How Functional Genomic Testing Can Guide Your Healing Strategy

Jason Prall

I’m so excited to introduce our next guest, Kashif Khan is chief executive officer and founder of The DNA Company where personalized medicine is being pioneered through unique insights into the human genome. He’s also the host of unfilled podcast growing up in Vancouver Canada is an immigrant household. Kashif developed an industrious entrepreneurial spirit from a young age prior to his tenure at The DNA Company advised a number of high growth startups and a variety of industries as cash If drove dove into the field of functional genomic as the CEO of The DNA Company it was revealed that his neural wiring was actually genetically designed to be entrepreneurial. However, his genes also revealed a particular sensitivity to pollutants. Now, seeing his health from a new lens. Kashif dove further and started to see the genetic pathways that lead him to his own family’s challenges and the opportunities to reverse chronic disease. His measure of success is not in dollars earned, but in lives improved cash if welcome.

Kashif Khan

Thank you. It’s a pleasure. I’m really excited about this talk because this is something that we love to talk about. 

Jason Prall

Well and this is so fascinating, right? I think we’ve seen a very interesting perspective shift when it comes to genes and health. Right? At first, everybody got super excited when we sort of mapped the human genome. We thought all diseases solved, we figured it out and then we figured out, oh man like we got way ahead of ourselves and and then what was interesting in sort of functional medicine. Integrative medicine naturopathic medicine. We, I think there was a tendency to throw the genes aside and say like, screw that you are not your genes. You know, it’s all about lifestyle, you know, and and so I think now we’re kind of coming back to the genes a little bit and going maybe there’s more to the story and so maybe just kind of giving your thoughts on that and kind of how the perspectives are now, kind of all over the place, in a sense. And I and where we’re at with the whole genetic story. 

Kashif Khan

You just laid out all the drama from the genetic industry in the last 20 years in like 20 seconds. So that’s exactly what happened is that there was this promise. If we decode our human instruction manual, that’s truly what it is. It’s instructions telling yourselves what to do different cells, know what pages and the instruction manual read to do their jobs. The thinking was well, if we can decode this, we know everything, we’re going to fix everything. The challenge and why. The thing that you said happened happened is because the research was not aligned to what we could truly derive it was aligned to sort of the conventional doctors’ toolkit of how do I diagnose and treat a symptom, Right? Right. So that’s how they knew how to do research, evidence, evidence based, double blind, you know, try and figure out if this guy has this guy and have it. 

Okay. We figured something out the challenges most of what we deal with in health, chronic disease, aging, for performance, energy levels. All this stuff is not a single gene factoid pointing to a problem that’s really powerful when it comes to genetic conditions, something like sickle cell syndrome, you have it, there’s a gene switch turn on or off and there’s no doubt that you have this problem and somehow we have to treat it and manage it. The majority of health care is not that the majority of healthcare is I have a suboptimal genetic profile. There’s some job my body doesn’t do well, but I’m not sick, but my propensity to get sick is much higher because I’m not doing this job. Well, what does that mean? What are now my environment, nutrition and lifestyle choices that load on that bad profile. So that’s we went kind of full circle, just like you said, I fully agree that if you go down the genetics route of, here’s the big data dump, here’s a bunch of snips, here’s a bunch of gene variants. Most of it is not actionable. 

Jason Prall

Right? And this is what’s interesting too, because, you know, I got, again, I got excited right? Like I did my 23 and me that was the 1st 1st player on the market in this game. I got all my snips which are single nucleotide polymorphisms. And I’ll have you explain kind of what that is and its limitations here shortly but I got all those and then I’m like okay like the heck do I do? And then I’m in the functional game like so I kind of understand a little bit about how to work those things and but but even then I had to go work and study and learn from some of the experts who have been doing this in the real world because there was so much nuance to it. And I’m not saying the SNP is this are worthless but there’s such a limitation to them. And then even if you do understand what they’re capable of, how to read those, there’s so much variance and how to work with that. And so with that that’s where I kind of left the whole game on the genetic thing. 

But then what’s interesting is that I got into more ayurvedic philosophy and understanding and and this is such a fundamental thing in Ayurveda which is you have a constitution now they use different language in different terms, you know, pick the cafa vata and on and we can go deeper and deeper into that. And what I find interesting is that in their framework of Ayurveda same thing in Chinese medicine, we can just call it the genes so you have a genetic sort of way that you are built, so to speak and propensity for entrepreneurialism, I have that same thing like I have a more propensity to take risk and to engage with these type of things. So there’s just there’s uniqueness to us, right? This is what’s cool. And I think now with The DNA Company you know what you guys are doing and some others, it’s like now we’re finding the western way to understand who we are at that sort of essence level and then how to work with that because that’s that’s really a key factor in not saying what are our limitations. But if I live an incorrect lifestyle for me then what’s going to happen. Right? And how do I avoid those things? Right. That’s the cool part.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, that’s so you laid it out. It’s like if you come at a problem disease centric, then that’s all you’re looking for. If you’re if you believe that genes are a tool to point to a disease and that’s all you’re looking for, that’s all you’re gonna find what it really is. It’s so much more. It’s every cellular process. 50 trillion cells in your body constantly doing all these jobs. Every single job is instructed by this this code. Right? So it’s so much more than just what diseases that are going to have. It’s what jobs might not do that then lead to diseases. So to your point a snip A gene is thousands of letters long. There’s 22,000 genes in your human genome. Most of them. We don’t really act on a lot of them we don’t really understand. There’s really only 100 that are functional in nature. If you think about medicine versus functional medicine, medicine is when you break something call me and I’ll fix it functional. Medicine is like let’s make sure you never break anything. Like we’ll get the why and figure out why you would get sick and prevent it or reverse it. Same thing with genetics. 

