Beyond Diets: How Your Genes Reveal the Ideal Eating Plan for You, with Dr. Sam Shay

There are genetics of behavior. So some people like me, I have a gene that I don't feel full after normal eating or there's also genes for craving sweets and there's genes for consuming sweets.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

Where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social and spiritual lives.

Hold on to your hats.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Sam Shea. He is a doctor of chiropractic and he is ifmcp, which means he's a functional medicine certified practitioner. He solves health problems and health puzz for busy, health conscious moms, mompreneurs and adults who have Asperger's so that they can exit survival and get back into community. So I'm really excited to have this conversation. Ed can't be with us today, but Sam, welcome. We're so happy. We, me and my absent partner are so happy that you could be here.

Thank you. You can have them text in questions if you want.

Yes, yes. It's all interactive. So can you talk about the role that you see genetics playing in how you then recommend people eat? What draw the line between there. Because you do a lot of work on that.

Sure. So, so the way to under everyone's got, you know, you ask two people about what's the best diet? You'll get 10 opinions. And the. When I looked at diet and I've heard the same narrative over and over and over again, I'm sure you have as well. I've tried every diet and it doesn't work. Oh, I tried that or I tried this or someone else had really worked for them, but it backfired for me and it just goes all over the place. And so I tried to find a unified theory of diet that actually accounts for everyone's experience without it careening to some sort of like postmodern interpretation of diet. What is there an actual framework? And I believe I figured it out. And so it's. It's a different type of food pyramid. It's a pyramid, but. And it's five layers. The bottom layer is genetics. So where your genetic foundation. So the way there's genetics is this first layer, the next layer I call the therapeutic layer, where if you've got some metabolic thing that's. That's awry third la is personal preferences. Fourth layer is access to food. And then the, the top, the pointy, that the cap is the earth layer. So earth is how you, how you interpret how you eat influences your politics, your, the economics and the environment. And so people make decisions on how they eat based on those three things. But that's the tip. People think it's the base and it's not the base. Your genetics is your baseline. Finding out what your genetic baseline is the most important. And then you adapt your economics, politics and environmental concerns to that. The model accounts for everyone's situation, even changes in their life, like if they're pregnant, if they're older, if they're injured, if they had a metabolic issue come up, whatever it might be. So the genetics layer is, what's your idea? The way to understand genetics is genetics will tell you here is where your ideal is and here's where your genetic fault lines lie that you need to shore up. This is where you need to aim at and this is what you, the pitfalls that are hardwired into your system. It's distinct from the therapeutic layer which is checking your functional medicine markers. Like what's the thumbprint of what your physiology is right now doing? Genetics will not tell you how much glutathione you have, how much COQ10 you have, what your amino acid profiles are, what your hormone levels are. They don't tell you what you have now, but they will tell you how everything, the genetics is the great filter. All of diet, all of environmental experience, all of psychological everything is filtered and interpret through your genetics. So your genetics will tell you you're ideal and where your fault lines are. So in the genetics layer of diet, you can find out what your carb tolerance is, meaning are you a keto Paleo, Mediterranean or high carb or some shade of gray in between? And we can do that now. And that's not to just get slightly technical, it's not a gene variant analysis analysis. Like are you a green, yellow or red dot? We're not talking about that, that's variant analysis. I'm talking about copy number analysis. Not the type of gene, the variation of the gene, it's the number of duplicates of the gene that you have. And in this case it's the Amy1 gene, which is the gene that produces amylase in the saliva. And the best analogy I can, I've come up with so far is imagine there's a fort in the Middle Ages and you've got the Visigoths charging your fort and the Visigoths are the carbs. And your fort is your digit metabolism. And on, on the fort are cannons. And each cannon is a copy of the Amy1 gene spitting out enzymes amylase. Now the version of the cannon that would be green, yellow, red dot, doesn't really matter because the cannon will shoot like 90 cannonballs a minute or an hour, whatever. The red version will do 90, the yellow version will do 95 and the green version do 100. That's not as important as how many cannons you have. A person with one green cannon will not do as well as someone with 10 red cannons, not even by a long shot. So it's the duplicates that matter.

