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These days, there are a variety of companies offering DNA testing so you can learn about your genealogy, origins, and genetic makeup. Chances are you’ve already used one of them, like 23andMe or Ancestry.com.

There’s even more you can do with these services, though.

Poke around online and you’ll find quite a few self-styled experts who are eager to review your raw DNA data and provide you with very specific lifestyle recommendations that will purportedly maximize your health, performance, and well-being, including specific foods to eat and avoid, exercise programs to follow, supplements to take, and more.

On the other hand, you’ll also find plenty of credentialed guys and gals saying that such DNA-based plans are little more than pseudoscientific scams that won’t have any meaningful impact on your life beyond your wallet.

As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and that’s what Dr. Anthony Jay and I discuss in today’s episode.

And to make it more interesting, I sent Dr. Jay my raw data from Ancestry before the episode so he could not only explain the ins and outs of genetic testing and how our DNA can affect our sleep, mood, body composition, risk of disease and dysfunction, and more, but also demonstrate what a solid, science-based DNA consultation looks like.

In case you’re not familiar with Dr. Jay, he’s a scientist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota who earned his Ph.D in Biochemistry from Boston University School of Medicine and provides genetic consulting to everyone from professional athletes to special forces soldiers and everyday gymgoers and everybody in between.

Dr. Jay’s also the author of the book Estrogeneration, which is all about a class of estrogen-like chemicals that are prevalent in our society and contributing to many different widespread health problems, including weight-gain, depression, infertility and many others.

(And if you want to learn more about that, check out the previous interview I did with Dr. Jay on it!)

So, if you want to learn more about how to use your unique genetic blueprint to live a longer, healthier, and happier life, this episode is for you.

Time Stamps:

7:54 – How does atrazine affect humans?

14:26 – What is a snip?

29:43 – What are the five categories of genes? 

37:24 – How do our genes affect stress, anxiety, and caffeine metabolism?   

48:06 – What is HRV and is a higher HRV better? 

50:51 – How does the blue light gene affect our sleep? 

58:39 – How do our genes affect obesity? 

59:55 – What is brown fat and white fat?  

1:09:20 – Which genes increase your risk for leaky gut? 

1:23:07 – How do our genes determine our muscle types? 

1:26:46 – Which genes determine how weak or strong our joints are? 

1:31:49 – Which genes determine if you’re a gout risk? 

1:37:55 – Where can people find you and your work? 

1:38:56 – Have you found commonalities in the genes of professional athletes? 

Mentioned on The Show: 

Shop Legion supplements here

My interview with Dr. Jay on artificial estrogens

AJ Consulting Company

What did you think of this episode? Have anything else to share? Let me know in the comments below!

Transcript:

Mike: Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre workout and post workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more.

More. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order and it’ll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you’re not, it’ll ship free if your order is over a hundred dollars.

So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Hello and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I am your gracious host, Mike Matthews, and DNA. testing which I’m sure you have heard about.

These days there are quite a few companies that offer it so you can learn about your genealogy, your origins, your genetic makeup, and chances are you’ve used one of them like 23andMe or Ancestry. com. I myself have done both. And there’s more that you can do with those services though. If you poke around on the interwebs, you’ll find quite a few self styled experts who are eager to review your raw DNA data, which you can get from 23andMe and Ancestry.

com. And then provide you with very specific lifestyle recommendations that will purportedly maximize your health and performance and being, including eating specific foods and avoiding others, exercising in very specific ways, taking very specific supplements and so forth. Now, on the other hand, you will also find quite a few Credentialed guys and gals who say that such DNA based plans are little more than pseudoscientific scams that will not have any meaningful impact on your life beyond maybe your wallet and As is often the case with these things, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and that’s what Dr.

Anthony J and I talk about in today’s episode. And not only that, but just to make the discussion more interesting, I sent Dr. J my raw DNA data from Ancestry before we spoke, so he could not only explain the ins and outs of genetic testing and how our DNA can affect our sleep, but also our mood, our body composition, our risk of disease and dysfunction, and more, but also demonstrate what a solid science based DNA consultation looks like.

And in case you are not familiar with Dr. J, he has been on the podcast before, and he’s a scientist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota who earned his PhD in biochemistry from Boston University School of medicine and he also provides genetic consulting to everyone from professional athletes to special forces soldiers and everyday gym goers and everybody in between.

Dr. J is also the author of the book Estrogeneration which is all about a Class of estrogen like chemicals that are prevalent in our society today and contributing to many different widespread health problems, including weight gain, depression, infertility, and many others. And if you want to learn more about that, then check out the previous interview I did with Dr.

  1. It was A couple of years ago, two, three years ago or so. So you’re gonna have to go a bit back in the podcast feed. But if you just search for Anthony J, it should pop up. So anyway, if you want to learn more about how to use your genetic blueprint, your unique DNA fingerprints, so to speak, to live a longer, healthier, and happier life, this episode’s for you.

Dr. Anthony Jay has returned to my podcast. Welcome, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s been a while. Our last discussion was on estrogen mimicking chemicals, which was interesting. Anybody listening who’s heard about these chemicals should go listen to it. It was probably over a year ago, right? So you have to go a bit back in the feed, but if you go far enough back and search for Anthony Jay, you’ll find it.

And you also have a book on the topic as well, 

Anthony: right? Exactly. Yeah. And it seems to be catching on now, more and more, I just gave a talk for the special forces for the military. I had to sign paperwork and say, I’m, I’m not going to reveal the location and I’m not going to publicize it on social media, but the talk has passed now.

So I can at least say that I gave this talk and they’re picking up on the issues with artificial estrogens and. DNA consulting and, these genetic insights that you can get, which of course, we’re planning to talk about today. Yeah. We can thank Alex 

Mike: Jones in part for, making us aware that the frogs are going gay.

And I’ve heard that so many times, which actually funny enough, that actually is 

Anthony: an. What’s happening? That was just a mainstream news story, Nat Geo, like National Geography Magazine, which, they’re pretty cautious with their science. They’re not too over the top, obviously. And they picked up on the story recently.

And you can literally change male frogs into females. The males will start mating with the previously males. The chemical I remember when, again, when Alex Jones was talking about it was astrazine, right? Atrazine, yep, exactly. Atrazine yeah, which is still legal in America and it’s the second most used herbicide in North America and that’s totally illegal in Europe, like they don’t allow any of it.

And here’s the crazy thing, right? We could go on this rabbit hole forever because I wrote a book on it, but I can’t resist. 3, 000 nanograms per liter is allowed. In our drinking water with atrazine 3000. And if you put a frog in 200 nanograms per liter of atrazine, it turns a male into a female. Obviously we’re not big frogs.

Mike: So how does that again, I know this was already discussed in our previous discussion, but I don’t remember the specifics and I’m sure some people listening are now wondering how does that translate to human exposure? What are your thoughts 

Anthony: on that? It lowers testosterone for sure. It has feminizing effects, but yeah, it’s hard because you can’t do a real controlled experiment.

You don’t want to dose somebody with atrazine. And so you just, you’re left with just doing epidemiology, just looking at people’s urine and how much they’re pissing out and trying to figure out from there what kind of health impacts it has. But in mice and other mammals, there’s a lot of issues.

You see just the usual issues that you see with other artificial estrogens that people could go into the book, the estrogeneration book and learn about. That’s the name of the book for anybody who wants to learn more about 

Mike: this estrogeneration. All right, let’s pivot now to today’s discussion, which is DNA research, DNA optimization.

And I’ll just preface the discussion with, I don’t know much about this. I haven’t looked into much of the research myself, but what I’ve heard Is from smart people who know a lot more about it than I do is that there is a lot of good science behind the associations between certain genes and increased or decreased risks of certain conditions or just inherent advantages, physiological advantages and disadvantages, but where it can get into the realm of sorcery is.

When that information is being used to make specific recommendations as to dietary methods or optimizations or exercise recommendations or supplementation. And that’s about it. That’s about all I know about the topic, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on because I thought I first and foremost wanted to learn more about this myself.

Anthony: Yeah, it’s completely true. There’s a lot of just cowboys out there basically taking people’s DNA and telling them this is exactly how many, what your macros should be. And this is exactly the supplements you should be taking. And it’s pretty wacky. Some people are just making stuff up, which kind of ruins it for everybody else.

But then there’s legitimate people out there doing it. And of course I’m trying to stay on the cutting edge. And I think it requires a biochemistry background to really get into it because you have to understand, what these genes do. Yeah. If you find a genetic flaw, like the best example, and you don’t have this genetic issue, some people have an inability or a decreased conversion of beta carotene to retinol, like they have an enzyme, they can’t do that.

So like you get beta carotene from carrots, right? That’s where carotene got its name. And it’s the orange color. And that’s hugely important for your eyesight, of course, because it gets converted to retinol, which is named after the retinols, right? In your eyes. But if your body’s not converting that, Then you’re not getting it from carrots.

You’re not getting it from plants. Plants don’t make retinol. So if you’re a vegan or a vegetarian and you have a 70 percent reduced conversion of beta carotene to retinol, which a lot of people have, and that’s just a genetic snip, then you can’t try and get your retinol from plants. You have to get it from animals.

That’s the only way to get retinol. You know what I mean? So if you understand that, or you can supplement with it, obviously, yeah, you can supplement it. But the supplements come from animal sources. Excuse me. Retinol is basically found in the liver by, it’s not even enough to just eat meat if you’ve got that issue.

But if you don’t know about that, number one, and then if you’re a vegan or vegetarian, like I say, there’s a real risk. And people think of retinol just purely in the eyes, but it’s hugely important for your immune system and your immune function. Some of these people are getting sick all the time.

And that’s a great example of a gene that they should be looking at. And if you don’t understand how the gene works and the conversion of beta carotene to retinol, you can you don’t know what you’re talking about if you don’t understand the mechanisms of how a lot of these genes work.

Yeah, that’s 

Mike: something that you would want to take into account before making the decision to switch, let’s say, from an omnivorous to a vegan or vegetarian diet. Because if you’re looking to go vegan, What can you do? 

Anthony: Yeah, you definitely have to supplement retinol or you could take a shit ton of beta carotene.

Mike: Yeah, similar issue with omega threes, right? With ALA and the conversion process is so inefficient that yeah, you probably can get to sufficiency, but you better be ready to be drinking a lot of oil and eating a lot of nuts every day. 

Anthony: Yeah. And like on the far other end of the extreme, there’s people that are going carnivore now.

And there’s a lot more people with genetic issues where flavonoids are super important to protect their heart and their arteries. Flavonoids are plant compounds and colorful plants have a lot of flavonoids. Some people pronounce it flavonoids, doesn’t really matter to me, but it’s a real risk if you have Issues where you need those flavonoids to bolster your arteries, protect your arteries.

There’s a gene, we could go into it at some point, but that one’s a little more complicated than exactly how it works. But point is there’s people that really need these flavonoids and then they’re going carnivore and man, that’s risky. I don’t like that. Yeah. I wrote a long article 

Mike: and recorded a rather long podcast on the carnivore diet, which long story short is I’m not a fan.

If you’re curious as to why, just search in the podcast feed for carnivore, head over to legionathletics. com and search for carnivore. You’ll find the article that the podcast is based on. And it’s very silly. I could see some people if they need to do an extreme kind of elimination diet because they have some real issues with food sensitivities or carnivore diet.

They do not feel good a lot of the time, and it seems to stem from foods they eat. But regardless of how you’re going to go about following an elimination diet, you’re not supposed to stay in that first phase indefinitely. You’re supposed to reintroduce foods because the body does need a variety of foods to just get all the nutrition that it needs.