So it’s kind of like let’s look for the snip and point to a problem or we can understand that in these thousands of genes there’s more than just snips. What is a snip? It’s literally a spelling mistake. So a T. Instead of being a T. It’s a C that gene now has a little bit of a broken instruction and does its job in a different way better or poorer. Right. There’s also something called an insertion or deletion which most genetic testing companies don’t look for which are much more impactful if imagine if the spelling mistake is so important that 23 minutes telling you about it. What if there was a whole paragraph missing completely or there was an extra paragraph in that gene and now you’re trying to read this page with this missing paragraph. How comprehensible isn’t. Right then there’s something called a copy number variation which very few companies test for because it’s a whole other test you have to run and it’s not that big data dump that pharma companies are looking for. It’s much more nuanced which is do you even have the gene? Forget about a spelling mistake? Forget about a paragraph missing. You might not even have it in some of the key areas where this happens is in the brain there’s certain you know chemicals that that need to be cleared.

Not cleared and your clearance processes can be deleted in your gluteus ionization process. So how well do you detoxify some of us particularly in the gut? Think about it, ancestral e food wasn’t a threat until quite recently. So according to our data, 49% of people don’t even have this gene the G. S. T. M. 1. Protective of the gut blocking toxins. Which is why there’s so much but dysbiosis and gut problems which directly leads to mood problems right? It’s also gluekhurananation, your ability to clear hormones and your ability to deal with mold and airborne toxins. So some really impactful areas. Most of us, well not most of us, a lot of us are walking around without this genetic code. Right? So that’s one. What do you test for the second and out of three things we should say that sort of the new frontier of how we can apply genetics is interpreting in the context of pathways and systems as opposed to a list of snips. Here’s a bunch of jeans you got 80% chance of breast cancer, 60% chance of Alzheimer’s a 50% chance of and you keep going down the list. None of it is certain. 

None of it is actually you’re taking the most personalized thing you have and depersonalizing it versus here’s how the endocrine or hormone system works. Here’s how the neurochemicals in the brain work. Here’s how the cardiovascular system work. Let’s take those genes and apply them to these maps and think of things functionally. It’s not a bunch of steps, It’s a baton pass. There’s things that work together in a chain. And if you know what the weak link is now, you know exactly where to intervene. So the whole chain works right. The third thing is, even then, even though you’ve got into this level of precision for an individual, you still don’t know if they’re getting sick or if they’re aging rapidly or the performance is off, they still may represent presenting well because of environment nutrition and lifestyle. What this allows you to do. True genetics isn’t. I see a gene you have an 80% chance of Alzheimer’s, that’s not what our genes are for, what our genes are for you fit in this bucket, here’s what your environment nutrition and lifestyle choices should be. That’s how you really apply genetics. And by the way, if you do these choices instead, here’s a list of problems you’re gonna have. 

Jason Prall

And this is really key because and I want to give a little bit of a framework around why I think D. N. A. testing where it’s at now why it can be so useful particularly in our modern context. So with with a lot of work that I’ve done I’ve done with the human longevity project, went to the blue zones, talked with these people that are in their nineties and beyond 100 what I what I discovered in that quest was that when we were in the mountains of Sardinia and I was talking to a 98 year old gentleman or a female that was over 100 and two. What I noticed was that this was a subset of the human population that basically was confined to these mountainous regions for hundreds if not thousands of years. In other words, the way genes work from my perspective is that they do adapt over generations, right? And but they adapt to the environment right? We are open energetic system. So everything that we are contacting whether it’s the food, the sun, the temperatures, the everything that we’re the microbes there influencing our genes and over generations are our genes will essentially adapt to the environment that we’re in. So for them generation after generation after generation after generation in the same environments, eating the same foods, doing the same things, thinking the same things, believing the same things. 

Their genetics essentially get specialized right and and and they can get preserved. And that actually that’s actually what we saw from archaeologists in Sardinia was that some of the most ancient preserved genome was in that region because it’s an island and it was protected and they fend off the the romans and everybody that was invading. So it was very unique in that regard. What’s unique about where we’re at now. I have German heritage and Irish heritage and I’m a European mutt and I live in San Diego, California. So I’ve got genes from all over the globe right? And now they’ve landed in San Diego which is not native to my ancestry. And I’m eating foods from all over the planet, right? And I’m doing exercises that are. So my point is that we live in a hyper novel environment with genetics that come from everywhere that are no longer specialized. So it’s almost like we most of us are some kind of mud. And I say that lovingly we have a random mix of heritage that we that we that we have and we’re using it in an environment in a context that is totally new. So the point is that when I can start to understand my constitution from an ayurvedic perspective or my D. N. A. In genetics from a more modern perspective. Now I can start to figure out because I’m not eating the diet that my ancestors ate. I’m now using different diets and different now. I can start to tailor my lifestyle, my diet, my exercise to my genetics which is fairly randomized at this point. So I hope that I hope that made sense for people. 

Kashif Khan

Exactly, yeah.

Jason Prall

But this is cool now because now we can get precise with what we’re working with and our unique environments and how to uh, to do so in a way that provides health long term.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. It’s as if every the people you’re talking about in Sardinia, every choice they’re making is perfectly aligned to their genomic legacy. Just habitually everybody’s doing the same thing and they’re all wired the same way. So we now, like you said, we’re scattered. It’s a shotgun of everyone went everywhere and we don’t know what those choices are and even the things that we think are good sometimes are completely counterintuitive, right? So if we go, I mean back to the topic at hand, talking about the brain, I can use myself as an example and how I ended up where I am. So I remember I, I have on my WhatsApp profile, I have a picture of a guy wearing a turban smoking a shisha pipe. Random picture that I found online. And I thought it was hilarious. So that’s my picture. So one day I was in a museum and I found that picture on the wall. That actual picture of the yeah, so my mother always tells me change that thing. It’s stupid. Right?

