Toxicity and Genetics

So we’re gonna talk about toxic burden and genetic expression today, on day four of our summit series. And of course, this whole thing’s brought to you by the Academy for Integrative Medicine, which is the health coach certification program that I teach. And at the end of each one of these, I offer you a $3,000 scholarship if you wanna join that group. So if you’re just popping in on day four and you haven’t listened to any of the others leading up to this, they do kind of build on each other. Just to know me, I reversed my own rheumatoid arthritis in six months when I was diagnosed in my early thirties after the birth of my fourth child. And I was pretty hard on my body, and so I always show this Boston Marathon picture because that’s who I was. Really, really drove myself in this way that, when I look back at her I go, oh man, poor little body. 

So, I wanna make sure that we’re covering the four Ps of autoimmune disease which is perfectionism, which is what causes the driving of the body, people-pleasing, which causes the lack of boundaries, the poison of past pain, which is what is our attachment disorders and toxic emotional beliefs that we create from our childhood when our brains are not yet fully developed and then we carry them into adulthood and they create the people-pleasing and the perfectionism, and then the Pitta dosha in the Ayurvedic spectrum, which means that we have a lot of fire in us. And that fire makes a very intelligent person with a very sharp tongue, but kinda hard to forgive when you’re a Pitta person. And so there’s a lot wound up in there that can cause inflammation. I go into a lot more depth in the subject matter that I’ve been teaching through the summit series in solving the autoimmune puzzle. 

This book has some worksheets in it that you can get started with in “The Quick & Easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook” which is this companion book. And then I’m working on the healing trauma through the chakra system book that will hopefully be out by the end of the year. And then if you don’t know me, I’m a family practice nurse practitioner with an integrated medicine specialty, also a psychotherapist and board certified in functional medicine and Ayurvedic medicine. And my doctorate is not an MD, it’s a PhD in sexology. And then I’m also a certified meditation, yoga teacher, conscious dying doula and a masters of divinity student, which has been my last year, really, really diving into Tibetan Buddhist ways of training the mind which is, they seem to have like the most knowledge about that. So I thought I’m gonna go find out what they have, after all these thousands of years, what they have perfected and it is amazing. And then I’m the founder of the Academy for Integrated Medicine health coach certification program. So bell hooks is an African American Buddhist who I ran into in my masters of divinity program. 

And she says, “there’s no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death, whether it’s the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction or state terrorism.” I think this is really a bird’s-eye view of autoimmune disease and that when we are engaged in some of the terrorism against each other, the violence against one another, the lack of seeing each other as also God beings then we become an autoimmune disease on this planet. And that’s a toxic burden that we all have to live with and it’s unseen. So we often, you know, it’s an environmental toxin that we don’t witness. We don’t get to see, we don’t get to really understand that it’s affecting us. 

So we’re gonna talk about environmental toxins and toxicants some of which you are completely familiar with and then others that are a little more subtle that I just pointed to just now and then how that then affects genetic expression. And we’ll talk a little bit, I call it unzipping your genes, doing a little genetics one-on-one. So the third corner piece of the puzzle when we talk about solving your autoimmune puzzle and that each of you is unique, all of us are unique. There’s no, there can be no such thing as standardized medicine because there’s no such thing as standardized people. There’s no such thing as a standardized group of people, we’re all different. And so the four corner pieces of any puzzle to be solved in when it comes to chronic illness whether it’s autoimmunity, cancer or something else, depression, anxiety, insomnia. 

We have to look at genetics as one of the corner pieces which we’ll investigate here as the fourth quarter piece. We have to look at leaky gut which we did yesterday in the webinar that I did on leaky gut. We have to look at environmental toxins which are gonna launch into just now and we have to look at trauma and emotional toxicity which we did on day two. And then on day one, I introduced the entire freedom framework. So this formula for vitality that you can think of. Your level of vitality is equal to your genetics plus your toxic burden and your body’s ability to get rid of those toxins, what we call detoxing. And your digestive health or your gut health. All of those things are in the physical structure, but then remember how I introduced you to the Panchakoshas also in your mental and energetic body you also have to do that same level of detoxification on those levels not just physical. 

