Kashif Khan is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of The DNA Company where personalized medicine is being pioneered through unique insights into the human genome. In this episode, Kashif shares his approach to genetic testing and how, with the proper information, we can learn more about our bodies and get ahead of illnesses!

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Highlights

3:03 - Kashif talks about his background and what got him interested in Genetics

5:22 - Information that Kashif learned about his genes that changed his life

7:51 - How a common clinical protocol doesn’t work for everyone

9:22 - Supplementation as related to methylation

11:39 - Kashif’s response to those that are skeptical of how useful genetic testing is

15:45 - Taking responsibility for the root causes of illness

19:52 - The role hormones can play in illnesses

22:43 - The role estrogen plays in men

24:04 - The profile of their genetic testing

24:59 - The types of genes that are the most actionable

26:38 - Kashif shares a personal example of how genetics can predict people’s behavior

29:28 - The diets of our ancestors, and how strictly we should stick to them

32:32 - Genetic testing in relation to the gut microbiome

35:00 - Where to learn more about Kashif

36:28 - Kashif’s epiphany

38:12 - A chronic wellness hack that Kashif is excited about

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About Kashif Khan

Kashif Khan is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of The DNA Company where personalized medicine is being pioneered through unique insights into the human genome. With the largest study of its kind globally, The DNA Company has developed a functional approach to genomic interpretation overlaying environment, nutrition and lifestyle on the genetic blueprint to create personalized and deterministic health outcomes. 

Prior to his tenure at the DNA Company, Kashif participated in a number of high growth start-ups where he took an active role as an angel investor and advisor.  He 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 neighbourhood businesses, Kashif has advised on business strategy in industries ranging from luxury retail, technology, finance, fine arts, healthcare, tourism and real estate. He participated in over $300 million in revenue in his own retail business prior to launching consulting services to help others thrive. 

Growing up in Vancouver, B.C., Kashif’s drive started from witnessing his immigrant parents’ struggles to establish themselves in their new country. Inspired by their iron-clad work ethic and resourcefulness, Kashif developed an industrious entrepreneurial spirit from a young age. While his high school peers were languishing in minimum wage jobs, Kashif was hard at work starting his first business.  

As CEO of The DNA Company, Kashif later learned that his neural wiring was actually genetically designed to be entrepreneurial. He has since made it his mission to build The DNA Company into a business that has impact and who’s success is measured not in dollars earned, but in lives improved.

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Connect with Kashif

Website | https://www.thednacompany.com/

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Connect with Dr. Lauryn

Facebook | Dr. Lauryn Lax

Twitter | @drlaurynlax

Instagram | @drlaurynlax

Website | drlauryn.com 

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Transcript (Episode website contains full transcript)

Dr. Lauryn (00:02):

Well, hello, welcome to the Health Detective Podcast, a show dedicated to quieting the noise in the health, speed, and fitness world. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, former TV news journalist and ex-chronic illness patient gone health detective, bringing you my 20 years of clinical and personal experience helping patients radically take their health back into their own hands. On this show, I love having real conversations with a variety of guests who are all a little bit of a health detective in their own way, trying to fight and solve the problems of health and wellness kind out there. Ultimately get ready to uncover truths and expose lies in both conventional health wisdom and diet culture as we know it so you can reach your optimal potential. Today we're talking all about the wild, wild west of genetic testing and DNA. Is genetic testing reliable? Is it necessary?

(00:51):

Is it effective? Only if we use it effectively. We have Kashif Khan in the house, who is the co-founder of the DNA Company, a company all about doing things a little bit differently in genetics using genetic testing strategically. This conversation changed my mind a lot about using genetic testing, and it's definitely something that I'm gonna be incorporating even more so with my patients in clinical practice and just really love how they are using only a select number of genes. There's so many genes that can show up on our genetic panel testing. So say, like a 23andme, consumer kind of testing, consumer-facing testing, but really the DNA Company is doing things a bit differently and just looking again at that handful of genes that are gonna make differences in protocol slash what supplements you take, what foods you're eating, et cetera. So I think this conversation was really fruitful and insightful for myself as a health detective, and hope it is the same for you. If you're liking the show, please don't hesitate to leave a review. Your reviews mean the world to me and helps others become their own best health detectives for themself. And of course, don't hesitate and be a stranger. Reach out at my website, Dr. Lauryn.com, D R L A U R Y N.com. Would love to share more about how I'm helping patients take back their health into their own hands as well as love hearing about interesting podcasts or topic ideas that you guys wanna hear about. So without further ado, let's get to the show.

