welcome to the fundamental health podcast I'm your host dr. Paul Saladino this podcast is the result of my relentless search to understand and correct the roots of chronic disease and illness in this podcast I will share with you everything I have learned about how to live the most healthy and radical life possible thanks for joining me on this journey what is shaking everybody how are you I am so excited coming to you from San Diego from the beautiful San Diego now I've gotten all moved in and I am incredibly stoked stoked is my surf reward to be sharing this episode ta with you guys from dr. Ben Lynch you guys may know dr. Lynch he is very well known in the world of methylation and basically invented MTHFR in the way that Al Gore and that's the internet but he's seriously an expert on methylation genetics single nucleotide polymorphisms you will enjoy this episode everybody's heard the term MTHFR we go into it in detail here we definitely get technical at times but I do my best to kind of summarize and bring it all back home for us and make it able to be understood so dr. Ben Lynch is the best-selling author of a book called dirty genes I'm gonna link to it in the show notes it's a really good book he's a leader in the field of neutral genomics which is the intersection of nutrition and genetics he's the president of seeking health which really is an innovative company providing supplements courses tools designed to help people overcome genetics his function and optimize health he earned his Bachelor of Science in cell and molecular biology little smarty pants from University of Washington he obtained a doctor of naturopathic medicine from Bastyr University in Seattle and he now serves on the board of trustees there he lives in Seattle with his wife and three sons and I got to hang out with all of them recently they are good people we went out on Ben's boat we went wake surfing it was an enjoy des and as you'll hear in this episode Ben Lynch ate raw meat and got buzzed and it made me so so happy you guys they made me so happy but as you can tell a lot of things make me happy I'm a pretty happy a lucky guy as I mentioned in this episode I have been impressed with the quality the consideration and the intentionality that goes into all the supplements he makes and so I recommend the seeking health brand to my clients without reservation you'll just know if you know anything about me that I very rarely recommend supplements in general and as dr. Ben Lynch and I talked about in this episode I think supplements are something that should be supplemental they do have utility but I use them very rarely when I do use them I usually go for a seeking health thing and I have no affiliation with Ben he's not paying me to say that he's didn't pay for this interview he's just a good guy and I want to talk to him about methylation and he has supplements that I think are very clean and well considered so if you are in the supplement market you should improve the quality of your food first do your exercise sleep and then think about seeking health if you want something that's clean and that I trust personally speaking of things that are clean check out my newsletter it's like the outcast song right fresh and clean it's fresh and clean I just released one today although today is not the day the podcast is getting released today is a few days before the day is getting the day the getting the podcast is released but I released a newsletter today and if you didn't get it you're missing out I always talk about articles that I like I talked about this podcast I talked about cool things that are happening with me I moved to San Diego surfing sunsets you know cool things I like this week I talked about a Berkey filter which i think is a great water filter I'm gonna be talking about books I like and podcasts go to Paul Saladino MD com front slash newsletter or just Paul Saladino MD com click on the newsletter link put in your email and you will be in the cool kids club and I will see you on the newsletter side in a couple of days when I release another one as always this podcast is sponsored by the incredible ancestral supplements these guys are the bomb I love what they do you know I love their supplements I like their supplements because they're good people and because they source them well they're sourced from New Zealand they're grass-fed there are no additives and it's an incredible line of supplements they have liver heart kidneys pancreas brain and more as we talked about in this episode the kidney of the animal has diamine oxidase in it and it's very helpful for people with histamine issues so if you have histamine issues definitely check out the kidney supplement the other one that I've been loving recently is the brain supplement because it's really hard to get ahold of beef brains or lamb brains or any that stuff there's a guy on Instagram who's gonna send me some lamb brains I'm gonna tell you how they are but until I can get the lamb brains I think these beef brain supplements from ancestral are a great option they have neurotrophic factors that support the survival of existing neurons and they grow new neurons so that sounds like a good thing to me and I play a doctor on TV so I don't know maybe I know what I'm talking about probably not but you can decide for yourself so anyway I like these guys a lot I do think their problem their products are valuable and I certainly believe in nose-to-tail I believe that we should be eating more of these organs and I think the ancestral supplements stuff are a great way to achieve this if you don't have pancreas liver heart kidney spleen tendons collagen at your nearest grocery store if you do then you should probably eat those as well but when we're traveling difficult to get those and it's just hard to get all these things in and I think that these are a great way to do that so check them out at ancestral supplements dot-com you can use the code Saladino MD for 10% off and that will support this podcast as well so thank you for your consideration there the other thing that I continue to love is the Jue vite you guys have heard me talk about this it is my near infrared light I have used it to raise my testosterone I really appreciate these guys as well they are also good people I don't have I don't really endorse a lot of supplements I to the affiliates stuff much but when I do it's something I really believe in and something that you better believe I use if you go to Juve Jo o V comm front slash Paul that will also support this podcast that is my affiliate link for Juve I probably will do a podcast all about that stuff in the future because I like it so much the red light therapy is so interesting to me but I think it's pretty clear that our bodies need near-infrared light you can get ultraviolet light in a tanning bed you can get ultraviolet light from the Sun you can get also you can get near-infrared light when you're outside but I'm not able to be outside with naked and with all my body exposed and sunrise and sunset but many of you will notice that it you are outside at sunset you may sleep better and that's probably something with the near-infrared light which is going on then so I've noticed this improves my sleep I don't have an ordering yet but I've heard other people talk about the fact that their deep sleep and REM are better when they do an earring for a treatments before they go to sleep so it's like these guys out it's cool stuff all right you guys that is it on to the podcast enjoy this one it gets technical at times I tried to bring it back it's too technical let me know we'll do another methylation once a super important topic I appreciate you all thanks for listening all right welcome to the podcast my friend dr. Ben Lynch is a pleasure to have you here today how are you I don't have any raw steak I'm like my desk here so I'm not sure how good I am Paul people may not know that we recently met at the home of Mike mussel who's an incredible guy I recently moved out of Seattle I'm a little bit I'm a little sad about that I'm missing it now you know I see photos of Pacific Northwest and I think that's really beautiful there but I'm living in the ocean or near the ocean now in San Diego but you and I had dinner with Mike a week before I left and I convinced you somehow to try lots of interesting things so tell us what happened at that dinner event like tell us what happened at that's in or her won in Rome you do things that Romans do right when you're surrounded by people eating a bunch of weird things you chime in and eat a bunch of weird things and and uh you know when you realize it's it's actually not that weird it's kind of what our ancestors did to when it was rainy day and you know their cave was flooded for some reason or all the wood was wet or they didn't know how to build a fire they just ate and they you know they survived because we're here so you know it was a it was a good experience for me to eat the the raw fat the raw liver and the raw what was it sirloin whose tenderloin interline yeah it was good and you know it it was cool and you came over to my home and you offered it to a bunch of kids and the kids you know some of them were down for it and others like heck no so but I recommend giving a shot with someone who's educated about it but what was so cool was that when we were at dinner with Mike and I gave you the Romney how did you react how did you feel we recorded this on an inside but everybody probably didn't see it I got a buzz man it was like it was like you know some people do meth or cocaine and I guess Paul does raw meat and you know I I took a bite of that stuff and I got a little lit up it