Lessons - How Your DNA Holds the Key to Preventing Disease | Kashif Khan - Genetic Health Expert

In this lessons episode, discover how your lifestyle, not just your genes, shapes your risk for diseases like Alzheimer's. Learn how brain inflammation is often the root cause, how small changes in diet, stress, and environment can prevent chronic illness, and how your body is built to live longer than you think if you care for it the right way. I mean, I've heard you speak about Alzheimer's and dementia quite a bit, and I'm predisposed to that. I think to some degree, because I think my grandpa got it, and I actually did a DNA test of some sort, I can't remember which one it was, but it was showing like that was like the one thing that I should look out for. And I've thought about like lifestyle changes and food and whatnot, but I've never really considered environment. And I've never even thought that there's supplementation that could completely, or with a high degree of success find a way to sort of push off or delay Alzheimer's dementia. So you're saying that like, I'm sure you know a lot about this. There are like supplement combinations if you are in the proper environment and your health and wellness is sort of on point that you can actually push yourself even if you're predisposed to it. Perfect example of what is believed as possible, even at the medical level, the doctor tells you how you have this genetic worker, it speaks to an elevated risk of dementia, watch out, right? And the anxiety of that alone will cause the dementia, because that's one of the causes is high cortisol, right? So we really need to use that more as a priority, as opposed to a prescription, what biology actually leads to this outcome? So we reverse engineering. So what do we see? For, by the way, Chris Hemsworth, Thor, right? We used to do during our research a lot of work on the Marvel movie sets. So the trainers or the stars would, we'd work with them to build these cocktails to keep people at their best so that you know those long shoot days, they had good recovery, good everything, good energy, good sleep. And so because of that, the one of the producer that made the show limitless, remember Chris put on the show, right? We were supposed to work on that show on the genetic episode and then COVID hit production got shut down. Chris is in Australia. I said, do you want, I'm going to just do it anyway. I'm going to pick up some cameras with my buddies and that's what he did. So in that episode where he did the genetic test, he was told you have the APO aging, right? The Alzheimer's. I know that was like a big story. It was a tabloid story. Yeah. Everybody has the gene. What version you have determines what clinicians will say is a very low risk, eight to 10 times risk or 17 to 25 times risk of getting dementia versus the average population. If you ask that doctor that told Chris that nice, literally sent an email to the producer saying, I just watched this episode. This is nonsense. There's so much more, right? Here's what I told them that yes, this gene is linked to people that have Alzheimer's because we only study things in a disease-centric setting. Farmer companies don't study healthy people to ask them why they didn't get sick. They study people with a disease and figure out what genes are tied to it because that helps them make pills, right? But that's too late. What does this gene do? This gene is responsible for lipid transport, so moving cholesterol in your body, literally moving it around. So everybody has this. Everybody has this gene, right? If you have inflammation in your brain, this gene is responsible to send cholesterol there to fight the inflammation. Clestrol is a very beneficial hormone that fixes things all of your body. It's also a root for your sex hormones like testosterone, et cetera. It's also good for your brain, right? If you have the bad transport tool, you don't do a good job of transport. And so when you have the inflammation, the cholesterol deployed, it's easier for some to get less behind, left behind, I should say, and start to build what we call an AMOLED plaque, this plaque in your brain. That plaque starts to choke at the brain cells, kill the brain cells, and eventually lead to cognitive decline. And the behavior that a doctor will call Alzheimer's. But if you actually reverse engineer it, step one, why did I have inflammation in my brain? If that didn't happen, I didn't need to worry about what version of this gene that I had, which only comes from this disease-centric thinking, which is where research money goes, right? So what causes the brain inflammation? Do you have leaky gut, like I did, which is why I had brain frog and depression? Talks and exiting your gut wall, crossing the blood brain barrier, causing brain inflammation. That's one big cause. Do you have high stress, constant high cortisol, which is another source of brain inflammation? You need to tone that down. Metabolically dysfunctional. What are you eating? And what are your unique genetics saying about your ability to process those things? Some people decide to become a vegan. Some people decide to go to a keto diet when their genes actually don't allow them to do that. And they're going to get sick from that thing, right? Fourth is environmental. This is probably the big, big underlying one that most people don't realize. There's a gentleman named Dr. Tom O'Brien, who's one of the sort of pioneers of the functional