Dr. Lauryn (02:20):

Well, Kashif, so excited to have you in the house today and to talk about the wild west of genetic testing. I know there's a lot of consumer-available genetic testing out there at 23andme, for example, that have become very popular, and sometimes maybe we're not using them as effectively as we could for really what are we gonna do with this information kind of testing. And I know your company has a really unique approach to genetics testing in general for really helping cure the problem of chronic illness or the way we manage and treat chronic illness, rather, not just manage but treat and address it. Well just would love to know a little bit of background before we dive into that, though, about what got you doing this kind of work that you are doing in genetics.

Kashif (03:03):

Personally, I come from left field. I have nothing to do with the industry. I actually used to sell luxury goods. We're in Canada, we're in Toronto, and our company had the record for the most valuable painting sold in Canada, but the most valuable vintage Patek Philippe watch for over a million dollars, that type of thing. So I was networking with the high net-worth people of Canada, and I realized what I was good at was the sort of PR and marketing of it didn't matter what the product was, I knew how to get in the media and talk about it and that type of thing. And so I actually shifted gears that that's what I'm good at, and that's what I enjoy. And I started doing that for other people. I was now running two businesses and I sort of worked myself into sickness.

(03:47):

My business partner would have to drive me home with debilitating migraines. I would literally just start vomiting from the migraines. It was so intense. I had eczema, psoriasis, like brain fog, you'd name all the typical things that point to a doctor can't figure this out. It seems like some kind of autoimmune issue, and that's why you end up going to a functional medicine clinician to figure out the root cause. So in that journey, our PR company was working with some healthcare companies to help them sort of grow. There's a lot of innovation here in Toronto, and I started to use that to learn about myself cause I literally couldn't work. I was so sick. I learned that decoding my instruction manual, my genetic manual, was a thing that separated me from here's all these symptoms I'm talking about eczema, psoriasis, brain fog and nausea, and migraines. There's one or two things, the hub that's pointing to all these folks

(04:41):

<affirmative>. And I was doing a couple things wrong and those couple of things being fixed kind of resolved everything. And that blew my mind that the change is so easy. I didn't need this cream and that pill and this, this whole basket of stuff I was doing, there was a cellular health problem that was leading to this. My body screaming you're in bad shape, better get back into it. And so I literally took the keys for the PR company that I had built, gave it to the staff, and I said, You guys, thank you for all the work. It's yours. I found what I need to work on. And I focused on the DNA Company.

Dr. Lauryn (05:16):

That's amazing. And what were those couple things that were big game changers for you with that information you discovered?

Kashif (05:22):

So this goes back to what you said, that in genetics, it's not about a list of genes. And then try and figure out what it means. The interpretation is key. Everybody can test. You can literally go buy a genetic testing machine and put it in your basement, and start tomorrow. But when it spits out a report, you have to understand what is, how to make that actionable, and what does it mean? And in order to do that, you have to be able to mirror the genes to the biochemistry. How does the body actually work? It's not this gene, this gene just the body's not 22,000 independent genes. It's systems, hormonal system, cardiovascular system. And you have to batch and mirror that. So what I learned in that is that my systems, my detox system, glutathionylation, which we talk about, the ability to bind on to a toxin, send it to the liver to metabolize, get rid of it.

(06:10):

I literally was missing some of those genes. Forget about what version or what snip or variant, I didn't even have, my ancestors didn't need them. They lived a beautiful clean organic life. They just didn't need this extra layer of detox protection, which western Europeans, having gone through the industrial revolution, had a lot more alcohol in the culture, these types of things, they needed it. So they developed it. This is why my half-Scottish, half-Irish business partner has an extra copy of the detox gene that I have zero copies of that I'm missing. So that was a big one. Then it was, now that I know that these toxic insults are sort of free-flowing in my blood because I don't clear them well, they're causing that inflammatory load. My body should be able to methylate and deal with the inflammation. So we mapped out the entire methylation system, and it sucks for me, and it's not any one gene. The entire process from beginning to end of methylating, I don't do well. So not only am I not clearing these toxic insults, but the damage that's being done, I'm not able to cope with it.

