From Patient to Pioneer 5/10: Cracking your DNA Code

"Hello friends! Have you ever wondered why your friend feels amazing on a certain probiotic, but it does absolutely nothing for you? The secret is hiding in your DNA. Today, we are talking about your genetics, and how knowing your specific 'SNPs' can change your life."

• Understanding Epigenetics: We have genetic variants that can be turned on or off by our diet and lifestyle.
• The FUT2 Gene: About 20% of the population is considered a non-secretor, or homozygous for the FUT2 variant. This means you don't produce the sugar needed to feed specific strains of bifidobacteria.
• A Mother's Breakthrough: Finding out that I am a non-secretor helped me  realize my kids might be deficient too. Targeted probiotics are crucial for me daily, and for my children in the first years of life. 
• Personalized Supplementation: Other common genetic factors, like being part of the 5% of the population that desperately needs CoQ10 supplementation for cellular energy and to fight off major fatigue due to another SNP.

"When you know your genetic SNPs and support them, you directly change your health. But what happens when the things we take to get healthy are actually making us deficient? In our next episode, we have to talk about the hidden cost of medications."

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Transcript

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Hello guys and welcome to the learning corner. This is Dr. Nicole, and we'll just jump right in. I should really record that so I can just go bloop bloop, and then you don't have to hear me say it every time. Well, hello, friends. I'm gonna jump right into this. Have you ever wondered why your friend feels amazing on a certain probiotic? But it doesn't absolutely do anything for you. Like nothing, but why does it work for them? Well, the secret is hiding in your DNA. Today we are talking about your genetics, cracking your DNA code, and knowing your specific SNPs can change your life. So when we jump into genetics, there's a few things to talk about. When I'm speaking on genetics in my clinic, what I test for is typically low to moderate penetrating penetrance genes. What that means is there is a high probability that diet and lifestyle will affect the genes and how they express. The expression of the gene is not how it's hardwired, it is something that sits on the gene. It's a switch, epigenetics. You probably have heard of it. We are not going to dive into that specifically today, but I just want to give you some background information so that you guys have what it takes to listen to this podcast and understand where I'm going with this. So full disclosure, full disclosure. I am not a geneticist. I know. Sit back down, you can still listen. I'm a clinician, I am a functional medicine practitioner, I'm a doctor of chiropractic, I am not a geneticist. Although I did think about doing that. And also surgery when I was a wee bit younger, but that is not what I decided to do. However, it's very intriguing and it is great information. If you want to learn more about that, you should find a geneticist in their podcast to listen to, because it will blow your mind. Back to our regularly scheduled cracking your DNA code episode here, um, episode five, if all of you wanted to know. But understanding your epigenetics for your low to moderate penetrance genes, the ones that we test here in office, it basically we have variants. Um let's say in our SNP, in our DNA, and in the end portion, we all get something from our mom and our dad, and they all can express or not express. And each gene has the variability to do either, to turn on, to turn off. And turning on an expression or off an expression doesn't mean for every single gene it's going to be the same thing. Some genes you want turned off, some genes you want turned on. It's just the explanation of what the switch is for. Um, high penetrance genes like BRCA1 and two, they don't have a lot of research around having any or a lot of effect at all from diet and lifestyle. I would wonder how that's going to play out in the next few years. However, that's what we have to work with right now. But the low to moderate penetrance genes, the variants that we carry, can be turned on and off by our diet and lifestyle. Meaning, if you have certain variants for sleep and you require longer amounts or quality sleep at certain times, your gene may turn off or on. It may work properly, your variant may work properly if you get eight hours of sleep every night, and it may work improperly if you get five hours of sleep a night. Um, there's a lot of studies done about weight loss and sleeping, and there's correlative data showing that if your genetics say you need more sleep, uh, then you're gonna end up gaining weight if you don't get that sleep. So those are just like one example on how a variant or a genetic variant can be turned on or off based upon sleep. So there's a lot to understanding genetics, but I just want to give you a few snippets to understand why I'm doing what I'm doing, what made me come into this position as a patient, right? So the first thing I realized is that I carry a variant. Um, I'm homozygous for oh, I can never remember. It's SLB, I'm gonna botch it. It's it's the CoQ10 variant. If you look it up, it's like SLCOB1B. I don't know. I'll look it up, maybe listen to my earlier podcast. I don't have it right in front of me. And no, I don't have a photographic memory, although I wish I did. Anyway, side note, okay, so I found out when I did my genetic testing a long time ago about the MTHFR gene, and I said, Oh, that's not enough to make a huge difference. Um heterozygous for one of