Hacking your DNA to slow aging and optimize performance

Kashif Khan

It’s a pleasure man, good to be here.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

We’ve been delighted to get to know you, yeah, it’s been a challenge to try to figure out how to understand the role the genetics play, and then how to begin to impact that. And I think you guys have done more to clarify this and break it down into bite size pieces that people can understand than anybody else. And so I’m grateful that you took the effort to do that.

Kashif Khan

No, thank you. That was exactly what we saw was the gap, was we have this human instruction manual that tells all of ourselves what to do, and nobody really knew what it was saying. We knew all the words and letters that were in it, but nobody was reading the story, like, what are all these paragraphs? what’s the point of all of it? Right, and that’s where the interpretation, I would say, that’s the number one word, the key thing that was missing, anybody can go test for DNA, right? You can literally go buy a machine, put it in your basement and start testing tomorrow. What does it all mean when you print out a report? That’s what was missing and broken and kind of what we went towards in our research.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Awesome, tell me… And this is a Peptide Summit, but I think of… Our philosophy is, is that we’re trying to break down and introduce people to social medicine and strategies of thinking about the body biology, and then how can we begin to influence it? And then what factors may impact how we need to influence and point us in a direction of where to go. And then I think genetics is a big area Within genetics there’s two aspects, straight up genetics and then epigenetics. Just from the genetic piece, tell me a story about how your algorithm begins to think about genetics?

Kashif Khan

Sure, so, the gap has been, and I’m sure a lot of people listening here have done some kind of genetic testing at some point, there’s a lot of out there doing it. I think 80 million people have done an ancestry test. So 30% of the American population. What was missing was the context of the human body. Meaning we already understand, somebody comes to your clinic, for example, you’re gonna get to the why, not the what condition do you have and what pill do I offer you, but the biochemistry of how did you get there, and how do we reverse this, how do we prevent it? Because we truly know why it happened. Root cause medicine, right? Genetics wasn’t doing that. What it was is doing was first of all, trying to identify genetic conditions, which is really important. 

You’re born with something, some genetics, which was turned on or off, you have it, you have that thing, something like sickle cell syndrome, you’re born with it, you have it. That’s like two or 3% of healthcare, 90%, at least according to this CDC, 90% of the of the four trillion dollar healthcare budget is spent on chronic disease. Things you’re not born with, things that happen later in life because you made the wrong choices for too long, and what are those choices? That’s what we were trying to figure out, ’cause it’s not the same for all of us, and it’s not always intuitive what that choice may be. And if you make the wrong choice, misaligned to your genomic capacity, that’s what leads to chronic conditions versus the genetic condition where there is a switch turn off. So the way you look at genetics isn’t, this gene equals diabetes, this gene equals breast cancer, this gene equals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because that’s not the way the body works. 

We, people like yourself know why breast cancer happens, why diabetes happens, why cholesterol even happens. Now let’s look at genes instruct each step of that process and use the map that already exists, the human biology map, right? Instead of trying to reinvent it, which only pigeonholes you to things that genes can inform that are direct. So that’s the work we did. We spent three years studying 7,000 people, one by one by one by one, to say, there’s enough science out there about DNA, we know what each gene means. Now, why did this person who fits in the, you have a 80% chance of Alzheimer’s bucket get sick, and why did this person stay in the 20% that didn’t get sick? It’s the exact same genes that we’re telling you, you have 80% chance risk of something. That I’m also telling you have a 20% chance risk of not getting that thing, whatever it is. So what were the choices made by those two people with the exact same genetic risk where they had a different outcome? And that’s kind of what was missing?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

What were those choices? What did you typically find?

Kashif Khan

So this is where we get into epigenetics, the thing that you mentioned, and there’s two ways to look at epigenetics to actually measure in time how your genes are expressing, right? Which again goes back to what I was saying before, isn’t as actionable as to understand what are the environment, nutrition, and lifestyle habits that got that gene to express that way, right? So we were in this habit of taking new science and then putting it into the existing context of measure your blood, do stuff that’s reactive in nature and disease centric, as opposed to health centric. How do I keep you healthy? And so even with epigenetics, the way we look at it is about the disease or about let’s measure the expression of the gene, but not ask what caused that expression. So what we look at is something entirely different. First, the profile. You fit in this 80% bucket, there’s some risk, there’s propensity, right? Then we say, what are the environment, nutrition and lifestyle habits of the people in the 80% and the 20%. And there’s areas where it’s not, like I said, always so straightforward. For example, cardiovascular disease, the number one killer. 

You would think that you follow your doctor’s advice of go exercise four days a week, which means running on a treadmill or getting on your bike, for some people that would be the cause of their cardiovascular disease because genetically, they don’t deal with oxidative stress so well, so when they’re getting into high cardiovascular output, they’re taking in so much oxygen, creating so much oxidants, which is the byproduct, which are toxic, that they cause inflammation. Then you have to look at well, what quality of hardware that they have? That endothelial lining, the inner lining of the blood vessel. If it’s not so good, the inflammation’s gonna happen a lot faster. If it’s highly resilient, maybe it won’t happen at all. So this is where you can look at the pieces, answering the questions that we already understand in biochemistry, as opposed to you had 80% chance of cholesterol problems. Well, what does that really tell me? I don’t know what to do with that, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so then along those lines then, and this is was the confusing thing, ’cause you have somebody that like Jim Fixx that was out there running and then dies running. And then we thought, so you wonder if I could go back in time and study and kind of figure that stuff out, the way that we begin to sort of layer upon that is then we say, “Oh, okay, if there’s an issue we find from the endothelial perspective, we have a whole bunch of things that we’re trying to do to work on endothelial function.” And then this is just further data that’s gonna help us in terms of how we organize our model of applying things. And then I think it’s also helpful because if you see some risk in your portfolio, then it becomes a little bit easier for me to convince you to take it to that next level from a diet lifestyle and wellness perspective.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, it gives you that sense of… If somebody’s not symptomatic, if they’re not sick, we feel invincible, right? You go to the doctor when you’re sick and that’s not the right way to deal with your health especially when it comes to chronic disease and aging, we’re learning that now, especially through functional medicine. But if you do attest this nature and you understand there is a big glaring red flag, right? Your endothelial hardware is the worst quality, which by the way, is not a two or 3% problem. It’s actually more rare to find someone with a good resilient endothelial than it is to find bad quality. Because we aren’t designed for the current environment we live in. What we’ve inherited ancestrally, our current DNA that’s in our bodies is somewhere between 200 to 250,000 years old. So we are like people of 200 to 250,000 years ago. We haven’t shifted in what our genetic map looks like. The way we live today is a blip of like the last couple 100 years, industrialization, how old is that a few hundred years? Versus 240 something thousand years of what we’re actually designed to do, which is why we don’t have robust high quality endothelial lightings that are designed to deal with pollution and chemicals, and sort of what’s lacing our food that may now enter our bloodstream and why cardiovascular disease is so prevalent. 

