How Bad Genetics Makes Lyme Worse and What to do About it

Kashif Khan

Thank you, it’s awesome to be here.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah. So, just to start off, I mean, I read your background, you’ve got accolades, so things that you’ve done in your lifetime, and I was just wondering if you could just give us a little backdrop, walk us forward. Kinda how you got started and with your body of work today and give us a little backdrop on that.

Kashif Khan

So first things first, I don’t come from in the industry, right? So I’m not a clinician, I’m not a scientist. And that’s important because I fell into this through my own illness. And I find that a lot of the people in the functional medicine space that sort of truly heal, that’s how they got there, ’cause they had to be failed by the system and then learn what they needed for themselves. And then people started asking, “Well can you do that for me?” And that’s all of a sudden how it turns into, well, this is now who I am, right? So I actually come from the PR and marketing world. 

So I helped to grow companies. And in Canada, from literally the largest companies in Canada, down to mom and pop shops, you know, would help them with their launches, get them going. And in that, because we were so in tune with call it the startup community of Canada, I started investing in things and doing work for free to help these companies grow ’cause we were doing well in our business. And I stumbled across a few pieces of medical science that needed help nurturing and growing right at the same time that I got sick. So I’m 42 now, and around the age of 35, I had eczema, I had psoriasis, migraines, acid reflux, I was depressed. Like I just didn’t, I had no motivation, I felt horrible. And I was sick constantly, you know, the common cold or flu. 

I haven’t been sick in like five years now, well, sorry, four years, right? And I learned through that where I was going to all these different doctors, treating all these different things. As you know, these multiple conditions, they’re all spokes pointing back down to the same central hub, right? So these symptoms were just my body screaming that there’s something going on. The system failure internally, that one thing that was causing all this stuff. Once I finally got to that, it all went away. I haven’t been sick in years, I don’t have eczema problems. I don’t sweat, I don’t have migraines anymore. I don’t even have allergies anymore. Literally the seasonal allergies that I’ve had since I was a kid, I don’t have them anymore.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Amazing.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, so how did I get to that? There was sort of peeling back the layers of the onion, going to functional medicine, going through integrative docs, trying to get to the root cause. And it was once I learned about my genetics and not your standard. And we’ll talk about this, it’s not your standard, what does this gene mean, what does that gene mean? But truly how does the body work? That instruction manual that tells us how every cell is doing what it’s doing. I started to learn what gaps and holes I needed to plug that after 35 years of the wrong exposure, environment, nutrition, lifestyle that were mismatched to me, I started to get sick. 

And this is why, you know, people don’t typically get a chronic condition until they’re about 50. And then when you’re 60, you have two, and then you spend the last 15 years of your life in treatment. It takes that long of mismatched choices to get sick. So I learned through my own journey and then we built the DNA company. Literally I walked away, handed the keys to the marketing firm, to the staff and said, “Thank you. You’re awesome, you keep it. This is what I need to work on,” that’s what we do.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

That’s amazing. It’s like that pain to passion, right? So you had your own personal experience, which drove you to your interests. And now you’re putting all your energies into understanding how our genetic makeup, our genetic code. And I loved how you just referenced glibly root cause, everybody’s looking for the root cause. Like it’s the holy grail. When it’s basically that blueprint is given to us.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

We just don’t understand how the organize the letters yet to actually describe what we’re doing. And that’s why I think your work is so amazing in terms of its contribution to us understanding more about what we’re about.

Kashif Khan

That is exactly what our science team and Stewart who led our science team, that’s exactly how he put it. He said, “All we’ve done is we’re now fluent in the language, right?” So the genetics has been known for decades, literally. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to understand genetics. But what we’ve come down to is this sort of dictionary, a bunch of words, but that doesn’t mean that we’re being able to put sentences together and speak fluent poetry through this language, which we now can. Because what was missing, what got us to this is it was being treated as that book of words. This gene is this, this gene is that, that gene is this, what does this gene mean, right? 

The body doesn’t work that way. It’s not 22,000 independent functions, which is how many genes you have 22,000. It’s systems, right? There’s a cardiovascular system, there’s endocrine system, everything that’s going on. The neurochemicals in your mind, they’re not all independent of each other. You have to understand how they interact. So first the biochemistry, how does the body work? Tell me about each system. Then how does each gene in each system instruct each step? Then you go from this sort of probability based, hey, you got an 80% chance of Alzheimer’s. What does that give me? That means that 20% didn’t get Alzheimer’s with the same genes, right? So what does that really tell me versus the certainty. So probability to certainty of, if you eat like this, if you exercise like this, if you close yourself like this, you’re getting Alzheimer’s. And here’s why the 20% didn’t get it. Here’s what they did right or wrong, right. So we’ve got it to that level.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Super, super interesting. Really, it’s a roadmap, you created a map. And so the difference between taking a left or right turn on a road could make the difference, whether your trip is five hours long or five minutes long, right? get there, wow. Wow, I find this to be so intriguing and so interesting. I had one of my mentors who passed a few years ago was one of the top nutritionists in the country, Dr. Bob Marshall. And his passion was well, he was top nutritionist, but his hobby passion was basically in auto mechanic. And he said to me, “Robbie, when you drive your Maserati, Lamborghini, Chevy, whatever out of the showroom, the minute it leaves the showroom, it starts to recalibrate.” It’s not different than our bodies, as soon as we’re born, we start recalibrating, right? The difference when in nowadays, when you need to bring your car in for a tune-up, you bring it into the shop, they plug it into some computer. It spits out what’s deficient. If it’s a part, if it’s your gas, oil mixture, whatever. And then they tune that up. And basically pretty much when you drive it out after the tune-up, it’s almost close to the way it was when you first bought it.

Kashif Khan

Yes.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

What about our bodies?

Kashif Khan

Exactly.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Where are you’re missing parts? And how can we get those parts? And what parts are they to get you tuned up? And I really believe that there’s a correlation here with what you’re doing in creating that specialized map. And you mentioned something that was super important, like in the Western approach to medicine.\, is everything is compartmentalized. We pull this out, we pull that out, but it’s not integrated. And we are integrated, we are natural. We are energetic bodies. We are alike bodies where there are so many influences and systems at play in order for it to work right. 