So I sent her. I said, look, this guy is famous and then she said send me the plaque to describe who that guy is. She said oh wait a second, that’s your great, great, great, great great great great great something grandfather. What are you? Yeah this actually happened. I said what are you talking about? She said yeah. And then she put my aunt on the phone, they told me the story. So apparently somebody way back in my ancestry was the king of Kabul of city capital Afghanistan didn’t know until that day. This was like four years ago. So anyways moving forward, if you look at my genomic legacy and you look at the way my mom behaves and my aunt who was on the phone and some of my uncles my ability to deal with dopamine. Dopamine is that chemical that powers pleasure. But it also powers reward, essentially satisfaction. You get satisfied by experiencing dopamine, the DRD2 gene that determines how dense your receptors are. Mine is way down here. Slim to right So my ability, the intensity at which I experience pleasure and reward is very very low. Then there’s the M. A. O. Gene which sort of breaks the dopamine down. I have the fastest possible emu then there’s comped which is a hormone clearing protein. It also has a tail end of methylation. It also clears neurochemicals. I had the fastest possible comped I feel things way down here and it’s gone like that. What are my potential outcomes? And this is why we’re saying it’s not your genes don’t prescribe the problem. They give you your avatar who’s here? You are, right?

Jason Prall

Context, right. 

Kashif Khan

Now The way I perceive the world, if I just go about my day the way everybody else is I’ll probably be depressed because I just don’t feel. Or I could find something that gives me pleasure and I’ll become addicted or I could find something that gives me reward and I’ll become entrepreneurial and I’ll achieve because I’ll keep taking risks. Whatever I did yesterday is not good enough for me anymore. Now layer on top of that another neurochemical, your serotonin, my serotonin is somewhat dis regulated which means so serotonin is meant to be your sort of mood balance or you know people talk about in terms of depression, addiction, certain things. What it’s really doing is determining how you prioritize stimulus. It’s reacting, your brain is reacting to stimulus. That’s reptile response right? So when you’re dis regulated in your receptors a little bit shorter like mine is your brain has a harder time prioritizing stimulus which to some people looks like you’re distractible. Your A. D. H. D. But in work it’s like I see every little detail and nuance and I catch everything. 

So the combination of my dopamine pathway I don’t feel and I strive for a reward because that’s the path I chose and I’m doing it at this high level of detail creates a somewhat of a high functioning anxiety warrior type mentality, right? And you wonder why I’m wired like this when you think about my lineage and even my grand, my mother’s father, my grandfather was a military man, and apparently they all were, I didn’t know this until recently, right? So, um, so I’m designed for this. I’m designed to be a warrior because this is who survived in my family, right? And but I’m doing it in a very different context. I’m now sitting in Toronto in the basement of a house doing a video with you online, right? And I’m living off of that, that high functioning anxiety being plowing, you know, my work forward, that’s what I’m doing with it. So if I was in the wrong context, if I was sitting in a job somewhere that I didn’t enjoy, that didn’t give me a sense of reward, I would probably lean on pleasure and become addicted or I would fall into depression, right. If I grew up wealthy and had everything handed to me, I maybe would have been depressed also because there’s no both sides don’t work for me, right? Pleasure or reward. So this context wrapped around your innate neural wiring is kind of the same as the environment, nutrition on all your health stuff when it comes to your mood, your mental map and your behavior context, the big one, and we can go on, there’s a lot of pathways you can talk about, but this is a big one for me.

Jason Prall

Well, I see a lot of myself and you know what you just described, right? And what’s interesting about that is that, look, I’m gonna say this, you don’t need to know your genetics, it’s not a necessity. However, it can be really, really helpful, especially if you’re someone that goes, gosh, like I feel depressed all the time. What’s wrong with me? Right? And this is I think something we probably all deal with on some level, right? We think there’s something wrong with us or we have a problem with, there’s something that we’re trying to fix, or something we’re trying to resolve within ourselves. And I think that can help us push us toward a solution. In other words, maybe it’s pushing us towards meditation or breathwork or a certain exercise or something to help get balance in these arenas. But wow, when you find out that, oh, these are my genetics and it explains how I feel and who I am to allow degree, then it kind of takes this weight off of you and go, oh, there’s actually nothing wrong with me. 

This is how I’m wired. How do I work with this in a context that not only suits my genetics, but suits my internal desires and fuels my natural gifts and capacity, right? Like because you pointed to the warrior, that is a really important context, a really important skill, particularly in the past, But now of course, even today applied in a certain way. So I’m pointing to this idea that what seemed to be shortcomings or, or problems or issues in one way there’s a flip side to that coin, which is that there’s a gift and if we can start to recognize what those gifts are and figure out how to apply our genetics in the context of our lives all of a sudden, somebody who’s caught in a 9 to 5 job, maybe that helps them understand, oh, actually might thrive in a more entrepreneurial environment, right? And that’s what I found the hard way I got really, really frustrated in the 9 to 5 job. I didn’t understand why, you know, and we can explain it as sort of a sole mission. And there’s all that context too. And that’s great. And if my genetics are helping me to understand the new path, then it just helps shortcut the process and get me going in a, in a way and, and living a life that is more aligned to who I am?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, you’re so we’ve met with thousands of people. So part partly the reason why we understand. So again, I just described a pathway. It wasn’t a gene, right? When it comes to depression. People talked about serotonin usually, but you can see that wasn’t even part of the, that was a later thing. Right? So first the pathway. So why do we understand this in our research? What we realized the gap was and why genetics kind of sucked Is because genesis never sat in a clinic and dealt with anybody, but we spent three years studying 7000 patients before we put products out there to understand how these people behave, how they act. And of these thousands of people, exactly what you said is the majority of the case. Yes. 