You can’t just eat One or two or even just three narrow food groups and expect to be healthy over the long term. Now, of course, the body’s good at storing nutrients that it needs, and it’s very resilient. But eventually, if you don’t provide your body with enough nutrition, it breaks down, 

Anthony: right? And there’s a podcast called Peak Human and Chris Masterjohn.

He just did an episode. Speaking specifically to the issues of going strict carnivore and some of the diet. He’s a PhD scientist as well, and he did a really nice job there. And there’s even additional things beyond the points that he talked about, which is again, a rabbit hole. I don’t want to go all the way into but yeah, that’s just one of those extremes.

And the beauty of looking at the genetics is it helps you narrow a lot of things down and it really does identify a lot of risks. And exactly the approach to fixing those risks is a little bit. Up in the air. But what I try and do is just have suggestions and I try my best to say, okay, here’s the problem.

Here’s what’s happening at the molecular level. And here’s some solutions that should help to fix that problem. It’s not 100 percent guarantee. And the other thing that really throws people off with the genetics, including the analysts, people analyzing the DNA is sometimes people have rare mutations that have never been studied.

They’re so rare. Nobody studied them. At least on a large scale, and those can have influences that you can’t expect or predict. Does that make sense? Yeah, sure, of course. So like with these SNPs, these are pretty well studied. There’s literally tens of thousands of studies on a lot of these genes and a lot of these SNPs.

Enough people have them in the population that they’re pretty predictive, but there’s always those curveballs where you should have Increased anxiety or some specific health issue, but you don’t have it. And a lot of times that’s because you also have some other rare gene that nobody’s ever studied and those certainly happen.

Yeah, that’s interesting. What’s a SNP, by the way? Yeah, SNP is a single nucleotide polymorphism. It just basically means a single DNA code letter has been changed. So DNA is made up of four letters. And backtracking for a second, computer code is made of zeros and ones, right? Yep. DNA code is four letters.

It’s a T G and C and a snip is just one change. One of those letters gets changed and it causes a pretty substantial impact. You can literally make one snip change one DNA code letter change and it’ll cause sickle cell anemia, for example. Interesting. So there’s some pretty dramatic impacts just from having one little piece of code changed.

And for people that don’t understand genetics, basically it’s a blueprint. There’s epigenetics, which are marks on top of the DNA which I talk about in our last podcast. I think, I usually talk about that in light of estrogens because it’s a big problem changing your epigenetics and altering future generations and all this.

And that’s a very important component of genetics. So when you’re thinking about all of this stuff, you have to consider the DNA. And you have to consider the epigenetics, the marks on top of the DNA. The best analogy I have is piano notes, like music, where you’ve got a super simple melody, like Mary had a little lamb.

Did that that, those dots are like the DNA, just single melody, but if you add chords on top of those notes, that’s like the epigenetics, you’ve still got the same melody. The DNA is still there. The blueprint is still there. The cords now add some complexity. That’s the epigenetics.

And you literally have to factor both of those components in. And today we’re just looking at the genetics because the epigenetics is such a new field, and that’s a huge component, but not a lot is known about it. But a ton of stuff is known about DNA and what. Cause you know what impacts that have. And it’s generational, right?

Like it passes on. So it’s just like a melody. It doesn’t really change that much from generation to generation. Anyways, so a lot of these snips, they arise from our ancestors and certain tribes that they were in. There was a lot less, there wasn’t really global travel and all this genetic mishmash that we have now.

There was a lot more like tribalism, where this tribe probably ate a lot of liver. So they needed to get their retinol from liver and they didn’t really eat carrots. So they didn’t need to convert beta carotene to retinol. For example. And this tribe over here had a ton of seafood.

They had iodine all the time. So they have all these genes that are dependent on getting iodine regularly. And now in our modern culture, maybe you’re not getting enough iodine. And just on and on. So that’s the beauty of these snips is they give us some insight into that and. pretty accurate.

Most of the time, it’s surprisingly accurate, which 

Mike: I like. And just to make it clear for anybody who’s just not familiar with even how DNA operates, you said it’s a blueprint. Can you just lay out the basic mechanism of how this works? So then when we get into some of the details, it’ll make more sense how these snips can Cause very real physiological 

Anthony: impacts.

So DNA is a blueprint. So just think of your house, right? You got a piece of paper that tells you how to build a house. If you’ve got a crappy blueprint to make a bathroom and somebody goes out and makes 10 houses built on that blueprint, you’re going to have 10 crappy bathrooms. You’re going to make crappy bathrooms, right?

And the house, the blueprint is just the blueprint, but the house quote unquote house is the protein. So DNA decodes ultimately for proteins. So the actual dysfunction is in the house. It’s in the protein. Does that kind of make sense? It’s hard to make analogies for these things, but yeah, it’s the DNA is the 

Mike: instructions of 

Anthony: what to do with these proteins, right?

Exactly. So the real flaw, when you see genetic problems, the real flaw is actually in the protein that’s made from the DNA code. But usually even if people can’t quite wrap their head around that, it’s fine. You just tell them you have a genetic issue. It leads to this problem. And that makes enough sense for most people that you know and the key too is to know that you’ve got two copies of DNA.

A lot of people don’t realize we have two copies of DNA in every cell in our body except egg and sperm cells. So egg and sperm cells only have one copy of DNA and then of course when they fuse together that’s where you got the copy of DNA from your mother and the copy of DNA from your father. And it’s also where scientists get this idea of plus or plus minus that sort of thing.

A lot of scientists use plus minus like if you have a plus gene. That means you have a bad version of that gene from your mother and a bad version of that gene from your father. Whereas plus minus would mean you have one bad copy of the gene and one good copy of the gene.

And then of course minus means you have two good copies of the gene, two normal copies. And we all have thousands of good genes. So me personally, I’m not interested in your good genes, I’m only interested in the bad ones, right? The plus or the plus minus genes. And so that’s what I look for when I do these screens.

And not only that. A lot of people just going back to people that are cowboys in the genetic field, they do these studies and they’ll find like you have a 1. 3 fold increased risk for cancer. Let’s just say breast cancer, some example, or you have a 1. 5 fold increased risk for colon cancer, whatever.

If you do these online genetic reports, oftentimes you’ll have 50 pages of you have a 1. 3 fold increased risk for this and 1. 5 and it just goes on and on. Problem with that is when they repeat those scientific studies with those low risks, they don’t hold up. So you do it in a larger population of people and you can’t repeat the study.

They’re not robust findings, but when you start getting above a twofold increased risk for something or higher, then you repeat those studies and they usually are robust. They almost always hold up. So what I look for is I try and find those genes that have more impact and are higher risk. Because those are more predictive and people go wrong a lot by over interpreting genes that really don’t, that just aren’t robust.

Does that make sense? 

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. That also probably can lead to unnecessary anxiety, right? If you’re going through page after page, you’re like, I’m basically dead. 

Anthony: I’m guaranteed to get one of these things. Exactly. And one of the things you learn when you do a lot of genetic consults like I do, you learn the cancer is really not that genetic.

There’s really, It’s so rare to come across real strong cancer risk genes. Most of that’s lifestyle or epigenetics or chemicals are exposed to environmental stuff. A lot of these genes, surprisingly, a lot of the health issues we have today are more environmental and less genetic than 

Mike: people think.

That’s interesting. And on one hand, you could say it’s maybe not entirely surprising and that you would expect to find genes that dramatically increase the chance of dying to be rare, right? Unless our, unless the human body, unless we messed it up so much, it would take a lot, but there’d be a point where it’s okay then I guess this 

Anthony: is the end of the species.

And speaking of messing up our bodies, right? Most of these studies, pretty much all the studies, actually, they’re done in people that are eating a standard American diet. We call it a SAD diet, standard American diet, S A D, which is an acronym. People have to realize when I’m talking about you have a twofold increased risk for Alzheimer’s or something, that’s in people that are eating a sad diet.

And just to jump right into your genetics, Mike, if you don’t mind. Yeah. Which by the way, for people 

Mike: listening. So I sent Anthony, my DNA data from, I think it was ancestry, right? It’s my favorite. I did ancestry and I did 23 and me and just, I don’t know, for fun to see what the differences are, if there would be any differences.

And yeah, I sent the raw data. Over to Anthony, so in preparation for the podcast, he went through it and we’re going to find out if I’m an uber bench or under bench, 

Anthony: it’s really not that scary. The worst genes that people have are usually fairly, they’re things you can mitigate really dramatically.

And like the biggest one, the one that most people get most nervous about, to be honest, is the Alzheimer’s risk gene. It’s called APOE is the big one because if you have the bad version of APOE, it’s called 4 slash 4 APOE4. Like in other words, you have a plus on that gene, two bad copies of that gene.

You have a 70 percent chance of getting Alzheimer’s. Now you don’t have that personally, Mike, but for people that do, that’s a really scary gene. But here’s the crazy thing, right? Is Rhonda Patrick has done a ton of research on that specific gene and a lot of other people. I talked to the military about it.

They’re doing like seven grams per day of DHA. When they have that DHA is the real trick. I think with that gene, it seems like it’s a DHA transporter issue. And you’ve got to take DHA. If you have that gene and spend a lot of money taking DHA or fish oil or eat a lot of seafood, you don’t have to supplement, but even that, like that’s not that scary.

Once you realize pretty significantly, maybe a hundred percent, there’s no studies, and humans, because it would take a hundred years, but Just based on the animal studies and what that specific gene does and the flaw in the APOE4 version, the bad version of that gene and what the flaw is, it looks like DHA should completely eliminate the risk.

And that’s backed up by a lot of experience in my own life too. Just looking at people that are doing DNA consults with people that are 80 years old and they’ve been eating a ton of seafood or supplementing DHA. They don’t have even a hint of Alzheimer’s and they’re supposed to. That’s 

Mike: encouraging for anybody who might be concerned about that, or if they just know that Alzheimer’s runs in their family, 

Anthony: right?

Exactly. And the thing about Alzheimer’s, I’m literally working on a book on this topic because there was a good book, it’s called The End of Alzheimer’s, but I feel like he missed the genetic aspect of it. Because when you start looking at the genes, you realize Yeah, there’s that DHA related risk, there’s some cholesterol related risks, there’s heavy metals related risks with Alzheimer’s, some people can’t clear heavy metals from their brain, and you don’t have that one, you’ll see it on your PDF I sent you, it’s an empty category, there’s nothing underneath that because you don’t have any genes that are flagged. Some people, their brains don’t deal well with carbs. And so there’s all these different categories that give people Alzheimer’s risks.

Maybe you’ve got an Alzheimer’s risk from heavy metals, and you’re just spending hundreds of dollars a year on DHA supplements, but in reality, you don’t have a genetic issue that requires DHA. You actually have to check your heavy metals and make sure, you don’t have a lot of heavy metals building up, like cobalts, chromium, cadmium.

Knowing and understanding those categories, In terms of Alzheimer’s risks and knowing your genetics and how that fits into your family history, that’s super important. It even helps your brain function better now. It’s not oh, let’s just purely think of a long term, the big picture. When am I 80 years old?

What’s my brain? Right now, your brain will perform better eating a lot of carbs. If you can handle a lot of car and you have good genetics, you have exceptional genetics for your brain dealing with carbs, as you can see, like that category is empty in your spot, probably about 50 percent of people. They get a lot of brain fog and a lot of fatigue and a lot of Alzheimer’s risk from eating a lot of carbs.

And that shows up in the genetics. Interesting. I 

Mike: didn’t get that from. So the first time, let’s see, I did something similar to this some time ago with a company. I don’t think they’re around anymore called DNA fit. And the results were more just broadly categorized. And I remember for carbohydrates, they were just, the conclusion was my body is just very good at dealing with carbs period.

