30: Using DNA To Maximize Your Health And Impact with Kashif Khan

30: Using DNA To Maximize Your Health And Impact with Kashif Khan

Hey everyone. Jackie Bowker here today, we have such a special guest. The incredible Kashif Khan. I am especially grateful because it was 10:00 PM when we recorded this interview. He’s in Toronto and I’m in Australia. We chat about Kashif’s company, the DNA company, and functional Testing, what even is this testing and why it’s key to creating a simple plan for us and our children to thrive and hint, you can use this test to be a better parent. We chat about how it helps to determine the foods we can eat to manage our weight, how he solves simple conditions like eczema with a really straightforward plan using this sort of testing.

He like me is on a mission to help people feel better and make health accessible for all. He is a true pioneer. His new research on functional genomics is mindblowing and he’s one of the smartest, most genuine people I’ve met. Enjoy this very meaningful chat about the role of [00:02:00] functional genome.

And if you want the test, you can order it directly@thednacompany.com slash Jackie for $50 off. Yay. Woo. Welcome Kashif. We are so thrilled and honored that you were joining us on the podcast today, especially because it’s 10:00 PM where you are. So thank you so much for staying up late for us in Toronto.

Yeah. I was just sitting about to open up some YouTube on my laptop and then this alert went off on my phone and I was like, what is going on here? And I was like, oh yeah, we were talking about Australia times. Time time to meet Jackie in Australia. Yay. Thank you. I’m super excited to talk to you Kashif and your mission and what you offer from the DNA company.

My first question to you is why is it so important that we understand what is going on without genetics? Sure. Well, to enter that, I have to tell you a [00:03:00] little bit more about what’s actually happening with genetics because most people. Around the subject is what disappointed a lot of people, myself included.

Right. That’s why I actually went to the field that underwhelming, Hey, you got 80% chance of Alzheimer’s good luck. Right. And that’s what genetics was. It’s what it still is because really the people that are funding the research are looking for rare genetic conditions where you can turn a switch on or off.

That is the best solution for that type of problem. Right? If you’re born with some genetic variant that causes directly correlates and equals a problem, the only way to deal with it is ongoing treatment or turn the switch off. So that research one day will help a lot of people. Meanwhile, while we’re all dealing with mood and behavior, cardiovascular aging, 90%, at least in north America, the healthcare budget is spent on chronic.

And none of that is caused genetically the gap and sorry, I’m drawing a going on and on here, but this is the key thing here. That gap between you got an 80% chance of Alzheimer’s [00:04:00] versus, well, why did 20% not get it with the exact same genetics? That gap was environment, nutrition, lifestyle. And that’s how you use genetics for chronic disease.

And aging is to understand where your risk is and not propensity, not 80% chance of something. It’s more like you don’t do this function. Well, the genes that instruct a solid their process, you have the bad version of those genes. So whatever process we’re talking, what you don’t do that well, which now means you could potentially have this, this, this, this, this now, you know, if I eat like this, if I exercise like this, if I move these things from my inbox, This gene can now do a better job.

And I prevent all that stuff. Or if I eat like this and exercise like this, and this is my environment, that gene is going to struggle even more and that function just won’t even happen. And I’ll probably get that thing a lot earlier than I was even meant to. So that’s the way we look at genetics.

There’s genetics, which is, and it’s the same difference between the last thing. I’ll say medicine and functional medicine medicine is what do you have call me when you’re sick or when something hurts and I’ll put a bandaid on it. [00:05:00] Functional medicine is why did it have. Right. Let’s dig deep and figure out why, what did you do wrong because of this?

And let’s deal with that. That’s the same difference between genetics and functional genomics. I love it so much. And I especially love how your offering is that it’s let’s look at the 20% of people. And let’s look at what they’re doing well, instead of let’s try and put a label on ourselves and then submit that with our belief process, that we have this thing that we have this diagnosis, which then created in the first place, it’s kind of a bit like the chicken and the egg.

Exactly. That was actually our research model. And what we realized was broken in genetics, everyone was chasing understanding what genes. Which is important. You have to start somewhere, but no geneticists ever met a patient. It wasn’t applied. So we actually, for three years studied 7,001 by one by one, by one, to understand of the people that had some profile.

We first figured out what the profiles are, the people that got sick or didn’t get sick. What were they. [00:06:00] Yeah. What were they, what were they? And we’d literally audited an interviewed 7,000 people over three years, track them. We track their supplements. We tracked what was in their homes in terms of mold and chemicals and what kind of stress levels, which is something we were just chatting about.

Right. Literally we’ve helped people lose weight just because they lean on food as a coping mechanism and they don’t even know it. And it’s genetically driven something as simple as when I get stressed, I need. There’s some people whose brains do that. And that’s genetically determined. So we started to understand all these things people are doing and now we can teach it.

So as opposed to a report that says, here’s your genetic risk, it’s, here’s your profile. But more importantly, here’s what to do about it. Here’s the supplements you should take. Here’s how you should eat per condition, anxiety, weight loss, you know, all the things you actually understand as opposed to the DRD two gene.