We aren’t designed for those epigenetic factors. So, and going back to what you said, this is why you have this crazy phenomenon of soccer players that just drop dead while they’re playing, Olympic sprinters, who are in the best condition of their life, best doctors, best training, best everything, 32 years old, they dropped out of a heart attack, because they aren’t designed for that oxidative stress level, and nobody’s measuring preventively, how inflamed are you? You’re 30 years old, why would I check? You’re a top athlete, why would I check? Well, I can tell you if you’re five years old, your DNA doesn’t change what you should be doing for training, what you should be doing for diet, what you should be doing for environmental exposure, do I either reduce or supplement with certain things to manage where you’re at? Your DNA is what the cards you’ve been dealt now you know what to focus on, okay?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And 10 years ago and five years ago, that was even more true because there was not much that could happen that could affect from a, for example, for a cardiovascular perspective, a young, healthy athlete, other than, for example, cocaine and drugs and stuff like that are toxic. But now we’ve got COVID and you hear more about cardiovascular stuff now with young athletes because COVID can really affect the endothelial lining. And so then, this would be an example where we get a patient and then we we’re applying this algorithm and then we go, “Oh, okay, so, oh, look at that there’s a little bit more endothelial risk.” And so then now we’re gonna, within our algorithm set up a plan of gonna work on that.

Kashif Khan

Exactly.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then now we’re managing that and then we’re thinking about inflammation and then thinking about that and then communicating that. And then I find that to be fairly helpful in terms of influencing health behavior.

Kashif Khan

Oh, for sure, yeah, ’cause now all of a sudden it’s empirical, it’s not like, “I don’t feel sick so why are you telling me to do this stuff,” right? Which is our belief, but there’s data sitting there that you can’t argue with. You have bad hardware, you don’t detoxify, you can’t metabolize fats and you’re on a keto diet, you made the wrong choice, or you shouldn’t be a vegan. As an example, there’s certain enzymes required to break down chickpeas, lentils, legumes, and you don’t produce them. So the data’s in your face and hard to argue with and all of a sudden you make the right choices.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That one’s an interesting one. And I’m really enjoying kind of the food conversation in a way, because we’re just kinda not emotionally triggered by it. And then I’ve got vegetarians, pescatarians, paleo, carnivore, vegan, I’ve have everyone on my team. And so then we’ve created this sort of centric accepting sort of spot that we’re in. But then we’re doing that testing. I have fairly good genetics for being able to be vegan. And so, but I’m not.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, and it’s often the first place we go with people because you’re gonna eat anyway, right? It’s one of the things where we’re not telling you how to exercise, we’re not telling you what supplements to take, you’re already eating, you’re gonna do it. So let’s at least do that the right way, the way you’re designed to do it. And the impact is quick, like you feel it right away, if you do things right. And all of a sudden you can eat a little bit more and feel yourself you’re not bloated, you don’t have these gut issues, there’s no, call it digestive type problems. The really cool thing we did in our research when it comes to food is we understood when we were trying to help people, coaching through, eat like this, you should be a keto or whatever. 

We found that the failures were typically behavioral, not the diet itself, meaning understanding the neurochemicals of the brain and what drives your personal mood and behavior, your personality, changes the outcome of what we’re asking you to do. So do you lean on food as a coping mechanism? Are you a binger? Are you an addict? Do you graze at the pantry, and you don’t even realize you’re doing it, right? Do you feel satiety? Literally there’s a gene that deals with the ability for your gut to tell your brain you’re full. And some people have a slow signal and that’s why they’re going for seconds and thirds thinking that they’re still hungry. There’s another gene that determines the satisfaction of the tongue and the palette. 

And if you’re not doing well there, it’s actually designed as like in a survival mechanism that it drives you to want more variety so that you’re getting the nutrition you need, and for people that don’t have variety that are the poor version of this are constantly snacking. They’re done with their meal, and now, I didn’t get the salty, I didn’t get the crunchy, I didn’t get the soupy, I need a little bit of all of it, right? So we always first deal with the behavioral genetics. How do you actually perceive food? Are you more reward seeking? Are you more flaky? Call it your naysayer, right? Then we know how to build a plan that you’re actually gonna stick to and that you understand, and it feels correct, and the outcomes are so much better.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then on the food thing to me, it seems like historically, and even for myself, if I went back 10 years ago, it seemed like a little bit of a black box.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I knew a lot but I don’t think I was in total control- of what I was eating.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Whereas now I’m in about 98% control and it’s amazing, the fact that I’ve… Learning how to totally overcome that. And I think part of that is having a whole bunch of conversations and getting data and going, “Oh, okay, oh, I have that.”

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And having that data stream in begins to kind of affect consciousness and then I go, “Oh, oh, okay.” And then somehow the amount of that and the organization and the clarity of that came up more and more and more to the point that I start, like now I eat like a super moderate amount, not too much, not too little.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Fairly balanced meat or fish only once a day. And then I eat and I start to be full and then I feel like I love that feeling of being full and then I just kind of relax into that and then it’s like… But I remember 10 years ago, I would be like, I probably would have seconds.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, yeah, so what you just described is kinda the journey people need to go through it, the challenge is when people are expecting to flip a switch and overnight everything’s changed. You first have to make it a priority or a habit, does food matter? First of all, right? If you’re being told today, you need to shift your diet, don’t expect that tomorrow you’re a different person, you’ve shifted your identity. It starts with even thinking about food and thinking about how do I feel, and thinking about am I bloated and thinking about am I still hungry, am I satisfied? And you start to have a better relationship with those senses, right? And you start to become more aware of them. And then all of a sudden like yourself, you’re just more sensitive, you won’t make that mistake, right? And I’ve been through this myself, I’ve learned that my carb metabolization is the optimal, oh sorry, the absolute worst. 

So I can’t convert carbs into glucose, which causes me to have a crazy carb crash and bloating and all this stuff. And my insulin response is also horrible, which would almost guarantee me to have type 2 diabetes if I went down the carb path and it would just make me feel horrible. So that good feeling that I was getting from eating what I was supposed to eat, pushed me towards, oh, this is how I’m supposed to feel. But it took months of that feeling to realize I’m actually supposed to feel like this, right? And now when I don’t feel like that, I’m so not used to feeling bad anymore, that it actually feels really bad, right? Yeah, when I even eat like for example, my kid has like a candy that somebody gave them that I couldn’t control, and I take a little piece of it that flavor, corn syrup stuff that’s going into my that I, before didn’t even notice. Now it’s like, feels like poison, right?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh, yeah. 

Kashif Khan

Yeah, yeah. So it’s that shift that realizing it takes time but though those habits develop and sensorially, you’re in a different place and then it’s permanent, t’s a new identity, right?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then this is the genetic pieces of lifestyle conversation like to hear you say, and now this is gonna be unusual thing to hear. Kashif say that it took months for that to happen is a victory. That is a victory, like and not a lot of times he say like, “Oh, I’m gonna tell you something.” And then you would know it and then you would sort of it tomorrow morning.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

This is a very sort of intimate sense connected thing where you’re paying attention to how you feel and then being able to control that, which is I have a friend named Rouse Joshua, he’s a successful entrepreneur and shout out to Rouse, and he was a successful entrepreneur, an Indian entrepreneur and his religion was that he’s a Jane.