medicine movement. And he did some research in California and said that 66% of California's dementia is based on what thing people are breathing. One hour of LA traffic is an equivalent to a pack of cigarettes. In terms of the amount of inflammation it causes. When you do that day in and day out, the brain inflammation just increased. The last one in the big one. This is why 80% of dementia cases are in women is because your hormones that are meant to benefit you can cause inflammation if you're not doing the activity that your hormones are designed for. And some women make toxic estrogens that can reside in your brain cause inflammation. So all of these five things, so when I got your gene results, say we were working back then, when you got your thing, I was like, okay, park this. Don't worry. Let's look at these five things. If we plug the gaps and holes on these five things with either the right supplement or the removal of the wrong habit or cleaning up the environment, whatever your priority is, it's not happening. No in root brain information. You don't have brain information now, which is why you don't have dementia now. Once you get to a certain age, your mitochondria, the energy that's in the brain, starts to also reduce. So the ability to fight the inflammation changes. And that's why it's an old age disease. So if you start to look at all these little pieces of what's the biology actually driving the net outcome, you can work on each step and then it becomes a choice. You don't need to have this thing that you're told you have a risk for. So all all all these predispose like predispose to cancer, predispose to heart disease. There are all things that can be mitigated to some degree. So there is some truth to genetic conditions, right? That is less than 3% of healthcare. According to the CDC, 90% of the $4.3 trillion healthcare budget in the United States is spent on chronic disease management. Things that are caused that we do not need to have you're not born with it. It's not in you. You cause it. No fault of your own. You didn't know any better. What you ate, what you breed, the toxic people you're surrounded yourself by, whatever it was, caused the inflammation to cause a disease. So if we can eliminate that in the United States of the top 15 reasons why people die, 14 are rooted in inflammation. So if you don't have inflammation, when whatever part of your body, which leads to whatever disease, those are all off the table. And that all of a sudden you go from a, like you said, this expectation that you get your first chronic disease at 55, which is the American average, second by 65, and you spend the last 15 years of your life in treatment. That is the norm. Versus a few simple tweaks and all of a sudden you jump from 78 average life expectancy to 90. Like I don't smoke. I eat clean. I exercise three times a week. And this literally by the way is a result of a Harvard study. They studied a bunch of nine year old plus people. And they said, here's the five things they didn't smoke. They exercise more than three days a week. They drank less than three drinks a week. They were not obese. And they had a healthy whole food diet. That was it. I got them from 70 to N. The 70 to 90 was 90 with good health. Not 78 in a hospital bit. So without even doing a DNA test, I mean, like if you just adopt these like five lifestyle changes, which just seemed to be smart comments and all things. So this is already going to fix the majority of the problems in your life and the majority of causes for information. It's that you remove the modern conveniences that are making us sick. I was going to say it seems like our whole life is actually so it's ironic because everything you just mentioned is so common sense and so easy. But our whole life and most people's lives are shitty food, stressful environment. And we just go through it every single day. I think and I think that intuitively we always think, oh, I'll get better. And I'll be less stressed and I'll work less and I'll eat better. I'll do it later. I'll put it off, right? Yeah. To prevent all simers in your 60s, you need to start working on your health on your 35. Right? Because the chronic disease is not a switch that gets turned on over time that your body is able to fight and is resilient at that age and can tone it down that all sudden the disease wins. And one last thought there is that the sort of kicker to all this is yes, adopt healthy habits. The last bit that people need to know is that some things that you think are healthy that is good for somebody else is actually bad for you. That's the X factor where you got that's the X to yeah. And that's the thing where that's how you get from 90 to 120. If you look at actually RNA to cells, aging is the degradation of DNA. So damaged oxidization environmental wear and tear. There's these caps on our DNA called telomeres that are like bumpers wear and tear. They're physically designed to last 120 years. So we know that our cells are designed to last 120 years. That's what we're supposed to get to measuring those can indicate your biological exactly. Okay. So that's why we use this for biological age measurement. We know they're supposed to last 120. So if we already know that we know 120 is what we're wired for. And it's supposed to be 120 and you see it. We're grilling ourselves. We are taking years away that we already have as a God-given gift. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.