I don’t know what that means. I need to know about the problem, so that that’s the way we laid things out and it just makes it a lot easier to use and so practical as well. And what I love about the plan is, you know, you can, it’s how I practice as well. It’s giving people a guided plan and it’s [00:07:00] like, it’s so overwhelming to get a plan where there’s a thousand things to do.

It’s like just to one change at a time. And like do the changes that are going to move the needle. It’s interesting talking about your example about eating calories, when your stress. I was just talking to my husband before this meeting because it’s freezing in our house a very unusual for a warm climate, but it’s like seven degrees Celsius feels like four.

And I was like, I wonder what Kashif would say about me. I eat when I’m cold. Like it’s just something that I do. And I was thinking about my jeans. There’s a gene called UCP one, which determines how you handle thermoregulation. Right? And if you don’t have the good version, which is more likely for women than men, by the way, because women ancestrally, one thing I have to tell you off the bat misconception, our DNA is not our ancestors, I should say are not grandma and grandpa.

Our DNA is 200,000 years old. Right? So the reality of how we live today, And how are even just grandma’s generation live [00:08:00] today, everything before that was very different, right? Even that’s a blip in time, but the way we are wired to sort of corporate this world is of people of 200,000 years ago. And imagine what that looks like.

Right. So now fast forward for most of those 200,000 years, it was the men that were outside working and doing things. So they were able to cope with thermoregulation. More of a struggle. They didn’t need that equipment, right? They didn’t need that genetic strength. And so the UCP gene we found in women is not the best.

So what happens when it comes to cold, your body signals. It’s warning time. There’s a problem. Why am I not comfortable? There’s something wrong. We must be struggling. We must be need food. So it starts to store fat and it starts to create cravings. And you will very specifically store fat on your belly.

Why? Because our ancestors, when there was problems, it was usually. And the war was usually fought with swords. And so your body wants to create this pack of tough fat on your belly to help protect you from that potential blade. We still do this. We still do this because our DNA hasn’t changed. [00:09:00] It takes millions of years to evolve.

Right? So that’s, what’s happening to you is you’re getting ready for someone to walk into your house with a big sword. So think of that next time I’m tucking into it. Piece of seven, when I’m cold talking about food, we have a survey at market over 12,000 people have completed it and it asks specific questions about what makes up their energy.

One of the questions is about. Food. And what we know is that seven out of 10 people probably not surprisingly are not eating a balanced diet. Can you talk specifically just about things that move the needle about why eating well or eating for your own body type or functional Genomix is important? Ah, I think so for us, we try and make it easy.

Like you said, those tiny habit changes are impacting. And so you have to make it easy by having tiny things to change the way we look at it as if you can focus on the macros, right? Should I be a vegan? Should I be on a keto diet? Should I be paleo? Like let’s pick a lane [00:10:00] right? Based on your genetics, because we can actually understand how well you metabolize saturated fats.

How well do you metabolize starches your insulin response? The particular genes that create the enzymes to break down vegan proteins like beans, lentils, legumes. If you don’t do that well, you shouldn’t be a vegan. Yeah. So we can, now all of a sudden put you in the right path. Yes. You should be on a keto diet and you’re going to thrive.

No, you shouldn’t. The first two weeks you’ll feel great and then you’re gonna get sick and you won’t even know what, right. So once you’ve done that, then it comes to things like hormones, you know, how well you store fat, how much do you burn fat? How well do you put on muscle in terms of that goal? What is my fitness body type goal?

Right? You have to think about hormones because there’s an innate foundational body type. You have that your genes are already trying to be. All right. So it’s not like I can go to the gym and go to deadlift 400 pounds. Like my friend, well, maybe your friend was designed to do that. Then you’re going to struggle and get frustrated and quit.

So we combine these things when we think about food, because usually food has to do with health and body type and all these [00:11:00] types of things. So it’s like pick your macros, understand what you’re designed to do. What did your ancestors eat, pick that sort of understand your hormone profile and how your body is designed to look like, then you can sort of converge and create this optimal.

I love that so much because she even, I was thinking, as you were saying that about the, you know, the Cato, you know, which we meet, you obviously need to be able to digest and assimilate fast. And in my clinic, we run a stool test, the GI map, where we can see the amount of Seattle credit. So measure the fat in the stool.

Do these tests line up like does my GI map that says that I have quite a bit of Seattle crit fat in my stool. So I’m not digesting and assimilating fat. And then my functional genomics today. Yeah. So this is part of the work we did with those 7,000 people is we brought in all the blood and stool and saliva biomarkers.

First of all, validate some of the stuff that we thought theoretically may be correct, but also to measure the improvement of the things we recommended. So if we told somebody that you are sick because. Which is not true for everybody, but it’s [00:12:00] true for a lot more people than you would think, then we will prove it to you.

Empirically let’s make the change and let’s show you what happens in your blood work. Right? I remember there was an MD from San Diego who told me that she’s been crazy sick for two years. She’s actually a well-known functional medicine practitioner, heals women from breast cancer all the time, but she herself was depressed, sick anxiety and no energy.