And how are you testing this? What are you using for testing?

It's a cheek swap. It's a cheek swap test and there's a specific lab in Australia that does it. And it's a three dimensionality to genetics that is not really understood or discussed. Everyone's just talking about variants and there's plenty of good stuff in variants. I do lots of variant analysis, but this is the one that's not something you can get from 23 me or ancestry. So for me, I had a perfect Portlandia Mediterranean diet. I knew the names of my farmers and their chickens. It was a perfect diet, all local, et cetera. And I was still having terrible gas, massive energy fluctuations, very moody. And I didn't understand because my diet was literally perfect. And then I did my genetics and I realized I have the second lowest carb tolerance you can have. I have two cannons.

Two cannons for carb. Like you're specifically referring to carbs.

Exactly. For carbs. I was, I was eating as if I was a six or seven. Six or seven cannons. And I literally was at, I'm at one third the capacity. And when you look at the statistical readout of how much amylase is put up per copy number, it's linear. It's like 1, 2, 3, like, it's, it's additive. So I was at, I was eating three times as many carbs as I was had capacity for.

Okay, can we pause? Pause, go back. What's the name of the test? How do people get it? Do you have to work with a provider? Like, do I need to set up an account? Because people are going to say, hey, Wendy, I heard you on the podcast and I want to get that test. And is it looking really only at how you digest carbs or is there more to that test?

So that specific test is looking at carbs, but has implications beyond carbs. So for example, the lower carb people like me, we are more from a hunter gatherer. And in our recent past, you know, 10,000, whatever years, we are still in the hunter gatherer lineage. Because the lower, if you're in a low carb environment, like the Inuit, the Aborigines, the Maori, the Pacific Islanders, they have like the lowest carb tolerance genetically, statistically, which makes sense because there was not a lot of grains and crops over there. It was hunting and sprinting, keyword sprinting after calories and away from things that want to eat you as calories. And so if you, the lower your copy number, the more high intensity interval training, sprint like exercise, you are suited, better suited for. Whereas the higher copy numbers are for people who are more had a bottleneck of agrarian, recent agrarian culture where the higher carb tolerance you are, the more you walk around and gather and grow your calories. So that's more on the zone cardio, longer distance side of things. So the implications are actually much more than just diet. In terms of the company, I mean the company is called Fitgenes. I mean if you contact them over there and you go onto the website in Australia, they're likely just going to send you back to me because you work with the provider to interpret the, run the tests and interpret the test for you and work with you on how to actually incorporate all the recommendations. And that's just one of the six panels that, that they have. The other ones that relates to diet are food triggers. So are you sensitive to histamine? Are you sensitive to food allergens? Are you sensitive to alcohol? Caffeine induced anxiety and depression.

That's a whole, that's a podcast unto itself actually.

When I, when I lecture in front of entrepreneurs And I say 10% of you likely have caffeine induced anxiety and depression, you can hear the collective sphincter's clench. People stressing out like, oh my God, my company runs on coffee. And they just freak out at that thought. So something's interesting about the histamine and the also salt sensitivity. I found that people who have red, now we're into variant analysis. People who have red dots in their salt sensitivity we usually associate with blood pressure. I don't always see blood pressure, I see water retention.

So they're all puffy.

Yeah, they can have water weight if they have. This happened to one of my interns. Like she was athlete, late late late 20s, perfect diet, you know, knew her lifestyle, but she was still. She said, I had permission to talk about this, but she had weight puffy weight around her belly and also her fingers. She's super frustrated. It turns out she had histamine and salt sensitivity genetically. And once she reduced her salt intake and reduced her histamine exposure, all the puffy weight went away.

How much is this panel? Like if you, if you had your druthers and you could do the whole panel and money was no issue. What's the cost of the ideal panel for people?

So the ideal panel, so each practitioner has their own structure. I have, the way that I structure it is I have a do it yourself program where they get the tests, they get the custom report, and then they have an entire backend video series that I put together and recorded myself that goes through all the different variations and options and what the interpretations are. But you have your custom part of what to do. That's like in round numbers. It's about $1,000 at the point at the time of this recording. Then there's other tiers. If they want to do more of a coaching model where they want like access to office hours where I'm speaking and like answering questions and teaching and so on, then that's, that's more. And then if they want individual coaching, then that's, that's another tier. And that's, that's all on my website. But there's other. I don't. There's not that many people in the states that do this.

