance. I just have to say here that this doesn't mean that there's some people who can do long distance and there's others who can't. That's absolutely not okay. Trust me, if I can run marathons, anyone can run marathons. It's the ease with which we can do endurance training, how naturally and genetically we're suited to be able to go along. So, how much training did I have to do for a marathon compared to someone else who has better endurance genes than I do, and how they managed to get to that marathon distance easier with less effort and less training. That's, that's the difference. Not that someone shouldn't run marathons or shouldn't do 100 milers. We can do everything. It's just the ease, right? And that's why I wanted to— and then separately, I would look at your power genetics. I would say, Oh, wow, your power genes are telling me that if you go into a gym and, as you said, lift heavy things, right, you are going to see a great responsiveness in your muscle mass and strength. So, going to a gym, lift heavy things, you're going to see muscle growth, so you're going to— and an improvement in your strength. And this isn't true of everyone. So, we know from the research that you can— they took like army recruits because you can do any research on army recruits, so they didn't have a choice, right? And they put them through this training program. And the first training program was cycling every day, like hours on end. And they measured muscle efficiency, which is more an endurance trait. And they found that some of them improved hugely with— I mean, it was incredible training load, and others barely changed their muscle efficiency at all. And they did a similar study where they put a whole lot of army recruits into a weight training program. With reps, and they got some of them that their muscle mass growth— they measured muscle mass growth— was incredible difference. And others that even though they were training with weights every single day for like 12 weeks, they experienced no muscle mass growth. So we know that there is a huge difference between how we respond to that kind of endurance style cardio training versus the power training. So, when I started out in genetics, like 20 years ago, I had this idea that they were two different things. But what I've come to learn from my team is that you've got to think of it as not even as a spectrum, but as something that is inherent in us, that we have both of these things. They both sit within us, and you can have both. You don't ever have to be one or the other. You don't have to be an endurance person or a power person. This isn't like a binary conversation, right? It's about how do those, that endurance and power potential sit with us. And then what we try and do is find what is the activity that best matches that interplay between power and endurance. Not, I have to choose power or I have to choose endurance, because we might find, you know, that If you've got great genes for both power and endurance, you're going to be— you're going to win, like, marathons, right? Because you can go far and you can go fast. But if you're, like, super powerful but non-endurance, you might want to do, like, 5K triathlon, like sprint triathlon. And so, it's not about letting our genes decide what we want to do. We should decide what we want to do. What do we love? What is our friends and our family doing? What do we dream about doing? Do we want to run the New York Marathon? And then we should say, what are the genes that I'm I'm working with and how are they going to get me there?

I'm glad you mentioned that our genes aren't necessarily deciding our sports for us because so much of whether an athlete or not, you still have to enjoy it, right? We want to get out there and get moving. And especially in the realm of the fitness enthusiast or perhaps somebody who's wanting to maybe lose weight, they're kind of willing to do whatever, but if they don't like that whatever, they're not going to stick with it. So I'm glad.

And in fact, I mean, the primary, like, one of the greatest reasons for doing exercise is for stress and mental, mental health. So if you're choosing an activity because all your friends are doing it, because it's the latest craze, and it's like, like the high-intensity workouts, like craze. I don't know if we're still in it, but it was huge here. And we just, all we saw was like a lot of injury. But, um, it was the same thing. It was like, we need to connect— like, exercise and fitness needs to be driven by our lifestyle and our stress and, and how that works for us. And then we decide, because exercise is always going to be amazing for us. So we must figure out what is the thing that makes me happy, and then we'll apply the performance, and then we'll apply the genes, then we'll apply the nutrition. But what's going to make us happy has to be the first question. And then we'll say, okay, I love running, running makes me happy. And then we'll say, all right, let's look at your genes, let's look at your lifestyle, let's look at how much time you have available to train. And then we say, okay, you know, it's only realistic to focus on running a 10K. And maybe we can focus a little bit about running a fast 10K because you seem to have a really good power, power genes that would really allow you to. So I think it's really important that we don't start with as you said, like start with the, the sport and then try to fit everything else in, but rather start with what is, what is it that you want to do, and then we'll make it work. Well, especially you in your practice, you'll make it work with what you have available, but don't be driven either by, um, the sport or by your genes. Neither of them should make your decision for you.