So we kept going back to, when did it stop? And she said two years ago, I said, what did you change? He said, I didn’t change anything. So I said, what did you change? You change something. There’s something we kept drilling out a drill. And then one day your husband walked by literally behind you and said, she’s a vegan because he has no interest in the subject.

I said, did that happen two years ago? She said, yes, let’s look at your genes. And that was the thing she did to herself that was causing this heavy inflammatory load to her body because she couldn’t break this stuff down. A lot of the foods that you end up bleeding on. Carb heavy because there, the options get lower and her starch response and insulin response was vulnerable, [00:13:00] which we can look at genetically.

We know how she turns starch into glucose and carbs into glucose and how he then triggers an insulin response. That’s why she felt horrible all the time. She was constantly in this car crash. That was our new reality. That is just, I think so insightful for people, especially, I love your line of questioning and we’re very, like-minded it’s like, what did you change?

And let’s just really drill down into, and I love this because we’re really helping people connect. My whole ethos is empowering people with education and helping them really connect back to their bodies and their symptoms. Yeah. You remind me of another example where you talk about change. This is one of the first things that opened my eyes.

When we were very early in our research, there was a, one of my good friends, sons, a young boy who at the time, I think it was nine or 10 crazy Exuma. Right. And it resonated with me because I also had crazy Exuma, which I no longer have. Right. So, um, and at that time I still had it cause we were still just breaking the door on the research.

We didn’t really know what the. So when we look at genetics, we’re not [00:14:00] looking for the Exuma gene, right. We’re looking for, what’s not working. And then how does that point to Exuma the glutathione pathway, which is your key detox pathway it’s possible to have, what’s called a copy number variation. It’s a particular type of gene variant, which means if your genes are your human instruction manual telling yourselves what to do, that’s literally what they are.

Usually you look for. What’s called a snip. It’s a spelling mistake. So you see the T is a seed. Typical thing you’ll see on genetic websites. Right. And then, so the, there is T H E R instead of T H I R. So it has a different meaning. Imagine if an entire page was missing, how would you understand that book?

That’s called a copy number variation, and this is possible in certain genes, including your detox pathway, which is so important. So our glutathione pathway, it’s literally like this kid who was nine years old. He didn’t even have. Forget about what version or how well he didn’t even do that process.

Meanwhile, you look at his Toronto lifestyle of chemicals, pesticides, and law, [00:15:00] and his father has a beautiful house with his father’s. Uh, I think he’s a dentist and they have a beautiful house, perfectly manicured, which requires a lot of chemicals and pesticides. They have all this nice furniture and paint and all that.

It was making him sick. So the thing that we got down to, to go back to what you reminded me of, it was, what did you change? The thing he changed was he got a new mattress and his father being a dentist said, you’re crazy. That has nothing to do with healthcare. And I told him, why don’t you look up what the laws are in Ontario?

For a non-organic mattress, they require a fire retardant, which is a potent toxin. And your son is lying on that thing for seven or eight hours, sometimes nine hours at a time, breathing that in with zero ability to detoxify and he doesn’t have the gene. And you wonder why he’s displaying an inflammatory signal.

This skin is screaming. That’s what eczema is that there’s something wrong inside and it’s so bad that your skin is now inflamed. So all we did well, there’s two things we did. We [00:16:00] first switched them out for an organic mattress. That was the father’s job, but we found a store here that did that. And then we supplemented him with the precursors to glutathione so that they could just go to work right away.

Exuma has gone. Right. So this kid who would have been taking steroids and creams for his late teens, So pressing it, and then you put the cream here and it just pops up somewhere else. You know who I know, who knows what other inflammatory diseases that would have led to because the inflammation didn’t go down.

He’s now a disease-free, he didn’t have a problem. He was reacting to chemicals. What happens if you breathe in fire chemicals that retardants chemicals like eight hours at a time when you can’t get there, you know, that’s what. Oh, my goodness. Well, that is so practical. And I, you know, I talked to Dr. Tom, O’Brien about this as well.

You know, the things that are in our homes, like when you get a new couch and the things that, uh, you know, not to mention, I know people use them, but I don’t understand why like the cleaning products and the makeup that are just full of all of these xenoestrogens and with chemicals and pesticides. So it’s heartbreaking to me to know that [00:17:00] they’re even legal in the world, any.

It is crazy. There are certain countries that make certain things illegal north America has about the worst of it. Europe is, I don’t know what the hell, what it’s like in Australia. Europe has much more stringent policies around this type of stuff. But you know, when you talk about, you know, Xeno, estrogens and all the hormone disruptors, I can tell you how many women we’ve had to coach through the reason you have breast cancer.

Isn’t because of the bracket, right? It didn’t cause breast cancer. It’s because your estrogen. And possibly also estrogen dominant, which means you’re producing a lot of this toxic estrogen. That may be the profile. And guess what? Just like this young boy, you don’t detox it that well, you’re supposed to, but you don’t.

And then you wonder why do men, well, I’m sorry, I should say women get breast cancer around the time of menopause for the most part. Not always, but for the most part, because that’s, when you no longer have a menstrual cycle to clear it and your body is worried about all this toxicity. And so it goes and stores it in fat to keep it away from the organ and your vasculature, your.