And so to understand it from a holistic point of view, I think is really important. And I love the fact that you guys take that, you know, take that approach to it. So let’s dive in a little bit deeper because today is a story about lyme disease. And why is understanding your genetic code, like understanding your genetic makeup? Why is that important to me as an individual, if I’m sick with lyme or even a high functioning lyme patient. How do I utilize this information to actually, you know, put it to work for me?

Kashif Khan

So it’s interesting that we unintentionally got involved in the largest lyme study in Canada. It’s an epidemic here just like it is in the Eastern US right? We were working with a few clinics here in our research phase. We’re now live, commercial, but up until a year ago, we were a research company, we were learning. And so we partnered with a number of clinics and said, “Give us the problems you can’t solve. You know, whoever that patient is, you just can’t figure it out, let us try and figure it out.” That was how we did our research. And so there’s one clinic that kept sending us lyme patients, you know, in downtown Toronto. And we said that there’s something here because first of all, we found that a lot of them were women and a lot of them were sort of mature women, right? So sort of 40 plus. And we started to see over and over again. 

And this is not the answer to everybody that some of them didn’t even have lyme, right? Some of them, like you said, high functioning, some were like, “Well, it’s a fluid, it’s gone in somewhere in bed.” So what’s that difference? Why is it that, like you said, “I take my car out of the showroom technically,” and this is where we’re failing. When you go buy a Ferrari, every place you go buy a Ferrari, any setting that you’re getting the same Ferrari. The parts are the same, it’s been tested, everything is identical. Every single one of us is different. Yet we’re going down that same road and that same path, right? It’s like taking the Ferrari off-roading and wondering why it falls apart.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah and also our world, you know, government and even medical approaches have a tendency to homogenize everybody to make it all the same, when in fact we’re all different. And I think that that’s again, another big, big difference in the approach that you’re taking, because it is completely unique to me. It’s addressing who I am.

Kashif Khan

Exactly.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And I’ve studied a lot of things in my life. And one thing where I got really intrigued with, this was about 15 years ago, I started studying dietary habits. And I wondered why, like Kashif, you could have a hamburger, I could have the same hamburger. We sit at the same lunch table, I’ll gain a half a pound, you will either be the same or lose weight. Why is that, we’re eating the same food.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, so that’s a great example. So I’ll bring it back to lyme, but that’s a beautiful example. So when it comes to metabolization of macronutrients, micronutrients, right, we are not the same. And it’s not an infinite number of combinations, there’s sort of profiles. And that’s one thing we’ve done differently is we’re not looking at this big data, you know, millions of data points and trying to figure out, no. We’ve learned because we’ve studied people. We’ve actually met 7,000 patients now face-to-face like this, which genetic companies typically don’t do so that we’re able to put people into buckets or profiles. 

As an example, when we deal with women and female hormone issues, for fibromyalgia, fertility, PCOS, we used to think it’d be infinite, but women fit into one of six buckets. We didn’t know we were gonna learn that. So it went from an infinite number of solutions to like, you’re always one of six genetically hormonally. So now we have six solutions as opposed to an infinite number, right? But it’s not one solution. It’s not one size fits all, trial and error, hopefully this works for you. It’s gonna work really great on one of those six women. Okay on, and then it scales down to the different profile, it doesn’t even work, right? So coming back to food. Keto diet, as an example, you know, go on a high-fat, meat only type of diet. 

There’s some people that everybody in the first couple of weeks feels amazing ’cause to get into ketosis is good, it doesn’t matter who you are. The trailing effect of the next second, third, fourth, fifth, six months is where you start to see the challenges. And I can tell you how many people have said, “Well, I don’t feel so good at it.” “Well, what did you change on the day you started feeling bad? Right, let’s just look at something simple.” And they would never think it was a keto diet because the first two months or two weeks, they felt great, right? They think it’s something else. There’s one gene that determines how well you metabolize saturated fats, literally one gene. And if you have the sub optimal version of it, yes to get in ketosis will still feel good, but a couple of weeks into it, it’s gonna drain you. It’s gonna make you feel horrible, it’s gonna slow you down. If you also are a sort of poor insulin responder, guess what? We know that genetically or sorry, even just medically we know that insulin irregularity is triggered by carbs, starches sugars, right? 

In some people, only in some Asian people, it’s also triggered by saturated fat. The genes of how that cascade works, and this is why I’m saying, “One gene alone doesn’t give you the answer, You have to look at the whole cascade. What is the body actually doing?” For certain people, specifically, South Asian, like Indian, Pakistani, Afghani, and you wonder why they have so much heart disease in that area. Because that, they’re getting the same insulin response from saturated fat as they would from sugar on a regular person that doesn’t have this genetic profile right? I can’t tell you how many vegans… 

So first of all, genetically, there’s some people we tell them, “You would be a great vegan, you’re designed for it.” There are some people where we tell them again, there’s a clinician, by the way, in California that we’re working with, who came to us saying, “I’m a doctor, I can’t figure out why I’m so sick.” We brought it back down to the two years ago when she started becoming, she was on a vegan diet, which she thought was gonna help her heal, right? That was the thing because the one methylation gene you talked about, before we got on the call, we were talking about MTHFR, which we’ll get into. Your anti-inflammatory response. There’s one gene that deals with all the sort of enzyme activity of breaking down, chickpeas, lentils, beans, lagoons, all those vegan protein sources. 

If you have the suboptimal version, you’re just gonna slowly kill yourself, right? So one simple gene or a cascade of genes can make things very precise. Now lets bring this back to lyme. What does this tell us about lyme? Well, why is it one person’s functioning, one person has kind of a flu, one person’s is bad. And we’re told that we looked up your MTHFR gene and there’s variability in that, right? It’s okay, it’s not so bad. And then all of a sudden, it’s not precise, so it doesn’t even help me. 