But I don’t remember any discussion about brain function in particular. And that makes sense because that lines up with my experience, I can eat a lot of carbs And sure, there’s a point where if I eat 400 grams of carbs in one sitting, I’m going to go pass out. But if it’s a hundred grams, I don’t experience brain fog or lethargy.

I’ll usually get almost like a pump in the gym. And I’ll usually notice that. That I’m getting hotter. Sometimes I even get sweaty. And those are all indicators that my body deals well with carbs. And I’ve talked about this. I haven’t gotten very technical about it, but just told people in the context of low carb versus high carb dieting in general, where this is, so for example, if you dear listener, when you eat a decent amount of carbs, not an absurd amount and not, a salad, but something that is say, it’s, I don’t know.

Depending on your body weight, 50 to 80 grams, up to maybe 80 to a hundred grams. And you feel the way that I just mentioned, where you feel good, you feel energized. You maybe get a little bit of a pump. Your body temperature rises. It’s an indicator that your body probably deals well with carbs. But on the other hand, if you get sluggish and tired and lethargic and bloated and sometimes gassy, then that’s an indicator of your body.

Probably does not do so well with carbs and so adjust accordingly and, just working with many people over the years, again, not being overly quote unquote scientific or technical about it, just working back to something that works for that person where, I can think of a number of people.

Guys who were lifting weights regularly in some cases, pretty big. You’d think that if you were to prescribe a standard lean bulking diet to them, you might say, all right, let’s start with 400 grams of carbs a day, 180 grams of protein rest and fat. But for those guys that would not work well. It’s just too much carbs.

They would not feel good, especially because it would require eating too much in one sitting. Whereas, Cutting that in half and going to 200 carbs a day and the rest in fat works much better for them, even though it’s understood that as far as if we were only looking at muscle and strength gain, more carbs is generally better.

That’s just known by anybody who pays attention to the bodybuilding literature and especially the nutritional side of it. But that doesn’t actually mean that Everyone should be eating a high carb diet, 

Anthony: right? And that’s super true. It’s amazing how, especially when I have clients that are really paying attention to their bodies.

Some people don’t, but some people do. And some people are really in tune. They already have this great sense of a lot of their genetic weakness, which, of course, I see on my end. With my software and all this, but I love it when people are paying attention, they already have a good idea, that caffeine jacks me up, or I get a lot of anxiety from caffeine.

There’s genes that give you anxiety with caffeine. You know what I mean? Yeah, no, 

Mike: that is cool. Like even me looking through the PDF, some of the stuff, and I’ll be curious, a few of these points will be interesting to talk about. But I wasn’t surprised and a number of them like, Oh yeah, that makes sense.

Like I could have told you that I couldn’t have told you why, but I could have told you 

Anthony: that. Yeah. Especially for somebody that cares. And the other thing about the carbs too, there’s a difference between your brain dealing well with carbs and your body. And some people, their brain is awesome with carbs, but their body doesn’t deal well where they have all these diabetes risk genes and they spike in their insulin and stuff, but their brain doesn’t really get affected that much.

So even like distinguishing that I think is important. And then the other thing is exercise helps to make up for quote unquote sins. Like you can eat pretty bad diet and then 

Mike: not being overweight too. Like having a good body composition and exercising regularly. They’re not panaceas, but they’re as close as you can get.

I think,

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Anthony: I have five categories for your listeners. I’ve got the brain, I’ve got the diet, and then I do a section called vitamin, hormones, and detox genes, which is how your body breaks things down and gets rid of them.

And then I’ve got gym genes, like your training genes, your muscle fiber type, your joints, your back, your whatever. And then sleep. Those are the five categories. That’s how I’d like to organize it, but if you scroll down to the diet section, you’ll see a section called metformin again, just on the topic of carbs can’t resist because a lot of people take metformin these days as a longevity drug, to be honest, because every animal that we study.

It increases their lifespan, rabbits, rats, mice, whatever a 

Mike: natural alternative to that, that I know is popular for the same reason 

Anthony: as berberine. Yeah, and cinnamon works pretty well too, and you can determine, your response based on just pricking your finger and checking your blood sugar in the morning after you take metformin before you go to bed or take berberine before you go to bed or take Ceylon cinnamon before you go to bed.

It’s pretty predictive based on your genetics and you have two genes, these ATM genes that. Indicate you’re a high responder to metformin like a real high responder plus and that’s not super common to have, multiple positions here on that same gene. Is that good or bad? That’s a good thing because some people get a lot of bloating and a lot of diarrhea and stuff from metformin and doesn’t really help improve their blood sugar that much.

Never taken it. I’ve 

Mike: never even taken berberine. It’s actually something that we’ve tried to work in a product over at Legion, but we wanted to, if I remember correctly, originally put it in our post workout because it makes sense. That’s when you’re going to be, it’s when a lot of people are eating, in some cases, their most common food.

Carb heavy meal is after a workout where you want nutrient absorption to be its best if you’re going to pick one meal. But the problem is it’s disgusting. It actually tastes like puke. Like you mix it into whatever it is you’re supposed to drink and you’ve now vomited in 

Anthony: your own mouth.

That’s horrible. Yeah. I just take the pills. I have berberine. I’ve got metformin. The problem with frigging prescription, which is super obnoxious. It’s from the plant. French lilac plant, it’s like a naturally derived compound, but a lot of people get diarrhea and stuff from it. So they’d like to monitor it.

And for some reason they force you to get a prescription with it. Hopefully that goes away at some point, but it is a valuable tool for people that really struggle with their blood sugar, which again, you, you shouldn’t you’re unlikely that you do, but. It also improves your metabolism, so there’s benefits just from that perspective.

We actually have berberine 

Mike: coming in a gut health product that is a non bacterial. We’re going to do two is how Curtis and then the advisory board, all the people. My job in the formulation at this point, now that I’ve recruited, honestly, what I consider an all star team is I just. Provide a good budget.

These guys know so much more about this stuff than I do, but there’s going to be two different gut health is going to be bacterial and non bacterial. So the probiotic is what Curtis and the team are working on right now. It’s just tough because there’s not a lot of good research on probiotics. And a lot of the stuff that is common is just garbage, but that’s another discussion.

I’m just personally excited to, we finally figured out a product that A pill that because we were thinking, Curtis is a big fan of Burberry and he loves Burberry. So he’s she’s should we just sell it as an individual ingredient? And sure we could, but the problem with that is it’s very much a commodity at that point.

And I’m not sure we’ll be able to offer the best prices and really incentivize people. Like they might be better off just getting it from a company like maybe now foods that runs. A billion berberine pills a month or something. Although the quality of those is apparently 

Anthony: real questionable. Of now, really?

Because the companies that I. No, not now. I just mean out there on Amazon. If you just randomly 

Mike: pick. Ah sure. Yes. Yeah. That’s something that’s worth actually mentioning people listening. If you buy your supplements on Amazon, be careful because Amazon is littered with scam artists and that’s not entirely Amazon’s fault, but because.

Even if they had people in there manually reviewing brands and products, they would have to be very savvy to even understand who’s dubious and who’s not because there are a lot of very good marketers on Amazon. And ultimately what it’d come down to is you’d have to be testing. Amazon would have to take it upon themselves to just test people.

tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of products, and they can’t do that. So it’d be either that or they’d have to enforce very strict standards for selling in the supplement space, like providing third party testing, which I actually, I don’t think they will do it, but I would be happy if they did because I already do third party testing.

I’d have no problem with that. But anyways, my point is, if you’re going to buy supplements on Amazon, Oftentimes, whatever it is that you’re searching for, you look at the top 10 results, at least half of them are shit products, that’s just straight up. And I know it sounds like a ridiculous generalization, but it is true.

If you’re searching for something that is halfway popular, a lot of the products that are appearing in the top 10, even just in the top 20, like the first page of results are going to be the products of people who know how to play the Amazon marketing game. Game and that often means one of the big components of that is simply spending a lot of money on Amazon advertising.

And the only way to do that is to have large margins in your products, which is often means in some cases, yeah, you can make a vitamin D pill and still have a good margin, but in many cases to have the types of margins that you need to really quote unquote dominate on. Amazon and any competitive niche is at least as far as supplements go.

It means that your product has to cost very little, and that means it’s not going to be a good product. And so what you’ll see then is you can go search for Berberine’s probably a good example, I’m sure it’s a popular product and you’re going to see brands that you’ve never heard of, but that look really slick, they’re going to have good product images, their product pages are going to be well designed.

It’s going to look like a legitimate established company, but oftentimes it’s not. It’s just. A couple of dudes living on a beach in Thailand, making millions of dollars a month selling trash. That’s one of the reasons why there are a couple of brands that I like to go to for individual ingredients that are trustworthy and that have checked out many times in independent research.

And now foods is one of them. Jero. I like Jero and I’ve heard good things about doctor’s best as well for individual ingredients. And there are a couple of herbs I’ve gotten from Swanson’s. But now foods and Jero are my two go tos for, just my vitamin D. What else am I taking? I take L theanine from now foods.

I take L tryptophan from now foods and stuff like that as I just go to now. So interesting. 

Anthony: The other aspect in terms of metabolizing carbs in your genetics, a unique one is that zinc transporter issue. You got So the gene SLC30A8, it’s actually a zinc transporter, so it brings zinc in and it also brings in glucose.

In other words, if you make sure you’ve got plenty of zinc, it’s not really an issue, but if you’re deficient in zinc, which a lot of people are to be honest, they think they’re getting enough from their diet and they’re not eating a lot of micronutrients. Even red meat, you have to eat quite a lot to get enough zinc.

And I don’t 

Mike: eat a lot of red meat. I do supplement with zinc, but I don’t, just because I don’t eat a lot of red meat, I’ll eat a hamburger or two that I cook myself at home, like on the weekends sometimes. 

Anthony: Yeah, no, I think that’s good. I think zinc supplementing is really important for you at that plus gene, again, specific to your longevity, your insulin sensitivity.

If we can just go back, 

Mike: let’s just take those big categories that you had mentioned. Start with brain. So we talked about Alzheimer’s. So I see here you called out something related to stress and anxiety. Those are things that a lot of people experience and also caffeine metabolism be good to talk about.

Anthony: Yeah, for sure. So stress, you’re pretty well able to handle stress, but the one issue you’ve got is plus minus on your oxytocin receptor, meaning the receptor doesn’t pick up oxytocin as well as it should. It’s plus minus. So it’s not massively impacting you, but. Just things that increase oxytocin will help.

If you experience a lot of stress, dark chocolate is one of the favorites, but, 

Mike: which is funny that you mentioned that because that is my go to. I have a little bit of dark chocolate every day. That’s my little indulgence. Like I’m not really a, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. I can eat dessert or not eat dessert.

I can like it. It doesn’t really, I don’t care either way. I usually I’ll have some dessert. If I go to a restaurant and they have good dessert kind of thing, but I’m not going to go out of my way to eat sugar at home, but I do have. Maybe a hundred calories or so of dark chocolate every day, and I find that very satisfying.

Yeah. And of 

Anthony: course, there’s a ton of ways and I linked a website there. I’m a scientific advisor for them. And you can learn a lot online about how to increase oxytocin naturally. There’s pretty good studies and a lot of good options, but like I say, dark chocolate’s one of the favorites because before you go into a stressful situation, you can bang on that.

And it helps, it’s interesting just 

Mike: speaking, To my experience with stresses, I don’t get stressed out. It just doesn’t happen. I deal with stress very well. The only notable thing that stands out in my mind is as I’ve gotten older, stress seems to impact my sleep. I wake up more often at night, but that’s really the only way it manifests.

Like I don’t deal with anxiety. I don’t have the normal like negative reactions to stress. I’m pretty just even keel in that regard where I just Yeah. Do my thing. And if I think about it, I could be like, yeah, maybe I feel a little bit stressed, but that’s it. And that’s, and at this point I’ve gone through some situations in life that I think many people would consider quite stressful actually.