Right. And where do [00:18:00] women have breasts? I, sorry, who would rest fact is in the breasts and all those glands that were never designed to deal with, you know, all this toxic insults causing inflammation, causing something that eventually becomes breast cancer. The main point was what you first said, even with all that most women don’t get.

It’s the woman who was on birth control pill for 10 years. It’s a woman that goes on hormone replacement therapy without knowing her genetic profile and what she’s turning it into. It’s a woman that uses every cleaning chemical every day and, you know, hand sanitizer every five minutes and putting the chemicals into her body that she converts as hormone disruptors into estrogen.

So that toxic pot of estrogen is being fired with more estrogen. And then it, your net result is just too much toxicity. And that’s the woman who got. And, and just for those women that are sitting there at home, you know, thinking, oh my goodness, I use those. And I do that. I always just say, you know, wherever you’re at, you know, these tiny changes can make the world of difference.

And so it’s okay that some people are. On a [00:19:00] journey that is further along than, than you, you know, it’s okay that some people know that going in and for its owner, like, you know, you can sweat the toxins out and that sort of thing. And it’s okay if you know, yesterday you were buying, GFN all these cleaners because it’s just one foot in front of the other.

And it’s just these changes that can make the biggest difference to your body, which, you know, could be silently suffering. If you don’t know. Yeah, for sure. And I would say the area in those 7,000 people we studied, I mean, we’ve done thousands of customers, but the particular people that we studied, the worst of it was female or one health.

It’s just so underserved, medically it’s, you know, women are told, well, you’re supposed to have problems with your hormones. That’s what being a woman is, right. It’s absolutely not true if you understood my niece. Who’s 13 years old now, you know, she had crazy anxiety issues used to literally pass out right.

Weight, fluctuation issues. So she was actually being prescribed an anxiety pill. [00:20:00] Right. For what looked like anxiety. Let me tell you what actually happened. So we’ll dive into the snow. So she actually collapsed on the floor a couple of times, and my mother called me, she, my mother and my sister and my niece lived together.

So my mother called me and said, you got to get over. You got to help. Right? So I’d call my pediatrician friend, you know, gut reaction. And he said, it sounds like an anxiety attack. She can’t breathe. She’s, you know, stressed or whatever. So I kept asking, you know, the usual suspects, what is it as a boy problem?

Is it bullying? Is it social media? Like what’s going on? And she had no clue. She didn’t know what was going. So what was actually going on once I kind of realized I have her DNA, why am I not starting there? I looked at her hormone profile. So in the circadian rhythm of the menstrual cycle, it’s not a flat line of hormones.

It’s, you know, you’ve got estrogen and then testosterone, it’s like up and down, up and down like six or seven times. Right? So in the very beginning is when you have your lowest level of hormones, because he just finished getting rid of. Right. So now the new cycle is starting. She did that to even more exaggerated degree because she has what we call androgen dominant.

So she doesn’t [00:21:00] produce enough estrogen and you produce a lot of androgens or testosterone. And so her valley is much deeper. So that was one. But why didn’t this problem happen before it happened three months in a row, December, 2020, right. Why because she was being homeschooled because of COVID. And so she had zero vitamin D.

She didn’t go outside for four months. Wow. Toronto had the worst lockdown in the world, by the way. I know I wasn’t Australia wasn’t the best, but Toronto had the world’s longest and worst locked down. So she literally did not go outside for four months. We already have a long winter in Toronto. So she got literally zero vitamin D the vitamin D pathway.

Typically, when you go to a doctor, they’ll draw some blood and tell you your vitamin D looks good or not. Yeah. That’s step one of three, genetically genetically. There’s a gene that will draw vitamin D from the sun and from food and put it in your blood. There’s another gene that will then transport it to the cell where it’s actually used.

There’s another gene that will then bind it and connect it. So there’s three steps and no other micronutrient is this complex. Vitamin D is because you can overdose. You can. It’s the only [00:22:00] one that you can have too much and it’s so easily. From the sun. Right? So her pathway was horrible all the way through.

She didn’t metabolize it. She didn’t transport and she didn’t bind it. So even the little bit of vitamin D she got from food wasn’t enough. The third thing is neurochemically like me. She doesn’t bind dopamine very well, so it’s very hard for her to experience. Right. So it’s a family trade for us. We have what’s called warrior genetics.

Our ancestors used to fight a lot. Right? So this drive it, that’s one of three things that plus our sort of noradrenaline response, which creates a drive. So if she’s not being. She’s depressed, right? Because she needs that extra head more than a typical person. So you had the perfect storm of that day of the month is the worst day for her behavior because of that farm one, screw up that deep valley.

The thing that she’s going to express as is like anxiety and depression because of our neurochemicals. And it happened then because the perfect [00:23:00] storm of she also was getting zero vitamin D, right. Vitamin D of the 22,000 genes in your body. 2000 required to vitamin D to function. So literally 10% of your human biochemistry dependent on this one thing.