‘Cause it’s not just a one gene, again, it’s a cascade. Your methylation or your anti-inflammatory response isn’t just MTHFR. That’s one gene, which is the most studied, but any sort of genetic test that reports back on that only is getting you back to the probability based, you’re 20%, 80%, 60%. There’s seven genes in the cascade, right from– so if you have the best MTHFR, absolute best, but everything else sucks upstream and downstream, can it really do its job properly, right? So that you have a chain, one strong link and everything else is weak, or the opposite might be true. You could have the worst MTHFR and everything else is doing well. This is why there’s been a gap between sort of clinician interpretation versus what’s actually happening. And you get back to the sort of trial and error. Well, hopefully this helps or sometimes it doesn’t help. Well, if you look at the entire cascade and understand it, it with certainty and precision, can give you an answer.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Amazing. You know, one comment, and this has been driving me crazy for at least two decades, when they give out these percentages. And when they’re given from the FDA and some other agencies, oftentimes the lists we’re learning now that they’re not as reliable as we would like them to be for us to have a true understanding of what’s going on. But when they say you’ve got a 20% of this and an 80% of that, it’s like, I’ll just revert it to a surgery. You go in for a surgery and they said, “Well, one in a million people get this reaction.”

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Well, if you’re the one in that millionth, you’re getting 100% of that reaction, okay.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And not 20% or 1 millionth of that reaction, You’re getting 100% percent of that. So understanding what you understand, your body of work is a game changer. It’s the only way I can, I’m using Dave Aspery’s words now I’m sorry for that. But it truly is a game changer because it really will make the difference of you understanding what those percentages are and how you fall into that sort of bell curve, for lack of any other term of knowing where statistically, you sit. And I think again, that will help all of us make better decisions as to food choices, lifestyle, and even take more notice on the epigenetics. The way that our personal choices and our environment is actually affecting our DNA and RNA and how that’s expressing itself in our bodies.

Kashif Khan

Yeah so that. Sorry, go ahead.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Back to lyme, okay.

Kashif Khan

Back to lyme.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

So tell me, I’m a lyme patient, how do I benefit from your information?

Kashif Khan

So the thing you just said is that the key, so the key is I could have, I can tell you about your genetics, right? And I’ll tell you, “Here’s your risk, but if you do everything right, that disease will never express.” We’re not born with diabetes and cholesterolemia and breast cancer. These things all happen later in life because we’ve done there. And when I talk about cancer, some are directly genetic, you have it. There’s genetic condition, which means you’re born with a gene variant, and you have something like sickle cell syndrome, you have it, right? Chronic conditions, again, diabetes, cholesterolemia, you know, Alzheimer’s, you’re not born with them. You have to do something wrong for a long time. Then what is that wrong thing, it’s environment, nutrition, lifestyle. And it’s not the same for everybody. That’s where, the key is, first understand the genetics. How am I wired, what’s my blueprint. And like you said, the blueprint of I’m building a house. Maybe there’s a wall there. 

No, what does that blueprint say, right? Don’t use one thing to assume the rest, which is what big data does right now. With certainty, you roll out that blueprint, and let’s look at the entire thing and understand from one end to the other end of the property what’s going on, right, so I know. So that environment, nutrition, lifestyle load on that blueprint now tells you, okay, I know what this foundation is capable of. Can it handle six stories or three stories? And we all have different foundations in different systems, right? Is the wall this thick or is it this thick? As an example, my endothelial lining, that inner lining of the blood vessel, right? There’s different qualities. Some people have stainless steel, they can smoke till they’re 100 years old. Some people have paper thin, that little bit of inflammatory insult will cause them illness, right? 

The same thing as looking at a blueprint and understanding, did they use dry wall or steel or brick, right? And we’re all made of different pieces in different areas. So that’s first is understanding your blueprint, what are you made of? Then knowing, because you have understood the blueprint, what is the environment, nutrition, lifestyle load you can actually handle in each area? Cardiovascular, brain, et cetera, et cetera, there are different, right? Then knowing you said, “Epigenetics.” So epigenetics, we’re measuring, where are you today? Genes is here’s what your blueprint is, here’s your wiring? Where are you today is based on that environment, nutrition, lifestyle load, what did you do, right? So this slow gene you have, did you speed it up because you ate something that affect its expression, as an example? That’s where you get to the net results of, are you sick or not sick, or if you are sick, do you wanna reverse it instead of treating it? And we can speak to this in terms of lyme, because with lyme, again, if you understood the reason why there’s the functioning versus the in bed, which we’ve now understood, you now know exactly what to work on.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

Kashif Khan

Right? There’s no more guesswork of just taking antibiotics to target the bacteria. We all get the bacteria, that’s what causes it. But that delta value between, I’m this sick and I’m this sick, it’s not a different bacteria, right? It’s our reaction to that thing, and our reaction is based on our genetic capacity to handle that thing. So for the people, let’s start with the worst, for the people that are in bed that they don’t know why is it hitting me so hard? Methylation is a big one. My ability to deal with that inflammatory insults, right? My body’s ability to cope and fight back. The bacteria may be sick, but the inflammation that it caused, that’s why you have brain fog, haziness, neurological, because there’s neurological inflammation also, not just, you know, where you would think it normally comes, but what if you get inflamed here? Then all of a sudden, you’re getting the haze that I can’t think, I can’t focus, that type of thing, right? 

Why is it so much more prevalent in terms of the degree in women, it hits them harder. And this is what we’ve seen in our research, i don’t know if it’s generally agreed upon, but this is what we saw. It’s because women are also dealing with estrogen toxicity, which is another layer of a toxic insult. And it’s, if you’re already at the, here’s the line, right? If I cross this line, I’m in bed, if I stay below this line, I’m functioning. If you’re already teetering here, because of all the other stuff going on, right? Do I work in a factory full of chemicals? Am I not sleeping properly, and so I’m not recovering, right? Do I have estrogen toxicity, which we can determine genetically, we can literally figure out your hormonal cascade, right? So what is it that’s pushing you to that, something that you would never think of? We have patients for whom we found the root cause of their disease was that they golf too much. Why?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Let me guess, they must be doctors?