Yeah, I, I love that. I'm glad you really hammered that home because I know so many people are very into Uh, whether it be Ironman triathlon or ultra, it's like, let's go longer because it's harder and it's a bigger challenge. But is that the right thing to do? I, I'm, I'm a big proponent for some of the shorter stuff and, you know, like sprint triathlons, Olympics, 5Ks, 10Ks. Why not work on that? And sometimes there's not as much glory in that, but maybe you're, you're saying that really cool jacket, you know, the Ironman jacket and the hat.

Yeah, the shoes and the bag.

It's all about the swag.

And it's all about the swag, right? It's like 20 years later, I'm still wearing my— okay, no, sorry, stop me now. Stop me now. But, but I, but I, I mean, that's exactly it, you know. And it, and, you know, exercise is for life. And so like, what is the thing that I can do for the next— I always say like, so 5 years ago I switched a lot of my training to swimming. I was like, what is the thing that I can do for the next 30 years? Like, when I'm in my 80s, what is the thing I want to be doing? I want to be swimming when I'm 80. And I knew that my body could do that, that because of, you know, the— my genes and injury potential, recovery. Like, so for me, like, what do we— what can we do? And also, what fitted my lifestyle, you know? What is— so we say, like, I always say, why is— why is this genetic report helpful for people who aren't elite athletes, who don't train 10 to 15 hours a week or 20 hours a week, whatever it is. It's like if you've only got 3 hours a week to train, which for most, if you're a parent and you have a job, like 3 hours is like probably what you're gonna get, you know, in a good week, right? Then what am I going to do with my 3 hours? And so I said like the great thing about genetics is like if I've only got 3 hours, let's have a look how to use those 3 hours to the best potential for you. I love it. That's awesome.

I know we were going to talk about mood.

Yes.

Shall we revisit that?

Yes, we can.

Okay.

Yeah. So there's a couple of interesting ways to look at it. So the first interesting thing about me— so when we— let's define what mood means. So we know that especially now, COVID times, the amount of anxiety and depression we're seeing is unprecedented. I mean, it was always— it was a big problem before, but it's It's another pandemic, really, of mental health. And children, grown-ups, everyone, we're talking a lot about mood. And mood is driven by what we call neurotransmitters, which are brain messages. And these brain messages get regulated by a whole lot of things. So it could be by stress in our environment, by trauma, relationships, connection with other humans, But it also, they also get impacted by nutrition, what we eat, and they definitely, definitely get impacted by exercise. So, what we have observed, and it's anecdotal, but I'm pretty sure it's in the literature if I looked hard enough for it, is that when we see some, I've had some really elite athletes that are doing, especially like, not that just the endurance of like Ironman, but are doing the like, 30-day multi-stage kind of 1,000-mile crossing a country kind of endurance events, or in my world of swimming, like swimming the Yangtze River, you know, and we do their genetics, what is really interesting is we do not find extraordinary performance genes in there. And every time it happens to me, I'm like, no, come on, you're joking. Like, really? I expected like best power, the best endurance, and I'm not seeing them. But what I do find is a lot around mood and behavior. And these genes impact things like anxiety, depression. They impact addiction behavior. Now, addiction behavior is driven by hormones and chemicals in our brain where we seek things in our life that make our hormones go up or down in a certain way. We call them like reward-seeking behavior. And there's— you can choose your poison. So, it can be drugs, recreational drugs. It can be food, as in binge eating, overeating carbohydrates and sugars. It could be gambling. It can be sex. But— and it can be exercise. And we know that exercise addiction is real. And exercise drives these hormones in the same way. Now, the interesting thing is when we see these, they're called the dopamine receptors. and there's a couple of genes that we look at. And when we test these athletes that don't necessarily come up with these extraordinary genes in activity but come up with a lot around mood and behavior, that they are looking for a substance that will— or behavior that will drive their hormones to make them feel better. And instead of choosing cocaine, they choose training and exercise. And so often in the greatest athletes, you get a combination, and it's OCD behavior as well, by the way, a lot of OCD behavior. And so in the greatest athletes we see, we see this combination of great performance genetics, but also some of this driven by mood to use their training to make themselves feel better. So they're getting a huge amount of reward and good feelings. And I always say, if you're going to choose a poison, then I think exercise is a great choice, you know, like, much better choice. So, the other interesting thing is we see, and for example, cold water swimming, cold water long-distance swimming, a lot of people who have bipolar, OCD, anxiety, or depression are drawn to cold water swimming. And part of that is because of what the cold immersion in the water does to their nervous system, to the parasympathetic and the, and the sympathetic nervous system, it actually almost acts like a meditation. It makes them calmer, makes their heart rate go down, all their stress hormones are decreased. So exercise is so interesting because it's not just about this muscle performance, you know, it's this really interesting world of stress and trauma and brain messages. And yeah, probably enough for there.