And you wonder why she went preserved, right? The whole body or the whole system, all the systems are failing. So the prescription was, she has anxiety. She needs this. That was literally the next step. The solution was high dose vitamin D. We gave her 10,000. I knew in the beginning of her cycle, 5,000 and the rest of the week, and then 2000 maintenance L-theanine to boost her dopamine levels so that she can experience pleasure.

And we thought if that didn’t work, we would have given her a birth control pill to mitigate the hormone balance. We didn’t need to do that. So just the vitamin D and the Althea Nene, she has not had the problem since it’s been two years. Wow. Yeah, I love that story on so many levels. Thank you for sharing, you know, personal stories like that and being so vulnerable because it really can help so many of us.

And what you did then was this deep [00:24:00] investigation because anxiety, you know, you’re very fortunate to have that genetic profile on hand, but you know, it could have also been coming from dysbiosis in the gut. So, you know, I love that. And I always encourage people to, you know, we are responsible for our own health.

So it’s great to get the vitamin D marker from the blood chemistry, from your primary care physician. But then we need to dig deeper than that because often, you know, your vitamin D might be like, I don’t know, 51 when the range is 50 to a hundred. So it’s like,

we are in all different. Yeah, right. We’re not, you know, 8 billion different people. We do fit in profiles. Right? So for example, when it comes to hormone health, we did not know we were going to figure this out, but we realized that women always fit into one of six buckets. But now that we’ve done enough profiles, we’ve learned, and that allows us to scale the healing because now we know we only need to fix it.

One of six. Right. So, [00:25:00] but understand it’s still one of six ways. It’s not one size fits all. It’s not trial and error. Let me just keep trying, when everybody doesn’t tell it works. Why don’t you just read your instruction manual and do what you’re supposed to do and be optimal on step one? Like the right decision in the first decision.

Yeah. What are your, what’s your top three things that you do personally to feel better? So anytime I ask anyone else, that question, the first thing, especially in the last year, everybody talks about us. Which is why at 10:00 PM, I’m wearing these glasses. I don’t wear glasses by the way. Here’s what I look like.

Right. So I have a sleep routine for a couple of reasons. So I didn’t start struggling with sleep. I’m 42 years old until my sort of early thirties. And then it got worse, you know, my late thirties and what I’ve learned genetically again, from studying people, this is typically what I have happened. So there’s three reasons you can’t sleep.

And sorry, I’ll answer your question too. About three things [00:26:00] that I think we should do, but quickly. Can’t fall asleep. Can’t stay asleep, sleep through the night, but I still wake up feeling like garbage. Those are three very different genetics. One. The first one can fall asleep is your circadian rhythm.

Your clock is broken. There’s genes that can determine how well your clock functions does your body know what time of day. When you actually go to sleep, does your body think has nap time or sleep time? That’s genetically determinable. And if you don’t do that well, there’s very simple things you can do to fix that, including what I’m doing here, right?

With the blue light blocking, I fall asleep, but I can’t stay asleep. That’s serotonin. So melatonin is a hormone that puts you to sleep. Serotonin is a hormone that wakes you up and it’s supposed to be triggered by that first summer. Coming through the window, through your eyelids, telling you time to get up.

And that stimulation triggers that serotonin production wake you up, wake you up, wake you up. If you’re like me and you don’t have a good genetic relationship with serotonin. Then after the first half of the cycle where your body knows it’s sleep time. And the second half, [00:27:00] it doesn’t know when that happens to be.

The light, this will trigger. That’s the warning, but then any stimulus will trigger too hot, too cold. I’ll be pulling on the blanket, weird smell, weird noise, dog barking, anything that happens in that second half, your body starts to produce the serotonin and wake you up. So I never used to sleep properly.

The second half I fixed that. Now I don’t know what to do with it. I know I could talk about this alone for an hour. Right? And then the third one is, you know, I wake up feeling like garbage, even though I slept, it’s all detox, your body recovers in your sleep. If you’re not doing a good job. Oxidation detox, Bluetooth, ionization, methylation, all these functions that are cleaning your system, then you’re overloaded and can do what you’re supposed to do in your sleep.

And you wake up feeling unrested. So anyways, sleep is a big one. And what seems so complex and trial and error and hard to do. Genetically is very easy to fix. I’ve done it for myself. That’s one second, most impactful thing for me is tiny, tiny changes in the way. All right. I’m still making changes. I’m still pushing [00:28:00] myself.

You get to the point where the reward of the change in what you do consistently feels better than the bad habits, right? Once you get to that point, it’s permanent. And then you can do the next thing. And the next thing, and the next thing right now, I struggle with a sweet tooth. Right. It’s a problem. I controlling it.

I don’t do much of it, but I still have that feeling. So now I, instead of fighting it, I just give myself the sensation with things that have no insulin response or sugar Stevia route. Right. I’ll give myself the satisfaction. So I’m not stressed out and whatever. So those tiny habits, when it comes to your food, learn what your goal is and make it a one year.

Right change one thing a week and you will feel so good because you can actually hit the target and achieve it and it’ll stick. And when things stick, you feel good. It’s a reward, as opposed to the pleasure, because remember dopamine powers, both dopamine powers, pleasure and reward. So if you were placed to pleasure with reward, you’ll get the same level of satisfaction and you don’t need the pleasure anymore.