Kashif Khan

Well, the first one, I think it was actually a pharmacist. You know, he had cholesterolemia at the age of 38 and the lipitor wasn’t helping him at all. Why, because when you’re spending four or five hours breathing in all these toxic pesticides that make that golf course so beautiful. And you don’t the ability to clear them. And we didn’t talk about detox yet, we’re gonna talk about that.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I wanna do that.

Kashif Khan

And the ability to then deal with the inflammatory load caused by the toxin. You’re gonna end up like him, where he also has that bad quality endothelial. So he got inflammation, body then uses cholesterol to reduce the inflammation. And all of a sudden he’s got cholesterolemia, and you start treating the thing that’s labeled as a disease versus the root cause, the inflammatory insult here, right? So, yeah, so that’s what it is. It’s here’s what you’re capable of, and we have different levels of what we can do. Some of us are here, some of us here. The closer you get to there, the faster you’re gonna be bedridden, right? Some of us are, and most of us by the way, are teetering on that edge, especially as we get older, because of all the inflammatory insult we’ve handled. 

Now lyme is aggressive enough to push you over the edge, right? So now, if you know why it happened, you know exactly what to work on. You know exactly what supplements you need to take, what detox you need to do, you know what you need to change in your environment? It may be mold in your home, who knows what it is. And the last thing I’ll say before we move on, sorry, you mentioned Dave Asprey. So Dave is an investor in our company. He’s a sort of advisor, he’s been helping us enter the biohacking community, which is where we do a lot of work. And what got him, I couldn’t reach him, he was ignoring me. And understandably, he’s a busy guy and I’m sure everybody’s trying to call him. 

So I literally heard he was gonna be at a conference. So I flew down there with a saliva tube in my hand, and I said, “Can you please spit in this tube?” He’s like, “Who are you, and what do you want?” I followed him around for a good hour until he agreed to do it. And I said, “I promise this will change everything. You need to know this,” right? So he got his results back. Dave sort of launched, he’s known as sort of the keto guy he’s really pushed that right? But he’s also really big in the mold community. He’s really helped a lot of people in that community. And so we showed him why certain people are so sick, right? And that’s the thing that triggered it like this, he’s done $50,000 genetic tests which he said, didn’t give him as much information as we were able to give him, ’cause it’s, again, fluency in language. Interpreting rather than reading a bunch of words, right? So anyway, sorry, I went off on a rant, but you.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

No, no, I love the direction. Everything is relevant, and one of the things I wanna bring you back to was you described what I call a tipping point. Where you’ve seemed to be petering or teetering and then there’s something that tips you over to the other side.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And it could be an age issue. It could be genetics or a multi faceted sort of challenge in a way.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

But I love the idea of understanding what the baseline is of the elements so that you can make those macro then micro adjustments to pull you back under so that you can just keep getting stronger and better. And ultimately, really Kashif, and I’m not, my wife says I’m too corny all the time but, I think our goal on when we’re in earth camp, like our stay on earth is to find our bliss or purpose and then to follow it. And what I feel saddens me a lot almost every day, because in our clinic, we deal with people that have chronic challenges from every walk of medical life, they’re being robbed of that. Like you said earlier, the last 15 years, they’re going from clinic, I’m in South Florida. 

So here it’s geriatric city and everybody spends their whole lives in waiting rooms, waiting to see a doctor or watching Oprah and reading Reader’s Digest, you know. And my vision of what my elder golden years would be like is nothing like that. And I think that it’s easy to get sort of pushed into that homogenous haze of contentment or I don’t even a complacency, I guess is the best word. And there’s a better way, and you’re showing us the better way. You should live healthy and well and strong to the last breath. And I think that you are giving us some tools to actually achieve that, which is important to have a background, a backdrop an understanding and a foundational part. You mentioned earlier about Dave and mold. And what we’ve seen in clinic is when you’ve got a lyme patient that is basically managing themselves pretty well, and then they get influenced by mold, they get completely wiped out. I mean, they go from functioning to non-functioning almost overnight.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And everyone’s looking for that tipping point, what was it that pushed me over?

Kashif Khan

Yeah and that’s, sorry.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I’m just saying it could be a whole host of things, not just one particular thing, but a buildup like you’re suggesting. And so we’re just winding that coil and you’re giving us the way to unwind the coil, to get back to, you know, a more natural and healthier state.

Kashif Khan

It’s a precision, it’s taking the guesswork out, the trial and error out and knowing upfront. Just you buy a microwave, you get an instruction manual, you haven’t read your own human instruction manual, right? So you can literally understand exactly how you’re wired and what those threats are, even if you’re not sick, right? Meaning that even if you have, if you still are functioning and wanna know how to prevent getting into that bucket, the person that got exposed to the mold and then cross the line to the other side, right? So that’s where you can truly understand what are your risks, and then they’re not the same for everybody. There’s some people that detox really well when we were doing construction right here in this building, in our office, I broke out with a bit of eczema on my eye, right? I have a partner, business partner, who’s Irish and Scottish, very different ancestry than me, had no issue. 

He was in the room while the paint and chemicals, and there was an epoxy that was used to put latex on the wall, ’cause we have a lab here, right? I couldn’t handle it. So there’s no one size fit all answer, it’s our best attempt to tell you, like, “This is what you need to avoid and you know, sometimes it makes people sick.” Well, what if it doesn’t make me sick, or what if it extremely makes me sick, right? There’s people are in different buckets. So that, it just goes back to what you said of understanding that personalized blueprint and being able to predict as opposed to wait and see, right. And the nature of what you described in that waiting room, none of those people were born with those conditions, right? They were born healthy. So if you understood where you are suboptimal, where’s the gap, where’s the risk and what to focus on, how to eat, how to exercise, et cetera for you, there’s no reason for you to be in that waiting room. If you are in the waiting room, then you’re already there, there’s no reason for you to spend the last 10, 15 years of your life doing that. Why not focus on the why? And this is the question we don’t ask, why am I sick? Not what am I sick with, why? And I’ll give you an example. 

