Hack your DNA to slow down Aging

And that's genetically determinable. And this is where we say that we can understand genetically that you have the poor endothelial, but you're not sick. You're not born sick.

Yeah, you better pay attention and do the things that really are needed because you know what's scary now is I'm having guys I went to college with playing golf drop dead of a heart attack, you know. Yeah, it's like, damn.

Welcome to the Peptides and Longevity Podcast, redefining aging and transforming health. Each week, Dr. Kent Holtorf will dive into groundbreaking science, innovative therapies, and the future of health and longevity alongside visionary physicians and experts. We'll explore how peptides, cutting-edge medicine, and lifestyle strategies can redefine the way we age. Get ready to transform your health, optimize your vitality, and unlock the secrets to a longer, healthier life. Let's get started.

Today we'll be talking with Kashif Khan, who is executive officer and founder of The DNA Company, where, um, you know, basically personalized DNA, checking, uh, your DNA and seeing how that affects the system. Uh, well, welcome. Thank you so much for, for taking the time.

No, it's awesome to be here. Thank you.

Great. And a little bit more about Kashyap is that he's— this is personalized medicine. He's been pioneer through unique insights in the human genome. We— they've done the largest study of its kind globally. Very impressive. The DNA companies develop a functional approach to genomic interpretation. Overlaying environment, nutrition, and lifestyle on the genetic blueprint to create personalized and deterministic health outcomes. Uh, prior to his tenure at The DNA Company, he's done quite a few things, pretty amazing. Um, uh, he's been involved a number of high-growth startups where he took an active role as an angel investor and advisor, ran two successful marketing firms where his client list comprised Canada's top earners and most affluent individuals, from Canada's largest company to small neighborhood businesses. He's advised on business strategy in industries ranging from luxury retail, technology, finance, fine arts, healthcare, tourism, and real estate. So smart renaissance man. He's participated in over $300 million in revenue in his own retail businesses. Prior to launching and consulting services to help others thrive. So he's grown up in Vancouver. His drive started from witnessing his immigrant parents struggle to establish themselves in a new country. Inspired by an ironclad work ethic and resourcefulness, he developed an industrious entrepreneurial spirit at a young age. While he was in high school, his peers were languishing at minimum wage, he was starting his first business. And it's interesting, as CEO of DNA Company, he learned, you know, that his genetics and his neural wiring, actually, that's how he was wired. He's designed to be entrepreneurial. And he has since made his mission to build DNA Company into a business that has impacted and whose success is measured not in dollars, but in lives improved. And I've been very impressed with, with genetic companies. I think they've solved some problems that we've had and everyone else has had that we'll talk about. So, uh, again, thank you for coming on. And, well, what got you interested? So it was your own health that you looked at?

Yeah, so as you mentioned, first of all, I'm blushing because I didn't realize how long that bio is. Thank you. Uh, yeah, so in that, you know, you mentioned the marketing business. So I did that for some time. I realized my core strength was that public relations, marketing, helping people find their place, you know, in distribution and getting going. And I was sick, like, I literally— my business partner used to drive me home in the middle of the day because I had crazy migraines. I had eczema, I had psoriasis, I was not— I didn't look right, like you could see, like, I was not in shape, right? I wasn't sleeping properly, which I didn't even know was a problem, you know, when a typical young entrepreneur sleep almost seems like failure. Like, no, you got to work, work, work.

Oh, I know, it's like I hate going to sleep, but then I hate getting up.

So through that, it was bad. Like, I got to the point where on a monthly basis I was crashing, spending a couple days at home because I just— migraine, nausea, I just couldn't handle.

You were working your butt off at this time too.

It was too much, it was too much. And I didn't know that the environmental exposures that I had working in downtown Toronto, big city, pollution, chemicals. In our building, there was a manufacturing company and there was fumes coming through the vents. I didn't realize. So in my genetics, what I learned— this is what got me to this— the key glutathione genes— glutathionization is your detox pathway, right? So glutathione binds onto toxins, send it to the liver to metabolize, get rid of it. I didn't even have one of the most important genes. So forget about what version or what SNP or what variant— didn't have the gene. The other one, I had the suboptimal version, and one I was doing okay. So this toxic exposure I was having was creating a heavy load on my cellular health because I couldn't clear the toxic insult. And then you lead— you get to this metabolic inflammatory state where all of a sudden you think you have some kind of autoimmune issue because all these spoke to the central problem trigger, right? So that led me to discovering myself, making myself healthy, And it was genetics that got me to the true answer, like what was actually wrong. Here's my instruction manual, my human instruction manual, what was broken in the code, right? And that's where I literally took the keys to my marketing company, handed it to the staff, and said, thank you very much, you can keep this. I found what I have to work on. I literally walked away, funded the company, and we started going.

Well, you knew the power right there. And, and I really like it because it almost always correlates clinically. Like someone has this problem and then you go, oh, no wonder you're missing, you know, this enzyme's very poor, you have this buildup. Yeah, you can't detox. And then you can focus on what actually to do.

Exactly. And that's the key thing about the genetics is if you're doing it right, and if you— meaning if you're interpreting the report properly, you're removing all the trial and error. It's no longer one size fits all. Let's try this, let's try this. We actually know what to do up front, right? And all of a sudden outcomes are better. So exactly what you just said.