There are some people that have a chemical imbalance, they were born with a genetic condition and there’s a mood disorder. The majority majority majority is not that the majority is I’m addicted, I’m a depressed, I have anxiety, I procrastinate, I burn out why because you’re in the wrong context, that same thing that feels like kryptonite is actually your superpower. It’s so true. And we see it over and over and over and we’ve seen it in people that haven’t spoken to their families and years that sleep all day and awake all night, that don’t eat that all of a sudden there high functioning leaders of the family because they finally understood why they didn’t fit, why they felt bad why? And they’re designed for something great. They’re just not doing it. 

Jason Prall

In so many ways. We’re fish trying to climb a tree right? And we go, what’s wrong with me? Like why can’t I figure this out and we try and we try to learn how to climb the tree and we try to figure out why we have a struggle, breathing and and all these things and then somebody finally puts us in water and go oh this is so much easier, this is beautiful and I’m super skilled at this, right? And so um I love this and and and again this is a new way to apply the genetics even beyond the health context. Look, I think there’s a lot to the physical health aspect to understanding genetics and even beyond that if you can help push somebody into the right environment in which they can thrive, this is where health starts to just resolve itself in a huge way, right? 

Like, I mean you’re pointing to something beyond just the basic health kind of, how do we work with genetics, right? So I think that’s a huge aspect. I want to get into a little bit more of the actual health, chronic disease component, because again, one of the things that I one of the reasons I ran away from the snips and the 20 three’s and knees and all that, even though it’s really cool at the beginning was that I couldn’t find an applicable way to work with my clients or myself, that was, to be honest, super useful, right? Like it wasn’t helping me figure out to help them execute a diet because like let’s say there’s still context, like if they have functional issues, but the snips say one thing I couldn’t really go anywhere with it. So how does The DNA Company, how does what you guys are doing? Cause I know you guys go so far beyond the snip so I can talk to me about that. What do you guys providing beyond? Just here’s your snips that actually used in a modern context.

Kashif Khan

Part of this that what you have described, that experience was horrible. It wasn’t just anybody can test. In fact anybody listening and go buy a genetic sequencing machine, put it in their basement and start testing. Testing isn’t the problem. It even comes with the reports built in. You don’t need to worry about the challenges, the interpretation. What does it mean? How do I apply this stuff And the way that things are output id are not aligned to the way they should be interpreted.

Jason Prall

And real quick I want I want to hit on something because what I had to do was I ran those tests, I got my snips and then I had to go buy a separate thing put together by a different company and different experts. And there was like three or four at the time. This is again maybe 78 years ago. And I’d run them through this whole other program and then that would spit out some recommendations right? And of course there was two or three different ones that were put to by experts and they were great and I love them for what they were attempting to do. But even that I got limited use out of their recommendations because it just wasn’t enough.

Kashif Khan

Yeah it wasn’t there, they’re limiting it to genetic problems, direct genetic thing. You need to be able to apply and interpret the bridge that gap between clinical chronic issues and what the genes are saying right? So as an example um you know if we focus again on the brain uh literally just this morning I was speaking to somebody who’s sort of a V. I. P. Client of ours that called me once in a while. and there was this conflict in their team where a senior leadership person just wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do. But this person was so valuable and had all the right credentials etcetera that if they were actually to do what they were supposed to do it would be incredible for the company. So the C. E. O. is asking me what’s wrong, what’s going on? So I literally with the permission of the person said do you mind if I scanned your like we already have their reports done for the team. Right? 

So what I saw was that their brain derived neurotrophic factor. This one yeah this one gene that drives one process which is your neural plasticity. The ability to develop new neural pathways was completely off. Right? What does that mean? Now they’re mature. This person was in their late fifties so they’re well set in their ways. So as you age, if you’re BDNF is suboptimal, it’s not doing well, then you don’t do a good job of developing new neural pathways, these synapses where the information sort of flows and you know, the superhighways of transferring information. Right? What that means is you become a subject matter expert that has difficulty learning new skills. Once you start and actually accept and start doing that new skill, you become a master of that also. Right? So you become a master of a few things and not a jack of all trades. And so this person who now is well into their fifties was a subject matter expert in what they do. Now put it into a different context in a company that does different things with what that person does and they don’t work that way. Right? It’s kind of like, I’m the author, I will speak, I will write, but don’t ever make me do the accounting, don’t ever make me do the legal, I don’t want to ever see a lawyer’s letter versus the entrepreneurs, like throw it all at me. 

Jason Prall

I was gonna say you’re naming me, but on the opposite, like, I’m a jack of all trades, but none and like, I don’t consider myself an expert in any one thing, but it’s rather enough of an understanding of all the things to to put them all together and and give you context for for all the things, Right? So it’s really interesting because even for me, I did there was a little bit of an issue I had with that was like what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I become the expert? Why am I like, you know, the jack of all trades? And so it’s really interesting that you actually looked. 

Kashif Khan

At that we looked at and that’s one component now. Why did they call us? Because this team was at the point where this person was slamming doors, yelling and walking out of meetings. Right? So we showed them the same exact gene profile also was leading to that. What’s going on is when your BDNF is off things mean a lot more. So you and me are in a meeting, we hear a problem the way we perceive it could potentially be different. And our reality now changes the way this person was perceiving. It was everything is drama, everything is a major major problem. They give thing and same thing for positive when they experience a funny joke or Youtube video, it was a little bit too funny for them. Right? So they give things a lot of meaning. So what this is what we call shell shock and we’ve done this work with the U. S. Military with like Black Ops special forces where who should actually be deployed on the front lines or not, who’s going to come back with problems, right? So this particular person was truly experiencing shell shocked that every time they had a problem, slam the door. 