This will really sort of explain that difference what I keep saying about genetics versus functional genomics, how does the body actually work? So everyone’s heard of the BRCA gene, you know, scary four letter word. And there’s women, Angelina Jolie, goes and gets a genetic test, and the solution is double mastectomy. Let’s cut a part of you off to avoid a disease because the belief is just like the people in the waiting room what’s taken for granted that I have this, this is a part of me. 

You know, and people that are in their thirties or forties, it’s like, I’m gonna get sick, I just don’t know what I’m gonna get sick with. It’s like a lottery to wait and see. No you’re healthy, you can maintain that if you know, right. So the BRCA gene, we believe that if you have this, your risk for breast cancer is dramatically increased. Now the prevention, there may be some pills you can take they’re working on, or you get a mastectomy if you just don’t wanna have that problem. What does the BRCA gene actually do, does any patient asks? Why does it cause breast cancer? What happens in my body? It doesn’t cause breast cancer. BRCA is a gene editing gene, which means it’s actually a repair tool that if something else is not working, it goes and fixes it. If you have the bad version of BRACA, it’s like having a bad repair person, it’s just not doing its job properly. Then you start to ask, aha biochemistry wise, so that means there’s something else that’s going on, that’s not being fixed, right? I just don’t have the repair person. So what’s that something else, why don’t we focus on that, ’cause that’s probably the cause. 

So then you look at the profile of the woman who typically in and around the time of menopause gets breast cancer, right? And we’re not talking about all breast cancer, most of what we’re able to deal with, whether you’re dealing with autism, breast cancer, et cetera, there’s a 15, 20% of people that have it, right? Same thing with certain cancers. There’s a switch that was turned on genetically when you were born and you’re gonna get it right? Same thing with autism, then there’s, I wasn’t born with this thing but, and this is like 80% of people in conditions, I got it because I’d made the wrong choices, right, so I’m speaking about that. Women that are estrogen dominant, so number one of three things, estrogen dominance, in that hormonal cascade, they’re just way more estrogenized than a normal woman is. 

So picture Kim Kardashians, right? So estrogen dominant, then estrogen toxic. Every month, I clear estrogen metabolites. When I have my menstrual cycle, it turns into a metabolite before I clear it. And there’s three versions, two of them are very toxic, one is clean. Estrogen dominant, estrogen toxic. Estrogen clearance, how well do I detoxify and get rid of that stuff. If I’m estrogen dominant, I’m estrogen toxic, and I don’t clear it well, I have this inflammatory load right. 

Up until the time that I’m menopausal, I clear it every month, I have a menstrual cycle. When I don’t have a menstrual cycle anymore, what is the body’s response to this inflammatory insult, it stores it in fatty tissue to keep it away from the organs and keep you safe. Where do women have fatty tissue, in the breast, right? And now when all of a sudden that inflammatory insult that all that sensitive cellular structure in the breast was never meant to deal with, that’s right next to the fat, all those glands, et cetera, the repair person is not doing his job, right? That’s the very last step. You don’t even need the repair person if you weren’t estrogen toxic, if you were clearing it properly, which you can mitigate starting at the agent, or if you didn’t take the birth control pill for 15 years and had even more estrogen, or if you didn’t go on hormone therapy and had even more estrogen or take the right hormone therapy, right? So this is why we say that, that profile again, this woman at 15 didn’t have breast cancer, but the environment, nutrition, lifestyle choices led her to eventually getting there because she had that risk, right? So you could very easily stop, reverse, you pick what you wanna do with it. So that’s just an example of genetics. This gene means 80% chance of something versus functional genomics, why is it happening? How does the body work? Where can we intervene and prevent this thing?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

So, so important. Oftentimes through our interview today, you keep referencing inflammation and toxicity.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And those are big words. And in our own studies, we feel or we’ve discovered that basically inflammation and toxicity they’d kind of travel on the same highway together.

Kashif Khan

Yes.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

But ultimately the reason why every single lyme patient out there that is listening today has any health challenge at all is because they’re toxic and that toxicity rolls into inflammation. And it could be just what you said, like cerebral or brain inflammation. Many times, if it’s lyme that has migrated into the brain because people know that it does pass through the blood brain barrier as a spirochete, then you’ve got, what’s called lyme encephalitis, where there might be actually inflammation in the brain or activity going on with your hormones and enzymes in the brain that’s preventing you from detoxing and it’s cascading into what you mentioned about brain fog and other neurological related challenges that expresses itself again in the body. Everybody tuning in to this interview, and you can’t miss this one because this is incredible, the stuff that you’re talking about is looking for a few things Kashif that we could do tomorrow. That’s gonna rock my world, that can change things for the future.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You’ve got an amazing test. Tell me, is it easy to do what you’ve talked about Dave just spitting into a tube. Like, is this an expensive process, is it protracted.

Kashif Khan

I mean the test itself, it used to be thousands of dollars when we were researching. And at that time we were dealing primarily with like professional athletes, you know, celebrities, people that were going to clinics that were saying, “Hey, I have $10,000, make me a superhuman,” right? Because we were in a research phase. So since then we’ve built an artificial intelligence platform that literally, and it sounds crazy, but it goes through 200 trillion data points to populate our reports because that’s the number of sort of thought processes we had to go through to interpret the data. So what’s making this now available is that AI does the same thinking that our scientists would have done and populates the reports, right? So that process it’s, I think it’s like four or $500 type of thing for the reports. And then there’s, you know, consultation and there’s reviews and there’s coaching. 