Dr. Lauryn (07:14):

Not even able to process it. <affirmative>. Yeah,

Kashif (07:16):

I can't. So now all of a sudden, migraine inflammation, nausea, migraine inflammation, eczema, psoriasis, inflammation of the skin, these are all tied to the same thing, but in healthcare, treated as siloed independent problems when they're not. Yes, the symptom is independent, it's in my skin, it's in my head, it's in my gut, but it's all starting from the same source.

Dr. Lauryn (07:35):

Understanding those mechanisms. So for you, so for example, without the genes for being able to clear toxins, I mean with supplementing with glutathione wouldn't necessarily work, would it? Because if you're introducing glutathione, you're not gonna know what to do with it anyways.

Kashif (07:51):

I can tell you how many clinicians that we've shifted their protocols where, and in fact, there's a very well-known person in the healthcare space whose wife was bedridden because she was taking a glutathione IV because of her sort through blood biomarkers, able to see that her toxic load is a little too much. We gotta clean this up, <affirmative>. She literally ended up in bed. Why? Because if you don't have the genetic instruction putting glutathione to work, it's gonna start binding onto minerals and nutrients and everything else too. It doesn't know what to do. What is a gene? A gene is an instruction. It's literally a set of instructions that tell your cells what to do. If you don't have the instruction, you're not doing it. So for me, I didn't take glutathione, which would've been the logical, direct, oh glutathione problem, take glutathione kind of like hormones. And we do a lot of work there. Oh, testosterone is low? Take testosterone, that doesn't always work. And we can get into that. So I started taking some of the precursors like alpha lipoic acid, selenium, NAC, glycine, these are some of the big ones that they just go to work, they don't need the instruction, and all of a sudden psoriasis is gone, eczema was gone, et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Lauryn (08:59):

So your body had that engine. And then how about the same thing for methylation. So we can see a lot of times, say, run a report, and a person's an under methylator that's most talked about. We can also have over-methylation, perhaps from too much supplementation. But perhaps, I mean, is there a reason why a lot of these supplements may not work for just high doses of B12 and a methyl folate and everything as well?

Kashif (09:21):

Yeah, so firstly, when you look at a typical methylation report, the focus is on one gene, MTHFR. And yes, that's the sort of the star of the show. That's that central hub. But there are six or seven genes up and downstream that are supporting characters. And if you don't understand what they're doing, you don't truly know the net. And this is why clinicians haven't adopted genetic testing in practice because they say, well, it's not really precise, just like anything else, it's trial and error. It's kind of pointing to something, but we still have to test it. What we're saying is if you map the entire system, it is certain you take it away from that probability base, you got an 80% chance of some genetic predisposition to, like here's you a hundred percent. So going to the supplements, take b12, but what does that mean?

(10:05):

Is it sublingual under the tongue? Is it a methylcobalamin.? Is it adenosyl? Like there's different versions. Do you have the ability to actually absorb it in your gut because your ancestors actually ate beef and didn't eat goat For the ancestors that didn't eat beef, which is a lot of people where they ate more sheep, lamb, goat, or poultry, You can't absorb the B12 in your gut because you don't have the genetic instruction to do so? And so you need the sublingual, under the tongue, and they do really well with the IV also. So that level of personalization takes it from, hey, you're not a good methylator, but now what do we do about it? And then we can get very specific, where on the get-go, they're doing exactly what they need to do, and they feel great right away.

Dr. Lauryn (10:46):

A hundred percent, and kind of what you've addressed right now is a big reason why until meeting you guys and understanding kind of like that there's more to genetic testing. Why I have not really used genetic testing is cuz I would see it as like, okay, it sounds cool, it seems like a lot of people are doing it, but what am I gonna do with this? I really believe more so in epigenetics and how things in our environment or also our internal system, like our gut, what's going on there or hormones which actually are related to our genetics, I later learned can be influenced more so than just knowing here's my genetic blueprint, I know I'm prone to celiac disease. And so kind of change our minds about why, I mean as you already are, but perhaps why traditional testing where it does run into a roadblock and then how you guys are addressing that.