And you tend to overtreat everyone because you don't know. You kind of shotgun it. I remember when I did mine, the guy says, you don't like hard alcohol, do you? And I'm like, no. I go, I wish I did, like, you know, single malt scotch, you know. And I just, I can't even smell it. It's so funny. But yeah, we find it really helps where, you know, our patients come on with just a ton of supplements and you go, you don't need that one, you don't need that one, but you need two of this one, you know.

Exactly.

And I think that really helps. And, uh, but the problem is it's another thing is for a doctor to learn.

Yes.

And it is very technical and you've got to learn a lot. You got to know for years So I think that's how your, your business model, uh, helps.

That's the gap. So what— so see, I came from the outside. I don't come from this space. I came from marketing, luxury goods, fine art, that type of thing. So I didn't have sort of the blinders that the sort of biotech industry has, that this is the way we do things, right? I didn't have that bias. So coming in, yeah, so I could see that it was being done wrong. You're forcing You're— if you're a clinician, you're busy, your staff is busy, you don't have time, you hardly have time for your family, forget about learning genetics, right? So, and even if you do learn it, what does this gene mean? What— you still can't interpret it functionally, meaning how do I now action that? How do I apply that to diabetes or cardiovascular disease or breast cancer? You have to be able to reverse engineer, interpret it. So what we said is it only will get adopted if we make it easy to use. And so we sat down with our science team and literally for months and months and months built this giant algorithm, right? So the algorithm was, what are the steps, the rule sets in the brains of our scientists that they go through when they're interpreting? Because they know what it means, right? And we built an AI platform that now does that. So when you get our reports, typically when you get a genetic report, it will tell you, you know, you had this gene, this gene, this gene, and then you got to figure out, okay, so what does that mean? What's the impact of the— so we say is anxiety. Low, medium, high risk. And by the way, if you want to know the genetics, here it is. Weight loss, you know, prostate cancer, uh, anxiety, depression, etc. You name the big buckets of things that people are in, we've reverse engineered those genetically, meaning how do they happen, why do they happen, and give people that, including the clinician, because it's so much easier to just speak to the problem with the recommendations in hand. Recommendations meaning what's solving that root cause, not the symptom masking. Right? And that's how we go about things. And we found that all of a sudden it just become very easy to use and actionable.

Yeah, because even like we'll have a report and they have these 4 genes where you don't— you know, you can learn everything about this gene, this gene, but it's how they interact. And so you really need some sort of computer algorithm to help, you know.

And that's what we spent— so we spent 2 years downloading the information from our scientists' heads. We spent a year building the AI platform that can then read that information and produce the reports. And one key factor— so going back to one of the earlier things you said, the genetic industry really is focused on solving genetic problems, meaning that this gene variant directly correlates and equals a problem— sickle cell syndrome, some forms of autism, you know, things that you're born with, right? You're not born with type 2 diabetes, you're not born with cholesterol. These happen 50-plus because it took that long of making the wrong decisions for it to express into a disease. So what does genetics have to say about that? That was the gap, you know. What are the choices I should make that I don't end up there? So the only reason we were able to do that— there's two things there. In our research, we, we realized there was enough information about genes. What does this gene mean? What does that gene me, right? We had to layer it into the systems that mirror the biochemistry of the body. So that was the first thing that we did, was the mapping. The, the body isn't 22,000 independent genes doing independent things. It's a cardiovascular system, it's an endocrine system, you know, it's, it's a hormonal system. What is those— what's the cascade for each system? So we looked at how those work, and then we figured out what genes instruct each step along the way. We then met with patients So we spent 2 years meeting 6,000 people one by one by one by one by one to say, okay, this profile leads to 80% chance of Alzheimer's, but why did 20% not get it with the same profile? That came down to environment, nutrition, lifestyle. I have a suboptimal profile for which the genes are not supporting my ability to fight off Alzheimer's, But I still have to do something to trigger it. I'm not born with Alzheimer's. Right.

Right.

It was studying those environment, nutrition, lifestyle loads that are put on the genes. And that's really the most important part, because now all of a sudden we understand why these diseases happen. And not only can we prevent them, we can also start to reverse them because that's what we did.

It's nice. I think it's, you know, your genes aren't your destiny. It's, you know, you can turn them on and turn them off. Yes, it's guided with epigenetically, again, lifestyle, you know, nutrition, lack of whatever, you know, replacing lack of nutrients, whatever it may be. And I think that's such a problem. We're just getting bombarded with so many toxins, and our food is devoid of nutrients. And so, and they— if you're genetically prone to get it, you know, or it's like my mom would smoke 5 packs a day. Of cigarettes, and she'd say, oh well, Lois didn't get, didn't get cancer, heart disease, you know. Well, what'd she die of? Heart disease and cancer, you know. Yep. Um, and some people may have some protective gene that others don't.

And there's, there's a perfect example. So the, the endothelial— like, why does heart disease happen? The endothelial, that inner lining of the artery, is where the inflammation starts. Right. And that's the very beginnings of most cardiovascular diseases.

Yes. It's not a cholesterol problem. Right.

It's an inflammatory— cholesterol is your body trying to reduce the inflammation. Your body sends cholesterol there to say, hey, you have an inflammation issue because of some toxic load or something. And guess what? I'm going to send cholesterol to actually help you. But when the cholesterol meets toxicity, it hardens and gets deposited. And all of a sudden you have a problem that looks like cholesterol, right? But this question, the first question, there's different versions of the endothelium. There's a stainless steel version, there's an okay version, and there's like a paper-thin papyrus version that you can poke right through, right? So now the question of, well, this person smoked till they're 90 and had no problem. This aunt smoked till she was 50 and died of a heart attack. The hardware was different. Yeah, and that's genetically determinable. And this is where we say that we can understand genetically that you have the endothelial, but you're not sick. You're not born sick. Yeah, the wrong load.