those. And I'm like, okay, well, I'll take a methylated B, but it doesn't always have to be. It wasn't, it wasn't a big thing for me. Fast forward to a couple years ago when I took um another genetic test. As you learn more, you take more tests, and you go, Oh, I don't produce a lot of CoQ10, and I'm one of the 5% of the population that can never take a stand drug, and I'm glad I know that. So I started taking CoQ10, and it was a life changer. I mean, when you go to the gym and all my friends would be like, Oh, this is so amazing, like I'm sore and it feels good. That was not my experience. My experience was no matter how much water I drank, no matter how much protein I ate, no matter how much rest, ice, heat, stretching, uh no matter what, it was like the hardest thing to get past the pain. The pain was unbearable. I mean, I felt like you ever look at like Tin Man on The Wizard of Oz where he doesn't have his oil. That was me, and it was so brutal. And so, for about a year of working out, every day I was in pain. I don't know how I even kept working out. So then I started taking CoQ10 and I worked out after a couple weeks. I'm like, wow, this is what people are talking about. Ah, I can see why people might like working out now because my muscles, they were sore, but it wasn't above the pain of giving birth. Okay. Like it was it was sore. Like, ooh, that's my bicep. Ooh, that's my quad. Ooh, that's my right. You could feel the muscle. It was amazing. Yeah, game changer. But you know what? My whole life, I, you know, I got tested with the comprehensive blood panel and I corrected my blood sugar, and I went on the cancer diet, and I right, I did all these things and I pulled out seed oils, and I, which is all good for your health. But I never had the tools to help with CoQ10 because I was so depleted that I couldn't get past the energy production of my ATP in my own cells. So I always had a deficit. That to me was a game changer. And that's what I'm finding with a lot of patients is that one nagging symptom, or why the probiotic doesn't work for you, but it works for the next person. And we'll jump into that with the future gene. And we'll go into all these things, and it's like, it's because your genetic variant is there or it's not there, it's functioning or it's not functioning. And we can find that out and personalize what your body needs without changing, well, for most of us, without changing everything. So, yes, we all need to eat fruits and vegetables. Yes, we all need to drink water. Yes, we need to work on our breathing, yes, we need to move, right? The four pillars of health. I'm gonna be doing a lot more on that. There is some on my YouTube and all that talking about my four pillars of health, why you do that. It's also in my education system that I created, because if we don't have those foundations, all the things that we do going from there are gonna be null and void because the body is gonna want to breathe, it's gonna want to be hydrated, it's gonna want, right? All these things stack up first, and finding that out for you is great on the specifics. So everybody should do the four pillars of health, right? Hydration, exercise, sleep, food. Those are the pillars. Then you should go, hey, my genetics say that I don't make this, so I need to take this, whether it be via food or supplement. I make too much of this, so I need to avoid this. Like for me, I can't take vitamin C very often as a pill at all. My food is plenty. Um, I get stomach aches and I absorb it way too much, and it's just too irritating for my body based on my genetic components. So I don't take it, but I knew that before. Now it's just confirmed. Anyways, those are the things that we all must do, right? The four pillars of health. Then we jump into genetic testing, we look at your genetic variants, the SNPs on the ends of your genes, what you have and don't have, if you're homozygous, heterozygous, if that's good or bad, playing to your benefit, right? For longevity, like your telomeres, or maybe your deficit, depending on which way you can look at these things. But let's jump into another gene, um, the fut2 gene. And a lot of times I'll talk about this as well. Um, this was also a life changer for me. For those of you out there that have chronic viral infections, um, the FUT2 non-secretor, homozygous for non-secretor variant, uh, is like I think it was 89% of all Crohn's disease patients are homozygous for this non-secretor status. Um, what that means is the person, me, or whoever carries the homozygous FUT2 non-secretor, so you don't secrete an illegal saccharide, which is a big complex word for sugar, you don't create that on pretty much anything but your blood. And when when I say that, I mean it's not gonna go to your baby, it's not gonna go to your um gut, it's not gonna go to your saliva, it's not gonna go to pretty much anywhere um other than your blood. Okay. Why that's important is if you're a mom and you're a non-secretor and you go to um breastfeed your child and you know that you're a non-secretor, you're not gonna give that sugar, which builds up good bacteria, like I don't know, the bifidus, the bif bi bifidum, blah blah. Anyways, okay, I'll have to like write this down. Um I'm just talking on a whim. Usually I'll have like all this in front of me. Uh bifidobacterium. Basically, it feeds that and colonizes that in your gut for your baby. So whether they're a secretor or not doesn't really matter right away because their guts are really clean, right? Their microbiome is novice. It's it's gonna get exposed, right, when it comes out of your womb. And however that comes out is where it gets its um microbiome from. So it's very important for a mom to