Kashif (11:40):

It goes back to something we were talking about before we got online today where, so look at the healthcare model. The same thing happened to genetics. Everyone knew there's a jewel inside us, this instruction manual, which, if he understood, should obliterate disease cuz now we know why it happens, but we didn't get there. Why? So if you look at our healthcare system, we have a great acute care system. Break my arm, have a heart attack, go to the hospital, amazing service. So long as financials are not an issue, you can get taken care of in an amazing way in North America. That same toolkit is now applied to chronic disease, meaning react. You don't call the doctor until you're sick, and then the measure of success is the thing that you're complaining about. This hurts, this cholesterol level is high, my hormones or whatever, if I get rid of that, I succeeded just like eczema, psoriasis, and headache are separate things,

(12:33):

I have to deal with each one of them separately when in fact, they're rooted in one thing. So that same approach was applied to genetics. The researchers started to say, what does each gene mean? Let's figure out if I can figure out the gene, I'm gonna build a product, and I'm gonna become a multi-billionaire, right? So genetics then turn into genetic condition tools, meaning you're born with sickle cell syndrome, certain forms of autism, you're born with it. There are other diseases where you know that this is a genetic switch that was turned on or off, and you now have a direct correlation. The belief was you can't work on chronic disease or chronic conditions. The gap in the middle was the epigenetics, meaning if you have a suboptimal profile that doesn't equal a disease, that equals a risk for poor cellular health or inflammation, et cetera.

(13:23):

But that doesn't mean disease, which is the way the medical system looks like. It looks at it, right? So what means the disease? If I have a suboptimal cardiovascular profile, I'm not born with a cholesterol problem, I'm not born with diabetes. It happens in and around the age of 50 because it takes many years of doing the wrong thing, the epigenetics to express the disease, and what are those wrong things? Environment, nutrition, lifestyle. So what we don't do, we don't measure epigenetic expression, we just reinterpret DNA to tell you epigenetically what to do. And this is what's been missing based on my suboptimal profile. What would cause me to go from, I have risk to I'm sick. What's the things that the load that I would add that would actually, and what are the things that I should do that I'll never get there, that I'll actually avoid this problem?

(14:13):

So we kind of took all of it and said, genetics does a really good job of pinpointing things accurately, but then you don't know what to do. Epigenetics does a good job of telling you where you're at, but you also don't know what to fix. So we worked in the middle and said between the two, here's the environment, nutrition, lifestyle choices for each condition, each gene, each profile, whether it's hormones, cardiovascular, et cetera. And now, all of a sudden, people are reversing disease, they're preventing the things that their ancestors had, et cetera, et cetera. So that's where we've taken things,

Dr. Lauryn (14:46):

Right. Well, and let's then kind of talk about the nitty gritty, the gray zone where perhaps protocols go wrong. So, for example, with the glutathione issue, a lot of times in the detox world or going through mold illness, it's like okay, take some glutathione, but those that are not getting better, or we may see this in mass cell activation as well. I mean, you know more about genetically what could be going on there for a person, but if they're reacting to everything, I've even had patients react to water <laugh>, for example. And so it's just where the body's in that heightened state of stress. And there's also a limbic and brain component there. But what about the nitty-gritty of functional medicine, I see a problem as the protocols can sometimes become the pill for an ill mindset as well of okay, just they have Hashimotos, we'll do the Hashimoto protocol, or they have candida, do the candida protocol, and yet still every body is different, and it can be confusing and a bit overwhelming.

Kashif (15:46):

So what we are talking about is exactly, when it comes to the ultimate solution, it's combining both the how do I mask the acute problem, Hashimoto's? I've now put this in the Hashimotos bucket so I can relieve the person and make them feel better by dealing with that. But I also need to take the functional approach of what causes the Hashimotos because it's, that's not the beginning of it, that's the end of it. That's, I've been doing something else for 10 because get rid of the Hashimotos, guess something else is gonna happen cuz you haven't dealt with the root cause. So let me give you an example. So cardiovascular, that's probably the number one thing. 50% of Americans are expected to have a cardiovascular event and it's taken for granted that it is just supposed to happen. Oh, genetics, my family has it, I have it, it's gonna happen.