was it was cool it was there was something in there that my body needed that I wasn't getting and you know I supplement like crazy and you know as I need to and and I eat generally pretty well and I move my body and but I ate that little bit of rami I mean I didn't have a full plate like you did I'm not that level yet but uh I felt good but really good I thought that was so cool I thought that was so cool and I was so interesting that you were open-minded and then it was awesome I went out to your house a couple days later everyone wake surfing people may not know this but you're you're you're becoming a good wake surfer and you know we had a good time I post a video of you wake surfing on on the Instagram as well I'll have to repost that when this this podcast comes out I need a new video I've gotten a lot better oh really yeah I got slack rope I can I can ride away for a little bit I'm still working on staying on it but I'm getting I'm getting good kind of makes me happy my friend the best surfing is the best we'll get you out to San Diego soon but but yeah I was super fun I walked into your house and there were a bunch of teenagers there and they all wanted to hear about the Rafi try it was so cool yeah so I think that I'm just so excited to add me on the show today because I've been following your work for a while people may know about me that I've just finished residency at the University of Washington and you know when I was in residency I learned a lot about functional medicine topics and methylation was one of those topics and if you google methylation you find dr. Ben Lynch like immediately I mean just kind of like Al Gore and then in the Internet I'm pretty sure you methylation so and then you wrote a book called dirty genes which is amazing and we'll talk about a lot of stuff in dirty genes and I'll link to it in the show notes but I get questions about methylation and MTHFR all the time so there's no one better that I could think of to have on the podcast to talk about this and break it down a little bits a complex topic but I'm so excited to hear you talk about it so for people that don't know what we're talking about who don't know about methylation and the gene MTHFR where would just where should we start I mean where do people need to start to get a grasp on this and why is it relevant to people well it's it's a tool in your tool shed you know and and it's a it's a kitchen appliance in your kitchen so you know the body has many many different types of functions and tools in order to get those functions done and genes are one such major tool and so we have about eighteen to twenty thousand different genes in the human body and that it kind of equates to about 18 different 18,000 different tools in your body to do different things whether you want to digest the meat whether you want to absorb the meat whether you want to transport the nutrients from the meat whether you want to get those nutrients bound to a receptor to pull those nutrients inside the cell you know the all these require different genes because the body is a beautifully to refined instrument and the word instrument is it's kind of degrading to think of the human body as that because it's so amazingly powerful and beautiful but genes have jobs to do and if you have the wrong tool for the wrong job or you were given a rusted tool that's half bent and you're trying to you know put in a screw and maybe the Phillips screw that you know the screws with the pluses you know it's a little bit script and you're trying to put that in with a flathead screwdriver it ain't gonna work so well and so if you're born with genes that you know kind of a blunted screwdriver and you're giving it a tool you know that's a bit you know stripped out itself by not eating well or the environments bad then you're not gonna be performing as optimally as someone with a brand new to Walt screwdriver with a new bit on it with brand new screws so it's you your body has the tools we have different tools in all of our tool sheds and we all have different genes and the components that we utilize every day matter and you so you you kind of touch on two things that you talked about in the book there are a couple of ways that our genes can get dirty we can get dirty jeans from by being born we can be born with kind of a crappy screwdriver or we can the screwdriver can get kind of blunt and crappy as we're living our life so why water what are some of the ways that the people I guess you know if you're born with a gene that doesn't function as well we'll talk about MTHFR is a great example of that if you're born with a gene that doesn't function as well that's just what you've got and you can modify it as best possible but what are some ways that our genes get dirty in our life environmental exposures what kind of stuff makes can make the screwdriver blunt if even if we're not born with a blunt screwdriver well you can get that screwdriver and you can get a piece of stuck bubblegum on the end of it so it could be a brand-new screwdriver but it's got a gunk of bubble gum on the end so if you remove the bunk gunk of bubblegum there's just fine right so you know if somebody has a genetic test and they get their indicia for tests back and they look it's like wow I am quote-unquote more there's no genetic variation in my entity bar gene I'm good but yet I have high homocysteine and I don't feel good and something my empty bar gene must be dirty because you take folate or you consume leafy greens and your homocysteine levels go down so that is definitely associated with the empty bar gene or you take riboflavin it goes down your homocysteine goes down so it's it's really important to understand the different types of dirt and how they impact your genetic function and so that is what the book dirty genes does is because there's there's too much guessing in medicine as you know Paul right especially in psychiatry or you know well actually all aspects of medicine nowadays there's there's poking and prodding and testing and guessing and take this take that let me know how you feel and we'll change it up but if you understand how genes work the tools that the jobs that they're doing and the type of actions that they want to have or the type of support that they want ie what vitamins and minerals make them go and you know what substrate that they need ie protein or you know upstream types of different folate then you know how to take action your own in your own life and let's say you know you touched on a little bit but let's say you're born with a dirty into Jaffar you're a dirty mofo right so let's say that I'm born with a dirty MTHFR gene and when I first looked at it I tell you Paul I was scared I was terrified but now I know I'm kind of a blunt screwdriver so I look for really good screws that aren't stripped and I also you know make sure that I'm perfectly parallel to that screw before I start turning so it once you know that you have a weaker tool the tool shed you adapt right because you can't go and get a new tool all the time so basically what we're talking about here is the idea like you mentioned that that our bodies have 20,000 different genes or essentially I mean that number is give and take you know a little bit but we have thousands of tools and all those genes code for things like enzymes that do things in our bodies and though serve functions and for some people there are this there's this thing and this is an acronym that I think people may have heard that I'll explain the single nucleotide polymorphisms or snips and the snips affect the way the genes function and they kind of make us individuals right so what we're talking about now are single nucleotide polymorphisms in specific genes one of the genes we've mentioned is MTHFR and we'll go into more detail about what that gene is and what it does but there are these polymorphisms in MTHFR and other genes that were born with and that's one way that the genes in our bodies can be more or less able to do their functions and so what we're talking about is the idea that you can be born with the genes that don't do the functions very well because of certain polymorphisms or they can get dirty because of environmental exposures like toxins for inadequate sleep or stress or inadequate nutrients and the ultimate result is that these tools don't work as well as they should is that kind of a fair summary of all that nailed it okay the hill the hill so let's talk about MTHFR because that's that's the that's the prize gene and everybody talks about so what is it what does it stand for I mean you've already talked about the acronym you know everybody calls it the mother effer gene I'm trying to keep the podcast clean if you look at the acronym it looks like it looks like mother effer so you know what is that gene what is it involved in what is methylation and how does this fit into the broader context of human health it fits in the broader context of human health because it's it's the driving force of what turns your genes on and off you know a lot of us think that our genes are fixed and some of them are our eye color or hair color our skin color these are fixed I mean we can tan right but that's that's different so but you are born with certain things and you can't change that what I'm talking about when I am talking about genetic and genetic function is I'm talking about the genes that we can influence and how they're you know communicating and how they're turning on and off so basically you know it's a huge thing but if you want to put it in the context of real life you know you look at your look at your hand for example in your hand there's DNA everywhere right and most of