And in some cases involved other people who were very stressed out about them. It’s also not that I’ve just grown up living off of my trust fund and, turning it loose for a living. And, oh yeah, I don’t know. What is stress? I’ve never experienced that before. What is 

Anthony: responsibility? What is hard work?

And people underestimate exercise, to be honest, like a lot of people, they’re not exercising. And that’s like a foundation people really need to exercise. And then if you still have the stress and things like that, because that balances a lot of hormone, there’s no drug that’s as good as exercise.

There never will be, to be honest, you never know. I can’t say never, but right now. Yeah. If it happens in our lifetimes, it will be a miracle. Yeah. You have that anxiety gene involved in the production of serotonin, but like I said, I think, you have some options that are precise to your genetics.

If you’re not, don’t worry about it. Caffeine is the same thing. You do have a plus minus where caffeine could get you some anxiety, it’s just a plus minus. There’s a number of other genes. Some people have all of the genes and they’re all plus, and then they have a really strong anxiety from caffeine.

And what’s interesting about that caffeine related gene, that one responds to oxygen levels. So it’s exercise again, right? Like bringing in oxygen, getting your blood moving around. It helps. What about caffeine metabolism? It stays in your body quite long compared to most people. 

Mike: Which is the exact opposite of what the DNA fit people told me.

They told me that I had two fast metabolizing genes. 

Anthony: That’s funny. Yeah, no, I factor in all these CYP genes, these liver enzymes that are involved. What’s your experience? 

Mike: So my experience with caffeine is one, my caffeine intake is generally low. So I’m talking about under 200 milligrams a day. I have a cappuccino in the morning.

That’s about it. Sometimes I’ll have maybe an extra a hundred milligrams at 11 or 12, 11 AM, 12 PM. But oftentimes not because I find that if I do that just even a few days in a row, it’ll start to impact my sleep. When I was younger, just, I don’t know, let’s say six years ago, five, six years ago, I had absolutely no sleep issues.

Caffeine didn’t matter. So my normal day was I had a run of six years or so of this was my experience. Obviously not every day, but generally speaking is I would have not very much caffeine, but I would have about a hundred and say 75 or 200 milligrams in the morning before I would lift. And then if I was cutting, which wasn’t always the case, there would be periods where I’d be cutting for sometimes it’d be two months, like getting ready for a photo shoot or I would have another 175 or 200 milligrams.

At six 30 or 7:00 PM and do cardio, fasted cardio, have some yohi being as well, which is also a stimulant. And then I would be working most nights, most week nights, I’d be working on the weekends too. But most week nights in particular, I would be working late. I’d have to eat some food and spend some time with my wife, but I’d usually get back on the computer and put in another couple hours of work and.

Get off, let’s say at 1130 or so, get ready for bed, go to bed, fall asleep within five minutes, instantly blackout unconscious sleep for six and a half hours, wake up naturally. And that’s it. And I’ve had no, there are no symptoms of sleep deprivation. I did that literally for five or six years.

Then as I got older, though, I’m just a lighter sleeper now. And, people say having kids changes that, which I guess could make sense from a physiological perspective or evolutionary perspective. Like maybe that our bodies are wired to pay more attention when there are kids around now. And, I know my parents both are not particularly good sleepers.

They’re light sleepers as well. So there’s probably a genetic component, which we’ll probably get to. I would not have caffeine at 7 p. m. Now, period. I probably could still fall asleep, but it almost certainly Bye. Bye. I’d be waking up every hour, probably. 

Anthony: And you just wouldn’t get the sleep 

Mike: cycles, do you wear an aura ring or a sleep tracker of any kind?

I did in the past when I was invincible and it was like, Oh, I guess I’m invincible. I don’t care. And that was the end of it. So like I’d be in bed again, no more than seven hours, usually six and a half hours, but I would get up to three hours of deep sleep every night. And I was like, wow, that’s pretty efficient, but that’s not the case. Now, my sleep is not bad at all, but I wake up at least once a night. Usually it’s like a good night is I will sleep about six hours, wake up P. And in the past, I would just get up and go about my day. Now, a bit more cognizant of my sleep is not as rock solid as it once was.

So my alarms at six. If I wake up at five, two, To pee or four 30, I won’t just get up, I’ll go back to sleep. Even if it just means getting another 45 minutes or so. I’m just like, I’m a stickler now on being in bed eight hours, even though I’m not sleeping eight hours. But some nights, like last night, I had to pee a couple times, which was annoying.

I woke up, I don’t know, three times last night. So sometimes that happens. Rarely I’ll have a really fucked up. Night of sleep, which often at this point, my, my observation is, it seems to be related to watching anything like I’m in front of a screen. If it’s stimulating at all, there’s a good chance I’m going to wake up like five times that night.

It’s actually strange to the point now where I don’t watch TV. I don’t watch movies anymore. I just don’t because I’m working all week. And then on the weekends, I’m not going to take time in the middle of the day to satisfy. I do stuff for my kids, Sunday I’m working and then I go golf, I’m not gonna, I’d rather go out and golf and be outside and do something like that than sit in my basement and watch a movie.

So so anyways, I’m just rambling at this point. 

Anthony: No, I was gonna say I think the anxiety gene that you do have that one gene above, it’s probably playing a role there while you’re sleeping, your brain might be triggering a little bit of anxiety. I would try some of those supplements and I’ll bet they would improve your sleep cycles if you’re tracking it.

Might even be worth throwing an aura ring back on the. 

Mike: If anyone from Aura is listening, you want to send me a ring? I’ll plug it. I’ll follow up with a podcast with somebody from Aura. 

Anthony: Yeah. Bring on their CEO. I can put you in touch with them. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That’d be cool. Yeah. I’m working on a medical study where we’ve got like a hundred free Aura rings and we’re doing a big sleep study.

Oh, nice. For a cannabis company that I’m a scientific advisor for just for the CBD component, but some other stuff too, I’m working on with them. So yeah, that’s the thing, like you might not even notice that you’re sleeping better, but you might be dramatically sleeping better if you try those supplements that I list there.

But you won’t know, unless you’re tracking it. 

Mike: Yeah, ironically, I recently got L Tryptophan. So I’m taking just a serving basically. Again, I got it from now, but just taking a serving before going to bed. That’s one of the building blocks 

Anthony: for serotonin. So I love it. I think caffeine stays your body.

Glycine as well. I take glycine before I go to sleep. If you noticed in the sleep section down at the bottom, like the very last page, let’s just shoot down there for a second, right? Let’s just organically go with it. Usually I go in order, but with the podcast and people listening, makes more sense.

If we’re talking about sleep, let’s talk about sleep. So you have really good genetics for sleep, but you do have that one gene. The most ridiculous named gene on the list, probably it’s called B H L H E 41, which stands for basic helix loop helix, family member E 41. So yes, that one, of course, it’s not a sexy one.

People talk about, but. It has this really this glycine rich loop that’s important for circadian function, which means glycine is a real good candidate for improving sleep in your case, just with this gene, because it’s really the gene issue that you’ve got relating to sleep, which 

Mike: just for people listening, my genetics would indicate exactly what I just said is how my sleep difficulties have manifested are in wakings, not I can always Fall asleep.

Like I rarely ever have trouble falling asleep and I can almost always go back to sleep. Even if I wake up six times, it’s like waking up every hour and a half or every hour or whatever. But I can always go back to sleep or almost always. So that doesn’t happen often, but that’s how it has manifested.

Not in just General kind of insomnia or racing mind at night. None of that. It’s just fall asleep. Totally fine, but wake up now these days, like I said, at least once and a bad night for no particularly good reason could be six times. 

Anthony: Yeah. I had literally just had a consult this morning. I had done this person’s DNA.

He’s actually a podcaster and, but he wanted me to do his mother’s DNA. So he was on the line and his mother was on the line, but he had the same gene as you here. And I had told him to get on glycine. He has an aura ring. He’s been tracking his sleep for over six months. Yeah. And his HRV, by the way, his heart rate variability, HRV is about 40.

And since starting glycine in the last five days, it’s jumped up to 80. He doubled his HRV, which is heart rate variability. So that’s an indicator that, his body is better rested. Yeah, higher HRV is better for people listening. I’ll give them the one minute rundown, right? Like your heart doesn’t beat exactly like one.

One, one, one. It’s not like that. It beats like 0. 99, 0. 98, 1. 01, like that. It has variability. If you’re super overtrained and you’re super exhausted, your heart’s just screw it. One, one, one. But if you’re really well rested, your heart will micro adjust. The beats a lot more and micro regulates better.

So higher HRV is better. And so he doubled his HRV just by taking these precise supplements, which I think is just a huge testimony. And just for people wondering, what 

Mike: are those supplements? It’s specific. Yeah. It’s specific, but in my case, right? So I’m going 

Anthony: back. For you, it’s glycine. Yeah. Glycine.

And Then 5 HTP and GABA and any of the serotonin that supplements that increase serotonin. I have listed up on the top there for you. So that’s 5 HTP and tryptophan. You have to be careful 5 HTP. You don’t want to overdose it. I’ve personally overdosed it just by Tinkering around and it gives you anxiety if you do overdo it.

Yeah, 

Mike: I’ve experienced that when I was taking when just different new tropics, right? And just saying, let’s see if I notice anything and notice nothing until I took too much of too many. And I actually that is probably the closest would be like, oh wow, this is what anxiety feels like. This is annoying.

And then 

Anthony: that was the end of that and like a little experiment. So I don’t wouldn’t take all of those supplements at the same time that increase serotonin and I would definitely not overdose any of them. You’ve got some good options there. GABA, St. John’s wort, 5 HTP and L tryptophan. Yeah.

I’m 

Mike: just doing L tryptophan and glycine. That’s my, those are my sleep related. And then also some melatonin as well. Not necessarily every night. I’m glad 

Anthony: you’re taking melatonin too, because you had the diabetes risk gene. Now, of course you’re not going to get diabetes, but it just means you’re going to have higher blood sugar.

For somebody like you, if, unless you take melatonin, like you have a melatonin receptor weakness, and that’s in the diet section on the top there, diet optimization genes under the melatonin, that MTNR1B, that’s melatonin receptor. And is it okay to supplement melatonin every day? Does that not, from what I’ve seen yet, and I’ve looked hard, like I’m super skeptical.

There’s no way you can take it every day for years and it doesn’t cause problems, but it doesn’t. They’ve looked into that because scientists are skeptical about that. It’s it’s a hormone. It’s got a down regular, like your body’s production has got to go down, but it just doesn’t seem to, but certainly you can cycle it.

That’s 

Mike: what I do in a, again, not a very scientific manner, but what it comes down to is taking it every other day or something like that as in general. 

Anthony: Yeah. I think that’s good and I think it’s going to help your metabolism and overall probably help your longevity, although that’s just a hypothesis, but I think it’s a valuable hypothesis because it’s based on your genetics.

Mike: One of the things that sleep is blue light gene, because that’s also something that a lot of people are hearing about these days is just blue light in general, reducing exposure. Does it really matter? How much does 

Anthony: it matter? Some people are super sensitive to blue light and that’s. Definitely not everybody.

People are assuming that everybody is super sensitive to blue light and that’s not really valid, but it’s surprising how many people are, and you’re plus minus like you’re a little bit sensitive and there’s other genes too. It’s not like this is the only gene you could have. There’s a gene called crypto chrome.

It’s in firefly protein and fireflies actually have it. They don’t have cryptochrome, but they have a flavor protein that’s real similar. Extremely sensitive to blue light. So for people that have that gene issue, it’s just like imperative. But this tyrosinase gene, this one’s pretty important to block blue light or to be cognizant, not be blasting your eyes.