Yeah I’m not doing this again. Never working with that person again. And that hamster wheel would spin and they enumerated on this thing for hours now and they can’t sleep at night. It also affects our circadian rhythm the same. So it’s not only uh looking at multiple genes that come up with a pathway, it’s also looking at multiple meetings of a single gene. Because not most genes don’t do just one thing. Right? So it was also dysregulating the security and rhythm. He couldn’t fall asleep on at on time at night it wasn’t sleeping properly. Wasn’t recovering his mood was off. So this was one area, the second area of the gentleman who looked at Andrew to be is a gene that determines how well or not. So well you deal with negative stimulus, your adrenaline response to adrenaline. And this gentleman was deleted. So remember I talked about an insertion or deletion like a paragraph is missing. 

He was missing that paragraph. Both puppies which meant that not only did he give things a lot of meaning from because of his BDNF but he also experienced the emotion and use that as a primary filter. So for him P. T. S. D. The shell shock which is a means a lot and I can’t stop thinking. There’s also PTSD which I feel the feeling when there’s a car accident when there is that argument. Whatever I hold that grudge and the next time I see that person again, I go down that street again. I get the feeling as if it just happened. That’s PTSD. He was also experiencing that right now. He’s coming into this boardroom where the company that he just left had screwed him. You have not paid him properly ripped off his work, not treated him well going into another boardroom, bringing back that feeling of you. People are gonna rip me off you. People are bad, right? I’m experiencing PTSD trauma and on top of that I’m giving it a lot of meaning and I’m gonna walk out of here. As soon as I hear something that’s not 100% aligned with what I want. And on top of that you’re asking me to learn and do new things which I’m not good at. That feels like a threat.

Jason Prall

Yes. Super threat. I mean that’s if if you don’t learn, if you’re not adaptable in that way, but rather it takes you a little while to learn something. You learn it really well. That’s super scary to be asked to do this new thing, solve a new problem that you’re not familiar with.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. So now imagine what do you do with this? This looks like a bunch of clinical problems, right? This looks like a bunch of pills that are needed, right? Right? He doesn’t listen, he doesn’t get it, he yells, he screams he’s got anger management issues. He needs counseling right? Meanwhile if you just shift the context and understand how he’s perceiving what’s going on. Everything is golden, everything is perfect and this person is going to be flourishing and it’s a context shift. And that starts with understanding how they perceive the world. Obviously once you do this over and over you can start to understand the cues and you may not even need genetic testing at that point. Which is kind of what we see. Right? So that’s applying it in sort of mood and behavior. But you asked about clinical. So there’s areas where we look at things for you know as an example take um something like migraines right? We’ve been dealing with that. A lot of people keep calling saying I don’t know why I have these problems. So there’s a young lady we just dealt with who uh lawyer in California who twice a month is not showing up at work because she gets these crazy intense migraines that puts her in bed. So what do we find? Okay. She grew up in L. A. One of the most polluted cities in the world. Apparently one hour of L. A. Traffic is equivalent to two packs of cigarettes. I read this recently. Yeah. 

Jason Prall

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. So what’s going on is earlier I talked about these copy number variations. Right? So she was completely missing the G. S. T. T. One gene and had the sub optimal version of the G. S. T. P. One. So what does that mean? That first line of defense at the lungs didn’t do a very good job minus 70% capacity to filter environmental toxins and threats entering her bloodstream. She didn’t block them. They got in the G. S. T. T. One gene. We all know that when we drink alcohol goes to your liver to get rid of it. How does that happen? Luton biotoxins find all the garbage and nonsense. Send it to deliver to do its job. 

Jason Prall

And real quick if somebody has mold right like that that gene becomes pretty important. Right? So again actual sure mold is bad. Yes and it may affect this person a heck of a lot more than that person.

Kashif Khan

Yeah I can tell you how many families we’ve dealt with, where there was denial because only one person was sick because they had that suboptimal pathway and other people didn’t. Right so now this young lady just went into law into law firms you just started working? Was blaming it on stress. Right? I have too much stress. I need stress counseling. I keep getting migraines. I have stress which makes sense.

Jason Prall

It’s a trigger for sure. Right.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. So what was actually so that that’s exactly it the stress the stress was that inflammatory trigger the catalyst that pushed her over the edge but she was teetering right right here. It’s only because she’s young that it wasn’t already constant and chronic, right? She’s young enough where her body was already, not just there but not enough. And the stress was the trigger that pushed her over the edge.

Jason Prall

We’re talking this is this important what we’re talking about right here because this is the interaction between the genes and susceptibility, a certain, let’s say, dysfunction that’s maybe taken hold in the body which is another component and the third component that would be the trigger. So now we have this and then and then the age. Right? So how much capacity and vitality is in the system. Right? So I’ve worked with a lot of young people in the vitality is so strong that we can overcome all three of these components. Somebody who’s a little older, it’s a little more difficult. So it’s really to identify the difference between the trigger that’s triggering the symptoms versus the dysfunction that’s held in the body, right? Or the or the sort of stress load we can call it. And then there’s the third component which is the genes. And I think it’s really important what you’re hitting on here, which is we can’t blame just one of those things. It’s not the genes’ fault. It’s not just the dysfunctions fault and it’s not just the trigger fault. We actually have to figure out the context for all three of those. Yes, remove the trigger totally. And let’s hopefully clear up the dysfunction, build a little more coherence and harmony in the body and understand the genes. So we know how to navigate the context of our environment so that we don’t run into those issues going forward. 