your genes in your hand are turned off and in order to turn genes off and on they have to be methylated and methylated is an action in the human body that takes a small component a carbon in a few hydrogens and it just sticks upon the gene and it tells it you know to don't work you're done for the day or you're done forever and a the flipside of that is if someone is not consuming any methyl groups in their diet because you consume foods that have a lot of methyl donors in them so when you eat meat you're getting a lot of choline and choline is a methyl donor you're also consuming a vitamin b12 and you hear methyl cobalamin right methylcobalamin is found in meat especially liver so you when you're consuming meat or liver you're getting a lot of methyl cobalamin and you're helping your methylation if your diet is void of methyl groups in about two weeks your methylation system will be messed up and a lot of your genes will actually be turning on and that shouldn't be on and then your risk for cancer goes up so that is you know since a lot of genes are silenced a big factor of methylation is making sure that these genes stay off and then also certain other genes stay on that's a huge factor but then there's another aspect of methylation which changes the function of things so for example making creatine right let's say you eat a lot of meats or you don't eat a lot of meat but big aspect of methylation is making creatine and vegetarians and vegans typically if they're not eating well you know it's I was a vegetarian for about a year and I felt like crap I didn't do it right and I know uh vegetarians or vegans some of them were jacked and super fit but I think if genetics are designed for it and they eat a really good diet but when I did it I I was losing muscle mass and creatine helps hydrate your muscles as well and so methylation uses you know most of its own compounds to make creatine about 80% of your methylation reactions in your body are used to make creatine and also make your cell membranes and we'll get into that more detail but basically it's a it's a it's a crucial process that you have to have functioning and a lot of it's controlled by diet so it's sort of the addition of these methyl groups which are single carbon units to two molecules two genes to turn them on and off to other molecules like the precursor for creatine they make creatine to make neurotransmitters so we're moving I always think about it kind of like a currency in the body it's almost like Bitcoin or something in the human body it's this it's a methyl group you know it's a single carbon currency that gets moved around the body and I think I've heard you say that there are that Sammy which is a common methyl donor so s-adenosylmethionine we can talk about that participates in over 300 methylation reactions in the body so as I understand that there are hundreds and hundreds of reactions in the body where methyl groups this one carbon unit you know this this currency is added to things or taken away from things and that is really one of the major processes that runs our body it is it is massively important and we can spend days just talking about methylation and of itself weeks and what's left over as a methylation reach after a methylation reaction occurs is actually homocysteine so we we hear how bad homocysteine is in cardiovascular disease and cancer risk and nerve you know it's like illogical disorders and it is but homocysteine is unmethylated meth I mean that's all it is so when you eat protein you're consuming the thiamine and other amino acids the Metheny isn't a big big component of protein consumption consumed diets and Metheny is just methylated but the binding is also called methyl homocysteine if you want to call it that so you know it you homocysteine is good and you need almost cysteine you just methylate it and you methylated it with the methyl cobalamin in methyl foley which is what the energy bar gene makes so we talked about it so far and empty Jafar is an acronym for this big mouthful of words that makes your body's primary form of folate so if you're not consuming a bunch of leafy green veggies or liver or other types of foods that contain folate in them you hear the words folate it's actually comes from foliage so that's pretty cool when you think about folate is foliage and so if you if you have a slower smore sluggish empty Jabar gene you're not gonna be making that much methylfolate and you need that methyl Foley to take that homocysteine and slap a methyl group on it and now you're helping you make your methylation system again but the good news is if you're eating a bunch of leafy greens and you're eating that liver it doesn't matter if you have a sluggish empty Chi bar or not because you know beauty for our team doesn't have to work so hard because you're giving it the end product you're giving it the you know the final thing that it makes so it doesn't have to work it doesn't have to work as hard this is an interesting concept I you and I were kind of dialoguing about this a little bit offline a couple weeks ago via text you know are you so I guess I'll just break this down for people the the folate cycle actually what we're talking about now is the math I mean cycle this is kind of a complex biochemical reaction it's this is one of the challenging things about podcasts and if people are interested in this they can look up the math I mean cycle I know it's seeking health.org you have these pathway planners that really show people how all these reactions look and man these are some of the best visual representations of the folate cycle and then these are definitely the best representations of the Fowley cycle and the Matheny Zygo that I've ever seen so people really want to understand the biochemistry I would recommend going to seeking health org and looking at doctor Lynch's pathway planners what we're talking about now is this idea that you eat folate in your diet and we can talk about the different types of folate but we Eve folate in our diet and it goes through a series of enzymes it gets processed via into different folate forms but that last step that last step in the Foley conversion pathway is that enzyme right it's MTHFR and that's the tool that we've been talking about that can be affected by snips the single nucleotide polymorphisms and that takes one form of folate and makes el methylfolate which is really the active form of folate and when people have a sluggish MTHFR gene they don't make that conversion very well but what's so interesting to me is that in some foods like you're suggesting you can get preformed el methylfolate is that right whatever sit and so I I think we were talking about this a little bit and do you know what what type of foods are you aware of that have preformed al methylfolate liver liver yeah liver huge huge amounts of folate in liver and then you've got spinach anything green is gonna have folate in it you know but then as you talked about with veggies when we have in that dinner you know plants are trying to protect themselves and so they make compounds you can stitch you in sir chemicals inside their leaves and their root systems to protect them against pests and and animals and you know then they they design their seeds to either blow in the wind or stick to animals fur what have you to be transported for somewhere else so planets have really evolved to protect themselves and so if when we eat those certain foods you know they might support us with nutrients but the same time there are anti nutrients in those foods too so for beans for example you know if you're eating beans there are folate and beans but they're that folate in beans is not very well utilized by the body because of phytates and other things so it's it's a and leafy green veggies you have oxalates and you got tannins and you know so it's it's it's tough to you know sometimes get these nutrients from these foods and some people have real difficulty actually eating these foods so consuming liver would be a good way to really really hit home and absorb a lot of these nutrients without these compounds blocking the absorption yeah so it's so interesting to me that the the forms of folate are different in that like you're saying some sources of folate are going to be better than others and I think liver is a great source of a lot of magical compounds riboflavin being one of them and preformed for being one of them and so this is such an interesting idea that I guess animals are making methylfolate ooh they're making el methylfolate so why wouldn't there be methylfolate and liver now there's been a lot of interesting research recently about riboflavin an MTHFR do you want to talk a little bit about that what's the deal with riboflavin and MTHFR I'm a flavin being another one of the B vitamins different than folate well this is just like we've talked about you could have a a born dirty gene or you can get eight I got dirty gene and so empathy far can be born dirty ie meaning it you inherited snip what didn't make it so quickly to function or as as readily available to work like mine mines reduce some capacity about 78% which is very very significant especially when you lived a life like I used to do in my college days in pre college days where I didn't eat very well and I suffered from it now I fair amount of protein and get my salads in usually and I feel much better but I lost my train of thought here your question was Oh how does riboflavin play and teach afar yeah yeah so riboflavin is the nutrient needed by your antigen or enzyme so genes make enzymes most of them not all of them but genes make enzymes and the enzyme will take a mineral or a vitamin usually