know their secretor status, especially if they're homozygous, to not secrete because it's simple. You give your baby bifidobacteria in their um, I don't know, if you're gonna do breast milk, maybe you just mix it with some of your breast milk and put it in their mouth. Um, if they're bottle fed, you put it in their formula or breast milk in the bottle. Um, there's many ways to do that, but that is so important, and I did not know that for both of my children. And why I'm talking about that is my eldest had skin issues, and I talked about this on a different podcast. And the importance of that is this when you have skin issues, you think gluten, dairy, soy, right? Allergic reaction, atopic dermatitis, all these things. And I mean, I would we tested and we took everything out and we did all this stuff, and not really any change. So I'm going, hmm, okay, well, let's give up on that. It's not communicable. You can't really change anything, so putting gluten in or taking it out really didn't do anything. Okay, so now we go, wait a second, I am a non-secretor. She needs, and so we recolonized her bacteria. We need to do a little bit longer because she has been 13, 14 years without it, and so we're gonna probably just add that back in. But within two weeks of giving her high dose specific um probiotics, her skin was smooth, and I'm talking no bumps. And every hair follicle you had, there was a bump, and a lot of them would get red, and the body couldn't figure that out, so we gave it the right bacteria in the gut, and guess what? Her skin, all baby smooth. So here's the thing what I'm talking about. There's some things that for us, because doubly, I'm taking a probiotic twice a day and I'm recolonizing, and guess what? There's a lot of change in my body. My weight went down, my skin has gotten better, I haven't seen any chronic um throat pain. You know, I got my tonsils removed when I was 18 because I had constant viral infections, right? I had tonsillitis constantly. Is there a correlation? I'm gonna say yes, because chronic viral infections when you don't have this type of bacteria is proven in research. This is the body and the science behind it. So, what I'm getting through is to you guys is this our genetics tell our story. It tells us maybe why we have chronicity on certain things, maybe why we have Crohn's disease for all you Crohn's disease patients who are dealing with this and trying to take medication and and maybe it's successful, but you still have ebbs and flows. There's a lot of indication between what our body can do, what it's programmed to do, and what it is doing, and how to support that. So the important thing to get from this is your DNA has applicable things that you can do that are simple, proven, and easy for you and your children that oh, it's so easy. If I would have known this, and now I do, so I'm just giving a shout out to all those moms out there. You know, get your genetics tested, look for your FUT2 gene, F-U-T2, and look to see are you a secretor? If you're not, make sure your kids get a specific type of probiotics. Um, so anyways, let's talk about the person who is homozygous who is a non-secretor. It is important to take on a regular basis probiotics, but it's also important to feed those probiotics. So, normal people who are secretors, you know, you secrete the sugar needed to feed that specific strain and its brothers and sisters for the bacteria, and typically you'll keep that up your whole life. So that's amazing. I'm so happy that 80% of the population does that to keep us all healthy. But the 20% who doesn't do that, my body just doesn't. You just take probiotics a couple times a day, you get very targeted, and then you support it with the food you eat. A prebiotic, right? The fibrous substance. Inulin is a good one that people will take. Um, there's a lot of different vegetables that feed and colonize and help colonize um good bacteria. That's where if you eat vegetables, it's really good for you. It feeds more than just us. That's just another side note. Um, so when you get into cracking your DNA, there's so much more than this, but those were just the easiest ones because they hit home with me. And I'm trying to tell you how I am a patient too, how I have discovered these things, and nobody else is helping me with this. I'm like, please tell me about this. And they're like, what are you talking about? Even other practitioners, you know. I love functional medicine. We all have our genre of what we do, we all have our background, we all have our stories. Some people are gonna be really good with XYZ, some people with other things. Find a good practitioner, somebody that you trust and that you agree with that can really help you and listen to their experience and why they're doing this. Um, there is a heart to all of us practitioners who do this, and mine, my story is a little different. I'm gonna be looking through um through the scope of chiropractic, right? So we're gonna diagnose correctly, more specifically. I'm gonna look at the whole body, that's just how I'm trained, and then I'm gonna look at um how your body is doing as a whole, systemically, looking at blood markers. I'm gonna look at DNA, what your low and moderate penetrance genes are telling me about your body. I'm gonna look at um your micronutrient testing to see what you're lacking in real time. And then we're gonna give you a one supplement solution if you can't consume enough via food. So we're gonna look at what diet you should eat, what support you actually need lifelong, or um depending on if you need it supplement or uh food. Those are the things that I do because I know that metabolically all of us have needs and foundational