Right? Third thing [00:29:00] I would say is, and again, this is just from my own personal thinking is starting young, which means focusing on your key. You know, most of my day when I’m with the kids is spent thinking of them through the genetic lens now. Right. And I’ve learned that when it comes to prevention, optimal health longevity, the earlier you start the better off you’re going to be.

Yeah. Well, in all these conversations, you hear, you know, any webinar or any YouTube video, we watch whatever we’re not talking about. Yeah, unless it’s a child problem, right. Autism, whatever. And we can talk about autism for an hour. If we want it to all this stuff we’re doing to optimize ourselves, we should also be doing for our kids that makes it a culture of the home.

And it makes it so much easier for those habits to stick. If mama’s the only one that’s not eating cookies, that’s impossible because the kids don’t want to cook. Right. If you involve them in the change for their own benefit, which is what I’m trying to do here slowly, slowly, slowly, it becomes the culture.

And when you leave the [00:30:00] house or they go somewhere else or they go to grandma or whatever, they take that culture. I couldn’t agree more because I’m so passionate about the children for the future. We were just talking in another meeting this morning about our children, my son, he’s 10 years old. And I guarantee he’ll be a professional football player because he is doing all these things now that just really give him the edge.

We’ve rebuilt his gut. We rebuild his brain, you know, he’s having the right type of collagen to support his muscles and all these things that my kids just think totally normal. We live in an anti-inflammatory anti toxic household. I’m the same as any other busy mom, I’ve just made one small step at a time.

And I’ve got a very, very, very Peaky Asia. And, you know, my son has not been the easiest. So I want to make sure that busy households know that there is hope and that if you just take a measured approach with a trusted guide and a simple plan, it can just make it so much easier to, for you to have that support by yourself.

Yeah, [00:31:00] simplicity makes things easy. So the thing you said about a simple plan start there. It doesn’t need to be everything like you purge the pantry and you’re completely shift. It’s not going to stick. Right? One thing at a time. What does breakfast look like? Right. How do you replace the ice cream in the fridge with maybe something that’s flavored by Monkfruit right.

One step at a time. Let their palettes, including your own change over time. They won’t want the. After a while when I eat, you know, I was at an event this weekend, a kid’s birthday party. And just like, you always see there’s pizza and chocolate and cookies and chips, right? That’s the standard kid’s party.

So I made the mistake of taking a bite of a piece of chocolate thinking I’m just going to have a tiny bite, just to look polite. It felt disgusting in my mum, I haven’t done enough. There was a sour flavor. That guy didn’t even know how to explain it, but it was so potent the flavor now that I dark chocolate, which is real.

Right. I couldn’t handle it. So just like that, your children’s pallets will also shift, but you don’t make the change, their [00:32:00] pallets going to be stuck to something that they shouldn’t be doing. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the talk that we have at home is 95%, so I don’t even consider it. Completely whole food, as far as I’m concerned.

And my kids definitely ate it for breakfast. And, you know, I think I’m like, go fuel off that quick. Yeah. You know, take some chocolate, you got to run a 1500 meter race today. So deprivation doesn’t work. Like we probably most sweet what I consider a sweet treat than anyone else in my street, but there’s no sugar and it hasn’t been any sugar or flour in my house for many years.

I was thinking about, oh, sorry. I was just going to say for your sweet tooth at night. Another thing that I think we forget about is like tea, like licorice tea is so sweet, so delicious. That’s another thing to go along with our whole food ice cream, which is, I dunno if you have powder over there, but it’s just one of those ice creams made of coconut milk and you know, no nasties, but it’s absolutely delicious.

And to me it’s so sweet. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And that’s the other thing is when people. [00:33:00] Ask us, what should we work on? We usually talk about sleep and food because you’re going to do those things anyway. Right? You’re going to sleep every day and you’re going to eat anyway. So you might as well eat the right thing.

If you’re going to eat something sweet, then eat the right sweet thing. That actually is a source of nutrition. So nutrition and it’s, it is very possible. We just don’t think of it that way. I told them, we believe that sweet is a treat, right? It is pleasure. It can actually be a source of fuel, a nutrition of brain, power of hormone, power of whatever you want.

You just have to find the right thing. Right. So understand that every time you eat something, you are making the choice to either hurt yourself or heal yourself. Literally right. And even possibly optimize yourself. Like I actually improve things by what you’ve eaten. Right. Simple, simple things. You can do that you’re going to eat anyway.

You might as well do it. Right. And I think as well, just the, I mean, I’m very famous for food swaps, you know, like a chicken snips or, but just make it [00:34:00] with real. Process way and helping people to understand how quick and easy that convey for breakfast. This morning, we were eating, I call it my hormone balancing salted caramel slice it’s made with coconut hemp seeds and some Mecho dates and some colleges.

That’s how amazing. And I’m now I’m going to be going to the pantry and grazing a little bit because you gotta be willing to go, uh, yeah, the recipes, but Instagrams, but people should be, you know, people need to sort of take this by the horns and realize exactly what you said. Well, we put in out temple in our body, the only body that we have right now in this human existence and, you know, make it work for you and not against you because she, if I have a question on dopamine, you touched on it earlier, but I really want to make sure we get to it before I let you go to bed because I do see it.