You better pay attention and do the things that really are needed because you know what's scary now is I'm having guys I went to college with playing golf drop dead of a heart attack, you know. Yeah, it's like damn, you know. And I'm sure they had bad genes and then bad lifestyle on top of that.

Yep. I can tell you, we actually have a— one of our early stage investors is a pharmacist. We did sort of an early investment round when we were funding our research, and this guy was 38 years old, had a crazy, crazy cholesterol issue, and it came down to that he golfed too much, which nobody would ever think is a problem. But what's the problem in Canada? Because we have such a long winter, especially in Toronto, the usage of pesticides and chemicals is highly unregulated. Here. It's much more regulated in the US than it is here, right? This guy, like, like terrible here. Yeah, it's already bad enough. Now imagine it's worse here, right? So now this guy was golfing 4 days a week in the summer because he was trying to jam it in, because in the winter he didn't get it, right? So 4 days a week, 4 hours at a time, he's breathing in all these toxic chemicals for which he was missing the key gene that helps you clear them. He was also missing— not— I shouldn't say missing but had a suboptimal methylation pathway, the anti-inflammatory, and he had this weak endothelium that equaled that inflammatory insult, which led to the cholesterolemia, right? So all of a sudden he's on Lipitor, can't understand why the number keeps going up, because you're fueling the fire with those chemicals. That's the root cause, right? And getting rid of golf is what healed him.

Wow, that's a, that's a big price for him, but, uh, or wear a gas mask or something. Yeah.

Well, even, even supplementation, you can do things to support if you know where you're suboptimal. Yeah, if your glutathionization process is suboptimal, then support that and then keep golfing. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

It's amazing, all that information is such power, and it can be one little thing.

Yep.

That's just because everything's a vicious cycle and it gets stuck at like, you know, the weakest point.

Yeah.

And what, what typical things do you find are uh, the most benefit or the most common that really help some people that are, that are feeling bad? And then, or what else do you find in the typical person that you can change based on their genetics that's a, that's a huge benefit to them?

I would say there's sort of 3 answers there. One, the easiest thing to identify and reverse is all the cardiovascular stuff because it's so mistreated in terms of what's really happening. Like we just talked about, it's the number one killer. It's the number one killer. It happens because of all these reasons we're talking about, right? It's more prevalent than ever before because the toxic environment, nutrition, lifestyle loads are worse than they've ever been, right? So that's one that it's so prevalent that it just kind of keeps happening— diabetes, cholesterol, etc. Then there's two where, because our approach is so unique in areas that are very gray, we have really good outcomes. And I would say the number one is female hormone health. And why? Because that's an area that, first of all, the delta value between how bad the experience currently is, right, when they go to your typical primary care MD, well, it's your hormones, you're supposed to have problems, right? That you're supposed to be in pain.

I've heard that before.

Typically, yeah. So the women believe It's supposed to be bad. I'm supposed to have bad, you know, menstruation issues, fertility problems, horrible mental health.

All my friends have it and they say don't take hormones, and I'm just like, oh my God. Yeah, yeah. Or if they do, they put them on birth control pills.

Exactly. Yeah, not knowing that, well, what if this, you know, hormonal issue is rooted in estrogen toxicity, right, which causes that inflammatory load? But guess what? Giving them a birth control pill the genetics of it, that gene is still instructing to convert all that estrogen into estrogen toxicity, the byproduct. So you're just fueling the fire again, right? So female hormone health, I would say, because first of all, the current, you know, current sort of experience isn't the best, and we're very precise about it. That's the one where literally women are crying. They come in, they're crying, I can't believe I— this many years of pain, or whatever. And there's a big flip. The other one—

or just a little bit more on that. So what you'll find that they have a gene that will tend to, uh, cause the estrogen convert to more toxic metabolites.

Uh, yeah, so the, the hormone cascade, uh, is very deterministic when it comes to the genes, but in com— regular plastic practice, it's not treated as that deterministic. Like, we're using things like the Dutch test and trying to understand what's happening today. Well, guess what? My menstrual cycle looks like this. So tell me today, it doesn't mean next week or the week before, right? The circadian rhythm of the menstrual cycle is peaks and valleys.

Standard reference ranges are 0 to, you know, like 400. No, you're normal.

Yeah, but that day-to-day what's happening doesn't really inform you. You need to understand the full cascade. So what we look at is progesterone converts to testosterone, converts to estrogen, and then you create an estrogen byproduct, either 2, 4, or 16-hydroxyestrogen. But even in this cascade, you may go from testosterone to DHT, the manly man toxic version, or you may clear it as a clean androgen before converting it into estrogen, or any one of these steps you may do a little slower, a little faster, right? So there's so many variables, and this is why you have things like You know, Kim Kardashian looks like this and Kendall Jenner, her sister, looks like this, right? Because they have the same mom, different dad. The genetics are so different that she is highly estrogen dominant, so she has the curve, she has the skin, she has the hair. Kendall is highly androgen dominant, right? The cascade is different, so she looks very different. She's thin, you know, lean muscle. So now look at those foundations and you can start to point to the diseases over here. It's like fibromyalgia, breast cancer, bad menopause. Over here it's PCOS, infertility, acne, hair loss, right? And instead of topically dealing with all these things as independent silo, they're all the same thing.