(16:32):

That is not at all the case for the most part. So typically, cholesterol numbers go up with some kind of blockage. The doctor starts to tell you, you got a problem, it's now labeled as a disease, and you're dealing with either a Lipitor pill or something to reduce that thing. So that's that acute, let's resolve it. And I still think you should do that to be healthy, meaning that you don't want it to build up and become a heart attack. So allow the doctor, allow the Hashimoto specialist, allow the mold specialist to calm things down that emergency response. But you then have to take responsibility to kick the ladder out from whatever's causing that thing. So let's take again cardiovascular example. Cholesterolemia is happening, that's not the disease. That is your body actually responding to inflammation in the endothelial. So the inner lining of the artery, this lining where the blood actually touches and flows through, is called the endothelial, right?

(17:25):

There are different versions, and genetically we can determine do you have the stainless steel version? Do you have the somewhat okay? Or a paper-thin version. If you have the paper-thin version, which many, many, many people do, which is why 50% of people get cardiovascular diseases, it's more prone to inflammation. So having said that, you could grow up on a beach eating fish out of the sea, sleeping well, with no stress, and you're never gonna get sick cuz you weren't born sick. If you have bad hardware, doesn't mean you're sick, it just means it can't take as much abuse. Now fast forward to someone in North America, not sleeping properly, eating poorly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We then start to look at combining them with my profile, where I had poor detox genetics. So if you had poor detox genetics, all those toxins getting in are going to cause that inflammation here.

(18:14):

We have a patient that we dealt with with the number one source of what we diagnosed as his health concern was golf because he was golfing four days a week for four to five hours a time. He was breathing in all these toxic pesticides, which by the way, in Canada are highly unregulated, and there's more regulation in the US, but Canada's not. So he's breathing in four days a week, four or five hours at a time. All these toxic chemicals from the golf course to make it look so beautiful without the ability to clear. Now 38 years old, he had a crazy cholesterol issue that he couldn't suppress. So he was on a pill that wasn't working. When toxicity comes here causes inflammation, and cholesterol is actually deployed as a hormone to reduce the inflammation. That's why the cholesterol's there. It's actually there to help you

Dr. Lauryn (19:02):

Kick it out. Yeah.

Kashif (19:04):

And when the cholesterol meets toxicity, it hardens and gets deposited, and it starts to build up. So the disease of, and this is why I say you gotta kind of do both. Yeah, let the doctor help you not have a heart attack. But that's not, you're gonna be in treatment for the rest of your life if you don't also realize what's causing the inflammation, which is then leading to the cholesterol, and you can reverse the disease, you don't even need to have it.

Dr. Lauryn (19:29):

Right. And it's a combination of figuring out the external factors such as the toxins or the gut dysbiosis, et cetera. And also just your genetic wiring and how your body is mechanically working. Are there other common themes that you see aside from the detoxification genes that you find to be really big effectors either way for folks

Kashif (19:52):

For sure. I would say the big one that continues to fly under the radar is hormones. And particularly in women with estrogen toxicity. This is why 64% of women that have their first cardiac event are expected to die on that first cardiac event with zero previous symptoms, with no warning signs, you get the heart attack and you're gone. It's much more severe for men than it is for women. Why? Because for the 64% who had the worst result, but some didn't, you also have to look at the people that didn't have the worst result, what were they doing right? How are they genetically wired? The difference is estrogen toxicity. So now in our hormonal cascade, you go from progesterone to testosterone to estrogen. That's what you do every month as a female. Once you produce those estrogens, you then have to convert them into a metabolite before you clear them.