I mean it sounds so cool. So are there. What if you just want to do the testing? How do, how do you arrange that.

If you want to just do the testing? I think the company refers you to practitioners and you simply can't get all the tests through the company because they want you to work with a practitioner to help you interpret and implement. Because what's happened is I call this 23andMe syndrome, where people get the results and then they start googling themselves into panic and, and the algorithms that are spit out from whatever apps are overwhelming and non prioritized. And so everything seems equally urgent and scary. And that's what I call 23 me syndrome. More data is not better data. Better organized and prioritized data is better data. So the way that these panels are constructed is they actually have a priority approach so that you actually know where to start as opposed to thinking everything is of equal value.

So it's ranked for you essentially. And is it stable from the United States to be able to go from here to there?

The cheek swab? Oh my God, it's super stable. I mean it's a cheek swab. And there's a little, there's a little preservative on it. These things last a very, very long time. The only time I've seen a fail is if someone didn't get enough sample if they were swabbing and then sometimes in. If they weren't swept and, and sometimes that happens in the elderly if there's enough like the, you know, like their skin's kind of decaying a bit on the inside. The buck. It's. It's not, it's not the highest quality.

It sounds generally like it's. It's a great test and it's easy to use. So now I always like using myself as a guinea pig. So I'm like, okay, I gotta do this test.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they did. It's super. It's just cheek swabbing it. Once I went into the other cap it and sent off. And the other things around diet and genetics is that there are genetics of behavior. So some people like me, I have a gene that I don't feel full after normal eating. See, fullness is in the brain, not the stomach. And there's the signal from the stomach to the brain and there's a delay. Or there's people who. There's also genes for craving sweets and there's genes for consuming sweets. So there's some people that crave sweets, but not a lot of volume. They can have just one little thing of chocolate and they're good. I hate these people.

My stepfather is like that. He'll have a half a cookie. I'm like, who eats a half a cookie? I do not eat the whole cookie. I would eat three cookies.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't like these people. So, yeah, my. So the. There, there's. If people have. And also, are you a super taster of bitter, like in your avoidant of bitter foods? And if you avoid bitter foods, you're gonna eat like 100 to 200 pounds fewer vegetables per year because you avoid the bitter flavors.

Can you be a super taster but like the bitter? Because I think I'm a super taster, but I love bitter food.

Yes. And I found out. That's an excellent. That's an excellent question. I actually came up with several reasons why people can like bitter foods despite the genetics. Okay. One is the modern crops of bitter vegetables are not the crops we had 50 years ago. Not even by a long shot.

It's totally different.

Things have been bred to be much sweeter. Number two, there's people who can have figured out that I found four separate Ways that people can cook to remove bitter flavor, like cooking with garlic and onions, example, removes bitterness, pungent spices hides bitterness. Sauteing olive oil hides bitterness. There's like a couple of the spices I'm blanking on used to hybrid. So they could already be cooking bitter foods in a way that's masking the bitter. And the third reason is psychosomatic, that they have really fond memories of broccoli or Brussels sprouts. You know, here comes the plane, you know, and they actually enjoyed that game when they were five. So. So there are reasons that people can like the bitter foods despite having the gene for not liking the bitterness of the foods. And if people have these genes that affect their behaviors, the goal is not to change your willpower to fight against the sugar cravings is you change your environment.

Say more about that. What do you mean?

So I'm not, I don't keep bread in the house because I'm not stronger than bread, but I'm smarter than bread. So I don't have bread in the house. So I control my environment. So I can't fail because my environment has already been set up that I can't fail within the environment.

What do you do for people who. I had a patient say to me, I don't keep it in the house, but I literally leave the house and go drive 20 minutes to the store and because of the cravings, pick it up and eat. And then I said, well, we'll just have a piece or two. She's like, no, I'll eat the whole bag. What do you do for that?