All right, so you're diving deep into peptides and longevity on this podcast, and we're right there with you. Integrative Peptides stands out, trusted by over 10,000 doctors to deliver real results for their patients. These premium peptides are your key to unlocking vitality, recovery, and a longer, stronger life. Visit integrativepeptides.com and use the code PODLIFE for 10% off your first order. Again, integrativepeptides.com, use the code PODLIFE for 10% off. It's time to elevate your journey, starting now.

And we've really found that is if a woman comes in who's like full-figured versus like, you know, athletic. And you know that this one's going to need more estrogen. Yeah, um, that grew up with more estrogen. The other person, a lot of times they're like, I hate estrogen. Okay, just a little bit. It's got to be balanced with the testosterone, and they're different ratios, you know, and that's how they grew up and they're physiologically what, what they need. Yeah, I think that's totally true. Or Or you look at men with, you know, say, the gene, they're converting a lot of testosterone to DHT, you know, they're bulky, hairy, but bald, you know.

And then the prostate issues, right? That's the DHT also causes inflammatory load to prostate. And we, we have men, we deal with a lot of professional athletes, so I can't tell you how many NHL players. So Toronto is the hub for NHL training. This is where all the guys come in the summer to train. Right? How many times has some clinic sent us an NHL player saying that this guy has man boobs, gynecomastia? Why? Because, you know, performance— he's not recovering the same, he's— the energy. So they give him an andro gel pack or some kind of testosterone. Ah, and if he's converting it into estrogen, all you've done is given him more estrogen even though you're giving him testosterone.

I think that's the number one thing we see, is especially also if anyone with diabetes or obese, and they put especially creams, and you get upregulation of the aromatase, they're just making tons of estrogen.

Yes.

So, you know, you can do things to block it. We'll tend to use a combination of like nandrolone and testosterone, right?

Yeah.

So a testosterone that does not convert to DHT or, or estrogen, and then kind of combine it, um, and, you know, and tone it. A lot of ways to do it. It's kind of like a You know, asking 5 chefs the best way to make a cake, you get 6 different answers. But I find that, and I find too, women love, like, you know, nandrolone. It's less androgenic.

Right.

Great for bones. It's funny, some women will drive home and just go, oh my God, I feel so good. Another one will call and go, I just had road rage. I called some guy up. So It's interesting, and the genes tend to correlate with that.

Yeah, so the genes— so now imagine there's no trial and error. We can actually tell you upfront exactly what your cascade is doing and how many problems are resolved. So, so then going back to your question, the other area, uh, where we feel there's major impact is mood and behavior. So mental health, mood and behavior, personality, because again, it's so great, right? The clinical experience is objective, like you're asking questions, you're trying to gauge How does this person even perceive it, right? Maybe they say it's 9 out of 10, but it's actually 4. So all of that in terms of the neurochemicals, what drives personality, emotion, stress, trauma, except we've decoded all of that. So when we have someone's genome in our hand, we can literally describe your personality to a T without ever speaking to you, right? We understand how you deal with people around. Yeah, it's awesome. And we use this with executives for like team formation We've used this in, in athletics with the teams also, but just day to day we use it for young teenage girls that are taking an anxiety pill that don't even know why it's happening, right?

And how many is that? It's just tons, because that's medicine now here. At least they go to the doctor, oh, here, take an antidepressant, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And, uh, and speaking of antidepressant, I'll give you myself as an example, right? So that entrepreneurial gene that you talked about at the very beginning So what is that? Dopamine is your pleasure and reward-seeking chemical. Either you enjoyed something or you achieve something, and dopamine is released. You get to feel it. There's this eureka moment, right? So the cascade looks like this: you produce dopamine, you have to bind it to experience. Then another gene called MAO— and there's, by the way, a gene called DRD2 which determines how dense your receptors are, so to what degree do you experience that pleasure, reward, emotion? Oh, right.

You know, I've not seen that on a genetic test.

You'll very rarely see that because that's, again, it's not a genetic condition. So geneticists believe it's actionable, right? You have to study people to understand the traits. How do they behave? And this is why we studied 6,000 people in person, because we literally studied their behavior. How do they behave and how does that correlate back to the genes, right? So it was— we— and this is why you said the largest study of this kind in the world. That's what we actually did. So now for me, dopamine receptors, I have the least possible density, so the, the weakest version of DRD2, right? There's a gene called MAO, which is sort of a metabolizer, breaks the dopamine down. I have the fastest MAO.

Oh, so you've got to be thrill seeker to get that dopamine up.

Yep. And then my COMT enzyme, which is the clearance enzyme, I also have the fastest pump. So I'm feeling it way down here, and before it's even halfway through, it's broken down and it's gone. So I have 3 outcomes: depression, because I just don't get to feel anything, right? Addiction, because I go down the pleasure path and I feed it with whatever, because you have to— you need something, something, right? Or achievement, because I go down the entrepreneurial path, which is unintentionally what I did.

And you probably need multiple things too, right?

You often need multiple things. Now I got to keep it in check where You know, why am I a marketing, PR, uh, and luxury goods businessman running a biotech company changing the way genetics is done in clinical practice when I have no background in the— and, and I'm teaching geneticists and clinicians how to do this when I have no right to be doing so, right?

You know, I, I love that. And I say, you know, I don't care about someone's degree, it's what they learn. Or doctors Oh, they're a specialist. They stop learning.