not always in order for that enzyme to function and it requires certain ph's certain temperatures certain environments and freedom of other things to allow that vitamin and mineral to bind to that enzyme so that as I'm cannot you work so think of it as a the entity of our enzyme is a wheelbarrow sitting in your driveway right so riboflavin is going to be you know the person who is actually wheeling the wheelbarrow so actually you have the empty of our enzyme it's there but it's not going to do anything unless there's something to drive it so riboflavin is a driver of the entry bar enzyme and if you aren't low and riboflavin which actually a lot of people are riboflavin is a very very important nutrient and not only is an important nutrient that's becoming more deficient in the population and I think partially it's getting deficient population there's one because people don't eat nose-to-tail like me and and two people don't eat grains like me and brown foods contain a lot of B vitamins and so if you're not eating grains and you're not eating nose-to-tail then you are going to be most likely riboflavin deficient so unless your supplement so that's kind of sad to say but you can get Brava flavin from nuts and seeds also and other types of foods fish and so on but riboflavin is really really important now something I don't talk about enough is I've I do have a dedicated video on this somewhere on the world of YouTube but the riboflavin when you take a supplement of riboflavin it could be riboflavin 5-phosphate or it could be Robin flavin hydrochloride which is fine but in order for that rabbit flavin to actually be utilized by your entire enzyme you have to have sufficient thyroid function and not enough people talked about this so because if you look at the pathway planners as Paul was talking about that that I drew up from all sorts of research papers and consolidating my findings on the one diagram you know rabbits not just listed as riboflavin it's listed as FA D we're changing it back to just be - and riboflavin just for clarity's sake but your thyroid function has to be functional because your thyroid hormones convert the riboflavin that you are consuming into active riboflavin which is FA D which is FA D right I think this is such an important point to emphasize for people and I love that you brought up nose to tail I prom I'm een yeah we'll talk about it but you know guys just so you know dr. Ben Lynch is not a carnivore but he's super interested in this and so like you know he's open minded and he thinks about things broadly and it's so cool when doctors in the space as well who are not even carnivores can speak to principles that my tail straight ways that a carnivorous nose-to-tail diet might be beneficial and that's not why I bring people on the show but it's interesting because it kind of brings it all for a circle but the food sources of riboflavin are interesting to look at I love I love for building a diet based on first principles and sort of reverse engineering a diet and looking at the nutrients that a human needs I don't think that as humans we know everything about nutrition but we know a heck of a lot about what vitamins and minerals humans need to function optimally and it's so interesting to me to think about where we would get those vitamins and minerals from and food and what the best sources of those vitamins and minerals are in food and as you kind of touched on earlier I've done a good amount of research for my book now and a lot of the B vitamins are not as bioavailable in plants because of because of the glycoproteins and so if we're trying to get B vitamins from plants they're only about 30% as bioavailable as the vitamins and animals but I think it's such an interesting concept because of these glycoproteins but even within plants there's not a lot of great sources arrived a flavin really if people want to get enough riboflavin of the day they have to be eating egg yolks or liver those are really or supplementing and those are really the only sources of bioavailable riboflavin and adequate amounts and the RDA for riboflavin is like 1.1 1.2 milligrams but there's some pretty compelling evidence that higher doses of riboflavin are even beneficial for people and might be needed for people with MTHFR polymorphisms I'll also mention that my MTHFR is dirty as well I was born I have so I'm Paul I am homozygous for the 677 C the T mutations that what you are or your compound heterozygote compound yeah I got one of the each yeah yeah no I'll clarify for people what that means or I'll let you explain so what do we mean when we say homozygous heterozygous compound heterozygous yeah HFR so you know you have the egg in the other sperm and within the egg you have a set of DNA and within the sperm you have a set of DNA and upon conception you know you you inherit one of those DNA from your mom and you're inheriting one from your dad so if you have you inherited one aspect that's heterozygous so heterozygous means you have a variation from what is normal then typically found in the population so it's not mutated basically and homozygous means you've inherited a copy from your mom and your dad that is different than the standard population it's different it's not bad it's just different sometimes it's bad but sometimes it's just different and so when when Paul says he's homeless I guess for the empty two four six seven seven he inherited one copy of the empty of our gene which we all do and at position the genes are made of a bunch of DNA bases and I think the empty of our gene has about 20,000 DNA bases and at positioned 677 there was a change in one of those DNA bases from a cytosine to a thymine and he and then he inherited the same thing from his dad so he's now he has instead of two cytosines for the empty fourteen is two things and what does that do well it changes the shape of the image of our enzyme when it's made and when you change the shape of the enzyme you change its function and so by changing the shape of the antigen or gene or they empty of our enzyme the riboflavin can't bind very well can't sit very well and on the edge of our enzyme and so what you do is you take more riboflavin and if you take more riboflavin doctor Bruce Ames did research on this that if you if you take a gene like mg far and there's variations in there that don't allow it to to bind riboflavin very well by giving it a lot more riboflavin there's a higher likelihood that that riboflavin actually is going to bind to that enzyme it's gonna be able to perform and do work so when you start thinking of it this way you know why is it that people who have chronic persistent migraines realize that they can take 400 milligrams of riboflavin and they got their life back right if the RDA is 1.2 milligrams and yet there are supplements that contain riboflavin of 400 milligrams you're like whoa that's 400 times higher than their the standard RDA well yeah but these people no longer have migraines and so there's another enzyme called Maui which also requires a lot of riboflavin and also your glutathione reductase enzyme uses a lot of riboflavin so there's a number of genes that need riboflavin in fairly high amounts if they're if they're not working very well it's such an interesting concept and just people know in terms of the amounts of riboflavin that we're talking about if you eat a few ounces of liver and four or five egg yolks a day you could probably get two to three milligrams of riboflavin as far as I can tell it would be impossible to get 400 milligrams of riboflavin in a day from food so if people have persistent migraines they're not gonna get enough they're not gonna get that dose of riboflavin from food and in that case the supplement is probably beneficial I think most people probably do just fine I've seen my MTHFR function I believe normalize with just liver and egg yolks I used to supplement ala methylfolate and I stopped when I was doing carnivore just to kind of follow and I'll talk to I'll talk a little about that in a moment but interestingly for you you know Ben I recently rechecked my homocysteine on no methylfolate and it was seven just eating liver in egg yolk so I thought that was really interesting so I'm talking about there is the idea that we can use homocysteine levels as a kind of a proxy for MTHFR function do you think that's reasonable I think it's reasonable most of the time mm-hmm most of the time if especially if you don't have if you're feeling pretty good you're in you're almost esteems around seven I think that's good the problem is this it gets complicated especially without diagram is homocysteine the diagram wants to go back towards well let's let's talk about this way when you're methylate something the leftover remnant is an almost cysteine right we talked about that earlier so you know if you if you're making creatine and your body has to do that it's using up a lot of methylation and it's leaving a lot of homocysteine out there for it to be converted what people don't talk about they talk about sani they talk about homocysteine but there's a component in the middle of those two which is called saw so you have Sam you have saw the a boma cysteine so saw is actually a precursor to homocysteine it's it's one step after Sam after methylation occurs you have saw and then before it becomes homocysteine so I say usually homocysteine is fine but the best marker for methylation is actually saw and even more you know more better good even better than that it sounded like my kids know better yeah they learn a lot in public school I tell you so you know your your Sam saw is a more better okay no I'm just playing with it keeping you on your