There’s all sorts of things people can do if they wanna take things back into their own hands. Right, versus how’s the doctor gonna fix me? Well, you wouldn’t be listening to this if that already happened, right? So you know, there’s more you need to do. So that process is, you know, a test, consult. And what we actually, for the purpose of this summit, I believe our team puts something together that’s, you know, a package is typically not on the website, ’cause we’re thinking about how do we specifically deal with lyme? And that requires some behavior change, right? That requires some coaching from on our end, in terms of what to target, how to fix it. So that will be shared with everybody. But one thing you touched on, the detox profile and how important that is, right? And that’s one of the key things we learned. So I’ll just quickly tell you about the test itself, why it’s different. And detox is probably a good example of that.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay.

Kashif Khan

So again, it’s not gene by gene, it’s condition by condition. People don’t care what version of what gene they have, they care, how do you fix me? What’s wrong and how do I fix it, right? That requires recommendations, which you just mentioned. It’s not just, I have this weak gene, it’s that you have higher risk of anxiety because of this gene, and here’s what you need to do about it. That’s the full answer, right? So how do we do that? It’s because we don’t only understand the gene, we understand the body, we’ve studied 7,000 people and I can understand what the physical trait equals. We’ve interviewed, and we’ve had the medical history of the 7,000 people, gone far beyond the gene and paired those things together. And the testing we test for more. 

So you mentioned snips a few times, right? That’s that spelling mistake in a gene, this letter was supposed to be a C it’s a T, so now that gene doesn’t do it’s job properly. Well, what if a whole paragraph was changed? If a snip is so important and that’s all we talk about, there’s something called an insertion or deletion, which we also test for, it’s a whole other test we have to run. You could have a whole paragraph missing or an extra paragraph, now imagine the implication of that on a gene. Then there’s something called a copy number variation. Our chief science officer, who actually, his team was nominated for a Nobel prize for this work, by the way. Where they’ve determined that not only could you have a snip, not only could he have an indel, like a whole paragraph is missing, you might not even have the gene, the entire gene is missing, or you have an extra copy of it. And where is this highly implicit, is in detox, which is so important to lyme patients. 

So glutathionylation, which I’m sure if you’ve been dealing with lyme, you’ve been stumbling across this, right? Glutathionylation, my ability to sort of bind toxins, send them to the liver, metabolize, get rid of them, right? I’m supposed to do that. Well, there’s several steps to glutathionylation, where do the things enter your body, you breathe them in. So you should have this first line of defense in your lungs. You eat things, so you should have a first line of defense in your gut. 

And then once, if anything leaked through and got past that first line of defense, there should be soldiers in the blood kind of, you know, going around, patrolling, looking for stuff right? In your gut and in the blood, not yet speaking of the lung, but gut and blood, you could be missing those genes, don’t even have it. So what about all those people that, “I’m always bloated, I can’t eat this. I eat hummus for lunch and I’m just not hungry the rest of the day,” because of the drying chemicals that they use on the chickpeas. “If I eat bread in England, I’m fine, but if I eat bread in New York, I get sick.” What’s the difference, the drying chemicals that are legally allowed to be used on the wheat, in the US but are not, they’re illegal in the UK, right? So those types of inflammatory loads, again, like you said, lyme is one thing. Lyme, there’s a bacteria that made you sick. How sick are you gonna get? You have to combine it with all this other stuff. Meaning if I’m missing the GSTM1 gene it’s called and I just don’t clear toxicity at the gut, well then all this stuff is entering my bloodstream. If I’m also missing the GSTT1, which then is those patrols at the blood, I’m also not getting rid of it, so there’s gonna be a lot more inflammation. 

GSTP which deals with the sort of lungs, you can’t be missing it, but there’s three different versions of it, the snip again, right? So if I have a suboptimal version there, why is it some people walk into, you know, a chemical factory or makeup store with chemicals or perfumery and they get a headache, migraine, joint pain, and some people don’t even notice. Because they’re either super powered here or are not powered at all right? There’s differences between people. 

So now again, if I have lyme and I’m not powered at all here, and I live next to a factory that’s throwing pollution into my airspace, I’m gonna get a lot more sick than the person that has that protection genetically, right? So these are the different things you need to look at. And that copy number variation test, typically genetic testing companies don’t do ’cause it’s a whole other test you have to run. And all of a sudden, you know, your test goes from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars because the markups stay the same. We’re very blessed that we work with the Canadian government in a research partnership. So they have a lab in Montreal, McGill University, which is well-known place. We work out of their research lab in terms of our testing. So we’re able to do this otherwise again, it would be many fold of the price I suggested. So that’s why we do this. So that whole detox profile, like you said, that’s kind of the foundation of cellular health, right? If you’re not toxic, if there’s no load on your cells, they should be healthy. And if they’re healthy, they should not be inflamed. If they’re not inflamed, you don’t have a disease or you may have the disease, but it’s expressing at such a low degree that it doesn’t matter, right? There’s one more thing I’ll tell you about detox.

Everything we spoke of until now is stuff sort of coming in, right? There’s also toxins from the inside out, oxidation. What do your cells do they take in nutrition, and they take in energy to create, or sorry, they take an oxygen and nutrition to create energy, right? In that process of using oxygen as fuel, you create oxidants, right, which are harmful. There’s some people that don’t do a good job of clearing that stuff. So that cellular process of the mitochondria, which we hear so much about the powerhouse of the cell, right? If you don’t have a good version of what’s called the SOD2 gene, you don’t clear these oxidants. 

So imagine going through this process and doing something like cardiovascular activity, where you’re breathing even more and getting even more oxidation and you don’t have that chimney for that fire that you’re burning, the sweat is just piling up. And imagine the load on the cells when you’re 20, 25, 30, 35, and doing that for so many years, right? That’s where all of a sudden, why do I have colitis, why do I have Crohn’s, why do I… All these inflammatory diseases start popping up. We can kinda predict if you had the bad detox of the gut, bad oxidation and you’d run on the treadmill every day, you’re probably gonna get colitis, right? So you can start to see these patterns because it all, the way the body works becomes clear, not how do I treat this disease and mask the symptoms. And then all of this applies to lyme because you now, again, going back to the very first thing we said, what do I do? Why did I get it, why am I so much more sick than that other person? And what specifically do I need to do about it? You can get straight to the answer immediately on day one, right?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, it’s amazing. You know, two things you just triggered, two things in me. One has to do with nutrition and the potentiating that our bodies and tissues ability to actually grab nutrition. So historically, or traditionally doctors will say, “Well, what are your deficiencies? You’ve had lyme for so long, and the lyme has pulled out your vitamin D and all these different hormones and enzymes that your body needs in order for you to be complete.” And so what do they do, they send a battery of nutritional supplements to you. But the challenge with this is that many of that is wasted because your body isn’t prepared to actually absorb the nutrition that you’re supplementing because of all the things that you’re talking about, the blueprint is off. 