Kashif Khan

All right, yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Then when I came to Silicon Valley, he was early person I met who I did yoga with and I just 100% love him. And he said, look at every religion that has a rule where they control what food you can or can’t eat. He goes, “Those are the most successful people in the world.” He goes, “Because it’s very challenging.”

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

To be able to learn to have any control over that.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And I recognized that that was like one of the most important things that anybody had ever said to me in my life.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so then I started trying to pay attention to that and I realized, oh, I wasn’t in a 100% control. And then it took me honestly, 10 years and our Cadi, this other teacher of ours that we loved talked about it 24 hours a day. But then that’s a good one.

Kashif Khan

That you speak to something that I’ve learned genetically, I’ll actually dive into the genetics of why of what you just said, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, good. 

Kashif Khan

So, and I’m a prime example of this. So, we were chatting earlier about warrior genetics before this started. So the way I’m wired is literally to be a warrior. I’m not sitting here with a sword and shield, and I don’t look like one, but ancestrally, whatever my ancestors went through, lot of stress, lot of fighting constan, striving for something. So what does that look like is my ability to bind dopamine and experience pleasure and reward is the absolute minimum, right? My density of receptors is really low, they’re sparse, right? Then the MAO gene, which is the gene that kind of breaks the dopamine down to bringing you back to normal. I have the fastest possible version. Then the COMT enzyme, which deals with hormones and so many other things, I also have the fastest, and that’s what breaks up that metabolite and clean it away. 

So I feel way down here and it lasts super fast. So when it comes to pleasure and reward, it’s very challenging for me, which leads to potential addiction, ’cause I go down that pleasure route and I find the thing that gives me pleasure, or it can lead to depression because I don’t find any pleasure. I don’t get satisfaction from the sort of status quo or at least to achievement because dopamine also allows you to feel reward, right? So, and that’s kind of what happened to me that when I was younger, I was kinda in and outta depression, in and out of various addictions, not anything super nefarious, but just not productive, right. And we also grew up in poverty and that’s why the depression kept coming out, the life wasn’t good. Then my father died when I was 17 and I had to take care of the family and I became super entrepreneurial and reward seeking because I needed to. And I never shifted back to any of the other buckets, but my dopamine made me whatever I did today, tomorrow it had to be more and bigger risk and bigger reward and bigger risks. 

So why am I saying all this? What you just talked about and what’s happening there is people that are, and I’ve experienced this myself, this new reality, we just talked about new identity. It used to be, even for myself, that food would give me pleasure, right? That dopamine hits, the tasty pizza, the whatever you could smell or about and plan the next meal, it was pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. And that feeling was too good to let go. So it’s hard to stop. It’s very hard to stop, especially when it’s in your mouth. When you start learning to say no, and you start actually enjoying that no, ’cause it’s giving you a sense of reward, you’re actually replacing the pleasure ’cause dopamine does both, right. And this is what’s now happened to me, what’s happened to you. The gene phenomenon he was talking about and gene is a very difficult diet, like you can’t eat anything.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

It’s so difficult, I know.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, it’s super difficult. You literally can’t even pluck a fruit, you can’t take the life of anything. It has to be naturally just fallen from the tree or whatever, right? So that reward that you get from saying no, and the enjoyment of that reward becomes no, your replacement for pleasure, but you have to create that shift. And that’s why I said it takes months of changing one habit into another habit, but that’s where I’m now at that I actually enjoy saying no so much. It gives me more reward than the yes of eating the tasty pizza that I don’t like anymore because I know it’s gonna make me feel bad. And I know that I got past it. “Oh wow, I did it again.” I achieved something again and now I’m on a different path, achievement as opposed to pleasure and that’s what happens to people when they change their identity and change their habit, and that’s why I’m just advising people, allow it to take some time. But once you’re there, you’re there, it’s permanent.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, and then that part, there’s also then another, imagine like we’re having this we’re having this genetic conversation.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then like then the next conversation is functional medicine conversation that could be microbiome, it could be an imbalance between the good and bad microbiome, it could be like infections and parasites in the gut. People can have bacteria or yeast living in the small intestine because sort of disrupts everything. So then imagine as a doctor, we’re having this conversation that’s kind of an emotional identity, genetic, spiritual conversation, and then you’re also over here having this other conversation that is infectious disease, inflammation.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Microbiome sort of wellness conversation and both are relatively complex and there’s a whole bunch of aspects going in. And so then the next step that we try to do is begin to merge those two conversations.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So then, oh, okay. That food makes me feel this way or that food could drive SIBO or do I have SIBO or do I not, maybe I’ll do some testing, but then what you guys have done in terms of the way that you organize the genetic testing that I really like it, I feel that it helps contextualize your understanding overall of everything, and then helps to tell a story that you can tell it to yourself about yourself. And that is a hero’s journey story that is ultimately like the story that has you on a trajectory of appealing.

Kashif Khan

It’s funny you said at that because we actually call it genomic storyboarding.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh really?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, we say that we don’t provide genetic reports because reports need interpretation. It’s just a bunch of data. We provide genomic storyboarding, we take your genetic profile and we tell you the story of anxiety or weight loss or hormone problems, or recovery from exercise. How do you do that? Let’s look at, ’cause it’s not one thing, it’s a system or a pathway. And if you’re not looking at from A to Z the whole system, then you’re not telling the story. And so using gut microbiome as an example, our belief is that gut microbiome and DNA are connected two halves of personalization. One is how you’re wired. It’s your human instruction manual. Here’s your DNA that’s… We can look at your blueprint and figure out how you’re made. The other one is kind of like a stamp in time. Here’s where you’re at. 

At a very personal level, let’s look at your gut microbiome and figure out exactly what do we need to work on? Right, so the one challenge is that a lot of people that are working in these sort of buckets are taking a siloed approach. Is gut microbiome better than DNA? Is epigenetics better than gut microbiome? What do like pick one and then we’re the best at this. And you don’t need the other one. The reality is like you mentioned SIBO or inflammatory issues of the gut. If you’re not putting them all together, you’re again just like what medicine does right now, the osteopath or the cardiologist or the endocrine, like everything is separate and siloed. And so you’re only ever dealing with symptoms ’cause if you don’t get to the system level, which requires integrating all of it, you can’t get to root cause, you can only mask things. 

So the only reason I say this is because it’s people like yourself that can take these pieces from the various sort of providers of the science and create them up and gut microbiome was a perfect example. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you’re causing the wrong fluoride to flourish and all of a sudden there’s like a toxic excrement or some kind of a byproduct of that, which is causing some kind of inflammatory issue, you then also need to understand the genetics of how do you deal with that. Maybe you detox it so well that you’re not noticing what you’re causing and there’s no symptom. There’s nothing to complain about. Maybe you detox it so poorly that it’s a giant red flag that needs to be dealt with as an emergency before you get IBS, Crohn’s, colitis, and all this other stuff, right? So you gotta sort of converge and merge all these pieces of science that we now have, but that requires a quarterback, someone like yourself in the middle to take all of it and turn it into a plan, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I like that. And, or you could decide I’m gonna be Tom Brady, the Tom Brady of my life, but I need a coach, you know?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and he’s kinda doing that for himself. He’s saying, “I’m finding all these pieces, but they’re pieces, so I’m putting them all together.” Now he has his own protocol, right, of what he believes in.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I’m interested in that whole story that you said about the dopamine and reward so then is because you’re less specific. What’s the logic on the low dopamine it makes a great warrior?