So yeah, you’re a little bit more sensitive. 

Mike: What I’ve always done Even going back to when I was a sleep champion I would just use Flux on the computer. And then I had no sleep problems. I’d use it even in the day on my computer. Yeah. 

Anthony: Same. Actually, I have it. It’s just, it’s there. It’s just on.

It’s just more enjoyable. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the number one conversation starter at the Mayo Clinic. People walk by my office and they do a double take and you see them walk backwards and they’re like, what’s going on with your screen? Cause I keep it pretty yellow. It’s blocking a lot of the blue.

And they’ve never seen anything like it. So then it’s a fun conversation, but yeah, but overall, you’ve got excellent genetics for sleep, you can see most of these categories are blank. That’s not common, to be honest, 

Mike: interesting. I guess I can say how that manifests even currently.

And something I’ve noticed is that point of, even though I do generally get a little bit more sleep, I think I’d have to actually be curious. I’d have to start tracking it because now that it’s a little bit broken up. It’s harder to tell. I may actually not be getting at least as far as deep sleep goes, or even light sleep.

I may not be getting more than I did previously. It was just previously, it was so easy when you just black out for six and a half hours, open your eyes. You’re like, okay, time to start the day. 

Anthony: I’m so impressed with aura. I got one for my wife and she does it. She’s the one that wakes up with the kids because I have to work so much.

I just can’t do it, she’ll wake up with the baby and stuff. I’ve got four kids, right? So sometimes it’s mayhem at night, but she’ll get three hours of deep sleep irregardless, which is amazing. I’m lucky if I get one, when there’s a lot of disruption and stuff at night, I have a gene here, a plus 

Mike: on poor sleep leads to poor cognitive performance.

I’m that. 

Anthony: That gene. It’s pretty rare in certain nationalities, like literally 1 percent of people in some nationalities have it and then 50 percent of people in other countries have it, but they’ve done a lot of studies on it because it leads to 25 percent less memory recall if you get low sleep, if you get perfect sleep, it’s no issue.

But if you do have low sleep, it does lead to poor cognitive performance. Yeah, I’ve noticed that 

Mike: specifically with memory. Actually, I’ve noticed that where if I’m not well rested facts and just stuff doesn’t come to me as quickly. It’s even more obvious because I’m learning German. And part of learning a language is building your vocabulary, of course.

And so I’m using SRS flashcards to do that. I’m explicitly Using it’s a task of pure memorization, so I’ll notice that on days where I sleep well, the answers come to me faster. I make fewer mistakes and then just in general. So in conversations, if I’m talking about something that relies heavily on.

Stuff I’ve learned or even things that have happened previously, I can just feel the extra like the gears are a little bit. They’re just grinding a little bit harder than usual to retrieve the information. Whereas if I’m well rested, it comes very quickly 

Anthony: and nicotine can actually increase this, the performance of this chain and will increase the expression of it.

And obviously you don’t want to become addicted. So I should start smoking. I’m doing it for my cognition. Come on. Yeah. And then you got five cancers and you’re good to go. But no, like some nicotine gum or something like what I tell people is basically if you’ve got an SAT or like a MCAT or whatever, like some specific thing, you don’t want to just try nicotine the first time out of the blue that day, just because people get nauseous or whatever sometimes, but sometimes it’s an amazing fix.

For that rare situation, not in the addictive sense because it’s supposed to be for that rare situation, but sleep is the ultimate for sure. Yeah, that makes sense. 

Mike: All right, let’s jump to diet and we’ve talked about a bit of this. Is there anything else interesting in here that 

Anthony: I was going to say that hex gene?

I want to mention that one because it’s interesting that you’re like really heavily involved in the exercise world and things and that’s interesting. Super important for you. And that’s pretty much for everybody. But you have a gene, a genetic issue where your pancreas doesn’t make as much nitric oxide.

So pancreas is where your insulin is produced, right? Beta cells. And so nitric oxide is really important for you for your glucose disposal, for your blood sugar, for your optimizing your health. And of course, the best way to increase nitric oxide is exercise. But I like to note that if for some reason, like you had surgery and you’re just laid up in bed for a long time or whatever, which happens, get some L citrulline or some beet juice or something that increases nitric oxide, figure out a way, because it’s really important for, or just eat low carb, which is probably good if you’re sedentary, but yeah, if you’re lying around all day. Yeah. But even so it’s just keep that pancreas healthy.

Mike: It’s got to be unique. I also, I do take citrulline every day anyway, because it’s in my pre workout and I just use, I personally use the caffeine free version of it again, because I just like to keep, I know that I could get better performance in the gym. If I were to take a bunch of caffeine before a couple of my heavier workouts, but I’d rather just because of the sleep, I just keep my caffeine intake low.

So I use caffeine. free instead, but it has eight grams of sit malate per serving. So that’s just my daily. 

Anthony: And if you’d notice down in the obesity, metabolic syndrome section, I recommend beet juice, L citrulline, that sort of thing. Again, there’s also betaine in it too. Nice. It’s funny. The betaine thing.

The pronunciation is so bizarre, when I learned and was it, is it betaine actually? No, you’re correct. No, you’re correct. But when I’ve learned that, I was like, man, what the hell? I think the spelling, it looks like betaine, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you’ve heard the explanation of the, where it was derived, like the word was derived from beats.

So you’re supposed to say beat. Yeah. Yeah. And you just made me question it. Cause I was like, wait, some people actually pronounce it betaine. Am I wrong? They just don’t know. No, they just don’t know that. And I didn’t know that I used to pronounce it wrong too. So it’s funny. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t bother me if people are pronouncing it wrong.

It makes total sense to me if they are in scientific class nutrition studies and classes and this sort of thing, but it’s funny. 

Mike: In that case, okay, if someone is mispronouncing everyday English words, that’s a red flag. But when you’re talking about technical things, yeah. And take Curtis again, who he’s the director of research for Legion and he’s the co founder and the former lead researcher and writer over at examine.

com. I All the technical stuff that you’ve read over at examine was researched and written by Curtis. And he knows a lot of, this would be a discussion right up this whole discussion, right up his alley. He’d be, he’s into this kind of stuff. And oftentimes I’ll have them on the podcast to talk about one thing or another.

And oftentimes he’ll say something and I’m like, I don’t know if that’s right. That just sounds off to me. It’d be some technical terms, some. Supplement or biological thing, and I’ll check the pronunciation and sometimes he’s wrong. And he’s Oh yeah, I’ll point it out to him, not challenge him. It’s Oh, by the way.

And he’s Oh yeah. I never actually looked at how to pronounce that. I never really cared, but yeah, that’s good to 

Anthony: know. And the problem is you go over to England and they pronounce it weird. All the other, they pronounce things different. America. So yeah, even estrogen, right? They call it estrogen, but anyways, overall you don’t really have too much obesity risks and stuff that you have a couple of plus minuses that aren’t really that important.

I wanted to 

Mike: ask about the obesity stuff because that’s very much part of the mainstream obesity is. Discussion, which you touched on earlier in that you believe that it’s a lot more related to lifestyle than it is to genetics. 

Anthony: Correct. Although people do have, the BBC, that FTO gene, there’s a number of different positions on that gene that you can have that are problematic.

That’s why I have that number three bracket on that. I know that’s a little specific to you and less for your audience to see, but. It’s like a sidewalk, right? Like you can have one pothole on your sidewalk. That’s bad. You could have three potholes on your sidewalk. That’s even worse. Jeans are the same way.

You can have one spot on a gene. You can have multiple spots on a gene, but this gene called FTO, the BBC did a whole one hour documentary just on this one gene, basically it’s called, why are we getting so fat if you wanted to watch it? It’s not super informative, but some people, I watched it, but that one, It seems like intermittent fasting is really the best way to go about having that issue and you don’t have much of an issue there, but some people do and it is harder.

And is that just because 

Mike: of food restriction, like restricting feedings or is there a deeper physiological reason for that? 

Anthony: The specific gene I’ve dug into this gene because it’s so powerful for certain people that are obese. They have the bad version. I really want to help them. And it’s involved in converting white fat to brown fat.

That’s the real mouth. 

Mike: And just for people who don’t know the difference might be worth quickly explaining that. 

Anthony: Oh, for sure. Yeah. So brown fat is brown in color. It’s healthy for you and it’s brown because it has so much mitochondria that it physically looks brown. People are used to cutting a steak or whatever, and it’s white, right?

The fat is white and white fat. It’s not brown, it’s white because it doesn’t have all those mitochondria. It basically just stores fat. 

Mike: It’s just an energy store, right? And obviously it’s involved in hormone production. It’s not that white fat is quote unquote unhealthy. But when we think of body fat, we’re thinking of quote unquote white fat.

Anthony: Exactly. And this form of fat called brown fat is actually healthy all the time. And your white fat can convert to brown fat. When I was doing my PhD, somebody on my thesis committee is like one of the world’s experts on brown fat. And he studies what’s called beige fat, which is the intermediate between the two.

You can actually, your body can convert the white fat into brown fat. It beiges the fat, turns it a little bit more beige. And basically that gene, if you’ve got the bad version that you don’t do that as well. So your body just tends to store fat. More than it tends to use it for energy. Brown fat burns 

Mike: energy, right?

Tons of energy. Yeah. And so people with larger amounts of brown fat are going to find it harder to get fat. 

Anthony: Yeah. So like my favorite, if we’re really getting into the weeds for that gene, and when people have that gene, my favorite therapy is cryotherapy like once or twice a week. But that’s so expensive.

It’s kind of niche. Not everybody can get out and get ahold of a cryo chamber, but it is pretty amazing, because that does help your white fat to convert brown fat pushes in that direction for you, but for everybody else, intermittent fasting and the other gene on this category, what am I just taking?

cold baths. Yeah, I’ve looked into the research. I’m not that. You could, yeah. Most people aren’t disciplined enough to really get into it. Like you have to take like a good 20 minutes. Yeah. I know. Doing 

Mike: it for real is, I looked into some of this research. I wrote an article about cold showers.

That was a thing for a bit. It’s actually something I still do simply because I like It just wakes you up in the morning and I know there’s no health benefits to even if I were to sit in the cold shower for three minutes, even if it’s ice cold, doesn’t matter. It’s not enough exposure, but I do still do it.

And I still just, I’ve just come to like it as a routine, but in looking into that literature for the purposes of recovery, it was for reducing inflammation after hard training, which you wouldn’t necessarily even want to do, but it could make sense for, let’s say, Athletes who have to perform regularly.

And they’re not just in the gym to get bigger biceps, like they need to function, but the standard ice bath protocol was the water needs to be very cold. So I think it was in about in the fifties. So there needs to be a lot of ice in that water. And it was basically full immersion up to the neck for a minimum of five to six minutes to have any real effect.

So how many people are actually going to do that? Yeah, not many. 

Anthony: Exactly. Yeah. That’s the problem with that. Whereas cryo is, a couple of minutes, people manage it and they get out and it’s even more potent. But I think intermittent fasting also really helps and it helps even more with the next gene, adiponectin.

You don’t have a huge issue here, but a lot of people do where they don’t make as much adiponectin. And adiponectin, speaking of hormones that are secreted by fat cells, adiponectin is a hormone secreted by fat cells and it helps you metabolize carbs and fat. So having less of that hormone is a problem for a lot of people.

You want to have more of that hormone and intermittent fasting brings it way up. That’s by far the best tool if you have that genetic weakness for obesity. So there’s different categories for obesity, right? Like people try and pigeonhole it into just one thing. It’s Oh, you’ve got a risk for obesity.