(20:47):

That's either two, four, or 16 hydroxy estrogen, you don't need to know those words. But two is the clean one, four and 16 are toxic, and some women make these two, you still should be okay. Now, if you add to that the North American story of 85% of women going on a birth control pill for some elongated period and to just more estrogen, which converts into more estrogen toxicity. A larger number of menopausal women are now starting to take hormone replacement therapy. Or even premenopausal, even women in their thirties now are saying, Hey, I'm gonna start early. More estrogen adding fuel to the fire. Estrogen mimics things in the environment, foods that we're eating. So all of a sudden, you have this cardiac event which is happening because of the other reasons we talked about inflammation, et cetera. But a load of that toxic estrogen causes an additional layer of inflammation, the vasculature is already under so much stress, and your genetics didn't know that you were gonna take birth control pill for 10 years or that you're gonna start hormone therapy for. So it wasn't designed to protect you from that.

Dr. Lauryn (22:00):

So the genetics of being able to clear those, would you say from estrogen or just having more,

Kashif (22:06):

It's two things. If you have the genetic construction to convert estrogen to four hydroxy, the more estrogen you have, the more this you're gonna make. <affirmative> birth control is estrogen, so you're just gonna have this more pool. So that's one. The second is yes, the clearance. So now that I have it, how well do I get rid of it? And if you have that combination of I make a lot of it, and I also don't clear it well, you're not going to do well when it comes to inflammatory diseases. And that's something like to answer your question that people don't look at.

Dr. Lauryn (22:34):

Yeah, do you see this in, I mean, males? So if we think about a male paradigm, like the man that has the moobs, the man boobs kind of thing or

Kashif (22:42):

Yeah, for sure. So same thing, there's this belief that man testosterone, woman estrogen, that's not at all the case. That's the average answer of dominance. There's more estrogen in a woman, which makes you a woman. But there are men that are estrogen dominant, and there are men that are estrogen dominant that go onto hormone replacement therapy where their doctor says, Here, take some testosterone. That's gonna make you live longer and be younger. But what if their genetic instruction is to convert all that testosterone into estrogen? Then we've actually had patients like you just said, that had ended up with gyno-like man boobs because they take so much of this, these hormones, and what is the answer? The sad thing is I didn't give you enough. You need more. Right? Because they don't understand the cascade. The thinking is if I gave you testosterone, you should have more testosterone. No, guess what? It converts, for some people, into estrogen. For some men, it may convert into DHT, which is that manly man version of testosterone, which gives you the nice big jacked ripped muscles. But guess what? It also inflames your prostate. So give that man more testosterone, and you might be giving him a prostate issue

Dr. Lauryn (23:54):

It just makes so much sense to just know what you got and how to then work. So would you say y'all work with about a profile of 80 genes? Is that right? Or 80?

Kashif (24:04):

Yeah, so we test for many hundred just in terms of banking the data that in the future, if more is learned, we'll be able to give it to you. But the ones that we find are highly actionable, and this is funny because you look at genetic testing and you go to a website, and they'll say, Well, we test for a hundred genes, we test for five, or we scan the entire genome. More is not necessarily better because if it's not actionable and you can't interpret it, what is it even doing for you? Right? Data doesn't mean much unless you know what questions to ask and how to interpret it. So yes, to answer your question, we brought it down to about 80 or so genes that we believe are actionable and important. We test for another 700-ish where we believe that it's coming. Eventually, we're gonna be getting it, and the rest of it we don't even bother testing for cause it's not actionable.

Dr. Lauryn (24:53):

So would you say primarily detoxification type of genes and hormone genes would be the most actionable right now?

Kashif (24:59):

Yeah, I would say if you look at the root cause of disease being inflammation, we already agree on that. What it causes then inflammation is poor cellular health. So what causes those things? Yes, detox issues, methylation or anti-inflammatory issues, and then hormone issues. So those are the three things that we've mapped out in systems that typical genetic companies don't look at. So we do a lot more with a lot less. The other area which we can dive into, where we also map it out, is mood and behavior of the brain. Because once you figure this out, here's what my body's doing, you also have to figure out how do I perceive it and what am I gonna do about it? And if you don't understand how your brain's wired, we can't put you to work. So a lot of our work has to do with how do we actually talk to this person? How will they actually adopt behaviors? How will they actually want to do this? So that's a big part of what we do.