Kashif Khan

So it’s not ending there. There’s other pieces to it. I’ll tell you the whole profile, right? So that’s step one is that I strive towards reward, right? So I’m looking for that dopamine hit if I don’t go down the pleasure and addiction route, which is why you often find high achieving people become suicidal or become alcoholics because it’s the same pathway that leads to both, right, but it depends what context you put yourself in is it striving for a reward or striving for pleasure? Right? So one is that, that I seek reward highly and whatever I did today is just not good enough anymore. I need to take a bigger risk and a bigger risk and a bigger risk. So I’m very easily able to make those crazy decisions, be in the front lines and go for it without thinking, especially because my COMT enzyme is really fast. So I don’t get thought for very long, which is sometimes could be a crutch, right, because I’ll just make rash decisions and just go, but it also allows me to make the decisions that nobody else will make. They don’t have the kahunas to do it, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I see.

Kashif Khan

So it appears to be this sort of warrior mentality of, “Nope, we’re getting it done. Let’s go do it.” Right, so that’s one. Second pathway serotonin. And because my serotonin receptors are somewhat dysregulated, I’m a little more sensitive to stimuli than the average person. So whether it’s good or bad, I notice more. So again, given the context, it could be I’m irritable, I get annoyed easily, I complain a lot if that’s where I use it, or it could be that I’m super highly detail oriented and I capture everything in every little T and I that gets crossed and dotted, I notice them all, right. There’s been times where we’re in meetings with our team and somebody will say, “No, we didn’t talk about that last week.” And I’ll say, “Can you open up your notebook to the second page and look at the top line?” It’s exactly we could literally could remember the guy writing it down at what time with the meeting he wrote it down, right. And it’s not that I’m more intelligent, it’s just I’m so much more sensitive to stimuli that I’m constantly capturing it all, right. 

So that leads to this fast decision-making, but by processing a ton of detail, which allows me to good decision, which allows me to lead and be that warrior, right? The last part, which is probably why I’m a CEO, I’m wired to do it, right. The last part… Actually there’s two more parts. So the third part is my noradrenaline response is also somewhat off. So when it comes to both negative stimuli and positive sort of pursuit of adrenaline, I’m a little more sensitive to it. So when it comes to that rush, that fight or flight or whatever, I feel it more and I strive towards it, right? Think of like that endurance runner that is constantly wanting to win, win, win, win, win, right. That adrenalin is important to me and I get lost in it. But at the same time, I also imprint trauma more, pain, grudge, negative stimuli. And so I remember all the bad and all the bad feelings and what that person did to me and it means more, so I do more about it, right? The thing has meaning to me, I remember not only the logic, but the feeling. So I can read the room, I can kind of sense where people are at emotionally, come to them at that level, which again, there’s good and bad to this. The bad could be that I’m suffering from PTSD and trauma, the good can be, I’m using it towards my goal. All this comes down to context, right? The last of it is brain-derived neurotrophic factor. 

I have kind of optimal version of it. So it’s very easy for me to develop new neural pathways and neuroconnections, so the clinical of it is that I would recover from a concussion quickly, but the mood and behavior of it is that I appear to sort of not have a neurotic or drama queen response, quite the opposite, where give me the worst and I just deal with it. It’s not a weight on my shoulders, right. Lawyer letter shows up with the male, I enjoy coming up with a strategy and how to deal with and not, I can’t think, or eat for the rest of the day, which is a typical response, right? So I strive for reward in that path, I’m seeing all these detail nuances in my quick decision making and making good decisions quickly, which allows me to lead. I have a sense of feeling, right? So I remember the mission, the feeling of why we’re doing this because there’s some emotion to stuff. And it’s very easy for me to sort of learn new skills, process information at a level where it’s not a weight on my shoulders. It doesn’t mean a lot. It’s more like, “Let’s get it done.” So that speaks to a warrior, right? Our co-founder is the flip opposite of me and we call him a warrior, right. 

He has a maximum dopamine expression, the slowest COMT enzyme. So he gets stuck in things, he’s constantly binging where I need to like, “Get it done, get it done, get it done.” He’s like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And then he goes right back to his laptop to play video games, right. But I can never dive deep the way he can, right. Give him a project on… I’m not the scientist in the company. I’m the CEO, I’m the guy that pushes things along. He’s the guy that creates amazing stuff. I call it the artist. He’s the guy that will dive deep, come back with a stack of paper like this. But the other eight things he’s not interested, he never even starts. Right, so it leads to different outcomes. And if you understand this about yourself, imagine how much more impactful you’re getting to your outcomes is knowing why you feel a certain way, or I didn’t get it done, or I overdid it, or it’s all wired up here, all driven by DNA.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, perfect. So then how then I’ll take that one is, is that then imagine so we’re talking at the Peptide Summit. So then now imagine I’m working with you and we’ve got this warrior gene kind of mythic kinda character that I have that he has, there’s aspects of metabolism and stuff like that that we’re talking about. There’s aspects of neurology, how you think about and kind of process trauma?

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so then we would have an example of that warrior. We take care of a lot of warriors who come back from war, and we’re still fighting in the same places for the last 1,000 years, another 5,000 years, crazy. And so then interestingly, then as we have our conversations, like are they stuck in fight or flight, or are they balanced? The vagus nerve not optimally working because of some combination of stuff in the gut and choices that are being made, plus maybe some infections plus neuro neurologically what’s happening on from a dopamine and a reward perspective or serotonin. And so then I’m sort of love the genetic storyboarding conversation, ’cause that becomes a thematic idea that is somewhat artistic, but it’s super scientific at the same time.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

They contextualize is the whole story. And then it can begin to give you some impact and understanding of how you feel in your gut, how you feel in your brain, why you might be paying a little bit more attention to other people on these. And then if you’re paying more attention, but you can tell yourself a story, oh, I’m a person that pays attention, and I do that, then that becomes an enjoyable thing. And then you can reference it and then people recognize that you’re paying attention and then they can connect. Whereas if you’re just sort of paying attention, but like without the context of why that might be, it might seem like neurotic behavior.