Kashif Khan

Yeah. So you just described functional genomics to A. T. You know, I need to get that clip and put it on our website as our next because that’s exactly what it is. And so now you look at this young lady, what changed in her life? Why now? Why now is because now she started working where she was driving in that L. A. Pollution every day which she never did before. She used to walk to school in our neighborhood, right? She lived on campus somewhere else. She went to Stanford and I think that’s in san Francisco and Canadians, I’m not quite sure. So anyways she uh and she was now going to an office every day breathing in chemicals that were used to clean the desk air through the vents where she wasn’t used to you know going to lunches in the city, all this pollution and stuff. So her environmental context changed. So that load that you know the function that she didn’t do well. She was now exposed to. The thing that she wasn’t capable of handling and this is why all of sudden that inflammatory load increased and the days that she was stressed, they would push her over the edge. 

Now there’s one other thing that sort of paints one layer to this picture is that she also had serotonin dysfunction like me, right? So on those stress days, she was reading into things and seeing things at a much greater level of detail than they actually work, Right? And this is what actually made her a great lawyer and we find a lot of the lawyers, we look at have serotonin dysfunction, which is what allows them to read 20 pages and capture all these little details that you can’t capture if you spend twice the time reading it right? So her serotonin dysfunction caused her to sort of experience these problems at a higher level of detail and her perception was there. This is reality for her. She actually thinks that this was happening. The people around her don’t see it that way. And that creates frustration. Also, one interesting thing about this is we found this is a common area where weight management, you know, there’s these, I hit a plateau and I just can’t figure out, I’m doing everything right. Your serotonin dis regulation and some other mood deregulation causes you to lean on food as a coping mechanism because your body knows stress is bad, your body knows corner is always bad and if it’s chronic in nature, every time I go to work, I feel bad, eventually your body’s gonna keep fighting that resiliency, which is go eat something, go enjoy your life, go have something tasty soul food and it’s actually perceived, Israel, you feel hungry, you create your brain creates hunger to go create pleasure for dopamine to get out of the pain, wow, so little nuances like that. 

But anyways, so her problem, yes, the stress is a trigger, it wasn’t the source, it was this multifactorial functional, look at what was actually going on, it was the environment. So what do you do about it? There’s a couple of miles like you said, get rid of the problem, which was hard for her. She has to go to work, she has to drive there, right? So okay then the option, another option is you have to supplement if you don’t do this job. Well let’s give you the right ingredients to optimize and support you with that job. And that was really the only answer for she wasn’t quit the job she just got and she also was gonna stop with, you know, driving to work. So this is the path we chose for her and she’s feeling better, we’re replacing the job that her body doesn’t do and now it’s doing it and she feels better.

Jason Prall

Yeah, this is beautiful and kind of going back to my previous analogy, um you know, it’s like humans in water, right? Like we’re never gonna be able to swim like a fish or like a shark, but we can supplement with scuba gear, right? And we can get in there and we still have limitations, but it gives us more flexibility, gives us more free, right, gives us the ability to do what fish do a little bit better. Right? So, so this is kind of the contextual aspect of things that when we understand the environment, when we understand the map that we’re working with now we can selectively choose and and look I I’ve been in this in this industry long enough and the tendency for most people is just to kind of you know, fairy dust with with supplements. Try a little of that, a little bit of this, a little bit that didn’t work, add some more of these things. And while I appreciate the effort and I appreciate going the more natural route, this is the challenge with a lot of the supplement industry is like what do I take, how much do I take, when do I stop? Is it working? Right. And like it just becomes very, very difficult. And I think the more we can get precise with our environment, our context with our own personal constitution and map the more we can be used targeted supplementation in a way that’s supporting our natural way of being.

Kashif Khan

So you just reminded me of another story just important because it’s it’s exactly what you just said. So there’s a gentleman that we were working with who complained about mood issue, right? It was unexplainable ups and downs which he didn’t have previously. Just all of a sudden I would say he was probably in his late 40s. So what we found again, when we’re looking at the genes, we’re not looking for the symptom, we’re looking for system failure. That may point to why that symptom is happening. So mood is off, why is moved off. So what we found again was there again, I’m trying to find examples that lead to brain and mood. So in this case, again, it was serotonin dysfunction. So what was actually going on? And why did it happen then? So when, when it comes to your sleep, the problem was actually asleep. There’s there’s some people that can’t fall asleep properly. That’s one sleep problem. There’s some people that sleep through the night and they wake up not so rested, like I can’t understand why I don’t feel like I slept. And there’s some people that can’t stay asleep. They have no problems falling asleep. But it’s that second half it’s kind of disrupted. 

So this was his problem. He didn’t even realize this was a problem. What was going on? We know that melatonin is the hormone that sort of, we bind it and it puts us to sleep. Serotonin is what wakes you up. So what’s meant to happen is that sunlight coming through the window piercing through your eyelid triggers this sort of peachy glow and your brain knows time to start binding the serotonin that I just finished making at that time and get up that first half of sleep is more recovery, detox, lymphatic drainage of lymphatic and all that stuff. Right? Second half is more getting ready for the next day producing hormones producing chemicals all this stuff. So your serotonin is made at that time, which is one of the things that’s used to wake you up and get you ready for the day. If your serotonin is dis regulated and your brain can prioritize stimulus, then it doesn’t know if that sunlight is the thing that’s triggering your reaction right now or is it, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, which often often happens people is it hubby just pulled on the blanket and it rubbed on your skin, hubby’s cold foot just touched your leg and bothered you dogs barking two rooms down. So all that stuff happening in the second half of the night triggers your brain like, oh let’s find some serotonin, Wait a second, I’m still tired of going to sleep, you get this up and down up and down up and down until you finally actually get up, right? 