So you have to detox your belief systems if they are harming you. Your resentment if somebody has hurt you and you can’t get over it. Resentment is one of the most toxic chemicals that’s manufactured on this planet and it’s manufactured by mankind not by a corporation, but by us in our own heads and then our cells have to bathe in it. So when we have resentment, we have to address that it’s affecting our vitality and our genetic expression. And our willingness to detox that is really an important factor in this whole vitality formula. It’s part of our critical mass. You’ve seen this in every one of the days that I’ve taught you because everyone always looks for a smoking gun when it comes to what caused my autoimmunity. Is it my obscene bio? Is it COVID? Is it, you know, and it’s not all of those are players. 

They’re part of the puzzle but there’s never just one thing. So we already talked about food as the toxin in the leaky gut webinar. Like you know, if you’re sensitive, you have an IgG, an IgA, an IgM or an IgE sensitivity or allergy if it’s IgE to a food and then you eat it anyway it’s like your immune system becomes the bull that’s charging after the red cap and then it’s aggressive and it would be going after everything then ’cause it’s mad and you’re the matador waving the red cake saying, I don’t want to stop drinking coffee. And I understand that but you wanna make your bull fruit mandible. So we know that we go from leaky gut to disease as I talked about in the leaky gut portion of this through all these toxins, okay? These are all toxins. Mold, Lyme, EMFs, PCPs, all of them. Okay. And then there are people as toxins too. 

So, just like I say a hypervigilant mind leads to a hypervigilant immune system a rigid mind leads to a rigid immune system. In other words, you can’t change that bull to Ferdinand if you’re too rigid. You have to get out of toxic relationships but that means you also have to stop being a toxin yourself. You have to self confront to see how you are toxic for others. That one’s hard, right? Everyone wants to point to out here but they don’t wanna see themselves. As in fact, I just had a conversation with my daughter about this yesterday that she, you know, I had helped support her through a difficult process and then she kept coming back to it again and again in the space of feeling very victimized by it. And I finally said, okay, honey, so now you’ve done this work where you’ve recognized the place that you’ve been victimized by it but you have to now start looking at the place where you were the one that was the perpetrator in another space. 

So you are perpetrator and you are a victim in this lifetime. So you’ve gotta balance it otherwise you start using space as victim as a dysfunctional way of getting power. None of you are only victims. I was sexually abused when I was 10. If I were to call myself a victim for the rest of my life and never be willing to look at the places that I have hurt other people then I’m gonna have an imbalanced sense. It’s gonna become rigid and I won’t feel safe. So you have to look at the places that you lie and we all lie. How do you lie? Like oh, I’m not gonna eat that. I’m gonna exercise every day this week. I’m not gonna eat badly. I’m going to stop doing this. And then you don’t, you’ve just lied to your body your body can’t trust you. And then you start looking outside for who are all the people I can’t trust. 

Who can’t I trust? Politics. I can’t trust them, president is a liar. You know, whatever it is that you come up with that you gotta look this direction too. If you’re upset about people that dominate you in your world, how are you a dominator? And you won’t do it the same way. I have a worksheet inside of my book solving the autoimmune puzzle that takes you through how to do this. How are you a parasite? If parasites are in your life and they really bother you then you have to think about like, how do I do that? But I do it differently but it’s still parasitic. And then how am I an addict? I often hear people say, well, I’m not really addictive. And I’ll say, okay. I actually think all of us have some addictive portions to us and might be addicted to looking good all the time. Like I just learned a new term last week called virtue signaling, like where we’re constantly showing how virtuous we are. 

And I thought, oh my gosh, I do that. I do that. I’m always wanting to manage my image as being good. Okay, stop that, right? It was really good to be able to see that ’cause I wanna be safe, I wanna be liked. So then if no one will come after me and then I don’t feel upset, right? That’s a form of an addiction. It’s also a form of dominating if you’re trying to control your image all the time that you’re nice, right? And so each time you get a new layer of this it’ll be subtler and subtler and subtler. And there are places where I’ve been able to let my bitchy, murdery, lying, conniving parts of my ego. I’ve been able to let them come out so I can see them and love them and say, oh, okay, I see where you came from. I see what you’ve done up to now to help keep me safe. 