Kashif Khan

Right, yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then we’ll do like vagus nerve hydrodissection will, for people with infections, we’ll use immune peptides like thymus and alpha-1 or LL-37. We might use mitochondrial peptides or supplements that work on mitochondria and strategies sort of to detox the body, and so then suddenly, we’re designing an overall approach that’s gonna help you contextualize both within your role as an identity of a human being, with your identity as your job, with your identity as of how all of your organs are doing things and how they make you feel and how your biology makes you feel, and it’s all impacted by genetics.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, the way you laid it out is perfect and that’s exactly what clinicians should be doing. I mean, a lot of people don’t have access to the knowledge or training that you do, but it starts with who are you? Where are you at? What are the red flags? How do I actually intervene without trial and error, without one size fits all? Right, what does this person actually need? Then what does the best tools? And you’ve curated that when it comes to peptide which kind of new and emerging, and I would argue that most clinicians, if you talk to them, don’t know where to start, right? Like maybe don’t even know, can’t even tell you what the definition of the word peptide is, right? So, and then all of a sudden if you have these tools cured that are so targeted, you know what to use, you know how to solve the problem. I have an anxiety issue. What does that mean? Do you need to get on a pill? Is it a hormone thing? Is it a neurochemical thing? Is it a gut brain thing? Then you know what to target and you’re resolving the root cause and you don’t need to be labeled as an anxiety patient. That’s on a pill for the next 20 Years.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Tell us from… So who has anxiety like the whole world? Tell us how you think about anxiety from a genetic perspective.

Kashif Khan

Oh! I’ll give you a very specific example, which is actually the reason why we went from being a research company to like out there with a public commercially, because this was the epiphany where within my own family, that was like, “Wow, everybody needs this,” right? We were a research company, were studying DNA, we were interpreting, plugging into other healthcare companies to help them do a better job. We weren’t out there trying to work with people. So my niece, this is now going back to winter 2020. She’s my niece, my sister, and my mother lived together. And this is again a genomic storyboard, because it’s not one thing. It’s multiple systems interacting that leads to an outcome, right? So she had an anxiety attack at the age of 13, right? So I got a call for my mom. It was October, 2020. And she said, we need your help. What pediatrician to call? Who’d we call? So I went over there, not far from my office and she was having trouble breathing, but she had kind of recovered from what they saw the worst of it, which she like fell over, couldn’t breathe. 

So anyways, I called my pediatrician friend. He said, “It sounds like a classic anxiety attack. If it happens, you can let me know, I’ll help you out.” ‘Cause she had somewhat gotten better. So sometime goes by my mother calls me again and says, “You need to over here ’cause it happened again. But this time she fell over and she hurt herself, she can’t walk.” So I called my pediatrician, friends. I said, “Can you please get the urgent care ready to check us in? So she’s not waiting ’cause she’s in a lot of pain.” He said, “No problem.” We get there. We spent a good six, seven hours there, and this is Canadian healthcare, it’s free, but you gotta wait, right? So after this six or seven hours, there was blood tests. There was a scan on her leg to check if she fractured it, and there was a bunch of questions asked. 

And the answer was, if it happens again, let us know. And I realized at that time, that meant that if it happens again, she’s being labeled as she has anxiety and there we’re gonna tell you what pill she has to take. Right? That’s when I jumped in and said, “I have her DNA, we did it for a diet nutrition for the whole family, right? So let me look.” I didn’t look, I went back to work. So time goes by, my mom calls me and says your niece is gone. I don’t know where she is. I said, “What do you mean? And she’s like a sweet, innocent girl, you would know, it is completely out character. But she said, she’s run away, she’s gone. So that makes no sense for her. So I drove over there, there in an apartment building. And my niece is standing outside like at the lobby, like not knowing where to go ’cause for her that’s far enough, right? So I asked her, “What is going on?” Is this like a social media thing? Bullying like a boy thing? Like what is it? She said, “I don’t know, I just needed to get out of there.” And I understood she was running away from like the feeling. There was nothing causing it. Not nothing to complain about. It was just that feeling of being there. 

She had to leave and go outside. That’s when I literally at that moment opened up her genetics and remember that I do it earlier and I asked my mom, “Wait a second. You’ve been calling me like clockwork monthly. Can you tell me about her menstrual cycle?” She said, “You know what? Now that you mention it, it just started each time.” Right, so what do we know about the circadian rhythm of the menstrual cycle is the beginning is your lowest level of hormones, right? Slim to none because she just feel clearing them, right? So she was already low. She was also what we call androgen dominance. So a lot less estrogen, more testosterone. So she was going even lower this giant valley as opposed to like a speed bump, right? So that was one where I said, this is something to do with it because when I look back at the text messages and calls like chronologically, they were happening like clockwork monthly. 

So again, it happened now, so why not before? ‘Cause this wasn’t the first month of her menstrual cycle. So then I realized because of COVID fall 2020, she was being homeschooled. Everything was closed in winter, in Toronto. So she was getting zero vitamin D, literally zero. So I looked up her vitamin D pathway, and vitamin D isn’t as simple as let me give you a blood test and see how much there’s in the blood. That’s step one. There’s one gene that does that. Let’s take D and put it into the blood. There’s another gene that transports it to the cell where it’s actually used. She had the slowest version of that. There’s gene that binds it when you get it to the cell, she had the worst version of that. This is the only micronutrient that’s so complex because if you have too much, it’s toxic, right. And everything else, you just kind of pee out or store and fat, whatever. And so she had this horrible vitamin D profile and she wasn’t getting enough. So this combination of hormones are slim to none. 

This was already a propensity towards mood and behavior issues at that time, zero vitamin D of the 22,000 genes in your body, 2,000 required vitamin D to function, 10% of your human biochemistry is dependent on this one thing and she didn’t have any, right? So now systems all whacked out. So why then did it lead to an anxiety issue? So we already know systems like under a lot of pressure, but why here? Like her uncle, she’s wired as a warrior, same genetics. She has no dopamine, right? So hormone shift, which was all already happening, now the extra load of the zero vitamin D was like kind of exaggerating that hormonal roller coaster. And now this sort of this system failure body wide led to that low dopamine, taking you over the edge of, I have a crazy anxiety issue, the world sucks. 

And it literally led to a breathing, panting, something probably triggered each time, but it happened on that day of each month. So now her outcome would’ve been, and you think about so many young girls that anxiety, depression, and they talk about the stuff and they end up on a pill very common today. The day we figure that out, she has not had this problem since. It is not repeated once, ’cause all we did was booster dopamine levels with L-theanine, a simple supplement you can buy anywhere, right? We high dose vitamin D regimen for her, which was five days before her cycle started. She was on 10,000 IU and it was split because she can’t transport it fast enough. 

So she was taking 3,000 IU three times, right? So and getting her nine to 10,000. And so right before the cycle, 10,000, the first week of the cycle, 5,000, and then a maintenance dose of 2,500. Those who things, she has not had the issue once since then. That’s all that was missing. So you understand the storyboard, you understand the genomics of not the vitamin D causes anxiety, hormones-cause anxiety. It’s like we need to see what’s systems are failing that lead to different spokes, right? This central hub leads to problems. The problem is not rooted in. You have an anxiety gene, right. There’s many, many ways you can get there and I can speak to 10 other ways why anxiety happens, right? This is just one of them. There’s many reasons why it happens. All of which we can resolve at the root cause level.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, and anxiety is, and this is an interesting thing, anxiety is a symptom.

Kashif Khan

Yes.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

It’s just a symptom. And so treating a symptom is like the worst strategy.