Jason Prall

And get this a lot when I had a kid and he was sleeping in our bed at the beginning and I would get all these stimuli right and constantly making. 

Kashif Khan

Constant, constant, constant. So this gentleman now was spending $400 a month on supplements because nothing was working, but he also didn’t want to give up what he was what he was on. So the answer wasn’t for him like more is not always more right? Less is more sometimes. So we got rid of everything now he’s taking two things, right? Literally two things. There’s a cocktail that we made for him that’s about maintaining that deep sleep level and then there’s a serotonin modulator, right? So that’s what he needed. And now all of a sudden his mood is better, which was the symptom problem because he’s getting the rest and he’s producing the hormones in the neurochemical. If you don’t sleep in the second half, you’re not making testosterone as a man, right? You’re not waking up with that morning, would that you’re supposed to because you just finished making all your testosterone. That’s why that happens. 

Jason Prall

And that’s the drive for the day. That urge to get going the, like there’s fundamental needs when you build those proper hormones and build those proper neurochemicals to get us going each day. It’s a really important thing.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. So this, the answer to his problem wasn’t, let’s give you a pill to make your mood better, let’s functionally find out the root cause of your problems. The root causes you’re not sleeping. So you’re not making the things you need to cope during the day and you’re not sleeping because of this. So let’s give this then you’ll sleep better. You make all this stuff you’ll feel better, mood issue is resolved, right? Why did it happen here? Because we find that um as people age, this particular problem gets worse of serotonin dysregulating sleep.

Jason Prall

This you’re pointing to because I’m in the longevity aging space and I’ve done a lot of research in both on the ground and in the scientific studies, this, there’s a natural arc to the human life, right? We behave differently when we’re infants and when we were teenagers, when we’re in our, you know, middle years and when our later years and and things naturally start to flow and operate differently. And this is just the reality. I think part of what I’m getting to here is that when things start to break down, let’s say. But let me put it this way, when we’re young, we can get away with a lot of crap, We can do a lot of wrong things and nothing. No, there’s no problem and things heal and there’s no issues. And then we start getting our middle years and it’s like we can’t make we don’t have as much room for error, right? We get our later years, same thing, right? So this is where it becomes really important to understand your genetic profile and to see where you’re sort of weak links are because those are the things that are gonna start breaking first, so to speak, right? 

But the real reason, I appreciate you putting a lot of this discussion in context of the brain. But I also want to point out the deeper point that you just brought up, which is that it’s really important to look at the genetics of your liver and your kidney for brain health because it’s all connected, right? Like it’s really important to make this point that if I’m not doing things that are conducive to good glutathione production and recycling of glutathione now, I’m going to have more systemic inflammation and mold perhaps or whatever the case that I’m trying to detoxify and keep my system clean eventually. That’s going to make its way to the gut, to the brain to everywhere and the system is connected, right? So, so again, it’s really about system coherence, not just targeting what are the genetics of my brain and mind chemicals. That’s great and it’s really important. And we’ve sent a lot of that discussion around it and I think it’s, it’s, it is important to point that out and really important figure out what’s going on in the whole body so I can optimize everything. You know, my brain is healthy, especially as I get older show things the weak links don’t don’t start breaking too soon into a point of disaster. 

Kashif Khan

And people inherently know this for everything except for themselves, right? So it’s like you got your car, you don’t only buy nice tires and that’s it, right? And this is like everything else just falls apart and why I got nice tires who cares? Right. No it’s everything has to sink and work together. And this is why you have this this massive problem of non alcoholic fatty liver syndrome today it’s not because our livers have changed right? Where the same people that the last generation before that work it’s our environmental load has changed and we’re not in the same reality anymore. You know? One interesting thing is people don’t realize when we think about our D. N. A. And we think oh I’m like my ancestors and you think about grandma and grandpa are D. N. A. Isn’t grandma and grandpa, it’s actually 200,000 years old. Right? So the people that we are today we became those people about a quarter million years ago, 250,000 years ago. So our brains developed the way they are our bodies, our ability to speak complex like all that stuff. Right? So and there hasn’t really been a change where the same people are genetically. Now if you look at what we’ve been doing in those quarter million years, the blip in time of our current reality of chemical usage, environmental toxins are food being garbage is what may be the last three generations.

Jason Prall

Yeah it’s hyper novelty like hyper, hyper novelty things that we’re experiencing, our grandparents didn’t experience. That’s wild.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. And even something like agriculture we take it for granted right? Farming a modern agriculture only started 10,000 years ago. Out of the 250,000 years for what we’re designed to be right, right? Designed to pick things out of the ground and kill things and eat them. So if you look at who we are and what we’re wired to do, the very thing that you said about the Sardinian people in the blue zone people.

Jason Prall

The things that we’ve gotten good at genetically.

Kashif Khan

Yes. This is what we’ve got, good that we’ve been training for 250 years job. Imagine training your whole life to be a snowboarder and race car, right?

Jason Prall

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

So that’s the reality that people need to understand because they look at Grandpa and they look at Grandpa and like it’s not really that much different, but it is entirely different. We’re not wired for. And this is why we have a $4 trillion $3.6 trillion dollars spent on chronic disease. None of what you’re born with, none of what your what your So you have to have, it’s all developed over time. Because unlike those Sardinians, all the things you’re doing are misaligned to what you’re wired for.