You see these genetic reports like, Oh, what is it? There’s different mechanisms for having that risk. And the more precise you can get, the more you can learn about the specific gene, the better. Some of these genes we don’t know that much about, but when you know it’s like a brown fat conversion or it’s a diponectin or whatever, nitric oxide you can get precise on it, just make better educated 

Mike: guesses.

And intermittent fasting is just a good example again of something that it for me, I’ve done it, of course, and I’m just whatever about it didn’t seem to serve any real purpose for me. And I like to work out first thing in the morning. I like to have a protein shake after and like a piece of fruit.

I would prefer not to, have leucine every two hours until I eat, looking at it in terms of my genetics, it would seem that it wouldn’t give me any major like metabolic advantage of any kind, 

Anthony: right? And that’s really rare to be honest. Most people, it does. So if I was making like broad global statements towards the general population, I’d probably say to intermittent fast because just so many people get dinged on those genes.

You’re in the. The minority there, which is good, but again, you’re also centered around performance. So that’s another factor you have to consider when you think about this is what age is the person? What’s their sex? What’s their goals, right? Like some people, they’re super sedentary and their goal is to just.

Whatever, right? Some people are pro athletes, not die. I gotta get a heart attack, right? And speaking of heart attacks, you’re super low risk in terms of your heart disease. You just have all of these categories coming up empty, which is awesome. Yeah, that was the next thing is because obviously on a lot of people’s minds is heart health, right?

And it should be because as you can see, just based on the pdf I sent you, There’s risks from a lot of different angles, right? And most people do have certain risks. Yeah. We should just to list 

Mike: them out, the different categories here are heart palpitations, heart disease related to iron, immune related, lipids, cholesterol related, homocysteine related, lectin related.

Sugar, hyaluronic acid, 

Anthony: flavonoids, quite a few categories. Exactly. And then CRP comes up sometimes with, that’s what’s interesting. Like the lectin free diet, for example, works amazing for certain people, which people, most people that have those genes where those lectins are triggering plaques in their arteries, it’s pretty much minority, but man, for those people, it’s important to know that, 

Mike: yeah, it’s interesting. I wrote an article about the plant paradox semi recently and similar to carnivore, right? The carnivore diet, just not a fan. It borders on just quackery. Actually, the way that Gundry is selling it and promoting it, how broad his brush is, and even some of his proposed solutions.

That dude is a straight fraud in my opinion, but it’s interesting to see that In some people, for certain reasons, it could make sense for them to minimize their lectin. In those rare 

Anthony: cases. Yeah. It’s actually very easy to do as well. Cholesterol is the same thing.

Like for some people, they get so obsessed with like most of the doctors that’s the only category they’re thinking about. With all of these things, right? And some people, their risk is far from cholesterol, like the cholesterol is the last thing they have to worry about, but the doctors, man, they worry about that one.

But for you, as long as you keep your triglycerides good, like you do have a risk with the triglycerides, if they’re high, keep an eye on them. If they’re below that number I put on there for you, 125 mgs per deciliter, I’m not too worried, with that gene. 

Mike: Yeah, actually I’m going to pull up.

Let’s see, cause I’ve only gotten blood work done once for life insurance. Otherwise I just didn’t, I just never really had a reason to usually a fitness person does blood work semi regularly it’s because they’re on drugs, unless they’re just. Completely not jacked at all. But if a jacked fitness person is getting blood work done semi frequently, it’s because they’re on drugs as I’ve never taken steroids.

I never 

Anthony: really cared to. The thyroid hormones I’d be interested in too, because that one, you do have a weakness coming down to the next section. I don’t want to jump ahead. Let’s 

Mike: see. So my track record was for it’s we’re 52 MGDL. 

Anthony: Perfect. 

Mike: Yeah, that’s phenomenal. So there’s nothing there.

To summarize my blood work, it was again, I’m just going to sound pretentious, but I guess it was perfect because they gave me like, I get, what do they call it? Super preferred health. I actually saved a bunch of money because of my health and it didn’t include hormones, which were like testosterone, estrogen, which would have been interesting, but I actually asked, I was like with the person I was working with, I was like, can we get that included?

And she’s no, don’t do it. This is literally a perfect score. And if you include anything else. They will look for something and you may be perfect literally in every parameter we could ever look at, but you might just end up paying more money and you want to know these other things. Also, even just like nutritional statuses again, she was like, just do a separate blood test.

Don’t just leave this the way it is. And so I was like, I don’t actually care enough to get another blood test. And that was the end of it. There was another one though you wanted to know? 

Anthony: I was going to say, did you do T3, T4, reverse T3, TSH, any of those? The thyroid hormones, thyroid section?

Probably not. I don’t think standard blood test. Pancreas, no. It was just. Because the thing about the thyroid hormones is they decline in everybody as we age. So if you start off mediocre. And to be honest, you’re borderline just in terms of your genetics on a lot of those genes.

Then as it declines, then it’s really a problem, right? And of course, one of the better things to do is supplement iodine because that’s a building block for all these thyroid hormones. Okay, good. It’s in 

Mike: legions 

Anthony: multivitamin. So I take it. So you’re probably not even at risk. To be honest, most people aren’t getting enough iodine.

They think they’re getting it from salt and it’s just not cutting it to be honest. So it’s hard to know if you’re at risk for thyroid because most of the people in the studies they do are pretty low on iodine. They’re not deficient, like they’re not dying from iodine deficiency, but they’re low, they’re not optimal, you know what I mean?

So that could just completely overshadow all the genetic risk there, but you do have a lot of them, if you scroll down to that thyroid category. 

Mike: Yeah, I’m still on leaky gut because I want to get your thoughts on that. So that’s also a controversial topic and something that is often used to sell people worthless supplements.

Anthony: Oh, yeah. Most of them, it’s pretty simple. Like the most interesting one in here is called IBD 5. This one I don’t see very often, but it increases your risk of inflammatory bowel disease by about two fold. Scientists debate like crazy exactly how this issue occurs with this gene because it’s one of those things hard to, it’s hard to figure it out.

But the major options seem to be via interferons like inflammation. which I doubt you have. You’re exercising, you’re eating healthy, you’re not eating McDonald’s every day. The other option is ergothionine transport with this gene and that’s something interesting that I want to bring out because most people have never heard of ergothionine and certainly nobody’s supplementing it.

And it’s a vitamin, it’s like a vitamin, your body needs it, you can’t make it. The reason nobody’s heard of it is because your gut bacteria make it. But you don’t transport it as well as you should through your gut lining, potentially. Now, some people have erythionine transporter issues, like genetic issues with their erythionine transporter.

Then it’s really critical, but for you, it could help. Erythionine mushrooms, you don’t have to get erythionine purified. Mushrooms have a thousand times more than any other plants. Like plants in general have some of it. But mushrooms are just by far the best source. So if you had gut issues, there’s a really interesting, I’ve never had issues 

Mike: there, but to be fair, I’ve also eaten very well for a very long time.

Now, even going back to when I was a kid, I I eat better now. I maybe didn’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, but I wasn’t. Pounding candy and fast food every day, like my friends, at least I was eating like real food. And now I would say for the last 15 years, I’ve been eating, especially the last probably 7, 8 years, been eating about as well as you can.

I’ve talked about this and not again, not to, not from a point of look at how cool I am and how I’m eating, but just bringing it back to standard dietary recommendations, plenty of fruits and vegetables, leafy greens, eating a variety of different vegetables, plant fruits. I eat cruciferous vegetables every day.

I eat mushrooms every day. I eat garlic every day. And I even go as far as, chopping it up and leaving it sit and mixing it into my. Vegetable medley stir fry last. So it has more of a beneficial impact because if people are listening, if you’re wondering why heating up garlic kills some of its health benefits, basically, but you can get around that by if you chop it up and let it sit for about 10 or 15 minutes and then cook it.

It actually increases the allicin or whatever that compound is, doesn’t it? And it sits for a minute. I don’t know if it increases it. If you let it sit and then bioavailability, I think the enzymes 

Anthony: break some of those. 

Mike: Yeah. You can now heat it up. You don’t lose the allicin in the same way as if you just chop it up and then cook it.

It’s not that still, going to provide your body with sulfur. It still has some value, but you lose that allicin content and getting, so plenty of fiber, plenty of a couple of pieces of fruit a day and even go as far as it. Again, optimizing it’s interesting. This is, we’ll get to a couple of these points on cruciferous vegetables, for example, like explicitly including those in my diet, making sure I eat some colorful fruits to get like blueberries, for example, to get anthocyanins anyway.

So for the leaky gut. It’s something I’ve never dealt with gut issues, but that’s probably because that’s been my general approach to diet. What I just outlined with, obviously, I’m eating a high protein diet and I don’t, but it’s mostly a plant based diet with, I eat some chicken and I’ll have some skier yogurt here and there, but I don’t really eat that many animal products.

Not that a vegan diet is the way to go, but definitely. A diet heavily weighted toward plant foods. I think you would agree and most experts in this field would agree is, yeah, that’s the way to go. You should be eating a lot of vegetables. You should be getting a bit of fruit. Whole grains are a good option.

If you need more carbs, lean proteins, of course, work for those of us who need to eat quite a bit of protein. 

Anthony: Yeah. And exercise. Again, like we’ve said, that’s the master key to health, right? Yeah, for a lot of people, it’s so overlooked. Some people they can get away with a little more than other people based on their genetics, but it’s always risky.

It’s always an issue. Yeah. Any other questions on that section? I know we could probably go into all these. No, I think that’s, yeah, I think that’s it. 

Mike: Now we have the vitamin hormone and detox genes. 

Anthony: Yeah, vitamin D, you have a couple of weak spots potentially. 

Mike: Did they check your D on that test?

Nope. All right But I do, I’ve been supplementing with 5, 000 I use a day for years now. And I actually make a 0. 2 of in spring and summer and really in the fall, like until it gets just pointless. I go out into the sun. I gather a couple of the guys here at the office. We actually go down, there’s a parking lot next to the office complex we’re in.

And we just take our shirts off and stand in the sun. It looks, I’m sure very strange to people probably for about 15 minutes a day. And I supplement with 

Anthony: 5, 

Mike: of 

Anthony: vitamin D. That’s perfect. That’s literally what you got on that form, right? Based on your genetics, some people, they don’t have any vitamin D issues in their DNA, but you’ve got a couple, and I think having 5, 000 is good.

It’s probably good for everybody, but especially important for you. 

Mike: Yeah. And I liked that you mentioned the vitamin K2 as well. I supplement with K1 and K2, but that’s an often overlooked vitamin. I think partly because it was long considered not Important for general health, but now there’s more information 

Anthony: that’s come out, right?

Yeah, in terms of not building up calcium in your arteries in particular. Yeah, and like fermented products and stuff have a lot of it. Your gut bacteria can make it. If you’re going to take D, it’s really important to have that, I think. Again, it’s in 

Mike: Legion’s multivitamin shameless plug. That’s why I get it every day.

Anthony: Yeah, SHBG, you maybe have a little bit higher SHBG, sex hormone binding globulin, which bind up more of your testosterone, but it’s plus minus. It’s not a huge issue in my book. I call it like I haven’t 

Mike: done a testosterone test, but my brother has. And I just remember that his testosterone test.

Total test was very high, which is also strange because you wouldn’t think that looking at him. He’s always just been a skinny dude, not muscular. And at the time was lifting regularly. And he had gained some, he’d gained quite a bit of strength or amount of muscle. There’s a disconnect there for people when they’re new you gain strength pretty quickly, but muscle gain can lag a little bit, but still after about a year or so of lifting could see that there was a change, but on a major change, right?

So when he went to get. His blood work done. We were thinking like my friends and I, we were joking with him that, I probably am the high T one. He’s the low T one. Ha. His T came back at 11 or 1200. And he certainly not going to 

Anthony: beat that. Yeah. Not using 

Mike: drugs. Definitely not.