Kashif Khan

Yes.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Because that is not treating the cause. And what I do, I take care of a lot of patients with pain, treating pain is a terrible idea with pain medication, because then that doesn’t do anything to treat the cause of the pain. And so then what happens is, is you just get used to the treatment of that symptom. And anxiety also is the same thing. And then if you are the type of person that has a situation like she has, and then you treat that with a benzodiazepine, then what happens is those patients become very dependent on that benzodiazepine. And I have probably talked to 1,000 patients in my life that basically told me the worst thing that ever happened to them in their life was when they had an experience, basically like your niece had and then they went to see a doctor and that doctor put them on a benzodiazepine.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then basically they never got off. And I run into those people 20 years after.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And we have some pretty good strategies to help them get off of it. But I credit you, you’re a CEO and a healer because that was very, very good thinking. That’s an amazing story. I love that story.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, and that was literally the day that we said that like every young girl, every woman, by the way, the area that we found needs the most work is female hormone health.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

Of the thousands of people that we worked with in research, the area that just straight out sucks the most is female hormone health, because it’s just taken for granted. You’re supposed to have problems with your hormones, right. Women have hormone problems, that’s part of life, infertility, crazy menopause, PMs, all this stuff, fibromyalgia, PCS. It’s so black and white if you understand it genetically. So that hormone cascade and knowing why these things happen, it’s very, very clear. But again, we’re not looking at the genetics of hormones, we’re looking at fibromyalgia and infertility and trying to resolve all these little spokes, like I said, as opposed to the central hub. So that’s a big area of focus for us because the delta value between where it’s at and where it could be such a big gap, so we spend a lot of time there.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

What would be like a female hormone health, maybe one of the top couple things that you see that from a storyboard perspective that you could share with us?

Kashif Khan

I would say that the estrogen toxicity being the root of so many things and never being treated as a problem, right. That the thing ends up being the problem as opposed to the root, there’s so many issues, breast cancer is a big one that we deal with. We have an investor, one of our early-stage investors where we did their whole family, and we had said that it seems like your wife based on her age is very high risk of breast cancer. And there’s things that we can do to prevent it. So they went to their doctor to verify this obviously, and the doctor ran a genetic test on them, another test that he wanted to do. And they said, “There’s no risk. These guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” So I said, “What do they do?” They said, “Well, they tried the BRCA gene and she has the good version. There’s no problem,” right? So which is, there’s some truth there, but the wrong truth. What does the BRCA gene do? The BRCA gene is a tumor suppressor. It goes and fixes things. It fixes broken DNA, repair stuff. 

So if you have the bad version, you don’t repair stuff well, you don’t suppress tumors well, but nowhere in there are you getting an answer as to why did the tumor happen in the first place, right. So the reason we thought she had risk, we didn’t even look at BRCA, that’s genetics. This gene equals this, this gene equals this. We don’t do that. We look at storyboarding, functional genomics, right? So what we looked at and why that we got the red flag was that she’s estrogen dominant. So in that hormone cascade, she just nets out a lot more estrogen than the average woman, big pool of estrogen, right? So you can, progesterone to testosterone to estrogen, it’s all converting into estrogen, this big bucket every month. She was also estrogen toxic, which meant that that bucket of estrogen all got converted into a toxic metabolite as opposed to a clean one, there’s three potential options, right? One is clean to her toxic. So she was toxic. She also didn’t have the right detox gene. 

So just like me, her COMT, oh, sorry, the opposite of me, sorry. I should say her COMT was low so that it also works on hormones so that the toxic stuff stayed there for too long and her glutathione and oxidation pathways are also horrible. So none of the detox pathways are working, right? Estrogen dominant, estrogen toxic, can’t get rid of it. Even then this doesn’t equal the disease, right? This equals more risk. Why at that age, were we saying that she may have a problem? Because once you get into menopause, you no longer have a menstrual cycle to clear all this stuff. So your body to protect your organs will go stored in fat. And where do women have fat in the breasts? And you wonder why so much breast cancer happens at the menopause age. Not all of it, but a lot of it happens at that time. So even then, it doesn’t mean breast cancer. There still has to be epigenetic factor we talked about, which is what was your environment, nutrition, and lifestyle? What did you do with these cards you’ve been dealt? What was she doing? Like your Jane friend. She was a Hindu sect and her primary protein source was tofu. 

So she was eating an estrogen dominant food daily, right? She was also using a lot of chemicals and stuff what we call hormone disruptors, which I’m sure you deal with a lot, but things that mimic estrogen as they enter your body, something as simple as a Teflon coat and frying pan mimics estrogen when you use it, the chemicals that are required to make it, right. So now all of a sudden, she had her bad profile, she was at the age for which she was now at risk because she doesn’t clear it. So it’s gonna get stored in fat. And she had the wrong epigenetic choices to fuel that estrogen fire and then cause even more estrogen toxicity. That’s why we said, this looks like breast cancer, you gotta change your habits. The answer she got was you got the good BRCA gene. Don’t worry about it, right. This is the point. Now that cancer’s there, that’s when BRCA gets to work to go fight the cancer. So yes, once you have breast cancer, you may not do as well fighting it because you have the bad BRCA gene. But what is the answer to BRCA? Go cut a piece of yourself off, right? Go get a mastectomy prevention. 

Go get a man. That’s what is told to be as opposed to, why did the cancer happen in the first place? Nobody asks why. And you go to most cancer research websites, they’ll actually say, “We don’t know why.” We know what, we know what it is and we’re working on treatment, but we don’t know why, and we’re not even trying to figure it out, right? So it’s another example and just easy tweaks. What is it? So what are the genetic tweaks for everything? It’s either reduced load, get rid of that epigenetic choice, environmental lifestyle, that would be something you can’t handle, or increase capacity, supplement, peptide. Some other thing that makes you do this thing better that you don’t do well, right. Those are really your two options. And if you do a little bit of both, you get up in the middle and you shouldn’t have the problem, or if you have it, you can potentially reverse it.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That so would be a good example. So then in functional medicine, we have all of these different tests. And so then one thing that we will do is we’ll do 24-hour urine.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

There’s these different tests. There’s a test called the DUTCH test. And then what we’ll be able to do is we’ll to look at those estrogen metabolites and we’ll see how you’re breaking those down. They call it the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s like an old Western TV show. The old westerns in way are probably emblematic and reminiscent, probably similar to like how it was and old days with Genghis Khan running around in Asia. Same concepts. So then we will begin to look at those. We’ll begin to look at estrogen dominance and then basically paint a functional medicine storyboard about the hormone story and then superimpose this on top of that and then as we look at that, then like, just like you said, what is happening right now? We are exposed to more toxins than we’ve ever remotely even been exposed to.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Our genetics haven’t evolved to be ready for that. And so that we may have all of those problems and no glutathione. And so then in the cell, okay, maybe we’ll give you a glutathione IV, maybe we’ll take some glutathione supplements. Maybe you need a little bit of support in terms of detox from a peptide perspective, sometimes we’ll notice that mitochondrial peptides will help people detox better.