Oh no, that was, that was brilliant and so interesting to listen to. Very briefly, will you touch on dopamine and what that is all about?

So dopamine is one of the big drivers. Yeah, so dopamine is a feel-good hormone, and so we want, we, we want dopamine because it makes us feel good. Yeah. So when we eat certain foods like the high— the refined carbohydrate slice of chocolate cake, we actually increase our dopamine in our body through— you've obviously all heard of serotonin and dopamine, they're all related to each other. But there's other ways we can drive dopamine, as I just spoke about, like exercise. And there's certain drugs obviously that you take, pharmaceutical drugs that you take, which increase dopamine. But there are genes that change the way dopamine is metabolized in our body. So I mentioned the DRDs. There's DRD2, 3, and 4, which are the dopamine receptor genes. But there's also another very famous gene called COMT, which is probably the most— one of the best researched genes in the literature. And COMT is directly impacting what all dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, all of these all of these brain messages. And so, what we see in people who have this COMT variant, right, because that's what we're testing for, like a spelling change in your DNA, we see that they're more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression and other mood disorders and to look for behaviours that try to compensate for that. And often in my world, it lands up being eating behaviour. So I, I am really driven to eat sugars, refined carbohydrates, because they have a really great impact on trying to, to increase my dopamine. But the great news is we can use other techniques like exercise, meditation, cold water immersion to try and manage dopamine without using medication and without using carbohydrates and sugar.

I also hear that as being It's not just about willpower.

No. So that brings us to kind of the world of weight management and genetics. It's not about— it's the idea that willpower is like what stands between us being either a pro athlete or being slim is from like the 1970s, that when people didn't lose weight, it was like, oh, you've got no willpower. And we all beat— we're beating ourselves up and saying, oh, I'm a terrible person. I've got no willpower. Because I can't follow this 400-calorie, barely eating diet plan. So, genetics is such a driver of what we eat and how we eat and when we eat, right? So, some of us are very driven to snack. That isn't lack of willpower. A lot of that is driven by our genetics. Some of us, when we see food, when we see a buffet of food, are very driven to eat. Without a sense of fullness, that is driven by genetics. That's not, "Oh, I'm a really greedy—" Greedy is the other word that I hate to use around food. "Greedy person because I just keep on eating." Appetite, satiety, how hungry I feel is very driven by genetics. How food tastes to me. It tastes different to me than it does to you, Chris. When I eat a plate of broccoli, I'm tasting my broccoli very differently from you. When I eat sugar, I'm actually tasting it very differently from you. So, all these things are influenced. And so, and of course, when I exercise, so, when I exercise and I do the same amount of kilometers, let's talk about just running kilometers, so easy, and I'm consuming exactly the same amount of calories as you are, how come you're losing weight and I'm not? Is it because I haven't got willpower? No, absolutely not. It's because genetically, my way my body metabolizes calories and stores calories and burns them up and moves them around my body is different. So this idea of willpower and greedy belongs in the 1970s and should be left there, because what we need to understand is, again, personalized nutrition. Why are we different? How do we respond differently? And how can we build a diet and lifestyle and training program for a person but that kind of deep insight of who they are.