But his free T I don’t remember the exact number, but it was quite a bit lower than you would expect. Yeah. And you 

Anthony: expect that’s that SHPG exactly. So I don’t know if, he might even have the plus, like who knows what your parents had, if both of your parents have a plus minus, you could get the plus, you can get the minus, you could get the plus minus, that happens all the time when I do families, it’s super interesting to do families because it’s predictive, but yeah, that’s exactly the thing. If you’ve got high T, but it’s funny, I was thinking maybe he’s eating some Rocky mountain oysters or something, 

Mike: exactly 

Anthony: as soon as he said it was 1100, that’s the first thing I think of, but no, I’m sure it’s just natural. And you can see your testosterone category, right?

There’s nothing there. There’s no like issues. I’m pulling up, although you did have a risk for some higher estrogen stuff. But again, as you can see with all those little paragraphs, I have eating those brassicas, eating that broccoli, the cauliflower, all that stuff. That’s pretty much the solution there, keeping that estrogen down, getting that diindolmethane at reasonable I don’t like it when people dose diindolmethane.

A lot of people ask me about that because I wrote the estrogen book, people are like, oh, why don’t you have a diindolmethane? For some people, it increases their estrogen, it’s a risky one. 

Mike: Yeah, and that’s a supplement that you’ll find recommended in the random grimy corners of the internet, where You know, self proclaimed biohackers will say, Oh, if you want to jack up your testosterone, just take 

Anthony: DIM.

It doesn’t work. Yeah. That’s risky as hell. And most people, especially if you’re overdosing it, you can look at the research on my webpage, AJ consulting company, and you’ll see like the, all the increased prostate cancer risks and all that other stuff with that one. Yeah. So it’s better to just eat the vegetables, 

Mike: even if you’re not like me and I have, let’s see, there’s 4, 5, 6 call outs for estrogen stuff.

Yeah. So it would seem that those, that cruciferous vegetables are particularly beneficial for me, but even if. I had no call outs. I still would be eating them every day because one, I like them and two, they’re just a great vegetable to include. 

Anthony: And they’ve done studies with saunas too. I love the sauna because you get a lot of these BPAs and all these artificial estrogens out actually better than you urinate them out.

Like some of the people in the studies. They had zero BPA in their urine, but they had extremely high levels in their sweat after using a sauna. That’s interesting because those chemicals lodge in fatty tissues primarily. Exactly. And your skin is fat, if you’re eating a bunch of chicken skin, 

Mike: you’re eating a bunch of fat.

You know what I mean? Yeah. I’m just saying it’s interesting that you can sweat them out, but not necessarily pee them out. 

Anthony: Yeah. You do both, but I think the sauna is even more beneficial. For somebody like you, or it’ll help you just keep that stuff down, yeah, which 

Mike: it almost sounds like I’m making this shit up, but I have an infrared sauna, which doesn’t get as hot, but I like some of the benefits of the particularly the far infrared light.

It gets fairly hot though. I sweat in there. And so I do that for 30 to 60 minutes a day. 

Anthony: Perfect, 

Mike: man. I didn’t know that. And then I’m glad. Yeah. I like to read first thing in the morning. So I get up again. My, my alarm is generally six o’clock. I’ll get up, go to the bathroom and then just go sit in the sauna for a bit and read and sweat and then go to the gym.

Yeah, that’s amazing. I love it. My thyroid we mentioned, I have a few call outs here that potential for thyroid issues. Exactly. Yep. Which we’ll see how I guess that plays out. I think my mom takes thyroid medicine, actually. 

Anthony: Yeah, I’m a fan, man. Like when you get older ages, I think everybody, just about everybody should.

My dad may too as well. I’ll ask them. I know 

Mike: that they, yeah, it’s like they’re in their sixties. My dad’s in his sixties. My mom’s in her late fifties and they take good care of their bodies. They exercise, they eat well. But there’s some hormone replacements and I think thyroid is part of that. 

Anthony: Yeah.

I’m a fan. Like I say, it’s do you want low energy or do you want decent energy? Sometimes that’s, it’s that simple, silly not to go in that route. What’s this point on alcohol? Alcohol is, I check alcoholism genes for people. You don’t really have too many. You have got that opioid moon receptor.

So a little bit of an alcohol risk, but it’s plus minus. So it’s not super strong. And that one’s actually related to pain sensitivity as well. Which we’ll talk about in the training session. I don’t want to miss that because you’re actually won’t give it away, but we’ll come back. But the ADHD 

Mike: for me and alcohol, I’ve actually never even been drunk, which is a strange thing.

But I just never got into drinking at all when I was younger. I don’t know. I just played sports in the crowd of people I ran. I was with. They just weren’t with me. into drugs or alcohol. So I didn’t get into it. And then as I got older and became more aware of the effects of alcohol and that it’s just a straight poison, it’s not good for you in any amount.

I was like, yeah, I guess it’s probably a habit that’s not worth picking up. And then turned into me. Being 35 years old and never having been drunk. 

Anthony: Good. No, especially because of that ADH gene that we got there, you have a 12 percent decrease in alcohol detox, so just via your liver, so it stays in your body longer.

Hangovers are a lot more pronounced in your case and things like that, no, it’s good. It would be more toxic for you. So I have some options there to help you if you want to go and drink, but I like what you’re doing, what you’re doing is better. 

Mike: Maybe you should recommend a psychologist or something for us.

If I’m thinking about getting into whiskey maybe try to couch it like as if I’m trying to, it’s like a skill, it’s like a wine tasting thing. Yeah. I’m trying to become a connoisseur, not an alcoholic. 

Anthony: I do like good scotch myself. Like the ones that taste like paint thinner to a lot of people.

I love those. But what’s funny is that are you 21 supplement like to play on words, right? Are you 21 that was developed by the KGB. Because they wanted their agents to be able to drink like crazy and not get drunk. So then they can do whatever agents do. But what’s funny though, too, with that opioid receptor, you’re more sensitive to pain.

But then if you go down to the training section, which we can jump, it looks like I’m let’s jump down there for a second. Yeah. Because 

Mike: Yeah, I’m looking at the rest of this section and it stands out. So I’m, again, I’m trying to pick things that people have also heard about, trying to make it interesting for the people listening.

So it’s not just, yeah, it’s listened to my, yeah, here are my genetics and you should be 

Anthony: interested in this. Let’s talk Jim for a minute. Like the last category we’ve got left basically is the training. And the highlights there, I want to start with the pain sensitivity, even though that’s on the end.

SCN9A, this is a rare gene that’s linked to extremely low pain sensitivity, which isn’t necessarily an issue, and it’s offset a little bit with that opioid receptor we just mentioned, which is a higher sensitivity to pain. Like you feel pain more with that gene, but this one you feel it less. And this one’s a plus, so I think you probably have a tendency to have, less pain sensitivity, meaning you’re more at risk for getting injured because you don’t feel pain.

When you’re working out, but again, it’s harder to tell and you have to offset that with that opioid receptor. You know what I mean? So sometimes it’s real clear cut and it’s like all the genes indicate you don’t have pain sense. But in this case, there’s a little yin yang going on. What’s this muscle types?

Yeah. Muscle types, people. Put way too much emphasis in thinking like I’m just a fast switch guy or whatever, but most people, they can train their bodies to go either direction and endurance or strength. And they don’t realize there’s not that much genetic difference. You know what I mean? You almost can’t write a book on it because there’s not that much to say, but this ACVR1B gene you have, it does give you higher muscle strength per volume of muscle.

If you had the exact same size muscle, somebody else, you’ll be stronger. That’s interesting 

Mike: because I actually, I’ve never been maybe I’ve been slightly stronger than average, but I’m not a super strong person. Naturally, even looking at my bests, my best lifts, which are respectable. I’ve squatted, let’s say around a body weight of 200 ish.

Maybe I was a little bit lighter, one 90. I’ve squatted. Maybe 365 for a couple. I’ve pulled four 20s for a couple. And I think that was actually when I did that, I hurt my SI joint, which was neat. It wasn’t even like my form was good. It was a freak, just Oh, what was that? I felt my hips shift.

And I was like, that’s probably not supposed to happen. And then I bench press, I think 295 for a couple. And I’ve seeded military Press 225 for a couple. So those are okay numbers. And I guess maybe they’re decent considering that I didn’t program specifically for them. Like I was always, I’ve always followed a routine.

That’s half strength, half bodybuilding. I didn’t go all in on a strength training. I just want to get really strong. I do not think no matter how hard I worked at it. I would be a good strength athlete, for example. I don’t think I would be able to compete for shit no matter how hard I worked at it, just given how much work it took to get to those numbers.

Whereas some people they’ll start outlifting and they’ll be hitting those numbers like by the end of year one, maybe year and a half. 

Anthony: What did you work out in high school? Nope. I played hockey. Yeah. It makes a huge difference. Like a lot of that is epigenetic. It’s the marks on top of the DNA.

It gets programmed when you’re younger, a lot of interesting because I always played endurance sports as a kid. Yeah, the guys that are like real high responders to putting on extreme muscle strength and mass. To a tee, they did the heavy lifting in high school when they were developing. 

Mike: Yeah, I’ve come across that actually quite a few cases that’s been true.

Actually, I’m thinking to some of the people I’ve Just met over the years who were impressively strong and yeah, one for one, they, or 

Anthony: they take 

Mike: steroids and that’s also usually the case, but exactly. Or, and, or, 

Anthony: and, or, yeah. Yeah. 

Mike: I think there’s also an anatomical component with me though. Like for example, I have strangely long arms.

Yeah. I don’t think I look too weird just to when you see me walking around, but if you look at my arms, you’re like, Oh yeah, that dude’s arms are actually really long. And that makes pressing harder, even if it just makes that sticking zone a couple inches larger. Like it does translate a more difficult lift on any sort of press.

I have long legs and long femurs. So that screws me on the squat and not literally, but it just makes it more difficult. Those what would the long arms would be an advantage on pulling. But the long legs are a disadvantage. So I’m like an okay puller basically. So I’m like a shit squatter, a shit presser and an okay puller.

Anthony: And you’re still got decent numbers. What it comes down to for a lot of these guys, they’re on steroids and they did a ton of training when they were in high school or pre puberty or whatever during puberty. And they’ve got this mindset where they don’t give a shit if they destroy their joints and all that.

That’s true. Destroy anything that, it’s just, yeah, it’s true. Live and die by the barbell. Yeah. So that’s, not very sustainable, but people do it and you don’t have to go there to be healthy and strong. Agreed. What are 

Mike: these joint points for me? I’m curious about that because like I’ve always had a little bit of crepitus in my knees and I’ve had some achy joints and tendonitis, which is not particularly a joint thing, but it makes me think of joints, tendons, and ligaments as a group.

And I’ve heard, I think that was in the DNA fit. There was some just again, it was a generalization of, I remember it was like, yeah, your joints and your tendons are pretty shitty actually. 

Anthony: As you can see, I have different categories and the big risk for you is inflammation. If you have a lot of inflammation, you’re going to have joint issues, but more specifically like that HLA gene is a fourfold increased risk for arthritis.

So it’s pretty high again, average Americans, right? But it’s still there. And that one’s triggered by insulin, that gene, high chronic, high insulin is especially the worst thing you can do. So if you had the joint pain and your insulin was high, keto is really effective in that case. That STAT4 gene is another one that’s another two fold increased risk for rheumatoid specifically.

So that one’s another chronic inflammation related gene. And there’s a drug out there, it’s called LysoFeline, but it’s like in pre clinical trials and it’s not available on the market. I wouldn’t necessarily go there unless you’re super desperate and then you could look into it. What I do 

Mike: is I take, so the, that’s one of the reasons I got an infrared sauna is because they’re from my understanding of the literature, there’s actually some good evidence that it can reduce inflammation, not necessarily increase post workout recovery.