Kashif Khan

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Sometimes by a regulator peptides will help people detox better. It’s pretty interesting. And so then suddenly just those little influences and then having the architecture of this whole conversation in the back of your mind can help you organize your thoughts and choices in terms of lifestyle. Once again, and it’s not just lifestyle, diet, food, nutrition, it’s lifestyle in terms of your menstrual cycle, it’s lifestyle in terms of everything.

Kashif Khan

Everything you do, how do you sleep? How do you exercise? It’s all impacting your outcomes. So I mean, there’s a ton of grooves out there talking about everything. They’re all right. All of these things matter. I’m the sleep doctor, I’m the mold doctor. I’m the… Every one of them has a point to make. You have to be cognizant of all, first of all, how are you… What are you designed to do? What are you capable of? And then all of these starts that everyone’s talking about, they’re all real threats, right? We’re not designed for the reality we live in, the way we sleep, the way we eat, what we’re exposed to, something as simple as going golfing, which seems so healthy and pleasurable. How many toxins to take to make that golf course look so beautiful the way it does?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh my God.

Kashif Khan

And you’re breathing it for four hours at a time, which you weren’t designed for that, right? You were never or exposed the grass of our ancestors did not have. It didn’t look like that because the chemicals weren’t used to make it look like that, right? So you have to start to be cognizant. This goes back to the very first thing we said of starting to make those little habits that change the way you think that change the way you behave, right? ‘Cause knowing is one thing, doing something about it, right? That’s your behavior change, implementing little things. And you start to now make it like a constant for yourself and you are aware of chemicals. And you’re like, “Well, I smell something here. It’s an industrial facility. I don’t wanna be breathing this stuff in. I’m gonna wait outside.” And things you wouldn’t have thought about before, right?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

100%, how do you break down from a genetic storyboard perspective sleep?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, sleep’s a really cool one because we landed on it completely unintentionally. So we didn’t think, and again, we were a victim of our own industry where we didn’t believe genetics had anything to do with sleep, right? If you ask the geneticist, there’s no sleep gene, right? So the funny thing is that in our research, one of the number one things people told us as the outcome was, “Wow, I’m sleeping, amazing.” Once we dove into their genetics, we fix whatever needed fixing. The way we look at things is it’s kinda like when you go to the Chinese herbalist and they take your pulse on your wrist, they don’t even ask you what’s wrong, right? They just take your pulse. They’re like, “I don’t need to talk to you. I’m gonna give you what I know your body needs.” ‘Cause, they don’t care what the symptom is. They care what kidney or what organ is failing, and I need to support that, right? So it’s same thing, genetically. We’re not so concerned with the problem is, we’re concerned with what gaps and holes we see in the genes. 

And if we support those, you become the optimal version of yourself and everything kinda goes away, right? So in sleep, this also happened completely unintentionally. And what do we find? That there’s people that can’t fall asleep, there’s people that fall asleep, but can’t stay asleep, and there’s people that sleep the night, but wake up feeling like garbage, didn’t get good quality sleep, right? So the first one, the second one was actually the most common, but people all believe they’re in the first bucket. I can’t fall asleep. That one is circadian rhythm. So there’s a gene literally called clock, which determines your relationship with your circadian rhythm of time, day and night, BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor which we already talked about, which develops your neural pathways also is highly implicit when it comes to a circadian rhythm and that clock. 

So if you’re not doing well there and you have the wrong habits, right, that aren’t aligned to you producing the right amount of BDNF, then your circadian rhythm is horrible and your body doesn’t know when to fall asleep and it’s the stimulation of blue light or the stimulation of stress or things that other people can sleep. 20 minutes after that, you can’t, right, that scrolling on Instagram on your phone or whatever you’re doing wrong may cause you to need another hour then to fall asleep for the time you put your phone down. And you’re saying, “I can’t fall asleep. I can’t fall asleep.” No, you did things that are triggering, oh sorry, preventing melatonin production. You’re not doing the things that your ancestors did, which was amber light, candlelight, fire, a dim. There’s no pot lights in a castle, right? So you’re not doing the things that you’re designed to do to trigger to your body, it’s nighttime. Because you’re circadian rhythm sucks, so you need to do that. So that’s one. The second one is I sleep, but I can’t stay asleep. 

That actually has to do with serotonin. So melatonin is your go-to sleep chemical. That’s what knocks you out. The people that can’t stay asleep, they’ll often have no problem with that first part of the night. They’ll sleep deep, great. They have nice dreams, then they kinda wake up, all of us wake up. We sleep in cycles, right? So all of us wake up after that first cycle. They have a challenge going back to sleep where some of us don’t even know we wake up, some of us get up go to the washroom, go back to sleep. These people kinda get up. And then the second half of that night is nowhere near the same quality as the first half. So what’s happening there is melatonin is your go-to sleep chemical. Serotonin is your wake-up chemical. And like I said about myself, if you’re dysregulated for serotonin, you’re much more sensitive to stimuli. So the first sort of ray of sunlight is what’s meant to trigger to your body, it’s time to produce serotonin, it’s time to wake up, meaning stimulus. So now any stimulus does this to the person that’s ultrasensitive, hubby pulls on the blanket. 

There’s a weird smell. Somebody walked down the stairs and there’s a creeping noise. If it happens in that second half of the night where your body’s waiting for the stimulus and you’re hypersensitive, it doesn’t know that that was the wrong stimulus and it starts to wake you up, and then you’re struggling between trying to sleep and serotonin being produced, trying to sleep and waking up and the quality is just isn’t there. So there are things you can do about it, right? There’s very simple things you can do. First of all, creating the lack of stimulus, blackout, no temperature problems, maybe a separate blanket, you gotta do the right stuff, but then there’s also supplements you take. The third one, and by the way, any one of these, we can talk an hour about just on its own, right. I’m trying to go like high level, right? The third one if I sleep through the night, but I feel like not so rested when I wake up, typically has to do with environmental and chemical response or metabolic response. So sleep is when your glutathione and all these processes are firing like that detox stuff happens in your sleep, right? It’s happening all day. 

But the bulk of it happens in your sleep. So if you are again, North American lifestyle, I sleep on a memory foam mattress because it’s nice and it forms my body and the contours are nice. Well, it’s also made of toxic chemicals and every time you roll over, you’re popping little bubbles and off-gassing chemicals, right? Or I have a nice pillow that contours my neck and guess what? It’s made of a foam that’s really toxic. Or my cleaner just showed up today and sprayed my whole room down and now I’m breathing this stuff, but the time where your body’s supposed to be resting and recovering, you’re adding an additional load of toxins and it’s struggling so much, you haven’t recovered. So what you were supposed to do from your exposure the day before, you’ve added another 20, 30% load, which you’re not capable of handling. 