Jason Prall

And using your analogy, we our bodies, our genetics are, our whole system has the capacity to become real good race car drivers. We just need to understand how to operate a car, what we’re working with and then it’s gonna take a little bit of time. Right? So like there’s this is the key factor I think that this is what we’re seeing across the board in the health. Well that not a lot of people are talking about is this hyper novel aspect to what we’re what we’re asking our genetics to do our bodies to do. They are capable. We just have to figure out how to do it in a way that’s going to maintain our health while we’re figuring out how to drive this car really. So we’re keep talking forever because this has been a fan Plastic conversation. I do want to as we wrap up I want people to understand when they run a test through the DNA company unlike 23 million. Some of the other early players in this sort of genetic game what do they get out of it other than knowing their genetics? How do they operate if they’re not geneticists and experts in this context? What do they how do they use this to better their life?

Kashif Khan

That’s actually a very important point because I don’t come from the industry. So I personally experienced the failure of giving being given a stack of paper and trying to apply it right? Yeah. And that kind of what is driving me to or drove us to build what we built which is it had to be easy to use. That was key right? Easy to use means that it’s it’s not a bunch of data that you need to interpret. It’s a bunch of insights that you can read and understand. The interpretation has already been done. So when we provide reports we don’t report report on a bunch of information on jeans. Here’s your cardiovascular, right? Here’s the problem that fall under cardiovascular, here’s anxiety, here’s depression. You know, here are the things that you actually understand. Here’s a carb metabolism, there’s fat. Should you be on a keto diet or not? Should you be a vegan you actually produce the enzymes that drive you know, metabolism of peas and chickpeas and lentils. Most people don’t by the way, right? So simple contextualized. Here’s the problem. Let’s read about it. And then there’s recommendations right there. Right? By the way, if you also want to know about the D. N. A. Here’s why we said all this. But most people don’t care. Most people are like tell me it’s wrong and how do I fix it. That’s it. Yeah. I want to know. I’m dealing with an expert that knows what they’re talking about but I don’t need to know the iceberg. I need to know the tip. What do I do, Right? So anyway we built… 

Jason Prall

So real quick and most importantly you guys determine that information. Not based on this is a study on this gene and this is what it does and therefore eat this thing. It’s more like you worked with a lot of people and you figured out. This is how this is what’s useful.

Kashif Khan

Exactly. And that’s exactly what’s missing. We studied, we took all those genetic insights that are published and peer reviewed and then we applied them on patients.

Jason Prall

This is really important by the way. This is really important because too many people are looking at studies saying turmeric does this and therefore block. Yeah, I really like how does it actually apply to the population? That’s what, where does the rubber meet the road?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, exactly. So that’s the work we did and I’m proud of that because I personally went through this as a patient, somebody that was ill that had migraines, eczema psoriasis, which is autoimmune. I had gut issues, I had depression issues and I healed all of that. I would have been on five different pills for five different problems if I didn’t know this, right. And I would have continued believing that I actually had these five problems actually did at the time, believed that I had these five problems. They’re all gone now. So, and it was from learning from people including myself, What was I doing wrong? What was I doing wrong? I was working in a building. I had a business in the building, were downstairs, there’s a manufacturing company putting toxic pollutants into the air ways that I was breathing day after day after day with zero detox capacity, poor methylation or anti-inflammatory capacity and bad quality endothelial health. So my vasculature in my hardware was like paper thin papyrus. 

So goddamn plane very easily, right? So now that I know this, I could have been taking pills and imagine and you’ve you’ve heard this before, it’s like here’s a fish in toxic water. What do you think is gonna happen? Right? What do you do right now in healthcare, you start giving it pills for the eczema but you leave it in the toxic water or you can just take it out and put it in the environment is actually designed for it doesn’t need any of those pills. That’s the route, Right? So that is literally what was happening to me. And so through myself and 7000 other people, we did exactly what you said we studied, learn and now apply recommendations that are so simple and easy and intuitive, we just need to know where to focus for each individual.

Jason Prall

I mean that’s super helpful. I mean this is amazing because you tell people where they can find more about The DNA Company and your work.

Kashif Khan

Oh sure. Well I mean for this particular event, first of all, we honor, you know, are excited by the people that are joining here today. Like anyone that’s here. You already done half the work. You’re on the right path to learn self healing because you have to quarterback this yourself. So what we’re doing is that the test itself, um we have an additional report which is a completely separate algorithm or on longevity and has some additional genes. That’s usually an additional cost. So what we wanted to offer everybody to thank you for joining us here was uh in this audience and please keep it amongst the audience. We’re just going to give you that report for free. So anyone that takes the D. N. A. test will give you that longevity report. 

The other thing we wanted to offer is that we understand that people here for a purpose, like it’s brain health, it’s mental health. So we’re going to host a masterclass. Anyone that’s now got their test reports in hand, come ask whatever question you want. You know, we’re gonna answer from the genetic perspective, we’ll all get together as a big group and have a lot of fun. Um So yeah, so when you go to the website don’t buy retail, it’s theDNACompany.com And we’ll say forward slash sorry, RBD. Reverse brain disorder. Right? So theDNACompany.com/RBD And we will make sure that that offers there for you, you get the free long report and you’ll automatically be enrolled into the master class so that you can learn more and just keep that amongst this group. That’s our sort of thank you for joining us here.

Jason Prall

Wow, that’s amazing. And the way just to kind of further encourage people to take advantage of that offer, um I think the best way to use this information is to get that genetic information and work that in with all these other things that they’ve learned throughout the summit, right? Because it’s not just one or the other, we can use this in conjunction with some other therapeutics, other tools and that’s where all of them become more, more useful, more effective. Right? And so again, and as a fabulous offer and because she thank you so much for coming on, um you get, I’m more excited about the company than I was when I first started. So this is really cool what you guys are doing and and I think the future is so bright for functional genomics and what we can learn. So you guys are really well positioned to take advantage of all the things that we’re learning and the fact that you’re working with so many people helped you guys get a better understanding in the real world of how this stuff works. So amazing, thank you so much.

Kashif Khan

It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you.