Yeah.

And they just keep doing what they've been doing 30 years ago. They're board certified in that. Yeah. Or it's like the old, you know, joke: if you got a chronic infection, don't go to infectious disease. If you've got a hormone problem, don't go to endocrinologist or an OB. They're just doing what they were taught in residency.

It's, it's terrible. Yeah, we had that experience all the time. Like, myself, again, I don't have the background or the— my piece of paper with my name on it. But just like 2 weeks ago, I spoke at a medical conference. There was maybe 70, 80, uh, doctors in the room who primarily were focused on female hormone issues, right? And it started off like, who is this guy and why am I here? Right?

Snob doctors, because they don't know. And yeah, the less a doctor knows, the more adamant they're right, right?

Yeah, so then I spoke and I gave the example of how we deal with breast cancer, which we can get into and I can tell you guys. And at the end, I'm not kidding you, no exaggeration, it was 3 hours I couldn't leave the room because of the questions. 3 straight hours. And I was exhausted after. But the example I gave them was, wow, you know, when it comes to breast cancer, everyone has heard about the BRCA gene, right? And when you say BRCA, it's a scary word. It's a 4-letter word. You don't want to hear it. Right? And women— I, I don't want the BRCA gene. Then ask that same woman, what does the BRCA gene do? They have no idea.

I should get my breasts taken off prophylactically.

Yes.

Uh, so what's her name?

Angelina Jolie. Angelina Jolie, right? Because she was told that there's a gene that points to the future risk of breast cancer. So what is the solution? Cut the breasts off, right? Who— nobody asked the question Why does the breast cancer happen, right? So we've already touched on this, but to complete the story, the BRCA gene doesn't cause breast cancer. It's a gene editing gene. What it does is when something else is not working, it goes and fixes it, right? If you have a bad editor, you're not doing the repairs. So if you have the bad version of the BRCA, there's more likely that other stuff that's not going well is going to continue to not go well. Which then leads to that inflammatory load that causes problem to cells, which eventually leads to disease. So then we have to look at, well, what's not going well? Why breast cancer, right? When you look at breast cancer in terms of demographically, it's typically menopausal women on the— for the most part. It's not 19-year-olds, although you have some, and it's not 80-year-olds, although you have some. It's mostly in that menopause bracket, right? So what happens during menopause is you stop having a menstrual cycle. You're no longer clearing that toxic metabolite. And for the women who are 4-hydroxy or 16-hydroxy fast, that the version of genes that convert the estrogen into that— just because you stopped having a menstrual cycle doesn't mean you stop doing that. The genes are still there that convert any estrogen into that, right? That's what those genes are doing. So now all of a sudden you're still producing this stuff, maybe not to this degree of low progesterone that's not protecting it. That's not— yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you may also have poor detox genes like me that are not clearing it, right? So now what does the body do with toxic insults when you don't clear it? It stores it in fatty tissue for women at that age, right? Where do you have fatty tissue? In the hips, in the breasts. What do you have in the breast that was never meant to deal with that level of toxic insult? All these glands and everything, you know, what is the breast made of, right? So all of a sudden you get into a why root cause, which is actionable. The BRCA gene maybe is not instructing the repair and all the damage that's being done. And so you have a greater chance, but it doesn't cause the breast cancer. It's the estrogen— the thing that you need to get rid of is the estrogen toxicity. That doesn't matter what version of BRCA you have, right?

I totally agree.

Yeah, yeah, this was the example we spoke of at that conference a couple weeks ago, and people were like, oh, like, I've been in medical practice for, like you said, 30 years, I've never heard this. Yeah, well, that, you know, this is—

it's not—

that's new science. Uh, all of these pieces are known, but nobody's functionally built the maps, which is what we've been doing.

Because it reminds me of— I mean, things are moving very fast in this integrative— I hate the term alternative— whatever space, right?

Right.

Um, and things in standard medicine move very slow, right? It's like, you know, that takes on average 17 years for a proven new concept to get accepted. Let's say your test, uh, to accept it to mainstream medicine, unless it's a new drug where there's a sales force out there, you know. And, uh, everything is like, look at— look, look at oncology. Okay, you got this breast cancer. No, we're not even going to test and see what it's sensitive to or anything. We're going to give you this cocktail. Yeah, you know, no matter who you are, it's like, it's barbaric. Yeah, you know, and it doesn't change.

Yeah, and I mean, that wave of change is now coming. It's tough. I mean, first of all, you have sort of safety guidelines where you need, you know, evidence-based, you know, medicine coming out, which I understand takes time. But if you have these—

I don't know, the death of evidence-based medicine. Jaded with this whole COVID thing.

But that's the problem, is what, what came out is something that was meant to be protective ended up being sort of protective of the wrong thing, protective of better solutions entering the market, right? So ultimately, you have stuff that we know works. You as a clinician are free to use what you think works, you know, as an example. But the solution I just talked about, uh, it's Dr. Most people will never hear this No, right?

It's, it's criminal. Yeah, you know, and someone has their— oh, just take your breasts off, you know, uh, and then if you tell them otherwise, it's like, well, and here's, here's 50 studies. Exactly. A doctor even— no, no, no, no, my patients are different, you know. Yeah, um, or, or a patient, they're just, they're scared because, you know, they read on the internet, they hear from their friends, their doctor says one thing, and Nope, this way you got to do it. And, uh, so it's a, it's a tough time being a patient nowadays.