toes here it's it's a better way to check your methylation homocysteine easy to find affordable simple go for it but if you're still struggling try to find a lab like doctors data who looks at your methylation ratio if your Sam your saw and they measure that they let you know the downfall of these tests is it might say that you're almost this team is fine your saw is high but in your Sam is you know high or low he ratios bad but doesn't tell you why so now you got a sleuth and figure that out with a doc and that's when you start looking at Gene's and cofactors and nutrients and that's where the functional medicine approach comes in so I'll just summarize for people because we're basically we're painting this methionine cycle in our in our imaginations but we have you know let's just imagine in the bottom left hand corner we have MTHFR enzyme which is taking foley it's turning it into l month or folate l methylfolate combines with homocysteine and it needs a riboflavin or an F ad to make that homocysteine into my thigh into Matheny now between homocysteine and Matheny there is some stuff involving a couple of other enzymes that we won't burden people with and it involves b12 as well as a few other cofactors but basically homocysteine goes to the thiamine and then that math I mean gets turns into Sami and that's s adenosylmethionine and that's the Sami that we've been talking about and that's this Universal methyl donor in the whole body and then that donates methyl groups throughout the body and when s adenosylmethionine donates methyl groups to DNA to turn off the DNA like we talked about to make creatine to make choline we're gonna talk more about choline when it does all those reactions in the human body after it gets rid of that methyl group it's now s-adenosyl homocysteine which is saw so as dr. Lynch is saying that's Sammy to saw ratio so s adenosylmethionine to s-adenosyl homocysteine ratio is really the most accurate measure of methylation but you have to work with a functional medicine doc to get a sense of that homocysteine is much easier but that's really the biochemistry and then acid NaCl homocysteine goes back to almost cysteine and we're back around the circle did I say all that right you did you did yeah and I always tell people just take your thumb and your index finger right so your left thumb is methylfolate your right thumb is homeless cysteine and your left index finger is b12 right so you actually you can pinch your actually pinch your left finger and your thumb together so yep so your your left hand your thumb and index finger are touching each other and your right hand is shaped as an L your thumb and your index finger apart so you take your methylfolate you methyl cobalamin and you connect it to your thumb and then that will convert the homeless cysteine into behind for you so funny yeah so that's it's a one-way about it but you know you can just look it up to on the internet and see it look at the pathway planners that's seeking out it'll help people understand the biochemistry but the takeaway I I think that we've had a good discussion of MTHFR here and I think the takeaway is just the idea that this is a gene it's involved in methylation which is the addition of methyl groups in this case it's involved in the formation of a methylfolate if you're MTHFR is dirty meaning if you have polymorphisms at the 677 or 1298 position you want to make sure you're getting enough riboflavin you want to make sure you're getting enough methylfolate in the foods you eat and then you want to make sure you check your homocysteine and if there are more issues then you probably want to work with a functional medicine doc to sort that all out does that sound reasonable yeah let's let's use your diet as a as an example of how this all works because you know you're reading all these papers these days and they talk about how Metheny is a marker of longevity and if you are consuming a lot of Metheny and containing foods I eat a lot of protein or meat then you have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease mm-hmm I called I want to swear it's nonsense and you know the I've met a number of vegans and vegetarians who are actually worse off in terms of cardiovascular disease then someone sitting next to them so it all has to do with the individual not the diet itself so if the person the vegan vegetarian is doing their their diet lifestyle in the environment right they're fine they're healthy go for it if you have the carnivore who's just eating you know a huge amount of meat and nothing else and not eating Oregon meats well they're homeless esteem could be high not definite but it could be so adding the liver like you're doing Paul is probably saving your butt because your homocysteine is a 7 right yeah yeah and so you know this would be this is proof to me that a carnivore diet when done properly you know is still supporting a methylation you're getting lots of choline which is a methyl donor you're getting lots of methionine which is a methylated component and precursor to Sami you're getting lots of methylcobalamin so and you're getting the folates from your liver and a bunch of your B vitamins from the liver so that's proof right there because you are m2 Jabbar 677 homozygous which is setting you up for an 80% decrease in function of unity to our gene so that means an 80% less ability to transform one aspect of fully into the body's number one form of folate but who cares if you're eating folate that the animal made and you're getting enough riboflavin from the rival they've enriched issues and stuff ya know I thought it when I started doing a carnivore diet I thought oh I want to see what my methylation does because and we can talk about this a little bit I remember when I was first learning your stuff I think you said that you had first gotten interested in the mth of our enzyme because of all the literature you found linking MTHFR polymorphisms and psychiatric disease bipolar and things like that so maybe we can just talk for a moment what kind of symptoms are associated with MTHFR polymorphisms or what problems to people with MTHFR polymorphisms run into if their methylation and the thiamine cycles are not running as well as they should well you you touched on it earlier methylation supports over 300 different enzymatic reactions in the body so you can have 300 things going wrong right there that's a couple right that's a couple and then you have methylation turns all your genes on and all your genes off so you're pretty much in trouble if you and baqr gene doesn't work so it's it's a myriad of signs and symptoms and and you know a lot of people unfortunately have these petty little signs and symptoms right you you get a little runny nose right and you go to the doc and actually you don't go to the doc cause it's just a little irritating runny nose and you wipe it on your hand and then go on your pants and you're good to go you know and other people is that you lay down at night and you stare at the ceiling and it takes you 45 minutes before you fall asleep and then finally invest in our ring and you realize it's like God my deep sleep sucks I'm only getting six minutes and my heart rate is you know route 65 and you go to the doctor and doctor I'm not getting to sleep just taking me too long to fall asleep so they give you an ambien or something you know what to knock you out and meanwhile your your genes are thinking what the hell is ambien I'm deficient in folate here and i'm deficient in other vitamins and you're giving me some pharmaceutical with a bunch of crap in it and these other ingredients and just got shellac and food coloring and else and your body just needs some vitamins and minerals and some loves so you know it's it really comes down to just base and fundamentals which we all know and what are you referring to there with asleep is the idea that methylation is involved in the formation of melatonin right yes and yes you know there's two steps to convert your serotonin to melatonin and one of those are the methylation a reaction then you have histamine a lot of people with allergies or drinking wine and listen folks this is a big one for a lot of you if you're drinking wine and she eaten cheese and you like you you get you know what silently runny nose and you can't fall asleep and you actually get a little bit irritable and read and written are in space that's high histamine levels and so if you take certain nutrients or eat certain foods that can process that histamine for you then you can fall asleep no problem you're not that you can be able to enjoy your wine and your cheese and you're not gonna get irritated and you're not gonna get the runny nose with a nose please with red face you're like well I'll talk more about that while it's in the book it's a dirty Dao gene it's right there but I'm just telling you that histamine needs methylation to get eliminated out of the body and then you have your dopamine norepinephrine and epinephrine also need methylation to get those out of the body so you know a methylation does a lot of important things for sleep tons of important things for sleep and so there you're talking about different things that are chapters in the book there's a chapter in the book on the enzyme Dao which you talked about which is diamine oxidase and that's something if people have histamine sensitivity they're familiar with Dao they've heard of the Dao and Dao can get dirty so diamine oxidase can be dirty and that is involved in the processing these histamine molecules and methylation is intimately connected with that and then with regards to the catecholamines you're referring to another part of your book you