If you don’t have those systems in place, then you’re spending hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars on medications and nutrition and supplementation. And yet it’s basically just passing through or not being absorbed as it should. So I think that that is paramount for people to understand. And then what you just hit on, I think is amazing. And it sort of reminds me of a sewerage system. You have the sewer in front of your house or something, that’s collecting all the garbage in your body. Your body should have a way to get that out. Our body of work is infrared frequencies, and one of our devices is a sauna, right?

Kashif Khan

Right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And so everybody says, “Okay, you know, let’s get in that sauna and start detoxing.” But the thing is is that if your detox pathways like your lymphatic system or your liver or pancreas, your filtering systems have been compromised, as many lyme patients today are experiencing. Because if you particularly, if you’re chronic, these organs, these systems have been working overtime for many years, many, maybe even decades. And now you jump into sauna and to detox, and what you’re doing is essentially throwing kerosene on a flame, right? We look to open up those detox pathways, make sure that you’re pooping and that things are working before we start dumping more of these waste products into your systems to actually get, to get them out, you know, so.

Kashif Khan

Exactly what you should be doing.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

So back to you and this work that you’re doing, how do people get ahold of you Kashif? What’s the internet, what’s your 800 number? Tell people–

Kashif Khan

Also thednacompany.com, right? The DNA Company, that’s literally, we were bold enough to say we are The DNA Company because we know it better than anyone, so that’s what we call ourselves. So thednacompany.com, I know that we are gonna host, there’s a lot of people that are asking for information. So we’re gonna host something specifically about lyme and how we can help with that. And I’m sure that will be shared somehow, you know, maybe an email or something along those lines, so everybody can get involved in that. And through that, that’s the thing where I was saying earlier, where there’s some areas. 

So when it comes to diet nutrition, buy the DNA tests, go read it, figure out what you need to do. There’s some areas where we know we need to work with people, right? It’s not just about here’s the information, but it needs to be interpreted properly and applied properly, and that’s where we’re building this sort of program for lyme. And so anyways, we’ll share that with everybody, perhaps through an email, you know, something along those lines and they can come listen to our webinar and learn more and decide if it’s useful for them. But I do think that, regardless of lyme or not, you know, we have a $4 trillion healthcare budget, 90% is spent on chronic disease, $3.6 trillion, absolutely unnecessary and preventable. And it just tells you how much we need… Just like you said about this simple thing, like the plumbing, nobody even thinks about my plumbing doesn’t work, right? Because what the belief is, when I get sick, the doctor will fix me.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yes, and it is changing by the way. That is changing, it is moving.

Kashif Khan

It’s awesome, but it’s still, we’re still spending $3.6 trillion on Crohn’s disease, which means that there’s enough people that need to hear the message that you don’t need to be that sick or sick at all. If you weren’t born with something, you don’t need to get it, it’s that simple. If you got it, it’s because you made choices that were mismatched to your genetic legacy. You weren’t doing what you were wired to do. And so you cause that inflammatory load that led to illness that got you sick. Now, if we identify the why we can start to unpack that that unravel it and bring you back, that’s the whole message.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

By the way, you know, we underestimate, or let’s say we assume certain things. And I can say this categorically, that the body is an incredible device, machine, creation that has multiple roads for bouncing back and recovering.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Like many people that have chronic elements, particularly chronic lyme. At some point they kinda give up, they go, “Oh my God, I’ve seen 25 doctors, I’ve spent all my money. You know, it’s been 10, 20 years, I don’t feel any better or it’s just been a rocky road.” And they just get, actually find themselves falling into some form of depression, you know, because they just figured this is it, it’s not gonna get any better, but that’s not true. 

The truth is, and it doesn’t matter how old you are that we have incredible regenerative qualities to us. And it starts with understanding and getting the roadmap. And what you’ve done is you’ve created a map, you’ve actually given us what we needed all along. And I understand that you’re still in developmental phases. What I really love about what you’re doing and especially at The DNA Company is that it’s not just about putting a test out. People in the lyme world, they’ve gone to testing services to even determine if they’ve had lyme and spent thousands of dollars. That isn’t even telling them what to do about it. What you’re giving us is an information that’s much greater than just understanding what you have. It’s what to do with what you have, that’s the key here. And man, wow, this is great stuff.

Kashif Khan

What you just said about lyme? Like even all those people that are in that sort of purgatory of being stuck of not knowing what they have, right? They can’t even get to the symptoms that you’re expressing that you think are lyme. And there’s some people that are listening here that don’t have lyme but think they do, right? There’s still a root in the same problem. So if the symptomology that matches lyme, whether you have it or not, it’s still methylation, anti inflammatory, detox, all that stuff. 

Right, so if you work on these things, you’re still gonna get better, whether it was lyme or not. ‘Cause those symptoms you’re expressing, you don’t, if you’re looking for the lyme pill, it’s only gonna target lyme, right? If you’re looking for the inflammation, detox, et cetera, it doesn’t matter what’s causing it. You’re dealing with the things you actually need to deal with. So that’s a very important point you make ’cause it’s, I can’t tell you how many people. We had a lady that actually got in a car accident, right? She was elderly, I think she was in her late 60s. And we met her two years later, she had lost mobility of her arm from her elbow to her fingertips, completely numb, right? She went on a custom supplement program we built for her through her clinician, which had nothing to do with this issue. She just wanted to be sort of optimal, energized, et cetera. So we custom compound in our lab supplement that spoke to her genetic underpinnings, like what she actually needed. 