I have chills. This is just, yes, so fascinating. So let's, let's circle back to the performance part. Cause I know that I wanted to touch on certain SNPs as it relates to nutrients, methylation, even caffeine, B12, some of those things. So yeah, y'all take your pick. Where, where do you want to, do we want to start on caffeine since that's one of them?

We can talk about caffeine cause it's very performance. Yeah. And I just, I just want to say though that none of these things that you mentioned are driven by one gene, right? So even caffeine is not— even though caffeine doesn't have a lot of genes that influence it, none of the things you mentioned are driven by one gene. So I'll mention some SNPs. Yep. But a SNP is a gene variation, right? So it's, it's very—

if you don't want to, don't, because, you know, a lot of people are like, what is this?

Yeah, that's what it's like. A SNP is a gene variant, right? It's just a spelling change in our DNA, completely normal. We've all got 3 to 4 million of them in our DNA, and it's what makes us respond to the world differently. It's what Chris and I do. We look at a genetic report, we're reading these gene variants, these SNPs, to understand who you are, right? So that's kind of SNP 101. So let's talk about caffeine. So caffeine is fascinating, especially with the Olympics happening right now, because caffeine was a banned substance. It was regarded as an ergogenic aid, right? And the reason being that caffeine has an impact not only on physiology on our body, it actually kind of uncouples some fatty acids and gets fatty acids into the system to burn up energy, but it affects brain, your brain, like, like really, as you know, that's why we drink caffeine, right? You get that kind of— so it has been regarded for a very long time as an ergogenic aid. The problem is, is that genetically we metabolize caffeine differently, and I'm sure everyone that's into this knows that because they know that they know someone who has like a double espresso before they go to bed and sleeps through the night, and they know someone who has like one coffee in the morning and is like all shaky and restless and can't focus. So everyone knows that they make their coffee decisions when they go to the coffee shop in the morning based on their reaction to caffeine. Now, we can habituate caffeine, and we do. So, the more caffeine you drink, you can actually get better at being able to use it in the body, but there's still like a baseline of how we respond. So, I can habituate myself from having 1 coffee, which is probably what I should be on, to having 2 coffees, which is what I do, because I do that every day, and eventually my body kind of gets used to it, but I could never have more than 2. I would be shaky and all over the place. So, in sports performance, caffeine does a similar thing. The problem is they set this limit in the banned substances to say that, I think it was like the equivalent caffeine of 3 to 4 cups of coffee a day is a banned substance, right? And then we have this extraordinary athlete, Elana Meyer in South Africa, world-class athlete, who was found to have higher amounts of caffeine in her system than the 3 to 4 cups. And she swore that she had not had more than 3 to 4 cups. In fact, she had about 2 cups and that there was no way that she had more than 3 to 4 cups and that was something wrong. But the blood test showed that she had this higher amount of the caffeine metabolite in her body. This was quite some time ago, probably about 10 years ago. And of course, subsequently, what we've understood is that we metabolize caffeine differently. So, Some of us, like me, are called slow metabolizers. So, I drink my coffee, break it down into my caffeine metabolites, and it stays in my body for a long time. And it doesn't— you can't see my hands, but it doesn't rise very high in my blood, but it rises up slowly and it goes a long time. So, the caffeine will stay long in my blood, which means if I have a second cup of coffee an hour later, I'm going to be loading up a lot of caffeine, which is why I'm going to start feeling bad. Others, super good, we call them fast metabolizers. They have their cup of coffee, the enzyme that breaks down caffeine works really super fantastic, the amount of caffeine going into your blood goes up very, very quickly, but then comes down, and then you're ready to have your next cup of coffee. So, obviously, what happened with Ilana Meyer is she was like me, a slow metabolizer. So, even though it wasn't 3 to 4 cups, it stayed in her body for a very long time. And when they tested her, it was still in her body, even though in someone else it would have come out of her system. And it's one of the reasons why caffeine's been taken off the banned list, is because you cannot assign this 3 to 4 cups, because for who? So unless we start doing genetic testing, which, not about it anyway. So the other part of the story is, depending on your genes will depend on how you must use now this legal caffeine ergogenic aid. Because if you're like me and I'm running a half marathon, I want to make sure that the caffeine is at its peak in my system when I need it most, which is probably into like the 15Ks, right? 10, 15Ks, which is when I really start needing it. So if I have my caffeine like as I start the race, it's probably only going to really peak when I'm finished my race. But if I have it like an hour before, it'll probably peak. So, we need to think carefully about if you take, if you're a fast metabolizer and you take your caffeine an hour before, by the time you start running, like, it's gone, right? You're not going to benefit from it. So, understanding the genetics of how we metabolize these nutrients is so helpful in performance training to be able to maximize how we use nutrition. I mean, caffeine's the most obvious one, but certainly not the only one to be able to really maximize how we utilize these nutrients. Awesome.