go through all these in the book it's so great you're talking about comt so there you're talking about an enzyme called catecholamine o methyl transferase and it's in the name catecholamine o methyl transferase there's a methylation reaction for the catecholamine neurotransmitters so I hope we're just able to illustrate for people that methylation runs the body it's an intimate system and it's an integral system in the body and there's methylation reactions involving neurotransmitters involving melatonin involving histamine involving all kinds in things and if it doesn't work you can get all kinds of symptoms that are going to be a problem so this is why it's so crucial it's not complicated if you give your body the nutrients it needs it usually works pretty well but it can get really far out of whack and for malnourished let's just talk for a moment about glycine because this is one of the things I talked a lot about on a carnivore diet and the idea of Matheny and glycine balance and from looking at your stuff and reading other things it's my impression that when your body gets excess methyl groups if you're eating a lot of methionine and your meat for instance one of the ways it buffers those methyl groups is with a glycine molecule and that can use off your glycine what how does glycine play in all this and is the Matheny and glycine ratio important in your opinion wow this is you know I've read papers on meth I mean glycine and and the whole you know balance of Sammy it's so confusing and I will read them and they're like oh I got it and then I'll forget it and then I'll read it again and I'll forget it and I honestly well I I don't know you know and you know Chris Master John is is talk a lot about glycine and I've read his stuff and I still am confused for meeting his stuff it still doesn't make sense now you know am I thinking too much into it yeah probably is it simpler than you know is it actually easier than I think actually I don't think so I think it's actually extremely complicated I think one of the reasons why I'm not grasping it is because one I haven't taught it but I don't teach things until I actually get it enough and I can repeat it and I can look at different diagrams and I can make sense and I feel confident I'm not gonna teach something that I'm not confident about so I what I haven't taught it but I haven't taught it because I'm not well-versed enough in it and I think it's extremely complicated so there is a gene in the human body called G and M T is cly seen and methyltransferase and you're thinking wow okay so you need methylation for this gene well actually no this gene is actually you know slowed down by the by methylfolate so when you take methyl foley this Eugene is is slow he's like well it's a methyl transferase yeah but it's a confusing game methyl transferase you know so you know and in this jeans job is to get rid of excess methyl groups in the body part of it you know and if you have a lot of Sammy you don't want too much because you don't want to be flipping all these switches so your body will will dump the Sammy and will dump it through this gene called CVS and to make your glutathione so then now you know dumping your your methyl donors to make your body's number one antioxidant glutathione is a fabulous thing but it's really complicated and you know then you have other genes which make lysine - you got the the SH MT gene and there are variants in that and that's what requires vitamin b6 and use a Syrian to do it and you also you know full eighths so I can't unfortunately give you that much information I'd be you know I'd love to hear your thoughts on it but you know maybe you can coach me through some of these things because it's it's it's just so confusing and and I remember you know Sarkis teen feeds into the folate pathway and GMT makes Sarkis scene so it's just like oh it's it's a mess well that's exactly what I've seen that that glycine and methyl transferase uses these methyl groups to add a methyl group to glycine which makes Sarka seen and again we're getting super down the rabbit-hole biochemistry and then you can look at sarkozy levels to see if you're dumping methyl groups into that into that pathway you know to get rid of the extra methyl groups I think the takeaway from that for me at least from my perspective was that if we are eating a lot of methane and mussel meat and not giving our body adequate glycine or I should rephrase it if we're eating a lot of methane it can use up glycine because humans can make glycine you know it's constitutively required or it's it's I think they say it's conditionally essential but there's plenty of literature to suggest that at least in terms of broadly considered humans most humans don't make enough glycine in their diet every day they run about 10 grams sure just in terms of all these things because we know that we use this amino acid for collagen and glutathione among other things super-important let me know that and so my thinking has always been oh we're gonna if we eat a lot of methane and we don't give our body enough glycine we can potentially use that glycine we can use it up to buffer those methyl groups by that GN MT reaction to SAR cusine etcetera so it's just an interesting thing I don't think anybody fully knows what's going on there but yeah and so basically what I'm possibly hearing here is if you are taking you say methylfolate or methyl cobalamin and some of these folks have chronic persistent conditions you know maybe they're College's disorders or what have you and they're not eating nose-to-tail or you know healthy or absorbing these foods maybe you already know the tale but your stomach gas is crap cause you're stressed out you're taking in asses and you know you're got antibodies against these things and so you're not making the stomach acid not zorbing the nutrients that you're glycine isn't building up so basically if you're taking methyl donors who have insufficient glycine you could be reacting to the methyl donors simply because you don't have that Bufferin impact of the glycine that's that's my impression and it's also I am be curious saying your take on this you know one of the things that I discourage people from doing in clinical practice is is taking Sammy because I don't want to I don't want to put methyl groups in the Sammy molecule if I'm gonna do something I'll have somebody eat foods that have high folate and make sure they have enough riboflavin or all supplement riboflavin but I don't want people taking Sammy and my experience a lot of people take Sammy and they get anxious and they it's like they're overloading the methyl groups are kind of there are ways in our biochemistry now that we can sort of circumvent all of these stopgap measures and you know we can put these byproducts of our biochemistry in places where we shouldn't be pushing on them very hard so I don't like to use Sammy and my practice because it pushes so many methyl groups there and I learned this from you that if you overload somebody with Sammy you're just gonna push up their homocysteine yes you can and that's a really bad thing right yeah and you know it's actually really stunning to me when I read research papers about various things and prescribed thing is 800 to 1600 milligrams of Sammy to a pregnant woman for cholestasis so you know our issues during pregnancy are actually fairly common and part of that reason is because they have insufficient choline during pregnancy so that's a huge problem and I talked about that in the PAP EMT chapter about this and it's you need to have sufficient choline to make your bile and your seal calling for your brain and your cell membranes so every single cell is covered with a little membrane and if you pull the nucleus out of the cell and will live for about I don't know X amount of time a few days or something but if you pull the membrane off and it's dead in an instant so some membranes are really really important but you know in terms of I lost my train of thought again so you can go to sew down any rabbit holes it's I don't know okay we were talking about we were talking about not giving too much Sammy and you are studies where they have tons of Sammy right so you know these researchers said oh okay well we know that cholestasis pregnancy is associated with gallbladder issues and so if we give Sammy a bunch of Sammy then they can make phosphatidylcholine and women need 10 parts of Faust all calling to one part cholesterol to have their gallbladder their bile slide through the sphincter of Oddi right into the small intestine and so I'm thinking well why the heck would you give Sammy when you have no idea where it's gonna go she's given phosphatidylcholine right done and you know let's say a woman is pregnant and that the studies at all it's helpful in some studies and not helpful to others well what if a woman is has empty chief our or she's already has high homocysteine levels well then Sammy is gonna make it worse she's not gonna actually make more cost of colon she's gonna make less so you gotta be taking fossil choline during pregnancy or lecithin and these things are phenomenal for gallbladder issues and and those of you who are fought in a keto diet or intermittent fasting you know you've got to be really up up in your faust all choline levels you know if you're not eating like Paul does because you're getting a lot of cost on choline precursors from eating these the way that you do the choline right to choline in the man yeah let's not yeah let's talk about choline because this is one the other genes you know I don't want to keep you too long I want to respect your time but I think let's talk about P EMT briefly