She woke up two weeks later in pain in her fingertips, six weeks later, full mobility. After two years of being told that this was damage from the accident, and her nerves were damaged. What was actually happening was neurological inflammation, intense, intense, neurological inflammation that because her methylation was so poor, it just wasn’t recovering. It was a constant cycle of trying to get better, can’t get there, trying to get better, can’t get there. And so for two years, her nerves were suffocating to the point where this was numb. So the thing that we gave her, ’cause we found genetically she doesn’t methylate well, let’s support her there. So all the methylation got supported everywhere. And that spoke again where we started of, of, “I got a numb arm,” wasn’t the problem. The problem was, this root cause system failure, right? And the same thing is true of anyone, whether you have it or not, you’re feeling these things target the system. Those folks are all gonna kind of go away, right?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, what’s really cool about where you’re talking, which most of us can understand in the lyme world, lyme expresses itself differently in different people. And that’s why it’s a tough one because if you’re not a lyme literate doctor, it’s not even on your radar to think about, could this be lyme? You come in as a patient and present yourself as MS, when it’s really lyme. So the doctor says, “Well, you’ve got these symptoms of MS,” ’cause he’s checked off this little checklist, right. And he treats you for what you don’t have and doesn’t treat you for what you do have. Now the converse could be that you don’t have lyme at all, but they’re treating you as if you do.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

But the point is is that all those roads come back to Rome because it’s still a systematic approach. So whether it be lyme or fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue or cancer, or all of the host of chronic ailments that have skyrocketing projectories right. With all the amount of money, as you pointed out earlier, that’s been put into trying to understand we’re not anywhere, but the curve is still like that. It’s not like that, and it’s not flattening out and it’s not going in the other direction. And I think that that’s simply because, they’re just throwing darts at the side, trying to see what might stick as opposed to really understanding with your individual expression.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And that brings me back to more about what you do with your company. It’s not just developing a testing service, you’re actually creating a solution. And you’re also offering the coaching to personalize the personalized test to allow me to understand, because I’m a lyme patient and I’m on my back and I’m not feeling great. And I just took one of your tests and I can’t read this, I don’t understand it. And I don’t understand, what do I do with this? And what you’re doing is you’re bridging the gap, you’re actually helping me understand what’s going on for me, and then creating a road back, you know, that’s individualized for me. And then that by itself is just an incredible body of work that everybody listening, everybody tuning into this summit, everybody that comes across your company needs to understand this. And we’ll do our utmost to get that word out because it’s super important to know.

Kashif Khan

Great, and I think just, I know you asked me a couple of times, how do people find out more? And other than the website, I didn’t have really have an answer for you. And I did hear from our team that they were working on something that, so just to make it easy and simple, what we’ll do. And I’m literally saying this on the fly and I’ll make sure it gets done is if you go to the website, thednacompany.com, I’ll make sure there’s a link there for you to register, to learn more about lyme, right? So we’ll go a little deeper and so you can register there and I’ll make sure that there’s something there so that people can learn. We’ll put it up there, so if you go to thednacompany.com, you’re welcome to just to go or to the test, do whatever you’d like, but we’ll put up that thing there right after this so that you can go learn more directly from us. And then we’ll teach you about how we work with lyme.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Fantastic. Well, we’ve ran out of time 10 or 15 minutes ago, but I couldn’t stop you because this just this information I could go on and on with you, we only really have a few minutes left. So I wanna offer you the opportunity if there’s something that you needed to say that we didn’t cover or a message you wanna leave with us before we finish our interview today, what would that be Kashif?

Kashif Khan

I mean, you know the subject matter so well, you’ve asked all the right questions that really drew out what people needed to know, right? So this was a great interaction with you, first of all. But the key is, I mean, whether it’s lyme or not, the number one thing that I always take back from my own example, you don’t have to be sick, right? You don’t, if it’s a chronic condition and you don’t have to have the worst expression of that illness, right? You should be healthy enough where like me, I haven’t had a cold or a flu in four years. I used to be bedridden several times a year, I just wasn’t healthy, right? 

So health isn’t about how do I mask the thing that’s giving me pain, right? It’s about why did I even get like, how I shouldn’t get sick? I’m not sick, the body is truly resilient, like you said, it’s super resilient. It is designed to fight. But once you push it too hard, when you do what it’s not supposed to do, which is different for all of us. Yeah, then there’s gonna be a load where it just can’t handle it. You cross that, like you said, you get into that tipping point where you’re sick. So understanding all that, just, it all starts with, first of all, believing and knowing that you don’t have to be sick, right. When it comes to chronic conditions and that starts with understanding your body and what would make you sick and then focusing on the right stuff.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

What a big message, what a great project. However, you came to this, I’m so blessed to know you and everybody out there to know that the success and you know what, you don’t have to wait until you become symptomatic. What you’re doing should be part of every integrated, functional diagnostic. Your practitioners to say, “Hey,” however you do it, like you said about Dave Asprey, “Just spit into this little tube and let me do a test.” 

However that transforms itself, know that going in, know that in early age, know that at a point in your life where all of this, your path to finding your bliss and your purpose, shouldn’t be a bumpy road, it should be smooth. And I think that what you’ve created is really the way there, it’s really the map that we need. And I think we’re all blessed for your ambition and your passion towards this, towards your body of work. And I can tell already that you’re unwavering and you work tirelessly with your crew to know, and to find more answers and keep raising the bar. Kashif Kahn, thank you so much for joining the summit, for being with us today, for sparing us your time, for dedicating your life and your body of work to the public at large, to understand more about what makes us tick inside and out. Thank you so much.

Kashif Khan

It was a pleasure, thank you for having me.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Hey everybody, it’s Robbie Besner, thanks so much for joining us today. Please share this content with anyone that you think might benefit from it. And we’re looking forward to having you with us tomorrow for another great interview.