Yeah, especially when you have access to so much information but you can't take action on it because it's almost like, uh, you know, you gotta, you gotta worry about the clinician's ego more than what's best for you, you know.

Very, very true.

Yeah.

And it's kind of like, I found that, which I'm used to it now, but you would think if, let's say, a patient's sick for 10 years, doctor seeing them, they have a good relationship with their doctor but they come to us that we send them back better. You think the doctor would be happy? No, they're, they're pissed. Yeah, they don't discharge the patient, you know, instead of going, hey, what are you doing? You know?

Yeah. But the great thing is we have this wave now of clinicians like yourself and many others that aren't happy with the status quo and are doing a lot more, right? So if somebody comes to see you, that's not the experience. Like, they're going to get something very different. So It starts there, right? Somebody has to pioneer, somebody has to sort of have the arrows on their back and fight the, you know, and then eventually it adopts.

And I think there's really something there because, you know, we love the genetics, but the problem is, is you got to spend so much time learning genetics. And it sounds like you solve that problem. Well, you'll have your experts, you know, read it and, and go through it. And, uh, so what, again, name of the company? How do people get it? Can, can patients order it directly, or—

yeah, it's both. So the, the— it's The DNA Company, literally. thednacompany.com is the website. And we started off direct-to-consumer first because our research was done with sort of high net worth people, meaning the technology used to be expensive, right? We were— we weren't just doing a typical, you know, you see on TV consumer test. It's a much more in-depth process for what we do. For example, when you buy a typical DNA test, you're getting what are called SNPs, which are like spelling mistakes in genes. This letter was a C instead of a T. So that's one test you can run. We do that, but we also test for what's called an indel, an insertion or deletion, meaning it's a whole paragraph is wrong, right?

So that— go back with that. I have not seen a test that offers that.

So that— so meaning that— so here's a dirty secret of the industry. Let's get dirty. The secret is this, that, you know, there's all this concern over data privacy and, you know, my data, my DNA, etc., right? So everyone knew that we had this jewel in us, our DNA, this thing that we needed to decode and it was going to fix everything. Right, so what happened was genetic testing companies got funded in a big way and they started selling these tests. What then later happened is investors said this business kind of sucks because we test your DNA once and then what? Because your DNA doesn't change. It's not like cholesterol or blood work where you have a clinic partner and it just keeps going and going away. Test once, done. Your DNA never changes, right?

So I gotta find a new per—

yeah, yeah. So the new business model became sell the data. Right, and how do you sell the data? You have to get mass evidence-based style, you know, let's get big numbers data, which is study as many genes as we can, find all the SNPs. So it's like average-based, pass them off. There's more you can test for than SNPs, and that was the problem where you have genetic reports from this model which tell you you've got an 80% chance of this, 60% chance of that. You're taking your instruction manual that's definitive and giving back probability, right? You're taking my cellular— like, my cellular code and telling me you got an 80% chance of something. Well, it's the 100% answer is actually here, right? So that's where we got to, and that's why clinicians started to say, well, DNA is not really that actionable, because the product wasn't designed for you or the consumer. It was designed for the data buyer, right? As an example, uh, 23andMe's big funding round 2 years ago, $300 million, was Glaxo. Right, that's who their big funder was, $300 million, and that's when you started seeing billboards all over Times Square, etc. Black Cat, right? So that's how the industry works. So now what we said is people still know that there's something here that they're not getting, and they're probably willing to pay for it. So we started with the high end, we started with, you know, celebrities, professional athletes, etc., and it wasn't— it wasn't cheap because we were doing the sniff test, but we were also doing The indel, like I was talking about, meaning spelling mistake, whole paragraph missing. Imagine you're reading a book and there's a paragraph not there, right? Or there's an extra paragraph. The implication— if a SNP means this much to a pharma company, what does the paragraph mean, right? There's also something called a copy number variation. The whole gene is missing. Forget about a letter or a paragraph. You didn't even get the gene, or you have an extra copy of it.

Now, when you mentioned that, that was a problem with you. I said I've never seen any genetic test report on that.

Yeah, it's, it's not for this model of collect mass data and sell it. It's not economically viable because you're now doing 3 separate tests for 1 person, right? And you also have to know how to interpret it. So what they do in these tests, whether the SNP-based, is they assume— so there's studies that show if somebody has this gene, this gene, this gene, this gene, they've got an 80% chance of having the missing gene, right? But that's still not certain. So what we do is—

but you're not testing for it.

Yeah. So now that allows us to be so much more actionable because we're not saying you've got an 80% chance of something. We're saying that if you have this environment, nutrition, or lifestyle load, it's 100% chance, you know. And nobody can be that certain. You can't predict the future.

That's a good motivator I had to make a change, right?

Yeah, because— but all of a sudden the science is there. There's plenty of studies that are published to back everything we say, but we're interpreting it better. We're putting the package together in terms of how do I take—

that's the key, is trying to filter the big data. There's like, you know, when I grew up and writing a book or a paper, you have to go down to the medical library, find the damn research article, if the book's even there, photocopy it, you know. And it's whoever had those things, and people would sell their files of studies, right? Now it's bombarded with so much information, it's who can sort the information.

Yep.

Uh, is, is the big difference.

Yep. And that's what we— our core strength is that it's— anybody can run a DNA test. You can literally go buy a DNA machine and put it in your basement and start running DNA, right?