because I think it's if I think MTHFR is amazing and we talked about that a lot but let's talk away that about let's talk about how methylation connects to choline through PMT so this is fascinating and will kind of bring that whole discussion together so what is P EMT PMT is a is an enzyme in the body well gene that makes an enzyme and this enzyme job is to make phosphatidylcholine you're like okay what the hell is that well facile choline is the major component in every single cell membrane in your body number one and your brain is a huge amount of faust all calling and your nerves as well and your bile so if you're eating a lot of animal fat and you're not eating enough animal protein or your methylation system isn't working then you're not gonna be getting sufficient choline and also getting not therefore not getting enough phosphatidylcholine so your your bile is gonna get fit and sludgy and if it gets thick and sludgy the number one form of gall stones are cholesterol based stones so remember you have to have ten parts of us all pulling to one part cholesterol in your bile in order to support to slide through and dump out to not get stones and a lot of people have that reversed so PMT is uses a lot of Sammy in fact every every molecule of faust all choline that is made uses three Sammy's so that means that every time your body wants to make fast all choline it's also producing a fair amount of homocysteine at the same time it's a very demanding product so in order to make that now you need to recycle that homocysteine with adequate folate and vitamin b12 or choline or b6 so now just making the fuss all choline requires other nutrients in the human body for it to function so you're thinking wow that's actually that's starting to make a lot of sense how do I support that well eating a meat based diet with some healthy veggies as well or eating organ meats contain all these vitamins and minerals in them that you know these micro these micronutrients that are found in high amounts of in organ meats so the foster holiness was really really important you can get fossil choline as a supplement please only get it in the sunflower based form if you're not allergic to sunflower because a soy based on choline uses a lot of hexane and if I invite you to try if you want it you know it's GMO issues as well and you got roundup and all that sprayed on soy too but the hexane is a major solvent and you actually can taste the the solvent if you bite into pc-based capsules that are using soy PC this is actually pretty nasty oh that's gross so yeah that's really interesting that's really interesting and this is another thing that that that I mentioned in the intro but we haven't talked about is that you have a supplement company seeking health and when I am recommending supplements to my clients which is rare admittedly because as we've talked about supplements are supposed to be supplementary and I want them to do food first but I will tell people and I am not affiliated with seeking health like I you know I recommend your supplements first because I think that dr. Lynch is one of the most if not the most considerate you know intentional person when he's designing supplements so the supplements at seeking health are probably some of the highest quality I've ever seen and they have the most in tension that goes into them of anything I'd seen so I would recommend the supplements from seeking health you know without reservation to people because dr. Lynch just thinks about these things you know he has a family and he's so hip to like we don't want to use a soy-based phosphatidylcholine because it has more GMO roundup and so they're really good quality supplements again I think that a lot of times people don't need supplements but when I do recommend them I usually recommend seeking health so I'll give you that little plug there bad I again people probably don't need them but I appreciate the care and the intention that goes into your brand of supplements yeah no I hear you you know really appreciate that and you don't look when you're reading the soap and scrub part in dirty jeans in the book you know the soap and scrub is is the you're getting to work you know part of being healthy is not listening your doctor and taking what the doctor gives you which are are supplements or drugs right part of being healthy is actually taking action and ownership and changing things and improving things and eliminating things from your life to obtain health right so part of the soak and scrub one of the bullet points I have in there is to stop all supplements that you can that are not life you know preserving supplements that you absolutely have to have because you need to find what you can do and on your own and you actually can do a lot without supplements by following the soaking scrub by following the basic principles in life by drinking filtered water by going out and surfing like Paul does by eating whole healthy foods not the processed garbage with a bunch of crap in it or actually taking supplements that actually could be making you worse and very often do because you're not using them right or they're fully loaded with metals and mercury's and and bacteria and solvents and it's a dirty industry the supplement industry is nasty Paul I'll tell you we were trying to make this Gaul batter formula for about two years because we were trying to find clean enough ingredients to make the damn thing it took us that long to find clean ingredients and one of those things was a apple pectin powder just simple apple pectin we could not find a clean enough apple pectin to use in our formulas so I had the accent we basically sourced all over the United States and overseas to trying to find a clean apple pectin but couldn't find and how couldn't find it anymore what because we didn't find it someone else is using it is using they're using the inferior forms is what I'm saying right right so if people are taking supplements they should be very aware of the quality of those supplements and and I've always appreciated this about about your supplements they're there like I said they're well-designed they're intentional and they're clean they're they're not going to get passed dr. Ben Lynch's must they're not good yeah or QC Department which we have now and you know we'll receive products that have been tested and third-party tested and they'll land in our warehouse we put him in quarantine and then amber will get to him send him to another test them again but if it doesn't meet the quality or the or the label spec or gone exactly you know it's anyway it's it's it's a huge that's a whole other part that's a whole that's next that's the next podcast the dirty supplement industry yeah well you were saying about the gall bladder I just want to bring that around for people because I work with so many people a lot of gall stones and I love that you brought that up because you know you have I see people all the time you've seen people like this people get golf stones their gallbladder is out before they've even said you know cholelithiasis it is such a disservice to people if you have gall stones I think that this is an in oversimplified world I could say I could go out and limb and say hey you know what this is an imbalance between your kollene your phosphatidylcholine and your cholesterol in your gall bladder and your makings gall stones so yeah if you want to get rid of your gall stones or if you have gall stones work with a functional medicine doc look at your production of phosphatidylcholine make sure you're getting colon rich foods make sure your methylation is going right and that most likely will resolve the gall stones because people get cholecystitis when the gall stone ends up lodged in the head in the neck of the gallbladder and it gets infected but I think you know that 99% of gall bladders don't need to come out you know yes yes and we we are we are having an epidemic of gall bladder loss in this country and they would they're whisking them out the surgeons just love to take those gall bladders out and never are people asking are you getting enough phosphatidylcholine what is your phosphatidylcholine to cholesterol ratio obviously we can't sample that in the bile but you can just give your body enough cooling and you know work and so like dr. Ben Lynch was saying you just you have to think about where you're getting your choline from that's the takeaway what are the choline sources in food from my perspective because I'm thinking nose tell carnivore I'm thinking liver and egg yolks and me there's a pretty good source of choline too but that's where you're getting your choline and then I want people to remember like we were talking there is a gene called P EMT which is involved in the formation of phosphatidylcholine and that one can get dirty too but again if you're getting the right nutrients they'll they'll be cleaner perhaps at this point people's heads are spinning and so I'll just what I'm kind of seeing in my mind has to take away from all of this is that you got to work with somebody who knows the genes who knows the methylation cycles whose done dr. Lynch is training or at least understands what's going on here but if you can create a well-constructed diet you really shouldn't have to worry about any of this would you agree I agree and that's that's the whole concept of dirty jeans and you know I've had some you know of the docs who have studied my work read dirty jeans are like this didn't help this didn't help me didn't address enough sniffs like well you're not listening you're not listening and the the basic statement is live the fundamentals those are the fundamentals you're good you're