Dr. Lauryn (25:56):

And you mean just from just understanding them from a personality perspective or actually from a genetic perspective? Brain

Kashif (26:02):

Genetically, if I have your DNA, I can tell you more about you than your mother can about your personality.

Dr. Lauryn (26:09):

Why I'm a type A person. <laugh>. Yeah.

Kashif (26:12):

Everything about the way you deal with stress, emotion, and trauma. Are you reward-seeking? Are you a binger, are you an addict? Are you irritable? Do you procrastinate? Everything about your mood and behavior traits is already genetically determined.

Dr. Lauryn (26:28):

That makes a lot of sense. And perhaps why a lot of times families have similarities. Yeah, I'm my dad's daughter, and we are very similar in our personalities.

Kashif (26:38):

And I can give you an example there. For example, if I'll put myself on the spot. So my family on my father's side has a history of addiction, and we thought it was a cultural thing we didn't understand what it was. So what I've learned about myself is that where does pleasure come from? The dopamine chemical. So dopamine allows you to experience both pleasure and reward. I ate some tasty food, or I did something good at work. So we can determine with the DRD2 gene how dense your dopamine receptors are. So your ability to actually bind and experience that pleasure reward. And I have the least density way down here. So when it comes to that tasty pizza again, it doesn't give me that hit. So I need a little more, right? I need. So that leads to that addictive behavior. So now also there's an enzyme called comped which clears neurochemicals.

(27:33):

So once you've had that experience, you need to get back to normal. So comp comes along and gets rid of the dopamine. I had the fastest comp. So it's like that in between the two, there's a gene called MAO, which helps metabolize and break the dopamine down. I also have the fastest mao. So I feel its way down here. By the time I'm in the experience, it's already being broken down, and the enzyme is clear, it is getting rid of it. So I hardly feel pleasure or reward. So I have three potential outcomes, depression cause I just don't get it out of life, addiction cuz I went down the pleasure route in terms of feeding myself that reward, and you always need more and more and more. That's how dopamine hits work or achievement. Cuz I went down the reward path, and luckily this had nothing to do with my genetics at the time I didn't know. I went down the reward path and became entrepreneurial. So I fed that dopamine hit through achievement, and that's why I switched gears from selling million-dollar Patek Phillipe watches to opening a biotechnology company, which I have no business doing because I could see it and I couldn't say no to it.

Dr. Lauryn (28:39):

Keeps you healthier too. More balanced in that way. Well, and also just interested ancestrally, genetically it seems like we're wired and from a food perspective, for example, if one is from just different parts of the world, do our genetics just ride throughout generation after generation? When I'm working with people from different cultures, for example, if they're coming from Asian descent and rice is a huge staple in their diet, whereas perhaps on a paleolithic kind of approach, rice is definitely not on that, but perhaps they can actually digest that. Or if a person's from India and vegetarian diets are really common there. And so perhaps the diet that their ancestors were raised on,

Kashif (29:28):

There are a couple things there. First of all, genetics make it very clear what and how you're supposed to eat. The second thing is interpreting that because going back to the Asian example of, well, my ancestors ate rice, why are you telling me not to eat rice? Right? And we've had to deal with this problem. It's like it's my culture. We ate rice. Why are you telling me it's gonna give me diabetes? Cause we have, I can't tell you how many Asian South Asians that we have to tell them to stop because we can clearly see diabetes coming, that insulin response, et cetera. What's changed is not that they don't have the same genes as their ancestors. The rice has changed, they're ancestors. So the way we get rice today is the white grain. That's what people think. They don't even know what rice looks like,

(30:16):

most people. The natural rice has a hull on it. It has an outer shell that is pure fiber. And actually, most of the nutrition is actually in that hull. That's removed because of the way we're globalized in order to store and ship rice, the white rice you can dry, and it lasts for a long time. Thathullattracts bacteria because it's very nutritious and it doesn't store very well. So rice processing, the standard has become to remove the hull and just sell the white rice molecularly. It's basically sugar. It's literally eating spoons of sugar by the time it goes through your system. That fiber that's on the hull counteracts the sugar, that carb or insulin response, which is the miracle of the food, it's already naturally designed to be good for you. The nutrition, the vitamins, the fiber, it's all in the hull, which we know. And guess what they do wi