Decoding the Mystery of Methylation

Kashif Khan

Everyone, welcome back for another case study. We have a really cool one here today. But before we get into it just want to make sure anyone that has not watched the case study yet here is again something that we said in the early ones which is in order to protect patient confidentiality and data, although we are sharing actual case studies from actual patients who have agreed to have their stories shared, we are using my report to show the data just so you do not see patient names and data and so you will see my report. But we found people that have the same profile as me in various areas of the genome and we are able to tell their stories. This story is a mindblowing one for us because of the outcome and I am going to share my screen with you. 

We actually have a patient who had completely lost feeling in their arm because of a car accident and they got it back. The interesting thing about this was, that was not the intention. This person actually came to us through their functional medicine clinician just wanting to optimize. They were elderly and they said, “I just want to do what is best for me, tell me what supplements to take.” Their clinician said, “Hey, if you take this genetic testing it will actually tell you what supplements to take,” so she did and she started working on it, now, she had been in this car accident where she lost feeling from her elbow to her fingertips, now, having said all that the intention for her again was just optimization but where she landed was she woke up in the middle of the night about two weeks into it with pain in her hand and her fingers and she called the clinician the next day saying, “There is something going on, my fingers are hurting, I have not felt them in a year and a half,” another few weeks went by and she had full mobility and feeling from her fingertip to her elbow, I think it was six or eight weeks into it around that time. What happened? What happened was when we looked at her genome, you will often hear the MGH of our gene. The MGH of our gene shows you your methylation capacity. And people will look at it as the methylation gene. Meanwhile, there are all these other genes in the methylation cascade and if you are only looking at that one you are not going to get the full picture of what is going on. This is the starring character, this is the central role that points to how well they do this job, but here is all of what else is going on. And if these are not functioning then you do not really understand your methylation. And what was going on for her was the same thing that is going on with me. From MTHFR it was great, so she was told, you have great methylation, inflammation is a problem for you but all this other stuff was not working. And when these genes do not work you do not have the ability to metabolize B12 properly. And B12 is a key micronutrient that fights inflammation which is the thing that she was suffering from, it was just neuroinflammation. 

She was told medically that she had lost feeling like this was damage from the car accident, nerve damage, done. What was actually happening was nerve suffocation, her nerves were so inflamed neuroinflammation that they stopped functioning and they were revived because given her genes we gave her an adenosyl B12 versus a Methycobal, I mean, which is what you normally get when you go to a store, buy B12, it is usually methyl. We gave her adenosyl because her genes that metabolize methyl were not working well so we gave her this version. The other second and more important thing was that she was given a sublingual under the tongue B12. Now this gene profile you think you are getting your B12 from beef, you think it is working for you but you have the version, the GG version, you actually do not have a great ability to have the enzyme function and then metabolize and absorb B12 in your gut and you need to take it under your tongue to your ancestors probably ate more sheep and lamb which has this methylated version of B12 that as you chew. Grandma says to chew your food, there is a reason for that because you are actually absorbing and breaking down nutrients right in your mouth. That was one big thing. The information was brought way down and all of a sudden this neurology, her nerve started to thrive again and she got feeling.

The second big thing. She lived in a city called Hamilton. Hamilton is a city just outside of Toronto which is known for its steel manufacturing and the air is fairly toxic. Because your people are living right next to these steel manufacturing facilities. And what we found when we looked at her glutathione pathway is she has one copy of the GST T1. Why is it so important? The GST T1 gene is your primary glutathione called a traffic cop in your blood that is looking for toxins to send to your liver collecting them, and metabolizing them, getting rid of them. She was missing 50% of the instruction either mom or dad did not give her a copy of the genes, you only had one copy in her genome, and half of it was deleted, she did not do this job well. When we saw this we started supplementing her with precursors. What that means, the initial logic is, you do not deal with glutathione, well, let me give you some glutathione, you are toxic, I tested your blood, let me give you some glutathione, there is chemicals, and molds, and pollutants and let me give you some glutathione. Well, if you do not have the genes or the, I should say the proper version of the gene that instructs glutathione and all of a sudden your body does not know what to do with it, you end up binding onto minerals, and nutrients, and things you actually need like glutathione is not instructed properly. And what we did was we gave her precursors. NAC, selenium, milk thistle, and alpha lipoic acid, these are potent detoxification supplements that get to work on their own that are precursors to glutathione that is not going to go bind onto your minerals and nutrients that you actually need in your bloodstream to deliver nutrients to your cells. And she started to thrive, the toxic burden was brought way down. And this was only done because her genes pointed to it, there was not a specific symptom or problem, it was more than her genes called for this type of cocktail of these precursors for detox very specific b-complex, and vitamins for her methylation. And then all of a sudden the outcome unintended was that her neurology and her inflammation went down and she started to thrive and this damage that she thought she had which was one and a half years of a literally unusable limb was brought back to life. 

And this is where dealing with the root cause often solves problems beyond what you thought you were going to solve. It is more like, hey, I got a migraine, or I have got issues, or I have depression and I want to fix something, well, we are going to go look at the systems that are failing and we are going to fix those and then you often see, hey, wait a second, my nails look better than they have ever look, my hair is a little bit better, my skin seems to be glowing. Because when all systems are thriving everything thrives. Remember, health is rooted in the cells thriving. The disease is rooted in inflammation. And inflammation starts with the degradation of the cells. If you can get that going well you can get a chronic disease. If you are not in a flame state it is either fibrosis or inflammation, it is those two things that will get you there. And if your cells are healthy and thriving the mitochondria are charged and inflammation is slim to none and nutrients are being delivered properly, the cells are thriving and you can not get a chronic disease, it is as simple as that. This is what happened to her, inflammation was removed, she started to thrive and all of a sudden a byproduct of just supplementing her properly for her genetic profile meant that her permanent nerve damage was no longer permanent.