good and you supplement at times as needed so if you if you get hit by a you know a big hit of formaldehyde from you know working in a store all day from you know new clothes you know there were new carpets and you're working in those stores you probably need a supplements and move it down the savior but you know if you're swimming every day in a chlorinated pool because you're you know that's what you do or your swimmer you probably need some additional glutathione because you're burning through it real fast but for the most part everyday living and in good clean air and you're eating good healthy foods you know and you're not completely stressed out and you love what you're doing you know you supplement periodically and you know that's it you know supplement is defined to is add to or enhance that's it that's what supplement means and it doesn't mean you cannot add to a crappy diet you know a lot of people try to they don't want the meds but they don't want to change their lifestyle so they try to supplement a crappy lifestyle with supplements and it becomes very expensive and they they get frustrated this supplement didn't work yeah it's not gonna work it's just won't and I'm straight up with you on that so I love you having me on here Paul and I love you you're teaching people about nose-to-tail and I want to share too that I recently realized that the the kidney provides a lot of the DAO ends I'm sure none like well duh and you you get you look at the histamine Dao supplement that we we provide people and it says it's from kidney so you know if you know the tale and you're consuming kidney good on you you know you're getting da o and you're able to process more instant yeah well I appreciate you coming on so much I just want to like summarize for people just so that they know because you said you live the fundamentals would you agree that the fundamentals are a well constructed nutrient-rich diet which can take many forms doesn't have to be nose-to-tail carnivore but i think that that that's one way to do it and that if you're getting a really nutrient rich diet and you're thinking where am i getting my B vitamins where am I getting my cofactors and then you're thinking about sleep and stress and you have a good community those are your fundamentals and exercise getting out going wake surfing with you those are the fundamentals and I love what dr. Lynch is saying and supplements are supplemental and you don't overuse if you don't create you don't you don't add supplements to a crappy diet arakata lifestyle I think that's a great point end on where can people find you where can they find your work I talked about dirty jeans and then put a link to it in the show notes tell people where they can find you if they're interested in more of your work yeah I say I do a lot on social media my kids make fun of my Instagram feed they say it sucks but hey you know I'm not in a pretty pictures you get what you get it's informative I'll tell you that so Instagram @dr Ben Lynch Facebook you find me there and my website Dr Ben Lynch calm and then our our company our supplement company in courses and pathway planners and our genetic tests are all available as seeing all calm our genetic tests will be coming out in the fall of 2019 and that's an exciting thing you've got a new genetic test coming out right yeah and it's man it's a lot of work but it's it's five years of research you know with my research team and you know my desk is a mess of pathways and notes okay this is literally littered with that way this is everywhere but I'm excited because it's unlike anything else but I also want to do a shout out to Marty Kendall the app or website called nutrient optimizer okay oh the nutrient optimizer is something that's really gonna be really really useful it's kind of like the chronometer app too if you want if you're eating and you want to measure the nutrients in your food nutrient optimizer and chronometer be really good things that's awesome so we didn't mention this but right now I think a lot a lot of people are probably using 23andme you can do 23andme and you can see all these snips but what dr. Lynch is developing is another type of genetic test that's probably gonna be better than 23andme or marketed more targeted and 23andme because one of our great headaches in the last couple years has been the fact that 23andme has left out some of the genes they're an important methylation so at the end of this year I'll hopefully I'll be able to get you back on the podcast we can talk about it then but what dr. Lynch is developing is a test like 23andme to look at single nucleotide polymorphisms a lot of which are left out of 23andme is that right yes and actually our chip is a lot of its custom so based upon our research we found snips that are really really credible so you know a lot of genetic companies out there making chips they just copy each other's work right you caffeine metabolize or slow or fast or you know you can't adapt you're sensitive the cards you know it's the same stuff left and right and I would say nobody's got what we've got because you know the tests don't provide it so we've custom-made our chip and it's it's phenomenal what we've done and the snips that we are providing you're the information we're providing you is is actionable okay it's we tell you what the consequence is as much as we can sometimes we infer a consequence and we just say hypothetical we don't really know but we share you this stuff but stuff but if it's important to find a single nucleotide polymorphism that actually has a functional change right or to the typical and so when you're getting genetic reports out there in the market typically you're just getting a bunch of snipped information but you're not getting any data of how it's functionally relevant or v if it is functionally relevant so it's it's a ton of work it's been a labor of love some frustration to be honest because we're really really really picky and we fight with each other if a sniff should be included or what it means which is great you know it's so the end result end of the day you're gonna get information that's gonna be pretty solid and actionable I can't wait I'm super excited about it you know what I'll just say as we close is that it's been very clear to me in all of the learning that I've done from you because I saw I've done your courses on seeking out that all of this is a labor of love for you and so thank you for all of your work then because there was there was one of your courses on seeking health that I watched and you were crying in the middle of a lecture you know because you were so emotionally overwhelmed talking about a case of someone you'd worked with I think he had autism spectrum and was sort of excoriating his skin and yeah I mean you know I can tell so clearly but this is all a labor of love for you so we are all incredibly we are all incredibly lucky to have you you know as part of the community and contributing so thanks for your time thanks for all of your work and I hope people will check out your stuff if they have questions and man it's been good talking to you I kind of I'm bummed I'm not in Seattle let's go let's go all right hopefully I'll get you to San Diego soon my friend yeah take care of man thank you okay there it is I enjoyed that conversation with Ben Lynch and I think one of the most poignant moments for me in that podcast was the fact that Ben dr. Ben Lynch really really does put his heart and soul into this work and this is a labor of love for him I wasn't kidding when I said that I'd seen him cry during lectures because he was so overwhelmed by emotion connected with the things that he was talking about so I love this man in a brotherly kind of way and I think he's a great dude and I really like I said I do think seeking health makes a great line of supplements if you need them I hope you do not eat good food so in my opinion the takeaway from this episode is eat nutrient-rich food okay you all know if you listen to me that I think that nutrient-rich food is no stale animal food bioavailability no plant toxins that is not to say that I do not think people can be healthy or construct a nutrient-rich diet with plant foods that is just the way that I would construct the optimal diet is without them if you choose to eat plant foods there are more and less nutrient-rich plant foods and there are certainly more and less toxin containing plant foods so be aware of that I think ultimately at the end of the day the main takeaway from what I am doing with this book I'm writing is to help people understand that animal foods are really the most nutrient rich foods on the planet with no toxins and that some people are probably able to tolerate plans to some degree I'm not looking to make people's lives miserable or boring by not having any plant foods and I think that you know plant foods are going to trigger issues for some people because of the various things in them so if people begin to realize that animal foods are the ideal thing some plant foods can trigger them that's what I'm going for because that I think would result in great health improvements for us as a human being population and maybe for our dogs and cats and parakeets too if we feed them that way I was kidding about the parakeets by the way don't feed your parakeet me I don't think it's supposed to eat that if you do send me an email let me know what happens anyway check out ancestral supplements calm Saladino MD is the code there check out jus WWJ ovv calm front slash Paul check out my newsletter Paul Saladino MD calm front slash newsletter I will see you guys in the future stay radical I appreciate you all [Music]