Great explanation there. Fantastic. So let's, um, I know more of a specific nutrient as it relates to performance are B vitamins. So I feel like that touches into, you know, our ability to methylate. And so, yeah. Can you, can you talk about that?

So methylation, let's just understand methylation. Methylation is one of the worst things to try and explain. Methylation is like, it's okay, I love that we have an Olympics, I can use all my Olympic analogies, right? It's like the 4x100-meter relay. Yeah. And there's these 4 extraordinary specimens of humans running really fast and they've got to hand over this baton. Now this baton is, this process of running around the track doing a relay is methylation. Because we have these processes in our body that are responsible for building new DNA in our body and repairing old DNA. And in fact, if you think of those two processes, it's a whole neurological function. All our nerve function is run on that, that basis. So we need to pass this pattern, which is called a methyl group, from one molecule to the next molecule, which hands the baton to the next molecule. And if we drop this pattern we're not carrying the baton with us, our ability to create healthy DNA and healthy cells and to repair damaged DNA, which is completely normal, completely normal to have damaged DNA, especially in athletes, we are not going to be able to repair them. And that is the process of methylation, is the baton. Now, in order to carry this methyl baton, to make sure that we're keeping these processes functioning optimally, we need B vitamins in our diet. B vitamins support this relay race to be able to happen. So, we're talking about folate, we're talking about choline, vitamin B2, B6, B12. But remembering that genetically, our genes impact how efficient we are at metabolizing and using these kind of nutrients. So, for some of us, we might need some more folate, some more B12, some more choline. So to optimise methylation, we want to have the best, best battering race and relay team. We want to make sure that we have the optimal amount of B vitamins in our diet to ensure that this process of running around and passing the baton, making new DNA, repairing old DNA, keeping our nerves sending their message around is happening optimally. And that's another thing we test in the report is How well do I metabolize and process these B vitamins? Do I need greater amounts in my diet?

Fantastic. I love the analogy.

You've never heard that analogy, right?

Yes, but that was so perfect. Yeah, with the Olympics going on and the, and the baton and the methyl group. I love it. So talk a little bit about like quality of vitamins too, because this is one of those And I know this is a little bit of a right turn, but this is one of my personal pet peeves. Oh yeah, you know, I grabbed the thing off the grocery store shelf and that's right. It said athletic nutrients or whatever. That's good, right? I'm helping myself.