Yeah. You know, I think it’s interesting for a couple of reasons. I see a huge difference between my son and my daughter. My son is 10, my daughter’s seven, and [00:35:00] my daughter is just very happy playing with adults, playing with things, but no real interesting devices. My son is there needing, needing the games, needing to like tap caseloads rewarding, get that, buy that thing, you know, there’s always after.

Present the next gift, the next thing. And so for me, I’ve got the kids at home to do their genetic profiles. I absolutely can’t wait to get your reports for them. And I can almost anticipate what they’re going to say, but can we talk about dopamine and quick and easy tips that you would recommend to.

That dopamine, instead of having something that is unsupportive. Cause I think there are a lot of young boys that are like my son. Yep. And I would say that I’m going to guess that it’s more to do with this comped enzyme, that it is the dopamine itself. Just the basic, just the way you described it, because here’s what that pathway looks like.

Pleasure or reward is experienced. Built. Bromine is deployed in a gene called DRD to [00:36:00] determines how dense your receptor. So how much do you experience to what degree do you experience? Right then there’s a gene called Mao, which breaks the dopamine down to get you back to normal. And then current, this protein comes along and gets rid of that metabolite.

Right? So that’s what the process looks like. Some people have like myself, the absolute minimum density of receptors. And it’s super fast Mao and a super fast comp. So not only did I not get to feel it the way you or somebody else felt, but it also didn’t last long. That’s two things, the feeling which in the pleasure or reward that was needed, but also the desire to go back to it, which is the addictive tendency, because it didn’t last long enough.

Right. It wasn’t immersive enough for me. So that profile it’s really three options, depression. Cause I. Addiction. Cause I go down the pleasure route and I feel that pleasure because my accomplice will fast. I need more and more and more and more or achievement, which is I fought, I [00:37:00] found her award and then I did something tomorrow and it’s not as I need more at a whatever risk I took today is not enough for tomorrow.

Right. I have had. And why is this so important? Because you hear this all the time, your genetics are not your legacy, right? Your genetics tell you how in this context, your brain works, but then the context of your body and where you are, and what you’re doing will determine the outcome. When I was young, growing up in poverty and my friend brought me a birthday present that I smoked, I got addicted, right.

Because I didn’t experience pleasure. We didn’t have anything at home. Like it was really bad in terms of economically it was bad. Right. Then. I went into achievement mode because my father passed away. He was sick. I had to take care of the family. I started working and I worked and worked and worked, and I was wired to work like that.

I was wired to just build and build and build. Then I realized, you know what I’m doing? Okay. I can probably take a break and spend time with a family. And I got depressed because I wasn’t fueling the pleasure or the reward. It was just different. Right. So I had to create a structure where [00:38:00] I’m constantly doing good things and whether it’s charity work, family, whatever I need to be pursuing and doing right now, look at the opposite.

If you have the absolute maximum density of dopamine receptors and you have a very slow metabolism path that doesn’t really work that well in the clump, doesn’t clear that quickly. You’re the person for whom it’s so easy to experience pleasure because your dopamine receptors are high and it lasts way to.

Right. So outwardly in most contexts, you’re going to appear to be like a flake. I don’t care. I’m not interested. We had a meeting, we talked about 10 things. I did one, I didn’t do the other nine are not going to start them, you know? But the thing that you actually get that additional wow factor from you’re going to be.

And you’re going to lost in it. Cause it’s so hard for you to experience that additional wow. Factor that when you do and because your calmness will slow, you get stuck. So you end up bingeing. So this is not the addict who like me needs to do it every day on time or I’m frustrated. Right? I need to work out on schedule.

I [00:39:00] get upset. Literally. I get frustrated. This is the person for the day. They decide to work out they’re at the gym every day for a week, maybe twice a day, and then something else comes along and it’s. Right. So when you understand this about yourself, now, imagine in our business, the co-founders me and a guy named Horace had these two profiles that I was talking about.

For the first year, there was so much friction. I kept saying, we do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, I was like, you didn’t even start. He’s like, I did it. Right. And then he’s saying, we need to do it like this. I was like, no, we don’t need to do that much. So where I was about quantity, he was about quality and we couldn’t see each other’s thinking or perspective.

We literally saw the world in completely different. Right now that we know that we are optimal partners because we know what half of the each need to work on and we compliment each other. So now imagine when you’re disciplining your children and you have a one size fits all approach and your child is wired like [00:40:00] me or wired like him disappointment.

When it comes to like my oldest son, by the way, is wired like hearts. And I recognize the traits did as genetic tests. Confirmed exactly what I thought. So the way he struggled with his homework before he doesn’t struggle anymore, because we realize he’s not a generalist, he’s a specialist. He’s going to do what he likes really, really well.

And the rest may not ever start. And we need to accept that that’s his power, his super power, as he can do a better job on what he’s good at, but on the rest of the stuff he needs help with. And that’s one simple pathway. There’s many, many, you know, neurochemical pathways. We can talk loud and really start to paint the picture of how you think and how you behave.