And I’m gonna give you a retirement package now, but you’ll find like as long as you are able to do that, and this is in my healing trauma through the chakra system program there’s a do it yourself program that you can do that’s on my website and I take you through how to do this. But the more you do this the more willing you are to really roll up your sleeves and get to work at this, the subtler and subtler it comes up like, oh, there’s another subtle layer of that that I hadn’t noticed before. And it actually becomes very liberating to let that energy go that you’re using to make sure that you don’t see yourself as a liar or a dominator or a parasite or an addict that you’re wanting to see everybody else that way. So it actually frees up energy to start witnessing yourself. And then you’re not as triggered against other people that are using those strategies but you can have good boundaries with them. So it’s really confronting self as a toxin as well as other people. 

All right, then there’re infections as toxicities, right? Epstein-Barr, hepatitis, E. coli Cytomegaly, Campylobacter, Coxsackie, MMR sexually transmitted illnesses, COVID, herpes. I do a test in my practice called the Neural Zoomer Plus where you can see what infections are in your brain. It’s really quite disturbing. I have herpes 6 in my brain and it’s not an IgM infection it’s an IgG, which means that it’s not active. It’s like in remission the way that the Epstein-Barr and Lyme are. So they’re not actively causing trouble. And so as long as I keep myself, you know, like I keep doing my food sensitivity testing until I die, and make sure that I’m not creating the raging bull then nothing has to come out of IgG into IgM and become active. 

It can just stay back there in remission. And I know that it’s there and I can make sure that I engage in self care so it stays back there. So there’s no way you are 45% viruses and bacteria. Like you’re not going to be killing off all the infections that you have. You don’t want to do that. You want to live in harmony. So I did this really amazing webinar called, it’s about COVID and its alternatives to the vaccination, the COVID vaccine for people with autoimmune disease because the recommendations from the American College of Rheumatology and the pharmaceutical companies that make the injections is we don’t know if you have an autoimmune flare, we don’t know how this is going to behave. 

And so I did an alternative to that using something called ivermectin. And you have to watch the webinar so that you know like the process. And I went through all this research and I talked about this like, we have to be in harmony with all of these viruses and bacteria and fungi and parasites and molds that we are interdependent and interrelated with on this planet. It’s not that we’re going in and killing everything. We’re looking at them as potential toxins for sure if they become imbalanced, if we become a hospitable host to them and that’s IgM now instead of IgG. And then we have, oh and I should probably tell you that webinar, if you wanna watch it it’s in the Reverse Autoimmune Disease Institute private Facebook group the replay link, which you can join but you have to agree to adhere to the rules of the group, but it is www.drkeesha.com/imask. So the letter I-M-A-S-K protocol. 

So that will give you the replay of that two and a half hour webinar if you’re interested in learning more. Okay, so chemicals as toxins. There are 13,000 chemicals in cosmetics and counting. Only 10% of those are tested. 13,000 and only 10% are tested. That’s so terrible. When it says BPA free that’s great, but then that means it’s been replaced with a different chemical. Okay, so you just have to know that. Usually what studies have shown is that women and men have 12 products that are chemical based on them before they leave the door in the morning. 12 products with 168 chemicals, 12 products that we use in the morning. So I counted those up for myself ’cause I’m very low maintenance. So I shower and wash my hair every four days. And so on any given day there may not be anything in my hair. 

I use a homemade and you guys have the, I’ve given you the recipes that I use in as one of the bonuses for this summit series. So you have it. It’s my autoimmune detox recipes for deodorant. So I use that. I use toothpaste and I have a homemade one in there that I’ve given you that doesn’t have any chemicals in it. And then I just use oil on my face. So sesame oil in the winter with jojoba and vitamin E and rosehip. I gave you recipe after recipe in that little booklet so make sure you print that out. I made everything in that book in one day and I took a picture of it for the back of it, you can see it in one day. So I gathered everything ahead of time and then I just cooked all day. I called myself the kitchen witch and I made all of those products for my home and for our bathroom and our laundry room, all of it in one day. 