So if people have sugar cravings that are leading to, you know, maladaptive behaviors like I'm also a former addict, I'm a former sugar addict and a former video game addict. I developed those when I was, you know, younger. When, when someone has that level of disorienting behavior, there's, there's a multimodal approach. One is you look, you have them go into therapy to see if there's are any type of effective modalities to have them identify and question stressful belief systems that are actually driving the numbing behavior to begin with. Then you can also look at physiologically, which brings us into the therapeutic layer. Do they have an underlying metabolic issue that's making their blood sugar dysregulated, that they're actually having not an addiction but a craving because their body's so metabolically off center that they're craving nutrients. So for example, if someone has a candida infection, their entire blood sugar regulation is off now here. And so it that you may want to address the candida infection on top of any psychological issues they may have in terms of numbing, numbing, the eating bread is a numbing behavior. You may have to do both. If the way the candida and the stuff intersects with the genetics, this is, this is the, this is the answer to. I tried all diets and it didn't work. I figured this out. So if someone genetically is high carb, like genetically, they do better on higher carbs, but they also have a candida infection. If they eat high carbs for their genetics, the candida is going to bloom and it's going to backfire. But if they eat low carbs, it's going to help deal with the candida infection, but it's going to be bad for them genetically. So this is why all diets will fail. Now, on the other side of the genetic spectrum, if I'm a low carb person like me, and I do really, really well on like paleo bordering keto, like higher fat diet, but I have a problem with my gallbladder, my pancreatic lipases, my digestion absorption system of fats, my carnitine shuttle or my mitochondria's capacity to burn fats. If I have any problem in that metabolic therapeutic pathway, me eating higher fat for my genetics is not going to feel good. And if I eat away from a fattier diet and I can metabolize that better metabolically, but I'm not going to do well with it genetically, so I can feel bad no matter what. So the answer to that is one, find out what your genetics of your optimal diet is. Then if that diet doesn't work for you, then we have to look at the metabolic layer. And that's where functional testing comes in. Gut testing, adrenal testing, mitochondria testing, blood sugar, all the functional tests we know that are not genetics, that's where that layer fits in. And so once, then we have to resolve the metabolic thing first, maybe with one diet and one set of therapeutic protocols, so that we can then return to our actual genetic baseline once the therapeutic metabolic issue has been solved.

That makes sense to me actually. Like that. So basically, if you do what your genetics are suggesting and you don't feel freaking amazing, then you have another issue that you need to uncover. It's basically, I always think of it like a shark's mouth right there. Here's your first issue. That's the first row of teeth.

Oh, it's not the metaphor I was thinking of but go on.

No, go on. So now you got to deal with, like, the next row of teeth and the next row of teeth, and you just keep going through until you've dealt with all of the new issues that pop up. Because, you know, when I remember when I got diagnosed with celiac, I went gluten free. But then I was like, I'm still a mess, because there was Candida and there was total gut dysfunction. You know, there are a lot of layers there. So fast forward 17 years, and I'm like, oh, I feel pretty good. But I still get nailed sometimes.

Mike. My comedy side's getting away with me. It's like this, this metaphor, the shark's mouth. Like you're telling your clients to stare into the gaping maw of your disulated.

Stay away from the light and go to the shark's ma. Right.

Gilbert's music in the background as they read your report. Diana.

So how, as people age and experience life, right, because nobody lives in a bubble, and there's always things happening, even when you have people like, I don't have stress. I'm like, B.S. you don't have stress. You live in the world. There's a pandemic, there's a recession, there's political upheaval. You have stress. You just aren't thinking about it. So how does aging play a role in all of this? What happens for people?