And all of a sudden, you’re struggling to get that quality sleep or you needed more because of that load, right? Metabolic is another problem. Some people their metabolic rate just isn’t the same or the way they deal with carbs or fats or vegan foods, the things we’re talking about. And if you’re eating late into the night, what so many of us do, and you’re not allowing your body to sort of reset metabolically, that’s another thing we’ll give you poor quality sleep. And we know genetically who those people are that can sleep till midnight, oh sorry, eat till midnight, and have no problem sleeping, and some people eat till 9:00 p.m. and they struggle, right? So again, knowing where your risks are and then what to do about it, those sort of epigenetic factors. So these are sort of the three big buckets that we see.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And for that bucket, that is the most common one just to save me from email questions. So I got somebody who says they’re in that second bucket and if they hear something or wake up and they’ve got this serotonin issue and they can’t fall back to sleep. What have you found helpful for that group in terms of interventions other than blackout the room and doing all those obvious things?

Kashif Khan

So I would say the number one thing going back to the blackout things, I just point out one thing. Temperature is probably the most important that people struggle with that they don’t realize. So something as simple a mattress cooler at which there’s plenty of companies that do that now, ChiliSleep is a great one. You’re probably familiar with them. That is awesome thing that will get you in a deep high quality sleep and prevent you from waking up, ’cause it’s probably the number one reason other than light, which you can deal with, get a mask or whatever ever. It’s the number one reason why people struggle staying asleep, it’s temperature, right? You need that perfectly. You need your heavy blanket for that sensorial weight because your serotonin is screwed up, but you don’t also don’t wanna overheat. So you need the cool from underneath. It would completely change your sleep, but going to supplements. 

So the gene for serotonin is called 5-HTTLPR. There’s supplements, which you’re familiar with called 5-HTP, right, which is a serotonin regulator. So if you take that at the right time, depending on how screwed up you are, if you’re like me, you probably need more in a little later, right, that’s something that helps you sort of balance your serotonin levels, right? We actually make a product. So the funny thing is in the middle of our office, we built the compounding pharmacy to experiment with all these various nutraceutical products to see how we can manage gene expression. So it’s not, “I can’t fall asleep, give me some melatonin.” Your standard supplement. There’s a very specific reason. Like we just detailed that I can’t fall asleep. 

So how do we deal with that at the genetic level? So we actually built the product that we call Sleep Optimizer, that the ingredients in it aren’t about knocking you out, they’re about getting you into a deep, high-quality sleep. Where when you’re there, you’re beyond the point where you notice the stimuli, right? You’re so deep asleep that the stimuli doesn’t, and I use it regularly and I find like I’m having these dreams like I’m watching a movie at night, it’s like IMAX theater. It’s pretty crazy. I don’t take it every day, but I do take it once in a while. So there’s things you can do and there’s other products like that quality that makes an awesome sleep product, there’s a lot of people out there. You wanna take something that’s not about knocking you out, it’s usually something you’re taking around dinner time that prepares your brain to get into deep sleep as opposed to putting you to sleep, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That’s a home run, that’s a home run. A couple things on the peptide Frat that are sort of interesting. The pineal gland is sort of the source of a lot of our circadian rhythms. And so then there’s a peptide called Pinealon from the pineal gland. There’s another one called Epitalon and there are even oral versions of these. These are small peptides, but these are called bioregulator peptides.

Kashif Khan

Right?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And people can take these, we’re liking to sort of microdose these at like a milligram a day. And so then like five days a week. And so then that’s a microdose of those. And often, we’ll take it with Vesugen which is the bioregulator for blood vessels, and then Cartigen which is the blood vessels for the cortex. And then we’ll find people will sleep well with that. Some people that we need to rebuild their circadian architecture, then at a higher level, traditionally there had been a higher dose of Epitalon where people would take 10 milligrams a day for 10 days and do that twice a year. And then I will have some people who can’t sleep, nothing’s work, supplements never have worked, and I’ll have them do that as a 10-day cycle, and then I’ll cycle them down to one milligram a day and then we’ll combine then nutraceuticals and supplements and sort of a sleep hygiene algorithm and try to put together a comprehensive story that’s gonna help them as they sort of design their life from a sleep perspective.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, that’s really cool. ‘Cause, you’re coming in with this kind of acute response and solving their problem, but you get it to this maintenance phase where it’s kind of like aligned with whoever they are and they need that little bit of support, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, yeah, that’s really cool.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, super interesting. Final question for you. Just I think anytime I ask and have a conversation about genetics, I just need to say, and I should have maybe said this at the beginning, but now I’ll say, what is methylation?

Kashif Khan

So, yeah, it’s honestly when you talk about genetics from the functional medicine perspective, everyone talks about MTHFR, right? That one gene, that’s sort of starring character in this methylation process. It’s phase two detox. It’s another layer of detox. There’s certain toxins that are either not, or are water-soluble and they need a methyl group attached to them. So methylation is literally the process of sending a methyl group. So there’s genes that do that to attach to this thing to allow you to be able to clear it. And its primary outcome is reducing inflammation, right? So if you think of outcome base, it’s called an anti-inflammatory response. What is it actually doing? Sending a methyl group to attach to something to get rid of it because your body can’t get rid of it on its own. So it’s a key metric for inflammation. The sort of nuanced problem that we don’t look at it properly is this MTHFR gene, which I’m sure a lot of listeners who are in the third year. 

I have the MTHFR gene. It’s one of six or seven things going on in that methylation process, right. It’s the most studied of the genes in terms of what exactly it does. And it has that snip or that spelling mistake that we’re all looking for. And that’s why you see it as this siloed individual thing in reports. But if you don’t understand, again, the whole pathway, the whole storyboard of step A to Z, what does methylation actually look like? I can tell you’re the best MTHFR, but you still have crazy inflammation. I could tell you’re the worst MTHFR, and you’re an information superstar because everything else is either good or bad, right. So you need to understand the full storyboard and pathway and that’s where a lot of tests get it wrong. Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Well, at BioReset, we’re exclusively using your algorithm. And I think I wanted to interview you because I think as we build, as we take a look at all the silos that we have been in, I think the genetics piece is probably one of the most important silos. And then being able to correlate that with everything mentally, emotionally, spiritually, biochemically, physiologically, and help to tell a story about your health. I found it to be extremely helpful for people. It empowers them to make the changes that we need to make to take our health to the highest possible level. And I think that it’s doable and achievable and easier than I thought. And so I’m grateful that you are our warrior and had the tenacity to be able to figure it out and pull it all off and you did it. So congratulations.

Kashif Khan

Oh, thank you. And that was keyword you use is we wanted to make it easy. That was missing from genetics. And you get a stack of paper, a bunch of gibberish, and nobody can even understand, even your doctors doesn’t know what it means. So our whole goal was make it easy and that’s where we feel like we have something to offer. So thank you for sort of appreciating what we do.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, and then I’m gonna have you come on our podcast and then we’re gonna start to pick apart one by one, a handful of these topics like anxiety and sleep and hypertension and diabetes and break the… We’ll do a lot of series where we break down some of these common things and try and begin to unpack them and see what are some of the pieces at a genetic level that are influencing those important things that impact society and health so much.

Kashif Khan

Sure, look forward to. Sounds good.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, hey, I’m delighted to know you and talk to you. Thank you so much.

Kashif Khan

Thank you, it was a pleasure.