I had a, I had a patient who got her whole genome, uh, you know, basically done, and just a line of just DNA code she puts on my desk. She goes, tell me what's wrong with me. I'm like, I could spend 10 years. I could tell you. Yeah, yep.

So we have— so a lot of your audience probably knows Dave Asprey, you know, the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, right? So he's actually an investor in our company. He's one of our advisors that helps us learn solutions, etc. So why did that happen? He did a $50,000 full genome sequence. It's out of Europe, and they're one of the more expensive ones. You can get a full genome sequence for $1,000 now, right? But these guys just dive a lot deeper and give you more interpretation. He said that the reason he invested is he learned more from our $400 or $500, whatever he paid at the time, than he did from the $50,000, you know, because again, we don't do the whole genome sequence, the 22,000 genes, because most of them you can't do anything about. Yeah, and we're not looking for genetic conditions. There's enough people out there doing that. We're not looking for sickle cell. What we're looking for is 90% of the healthcare budget is spent on chronic disease. Yes, for the most part preventable, and genetics doesn't—

yeah, so, so you focus on the stuff that you can change. You can't change it, here's, hey, you got that, okay, thanks, you know.

Yeah, exactly. So that's what we do, and it's, uh, it's been an awesome ride because now all of a sudden we see the change, the outcomes, and We believe, like you said in the very beginning, this is going to sort of shift the gears of medicine. It's going to make things more personalized.

Nice. And is it— do you have, uh, one test where it's everything, or do you have subsets if people want them?

Or what we do, the core test, um, we have a flagship product that comes out of the test which we call the 360 Report, meaning it covers all of what most people seem to need. Cardiovascular, mood and behavior, which kind of drives everything, uh, immunity and inflammatory response, or your detox and, you know, right, uh, diet and nutrition. So at a personalized level, how do you deal with carbs, fats, you know, macronutrients, micronutrients, even vitamins like C, D, A, etc. Uh, fitness and hormones, so body type, acne, skin, um, you know, what are your hormones doing? Not quite the health concerns yet, but more the lifestyle and body type, right? And then the last one is sleep. So chronic sleep, what are— what is it in the genetics that are driving you to either not sleep well, not be able to fall asleep, or I fall asleep but I wake up in the middle of the night, right? And we've kind of cracked the code on all that stuff. So that's the core product that people get. But from there, we have coaches that can drill further. And for the clinicians that are listening, we have coaches that can work literally for you and your patients. And this is a big part of what we do, is like you said, it needs to be made easy. So instead of us trying to teach 500 doctors how to do this, we're saying we already have a team that knows it so well, they— we will package it up so it's your team. Your client calls, they're going to answer with your clinic name, and they're going to work for you because we know that's what you need. And now all of a sudden it goes from the 6 systems I talked about to the hardcore, like prostate cancer, breast cancer, you know, fibromyalgia, fertility, anti-aging, you know, career planning, all the big buckets that people want to talk about. The coaches then can dive deeper and from the same test interpret more.

Yeah.

So that's how we do things.

And where they see patterns and go, hey, this is— you got a big problem here where if you just try to read it and learn it, you're in— it's— it doesn't come across well with patients either when they know you don't know because there's so much to know with it.

You know, this— I mean, our chief scientific officer always says that the problem with data is data is dumb, right? You need to know what question to ask it. So even the reports that we give, we're giving what people— what we think people need for the most part. But ask us a question and there's going to be more information that's not in the report, right? And we know how to take that question and sort of ask the DNA for the answer, right? How to interpret.

Yeah, no, I love that. And tell me more about the study that you— that you did.

So what we did was, uh, we started with female hormone health, we trickled that into cardiovascular, then we branched off into other things. So we said that going back to the evidence-based model, we're not trying to get a drug, we're not doing this to work with Health Canada or FDA, we're doing this to truly figure out how to best help people. And we figured the, the only way to do that is you have to go n of 1, meaning that each individual person is a separate study. If we truly want to take what DNA was meant to be, personalization, why are we depersonalizing it and creating an evidence-based study of this works on 7 out of 10 people, right? So that's what we did differently. We self-funded it because, you know, when it comes to those types of studies, you don't fit the mold. That's not how research is done. Well, we're not trying to reach that outcome. We're looking for a different outcome. So we self-funded, we had some investors, we had some clinic partners that worked with us that also got involved.

That doesn't sound cheap either.

No, we— I mean, we, we dove in, you know, it was 6,000 people, right? So we dove in, and some of it was paid, some of it was us paying for it, some of it was clinic partners. We worked with, for example, like the US military on the Black Ops Special Forces PTSD trauma— who should actually be deployed in active combat, who can actually pull the trigger.

That's huge. I kind of took a dive into that because I had to give a talk, and I'm like Damn, like with chronic illness, PTSD is a big part of that.

And, uh, and we've decoded where that— how and why that happens.

There's a couple different paths to get there where you can tell who would likely get PTSD before they have it. Yeah, before they go out with certainty.

It's not like a maybe. We can tell you for sure this person is wired for PTSD, right?

This thing— what— how much that could help the military.

Yeah, yeah. And we've done that with— so we haven't done it on a big scale, we've done it in research, meaning it was just the Black Ops Special Forces. Uh, and then we, you know, so we tried to work with different communities. So some athletes, some executives, some, you know, stay-at-home moms that have fertility issues, right? We tried to focus different, like a diaspora of different stuff. And that allows us to get this n of 1 where now anyone that calls us we've kind of seen it before, right? The context is very important. You know, the, the same mood and behavior profile as a student, as a dad, as an executive— three very different contexts in terms of how you're going to behave. So we have to understand what gets triggered by that load. And that's, that's why we did this N-of-1 research, which is very unique. Genetic companies don't do this because their intention is, how do I discover something about this gene which then becomes very valuable in the pharma industry. We're not trying to do that. What we're saying is, how do we become valuable to people and become their quarterback, right? That's what we're trying to do.