disruption, and all of us have to get that direction and that why. So we look at where did you come from in a full health history, all your intake paperwork, then all those labs to come out with this is the diet you should be consuming, this is how much sleep you should be having, this is when you should be sleeping. Hydration is important. You need to be doing this, right? Then we look at, okay, here's the food you need to support your glutathione, to support your microbiome, to support, you know, the genetic components of your body. And then, lastly, because supplementation is a supplement to the things that we are doing, if we need high dose anything, then we'll look at it after we look at your micronutrients and we'll change it frequently. As you start shifting and learning your body into food and all of the things that you need, because it's gonna be easy. What happens is this if you see change within the first couple weeks and you feel better, you're gonna continue. That's how it works. Period. End of story. So when I literally in a week or two was like, this is game changing with CoQ10. I mean, literally, what? And yeah, we can get in the menstruation as well. My cramps that I had, which weren't very many, are zilch non. Guess what? Your uterus is a muscle. Uh, what does it need? CoQ10. Every cell in our body needs CoQ10, by the way. But, anyways, that's where it's just drop the mic. Let's let's focus on the real issue and not keep you. Yes, some supplements you might. I'm gonna take a probiotic or something similar to it the majority of days the rest of my life because I know that my body has no chance to produce it. Okay, that's just what I'm gonna do. I will take supplementation when I know I'm not eating very good because I'm not going to miss out on my B vitamins because I'm not having organ meat per se, right? I'm going to take CoQ10 because my body doesn't make it like your body probably does. And so those are my absolute like, I'm gonna take it and I'm gonna support those pathways with food and lifestyle to really encompass how they can work in tandem. So that's the exciting part about me being a patient first and being able to bring it to my patients. I don't sit and tout about patient testimonies. You know, I thought about this, everybody's like, you need to go and collect patient testimonies, and you okay, great. Um, do I need to pat myself on the back? I guess maybe to tell everybody else how everything or do how everybody is doing. The problem is they get fixed so quick and they get out of my office, it's like, okay, let me hunt you down. So the next time they come in, they're like, oh sure, I'll do it. And then they're on their way and they're busy. They're, you know, busy musicians and executives and and moms, and and there's a lot of people out there that I get to support, and I am so grateful for doing that. But my motto is always I want to see what's going on with you, fix it, and get you out of my office. That's important to me, and it Should be important to you too. And supplementation for me, I don't want now that I have the tools, now that we all as an industry have the tools, it should be a supplement. It should be the things that we can't get from diet and lifestyle, or you choose that you don't want to do. Some patients come in and they're like, I just want to eat crappy. And I'm like, okay, if you want to do that, I'm totally going to support you. But then here's how much your supplementation is going to cost, and here's what I would recommend. We can do that. And some people start there. And then pretty soon they start feeling good and they're like, wait a second, I actually have been craving vegetables. And I'm like, yeah, that's kind of the point, right? I've been tired at nine o'clock, not staying up, getting my second wind lethargic in the, you know, in the morning, and then no, they're sleeping better. They're sleeping, they're getting more rest when they sleep because your body's functioning, your weight drops, all these things happen. And it's like, then we retest, and their supplements really help get them in to where they should be, and they're still eating McDonald's three times a week. You know, there's a lot of differences. I don't put people on programs that are unattainable. I put people on specific programs that meet your needs that will gain you the goals that you choose. So when you're when you're working with me, when I am looking for a practitioner because I am also a patient, I'm going, what are they gonna do? What's the long-term outcome? How are they gonna change that? Do they give me a why? What's going on in their head, and is it valuable to me? So when you know your genetic SNPs, you support them, you can directly change your health. Remember that. What happens next when the things that we take are making us healthy, they're correcting our deficiencies, that's where the change happens. And we know that by our DNA. So next time when we jump on here, I think I'll probably end up recording and dropping that next one, maybe in the next four to ten days. We'll see how crazy busy I get in my office. But um, in our next episode, I'm gonna talk about the hidden costs of medications, DIND, right? So we're gonna talk about what deficiencies are being induced by medications. So definitely stay tuned for that. I hope you guys got a lot out of this. Um I hope you understand where my heart is as a patient looking for answers, as well as a practitioner looking in for patients to give the answers. That's why I'm doing this podcast. That's why I'm a practitioner. That's what drives me to do this every single day. So join me next time and we'll learn about all the hidden costs of medications. Signing off.