So it is possible. So when I went through everything I thought well, and the makeup that I use is mineral but I do get eyelash extensions. Oooh. So when I gave my Ted talk I was told you need eyelash extensions. And I’ve loved them ever since which is a big chemical near my eyes so I have to think about that. I’ve been thinking, ooh, I need to stop doing that. And then I also get my hair colored but I use Ayurveda but it still has chemicals in it so I’m also thinking of time to stop that. I don’t get my nails done. I don’t tan. I don’t do any of those kinds of things. So I counting them up and I thought, okay, the eyelash extensions are biggie. That’s one. And then the hair chemicals every four months is another but I make my own shampoo and conditioner and don’t put anything on my fingernails. And then on my skin it’s just oil. So you have to kind of try and think about this. Like, what are the things that you’re using to clean? What are the things that your furniture and your carpet and your wood is off-gassing? 

There’s just, we have so many chemicals around us. It’s crazy. And I don’t use any foundation but five pounds of makeup are absorbed for most women in a year. Five pounds, can you imagine? Oh, I was using my masks. I would leave mine in my car and then my daughter would say, can I use your car mom? And I would say, sure. And then I’d go out and the next time I use my car, I would pick up my mask to put it on and it was caked with foundation. I don’t use foundation. How did this happen? That was my daughter’s. And she’s getting, you know, she’s had problems with acne where your mask gets and I don’t. And so it’s from putting stuff, on your pores, right? Using foundation. Try not to do that. Try not to do that at all. And then your skin can be just nice and clean and breathe. So, you have higher autoimmune rates the higher you like anything you put on your skin is eaten by your skin. So it goes into your skin. Remember like we do birth control patches on skin, we do scopolamine for motion sickness on skin. We have pain patches for skin. That means if you put it on your skin you’re eating it the same as if you put it in your mouth. 

So it causes higher autoimmune rates, earlier menopause and you can use the environmental working group to cross check your products and then better yet if you can make them yourself. So I love this, “reducing carbon emissions is important but it’s short-sighted if not coupled with reducing the toxic emissions from your heart. That’s something spiritual leaders are supposed to teach and something all thinking people, regardless of their beliefs should practice.” From Radhanath Swami. I love this because yes, carbon emissions and also what are we emitting from our heart? What do we have stored in there that’s creating a toxin to ourselves? Okay. All right, so toxic buildup body, if you have. 

So I do genetic testing on a hundred percent of my patients because I wanna know what are your genetic pathways for detoxification? And I wanna individualize your detoxification protocol to your pathways. So if you have a buildup of toxins it interferes with genetic expression. It disrupts your hormones signaling. It creates inflammation and it can trigger autoimmune disease. And when I first did my very first detox, oh my gosh I was so crabby. I will never forget it. I lived in Michigan. I had just started into this autoimmune reversal thing and one of the things I read is I needed to detox. 

So I got a book. I ordered all the things and I did it. It didn’t match my genetic pathways at all. I was so crabby. And then over the next few years I learned that like I would detox and feel good and then I would retox. So I’d start eating sugar again and then and it was like this roller coaster. And so eventually you need to get off that roller coaster where you’re not detoxing and retoxing over and over again. All right, so the fourth corner piece of the puzzle is genetics. And “your genetics load the gun. Your lifestyle pulls the trigger” is what Dr. Oz is famous for saying and we know that it affects your microbiome big time. Okay, so your microbiome affects how your genetics express themselves. 