That’s questionable, but reduce inflammation in the body is, looks to be pretty 

Anthony: reliable and it increases nitric oxide too. And that’s really important for you, for your pancreas, like we talked about for a lot of things we talked about, but also for your joints, because that blood flow section, if you look down below.

The gene in that category basically indicates like your joints don’t have a lot of blood flow. Most people don’t realize your joints have something called synovial fluid. And to get the toxins out of your joints and to move nutrients in, you have to move your joints. And that’s true of everybody. It doesn’t matter what your genes are.

I’ve worked in the orthopedic surgery department at Mayo Clinic with stem cells and stuff. And I’ve watched them do knee replacements and my brother’s a Orthopedic surgeon, et cetera, et cetera. But for you, you have more of a risk of needing to move around to get that crap out of your joints and get nutrients in.

And one way to do it, of course, is exercise. And that’s the best thing. But infrared light is also super powerful here because it increases nitric oxide and you can target your joints with that. It just 

Mike: really helps what I’ve noticed from my little infrared sauna routine in terms of my joints is now, fortunately, I don’t have any.

Really major joint issues to speak of anymore. I guess I didn’t have major joint issues, but so previously when I was lifting some of those heavier numbers that I had mentioned, I remember that was the end of a lean bulk that I had done. One of the reasons why I was like, okay, I think. I’m reaching a point where pushing beyond this is asking for trouble is I remember my right knee would bother me a bit after I would squat my lower back.

Sometimes just didn’t feel too great after deadlifts. I had that SI joint issue, so I started just noticed that I was getting running into joint issues and then I backed off the weights. I just started cutting. I was like, whatever. And then I just got super lean and was like, I’ll just make the best of it.

I backed the weights down a little bit. And I started working on mobility and I found that for example, my internal rotation on my left side was really bad in my hips. I guess I’m not well versed enough in anatomy to automatically go Oh, if your internal rotation on your left side is impaired, you can have SI joint issues.

It makes sense if you think about it, but I just didn’t automatically connect it. And then I in poking around the literature, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence of that. And I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. So since improving the internal rotation in my hips, the SI joint. Issue has completely gone away and improving mobility in my shoulders that help these days.

I don’t have any real complaints as far as joints go. However, I’m not lifting as intensely. I’m still training intensely, but I would say if my training before was like a Generally an intensity of a nine out of 10, I’ll give it a seven out of 10 generally. And sometimes I’ll push up a little bit higher, but what I’ve noticed from the infrared sauna in terms of joints, and if anybody out there, if you have joint issues, this would be relevant to you.

Or if you have crepitus, which is like cracking. And that’s what I noticed is less of that. My understanding of crepitus is that it’s not a big deal if there’s no pain and there’s never really been any pain with it. It’s just been a thing for, it hasn’t gotten worse. It just is what it is. Actually, since using the sauna, it’s gotten.

Like it’s been noticeably less. I’ll notice it going upstairs. I’m like, Oh my, I didn’t even, my knees made no noise. So that’s interesting. 

Anthony: No, I agree. And it’s not like you’re training for the Olympics or anything, so you don’t have to prove anything to anybody. Exactly. So I think it’s better to do a longevity training program.

Mike: You got to train for the gram. 

Anthony: I thought that was just for the butt, 

Mike: It could be wrong. Yeah. I wish it were that easy. If I were a female, it’s all hip thrusts at titillating angles. And then that’s it. And I’m going to have a seven figure following that makes me no money. Yeah. 

Anthony: Or you could just promote cheap ass supplements.

Anyway, you did have a little bit of gout risk too. And I wanted to cover those because those are interesting. Like the first one, PRKG2, this one’s not well studied, but it seems to be connected to hydration. And kidney removal of uric acid, so drinking plenty of water and staying hydrated is key for that.

But the other one is even more interesting, SLC 289. This one is is actually a sugar transporter, fructose and glucose transporter. So if you get a bunch of uric acid buildup in your joints, it’s because of the sugar. Be honest. So all the doctors will tell you to stop eating meat or whatever, but that would be a kind of a false direction with your genetics.

It’s probably more related to carbs. If you had uric acid buildup, which I really doubt you would because you’re exercising, you’re moving, you’re flushing stuff out of your body, you’re eating healthy, all the stuff, right? But I also drink a lot of water. I drink probably a gallon a day. Yeah, I’m not surprised.

And the last category, the very last category here is bone strength. Thanks. There’s other ones we’re skipping over, of course, because you don’t have any issues, but you had a yin yang here where you have stronger bones for that plus win 16. And then you had a weaker bones gene. So I think they’re offsetting.

Interesting. Yeah, I’ve 

Mike: fractured my wrist when I playing football many years ago, I got tackled hard, but it’s just not even, it was just like a Pick up game with friends and randoms that were at a field and got, and I fell hard on my wrist. And I think given the force, I’m probably lucky. I didn’t just shatter it.

I was actually surprised that it was only a fracture. I was like running full speed and someone jumped on my back and swung me around. I didn’t even see him coming. And. But so I don’t know. That’s my only experience with bone strength. 

Anthony: No, that sounds pretty much what your genetics, some people, they have stronger bones, stronger, more strong bones and in their genetics, and they do these these DEXA scans and things.

And the doctors are like, Holy shit, you’ve got strong, like tense bones and it’s pretty predictive. And they never break them unless they get hit by a boss or something. It’s another category I like to look at, because if you’ve got weak bones, there’s some stuff you can do to fix it, but another rabbit hole for another day, man, but that’s overall really good, Mike.

Yeah. I think, 

Mike: This has been a super interesting discussion at least to me. I hopefully if people are still listening, hopefully they found it. Enjoyed trying to make it trying to pick things that people would like to hear about. 

Anthony: Oh yeah, 

Mike: applicable. 

Anthony: People are usually fascinated by it because there’s not a lot of awareness.

No, 23andMe, they offer these health reports that are pretty neutered. They’re pretty weak. They don’t tell you much of anything and people get them and then they’re like this is clearly not useful. So they shut the whole industry off or they shut that out of the block that out of their mind.

But then when they recognize, when you do these like ancestry. com is my favorite because they do 900, 000 snips. That’s a ton of information, right? Like 23andMe, they only do 600, 000, which is still a lot of information. It’s a ton of info. This has been 

Mike: not only interesting to you, but it’s useful.

There are definitely a couple takeaways here. I’ve for the most part, it’s continued doing things that I’m doing, but that’s good to know that intuited my way into some of this or just honestly, some of these things just sounded like drinking a lot of water or something that I’ve always done. It just has, I just have felt like.

That’s what my body wants. I don’t know. It wants more water, not less. Like I wouldn’t, you’re not doing the snake diet. 

Anthony: It’s a guy who does like dry fasting, a joke. He’s super obnoxious dude. He’s getting really popular on YouTube. Cause he’s just so extreme. People like to follow him just for the humor because he’s so obnoxious.

Mike: Is it a joke or he’s serious? He’s serious, but it’s 

Anthony: A joke. It was a joke from my 

Mike: perspective. It’s a joke, but he doesn’t mean it to be a joke. That’s funny. I’m going to look that up. This snake diet. It’s a rabbit hole. Yeah. As the cool kids say, miss me with the snake diet. Okay. 

Anthony: I see a legion article in the future on the promise of a snake.

Hey, if it has enough search volume, we’ll go after it. It does. Trust me. I keep hearing about it on my genetic consults. People are like what do you think about the snake diet? So it’s out there. I’m actually making a 

Mike: note right now. Snake diet. No, this has been great. Also, one thing I like about it is I think there’s value in just better understanding your body and how your body works and you get to feel more in tune with your body and then you get to make some changes and see some improvements.

And that’s cool. And I think that can lead to Being more aware of what’s going on in your body. And it may also for anybody listening, if you want to reach out to Anthony and go through this process, it’ll be cool for me, at least like I go through some of these things and it, I guess the word could be affirming where it’s like, Oh, that’s neat.

Like I already had a sense that was the case. And so it shows That if you are paying attention to your body and if you care about your body and take care of it to some degree, not that you need to obsess over it, but that you can know things and then you get a DNA test and you go, Oh wow, that’s actually right.

Like I’m not surprised. Like I came to that conclusion myself either because again, a few of these things were just things that made sense to me, or I had heard about it. And I tried it and I’m like, yeah, that feels good. My body feels like it wants more of that. And not that is necessarily those signals could be misleading too, because it depends.

Some people think that, Oh, my body wants, more cupcakes every day. Is it really though? Is that really, or is there something else going on there? But, oftentimes there are signals among the noise. And if you can pick up on those. It’s neat to then go through this process and how your intuitions line up with DNA.

Anthony: Yeah, I agree. Like Socrates said way back, I’ve been to the the Oracle of Delphi, and I’ve been to Delphi and they, then they have this stone there that says know thyself. The oldest philosophical command. Yeah. Principle. Yeah. And people think of it purely as philosophy, but in reality, This is it.

Know thyself from know your DNA knowledge is power. 

Mike: So for people listening who want to have you go through their DNA, what should they do? Where should they go? How does it work? 

Anthony: Yeah. Right now I charge 300 to do like a one hour rundown of people’s genetics and it’s on AJ consulting company.

You have to type in that whole phrase, which is obnoxious. I apologize. I’m not a marketing guy. The scientist in you is winning over the marketer. Yeah. And to be honest, I have a pretty long wait list. I’m actually getting some coaches and I’m training in on this because I want to bring the price down a little bit and be able to get it out there a little bit more because I do pro athletes.

I have done MMA fighters. I’ve done NFL players, like real famous ones too. I keep it confidential, a lot of really, and then the next person I’ll do is just a random dude from Oklahoma or whatever, like who, Drives a garbage truck, and I’m, that’s awesome. I love that because it helps those people too.

It’s not I don’t want to get feel like your genetics doesn’t matter, because you’re not a pro athlete does, it helps everybody that I talked to, I think, I hope. 

Mike: Something that just pops in my mind is out of curiosity. So you’ve worked with high level athletes. Are there interesting.

Common denominators among people. What are just a couple interesting common denominators genetically? 

Anthony: Yeah. It depends on the sport, right? Because a friend of mine and he doesn’t mind me saying this, but like Zack bidder, he just set the world record in the a hundred mile race. He did it with.

Six minute and 45 second miles for 100 miles straight, for example, like somebody like that, of course, that’s like a different league of endurance, athleticism and joint genes. And but most of the guys that are in like the conventional sports that Americans think of like baseball pitchers and things, they have a surprising.

Like they have very good dietary genes. So they don’t get, like a lot of sensitivities to different foods and things like that. So they can get away with a lot of stuff that most people can’t. 

Mike: Anyone who’s played a lot of sports, you can immediately think back to those kids, especially as you got a little bit older, who, they’ll, they show up with like big Macs to add to the game and then just go destroy everybody.

And you’re like, what the fuck is this? 

Anthony: I feel like that’s more of the advantage than the muscle fiber types and things like that. Most of them it’s in the diet. Interesting. Yeah, it’s super interesting. 

Mike: Cool, man. Yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time and appreciate you going through this. And I want to talk to you.

We can talk after just quickly. I’ll talk to you about getting this done for my wife. I think it might be helpful for her and if it would be of any value for my kids as well. But. Yeah. So thanks again. And people are saying it’s a J consulting company. com is where you can reach out to Anthony and he’ll take care of you.

Thanks Mike. I understand there’s a waiting list, but Hey, you can get on the waiting list and you can get it done. Hey Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, legion athletics.

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