I have a rule with my patients. Like, if you can grab it off the grocery shelf, you shouldn't. Like, if they're selling it off a grocery shelf, you shouldn't be buying it. This is a real case of cheap is expensive, you know. So there is such a difference in quality of supplements. So I'm not like, take 1,000 supplements, but if you're going to take supplements, take the right supplements, which again, we use genetics to try to help us decide what are the best supplements, and take the highest, highest quality supplement you can afford because the active— we want those ingredients in those supplements to be active ingredients. We know exactly what they need to do. We are not plugging holes. We want those supplements to do something in the body. They're switching on genes, they're switching on enzymes, they are making things happen. And if you're not taking a quality supplement that has an active ingredient, whatever that cheap supplement is that you bought, no matter how cheap it was, it's a total waste of your money. You might as well have just thrown that down the trash. So rather take fewer supplements of higher quality, that what we call practitioner-grade supplements, and there are some brilliant ones in the market, and work with a practitioner who is able to tell you which supplements to take. I always say like 3 to 5, 3 to 5, like try not go over that 5. You normally never get away with less than 3, but I really try not go over that 5, right? And let me think very carefully of the best quality and the best supplement to get the best outcome. But if you can pick it up off a grocery shelf, you should not— you shouldn't be using it.

What about Amazon? Another one of my pet peeves.

You know, hard for me to say because I don't know what's available on Amazon because I'm, I'm too far away, but I'm guessing it's the same as a grocery shelf. It's just an online grocery shelf, right? It is. So I've seen— I mean, I've seen what they're selling They sell like a genetic test on Amazon. It's the same thing, right? Like the difference between going to you as a practitioner and getting a practitioner-grade genetic test and having that conversation with you so that we can really create a personalized program is the same as going to Amazon. So I love Amazon, but not, not for my health.

Not for this. Yes. I wish people knew how much time I spent looking for the right combination of supplements that not only will they be compliant with, but will be the highest priority for their health needs and also be affordable. So I, I really put a lot of— it's not a cookie-cutter type of thing. And I sometimes, I wish people knew that. And they're like, oh, well, I can get the same thing on Amazon. Or I'm like, oh no, no, I agree with you.

It's one of the toughest parts of being a matchmaker because There's so many products out there. I mean, there are some good companies now that are helping, but the supplement industry is a money-making industry. So you have to be so— so you need someone like you, Chris, to be able to interpret it and analyze it and evaluate it. As a consumer, you don't stand a chance. You're just up against marketing. Yeah, you don't stand a chance. You need a practitioner to wade through that industry and find you the best value, best quality active ingredient supplement. And if you're not, if you're not having someone help you make those decisions, you're probably wasting your money. And remember that even the poorest quality supplements are doing something to your body, just probably not what you want them to be doing.

I love that. So I think that's a great way to kind of put a bow on it. So yeah, if you had 2 or 3 things that people can walk away with from what we've talked about today, whether it be related to performance or supplements or training? What would be, what would be those things?

Okay, first thing is, despite everything we've said, make sure that whatever exercise or activity you do, you love it and it fits your, your family and your lifestyle. Performance, second thing, performance isn't something that is owned by elite athletes. It's relevant to all of us who have jobs and families and make school lunch and do carpool. And it works both on a physical and a cognitive and a mental level. Like, we're all looking to be the best performance we can be. And I always add this one in because I can't help myself. It's like cold water swimming. Cold water swimming.

I thought you were going to do the broccoli sprouts again.

I know, but like, if I had to do 4, I would do— I had to choose between broccoli and cold water. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Cold water swimming for mental benefits, physical benefits, connecting with nature, connecting with other humans, being, being in water. You cannot, you cannot beat it for health benefits. Fantastic.

Yael Jaffe from 3x4 Genetics. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Chris. As always, so much fun.

Fantastic. Yeah. And if you are interested in getting this test, check us out at theenduranceedge.com, because that is one of the unique things with your test is that it is exclusive to practitioners. So it's not just something that somebody can just buy off the shelf.

You can't buy it on Amazon or off the shelf.

That's right. Yeah. And try to interpret themselves. So theenduranceedge.com, you can book a free nutrition consult with myself or our other dietitians, and we will get you understanding your blueprint, understanding your body, and what are the best choices for your health. So fantastic. And thank you all for listening. Yael, thank you again. And we will catch you on the next episode.