It's scary. Everything's data selling, you know. Yeah, they may not, you know, they'll take your name out of it, but they're selling your data, you know.

Yeah, that's what it is.

Yeah, yeah. Um, Yeah, I haven't had a chance to use your, uh, um, to use your test, but everything I went through, I'm like, damn, they're doing it, they're doing it different, and it's, it solved the problems that we were having with it.

Yep. Yeah, so that's, that's what we did is we literally interviewed, uh, we spent one month interviewing 60 different clinicians of different sorts to literally ask them, what is your problem? Right? Why don't you use genetics in practice? And so we didn't say, here's what we make, go sell it. Yeah, what do you need? And that— we'll go make that.

So that's what we did, try to put the square peg in the round hole.

Yeah, because we know this, this tool is so powerful, whether for the consumer or whether for a clinician. If it's not usable, if it's not easy, right? And there's— I'll actually give the credit to one man. There's a gentleman, uh, named Jason Taffler, who was the chief digital officer for Rogers, which is one of Canada's big telecom equivalent of your AT&T, right? The Rogers here. So he, he was our patient. His son has behavioral development issues, and so he loved what we did, but it was a deep clinical— like, our scientists were with him working. He said, all you need to do is make this easy to use. That's all that's missing. Right, he said that's your biggest problem. And so literally we did that for the next year. We funded the AI, the platform, we interviewed a bunch of doctors saying how can we make this easier, we interviewed consumers and said how can we make this easier, and we're there now, right? So that's what we did.

Nice, uh, impressive, impressive. Um, so if a doctor or patient wants to get to you, find you again, and order these kits uh, where would they go?

So yeah, thednaccompany.com. Um, I would suggest that, um, you know, if it's a clinician, uh, contact us and we'll help you. We actually do— even though you don't need it, we have training. There's tons of video and resources. And even if you just want to learn, forget about whether you want to be testing or not, if people just want to learn, we have tons of educational— like, we have a full course that we built for people to learn functional genomics. So if anyone wants to go there, they can. Uh, yeah, so thednacompny.com is the website. And from what I understand, for the purpose of the summit, there's a special offer, you know, that's being offered, and that'll be, uh, I'm sure shared somehow to everybody.

Okay, yeah, so I, I was gonna, I was gonna put you on the spot and say, hey, is there a special deal for the summit?

Yeah, so, uh, in fact, I think there's another, there's like a webinar that's explaining that. So we'll share that with everybody, and if they want to attend, listen. They can, and whether just to learn, we invite you just to learn, you know, uh, we'll dive deep into a couple things, uh, but if you also want to participate and work with us, we're happy to work with you.

Sounds great. I, I think you got to solve the, uh, a major problem in, in this industry. And, uh, um, so I'm gonna go and order them for our clinic, and first of all, I'll do all myself. And see why I'm so crazy. But, uh, but, uh, uh, yeah, no, this sounds great. Congratulations. And, um, how long have you guys been in business? How long have you—

so we informally started the research in 2017, and we ended up, uh, formally like incorporating in 2018, where we put investor money into the company. And we just worked 24 hours a day for 3 years And here's where we're at, you know.

Nice, nice. Congratulations, you obviously know your stuff. And, uh, um, really enjoyed, uh, speaking with you and learned a lot. So, uh, it's nice because I, I think I, I know what's missing in our genetics test too. So, and that's what it is, you know. So, um I'll be, uh, I'll be ordering some, and maybe I'll, I'll call you when I get my results back.

And yeah, we'll, we'll dive deep and figure out what's wrong with you.

Take a while. So, all right, well, well, thank you so much. Um, I think this fits right with, you know, it's a, it's a peptide summit, but all these things go together, you know, they go together, optimize until you know what's wrong.

Yep. And if you're going to be getting into peptides, which is a great thing to do, understanding the personalization of it— like, what do I need? Why do I need? What's going on hormonally? What's going on up here? What's going on with my skin, my head? It's all genetically driven. So now all of a sudden, when somebody's working with you, there— it could just be so much more effective. You know where to focus, right? It's making the process smoother. It's, it's, you know, it's good win-win for everybody.

And, and that's sort of— and I mentioned that We're able to take people off of things that, you know, because doctors don't know this, you, you tend to shotgun or trial and error, right? But with this, now you know, okay, here's your problem, here's your problem, and you can get from point A to B much quicker. And then that's, that's the key. Or you don't miss that thing that you've been stuck on Why is this patient getting better?

Right, right.

Oh my God, they can't, they can't metabolize this, so they build up this. Like, you know, so you've probably heard a lot of great, a lot of great cases.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

So great. Well, thank you again, and, um, look forward to working with you, uh, more. And, uh, and, uh, checking everything out. So appreciate, appreciate you taking the time and, uh, and being a sponsor of the summit. So, uh, thank you.

It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the Peptides and Longevity Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners passionate about optimizing their health. For more insights, resources, and updates visit our website at www.wholotorfmed.com. Together, let's embrace a future of health and vitality. Until next time, stay inspired and keep thriving.