And if I have your DNA, I don’t ever need to talk to you. And I know everything about your personality. I can tell you everything about how you behave. Do you procrastinate, do experience burnout easier, you know, are you stressed out all the time? ADHD? It’s all wired. You. I love that so much. It just, so I would love parents listening to think about [00:41:00] how they can use this critical information, you know, which is super progressive.

You’re just incredible to help them be better. Parents because they understand our perfect children and we can give them a better life and a better experience and more joy and support them better. So Kashif, you are such a, an achiever, like you said, and that matches that how to serve your genetic profile.

What events are you embarking on now? Well, my belief, so I don’t come from the industry. Right. I literally stumbled upon it because I was sick myself and so many functional medicine stories start this way. You seek it out, you hail yourself and then you want to teach others and the people around, you want to know how and why, and what’s going, you know, so for me, I need to normalize.

I need the world to know that there’s this thing inside you, that’s already telling you what to do, but the tools we have have been the [00:42:00] wrong tools. We have all this research on genetic conditions. And what does this gene mean? And what does that do you meet with the body? Doesn’t work that way. The body is not 22,000 independent genes.

Right. It’s processes. And we already understand all those systems and processes. We just now need to map the genes as per those call it flow charts. So we already know about, right. So I decided to take sort of a leap and say, we need to put a book out there. Right. So I went to this guy that I knew from a previous deal I’d worked on in my previous life prior to DNA.

He’s a sort of Hollywood agent. I didn’t know what else to do. And I said, can you please help me with this? Because I have a great story that everyone needs to know. I’m not talking about my personal story. I’m talking about how you can unlock your genome and use it to heal yourself. Everyone needs to know that we got rejected by every single publisher in the health and wellness space, right?

They said, you’re not a doctor. You’re not a scientist. You’re a businessman. Who are you to write a book about this topic? So I then being who I am genetically called the publishers myself. And within three days [00:43:00] at three hours. And we now have a book coming out next fall to tell everybody this story, in terms of diet, in terms of hormones, in terms of how you help your kids in terms of your brain and anxiety, you know, when it comes to detox with Sudan, to your question about like, what’s next and what are we looking forward to?

I am very, very excited about being able to normalize and share with the world that there’s a thing inside you. That can tell you exactly what to do about every health and wellness decision you need to make for you, your family, your kids, everything. It just was never properly decoded. It wasn’t used properly.

The tool was kind of broken the tools that we use to decode it. Now it’s good. Now it’s usable. So that for me is exciting. So I’m trying to spend a lot more time. We have an amazing team. That’s helping people with the testing side and I’m trying to focus on. Getting the word out there so that people know there’s something they can do.

There’s so many people, autoimmune conditions, Exuma, Lyme disease, you know, fibromyalgia, they’re just stuck and none of them need to be stopped. But it’s just so awesome. I’m excited. I didn’t know that about your book and the [00:44:00] story’s beautiful. So yeah, it just shows you what you can do when you really believe in yourself, you know, and a big fan.

I know you think this as well, you know, our thoughts create our reality, get what we think, whether we like it or not. So you’re just a great living example of that. And, you know, I love that you can just like in my clinic, we can work with your results and then create. Uh, protocol based on that and other investigative assessments that we can do.

So for anyone out there, cause sheaf has very, very generously given everybody a $50 off their tests. So if you go to the DNA company.com/jackie, you’ll get that $50 off. And we’ll pop that in the show notes as well. And we obviously work with the tests in our clinic as part of our program. So just super excited for you cause chief, your creation.

And also, I think what’s really important for people to know is you only do this test once, which is so good, because a lot of the assessment methods that we run a frustrating point, they [00:45:00] yield so much information, blood chemistry in our stool test, but they are a moment in time. So I love that your offer software and that’s why we built.

That’s. Another thing that we realized was broken in genetics is all these paper reports. So we built the. Platform, it kind of looks like Netflix when you log into it, but it’s all these tiles that you can click at a very easy to use. And that way we can keep improving it. So you bought this one thing every four or five months, you keep logging in and you’re learning something new, you know, as we keep researching and learning, we keep improving it.

So it’s almost like a lifetime membership for the cost of a test. And we just keep. I love it. I love everything you’re doing and I can’t wait to, to get my hands on your book. We really appreciate your time. And coming on the show today, I want to get you off to bed so we don’t get so excited that you’ve got to get to sleep.

So thank you so much for coming on the show today, and I will speak to you very soon. No, it was a pleasure. You were amazing. Thank you. If you made it to the end of this episode, celebrate yourself [00:46:00] because it means you are truly dedicated to feeling better in your health, in your career, in your relationships.

And I am so proud of you and if you want more. I feel better now. So tuning every Monday for new episodes and join our community on Instagram at Jackie Bowker for all the behind the scenes action and malls. Hey, why don’t you sign up for a chance to have your question answered @feelbetterinstitute.com/Sign up. That’s feel better. institute.com/sign up. But most of all, police keep reaching to feel better because the world needs you to feel good. So you can share that very special gift that only you have. So with that said, see you soon here’s to feeling better now bye-bye