Sure. So aging. So there's a couple things, and this will bring in the other. The other top three layers quite nicely. So the way aging doesn't change your genes, what aging will do is that it will change. You have longer exposures to more things that affect you epigenetically, whether it's heavy metals, stressors, injuries, inflammation, environmental chemicals. Then the therapeutic layer. So the expression of your genes can change, even though the hard wiring of the genes doesn't change itself. So the, the metabolic therapeutic layer right above the gene layer, that can change as you age, as. As things accumulate and as your circumstance and life changes. So that's one way aging can change. And that's where functional testing comes in. You know, the, the mitochondria, the gut, the hormones, et cetera, the nutritional testing. Then another layer above that is preferences. And that's, you know, I can design the perfect diet for someone who genetically and accounts for their metabolism, but if they don't want to eat the thing, or they have a religious restriction on it or a cultural restriction on it, or they have any other type of thing that restricts their preferences, we have to. And even as they people age, their preferences for food changes. You've seen this. People like sugar less and they like different foods more. And as the to the preferences layer, that's how we have to adapt to what's realistic as opposed to what's idealistic in terms of getting people what, what they can eat in an ideal way. Then the way layer above that is access. Now, not everyone here lives near a farmer's market, you know, so there's food deserts, not everyone. And access to foods also is like if you're out to eat or if you're traveling or if you're at a social function, do you have access to your foods? And as you age, your circumstances, your finances, your environment, your living situation, who you live with, where you all these things also change over time. And so you're adapting your diet to your level of access will shift over time. And then also the final layer, we mentioned it briefly, the earth layers. Is the earth layers how you interpret your food as affecting politics, environment and the economy. Over time, people's opinions about any one or more of those things can shift. So your diet will shift over time as you learn and grow and your understanding of how the world works changes.

This is very cool. Sam, tell me, as we wrap up, how can people find more about you? Where can they reach you? And we'll put everything in the show notes so you don't have to, I guess, spell it for the Dr. Drivers and then we'll put it in writing for the people who are actually watching.

So my main website is doctorsamshay.coM-R-S a m s H-A-Y.com there's not EA I'm not a stadium. And I have several free ebooks there and some E guides, two on genetics, one on genetics for diet, the other on the genetics for the other side of genetics that we didn't have a chance to talk about. That has to do with dealing with preventing and shoring up those genetic fault lines that are caused by inflammation or methylation issues or liver detox and so on and vitamin D receptor issues. Those are on my website. I also have an ebook on the 10 pillars of health, which is my therapeutic model of how to understand all the different aspects of someone's health. And also talks about functional testing. And also there's links on there for my standup comedy. And I'm actually at the time of this recording, I'm working on my hour special on what it's like to have Asperger's and the. Because if someone had just taken an hour with me 30 years ago to explain how my brain worked, it would have changed my life completely. So now I'm making that hour using comedy to make it palatable, the messaging palatable, and using social media to make it scalable.

That feels like a cartoon too, Sam. Like there's a cartoon here somewhere for living with Asperger's.

That.

That just feels like that's the next frontier. Is there a cartoon already about it?

No, it's not really a cartoon. There are cartoon characters that are on the spectrum, but what's happened is that Asperger's has gone through a lot of many cultural shifts from being freaks to being useful to being adorable to hopefully being normal. So the useful are things like Spock in Star Trek, the original Star Trek Data in Star Trek. Next Generation was the bridge from someone on the spectrum being useful into adorable. And then Sheldon from Big Bang Theory is now just pure adorable. But still, in my opinion, a zoo animal like quality of like, oh, my God, he's so adorable. Look at all the polysyllabic words that just come out of his pores. It's not. It's not. It's still kind of gawky from the. And I'm wanting to shift it to normal and away from animals. So my. The. So the intention of the. The special, which I will put out for free on YouTube when it's done, is, is to help educate, give, give words to the lived experience of people on the spectrum and help people who are normies understand what it's like and also get very practical things for everyone can do.

Does make sense. Sam, thank you. All right, so for the listeners, you go to drsamshay.com, he's not the Shea Stadium. He's S H A Y. And we'll put everything in the and recap. First off, thanks for being here, Sam, because this is like scratching the surface of a really cool conversation. And now I want to do it on myself to understand kind of things I know at a sub level that I want to put data to. And for those of you listening, the goal is really to feel freaking amazing. And this is one way to uncover your genetics so that you can eat in a way that works for your body and then figure out what's not working. So, Sam, thank you for being here and for the listeners, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

Thank you, Wendy. Appreciate being here.

Yeah, thank you. Don't go it alone.

It's not a social journey until others join.

Share this with your friends.