Your level of toxins affect your microbiome. All of this is interfacing. And we know through the Panchakoshas, it isn’t just your microbiome that’s so limited. People will often talk about, oh, the microbiome is everything. It’s not. Actually it’s your mind, your perceptions that’s what triggers everything. And that actually creates what’s going on in your microbiome. That’s why in the last couple of webinars I’ve talked so much about emotional detoxification and showing you this little model of, yeah, there are five layers of you. The physical layer is the one that contains your microbes but your mental layer, where you have your thoughts, your feelings, your fears, your doubts they go through the nervous system and affect who’s living in that microbiome and affect how your adrenals respond which sends out cortisol which breaks down your gut wall which then creates who’s gonna live in your microbiome. 

So all of this affects genetic expression, and so I call this unzipping your genes. Okay, so genetics 101. People all have 99.9% of the same exact genes. You don’t have red hair genes and brown hair genes. You have 50 trillion cells with instructions for how to make you and the instructions are encoded in your DNA. Your DNA creates your 23 pairs of chromosomes. The chromosomes are organized as genes, your DNA is the cookbook and the genes are the recipe. The recipes tell your cells how to function and what traits to express. So we’re still figuring out how to figure out your SNPs or single-nucleotide polymorphisms in your genetics. By no means have we got this figured out. And so when I first learned this genetic pathway map which you could look at here there’s so much more that’s on here now in chemistry, in high school I learned the Krebs cycle. I learned it again in a nutrition class in nursing school. 

The Krebs cycle it was a nightmare. And it’s only this one little part in this entire map of how your body takes nutrients and converts them into energy. That’s all this is for is to take your nutrients and convert them into energy. And we try and make it very complicated but it’s not. And so you can see if you have heavy metals like for example, lead interferes with nitric oxide, aluminum interferes with dopamine. You can see that if there’s a problem with this traffic circle right here with your BHMT SNP, then you might not have enough trimethylglycine which then can actually interfere with how well you metabolize estrogen through your liver, and then that can put you at risk for breast cancer. 

So there’s a lot here. It’s very complex but at the same time, if you get lost in the weeds of each one of these SNPs, it’s like standard American medicine. We’re looking for the one thing and I’m hoping that you’re seeing from this. It is not about methylation. It is not about CVS. It is not about MAO. It is not about COMT, it’s about the entire system. And so much of it starts with your perceptions of yourself in this world. That’s what’s so fascinating about the whole thing. I had one of my students pipe up in the Academy for Integrative Medicine health coach certification program group. So now I figured out that all my problems are because of my FUT2 SNP. 

I was like, oh my gosh, no, no, no, no, no. That is not accurate. That’s not what all your problems are from. That’s one piece of your genetic puzzle which is only one piece of your entire puzzle. And it does point to the microbiome which and she said, so what do I do about this? And I said, everything you’ve been taught. You address your perceptions because those are affecting your adrenals. You check your adrenals and your hormones. You make sure that you don’t feel like you’re a zebra being chased by a lion because cortisol will be dumping into your system breaking down your gut wall. And then your FUT2 can express itself as an unhealthy microbiome. But it’s not about the FUT2 by itself. 

So SNPs are copying errors. So to make new cells and existing cell divides in two, mitosis it copies its DNA so the new cells each have a complete set of genetic instructions. Sometimes they make a mistake during the copying process just like anything, those errors are called SNPs. Now this is a DNA double helix and this is cell division, splitting into two cells. Isn’t that fascinating? I am such a science geek. The consequences of this copying error biological variations between people. So when it says copying error it’s what makes you and I look different. Our appearance, our disease susceptibility, and our response to drugs. All of this is a consequence of SNPs. That’s not bad. And they’re inherited from parent to child. The more SNPs that are similar the more closely we’re related. So why genetics are so sexy to us is that people that are sick want answers and they wanna blame it on something. 

They really like to get really excited about genetics. They’re curious and they’re excited but they usually have the wrong idea about genetics. A Mendelian trait is a single locus in an inheritance pattern like sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis. These things are like disease related genes. That’s what people usually think when they think genetics. Oh, it’s the heritability of a disease. No. When we’re doing genetic testing we’re talking about SNPs, which is going to be more like, detoxification pathway problems. NOS, nitric oxide problems which is oxygenation. Problems with methylation, probably. You know, so that’s what we’re looking at. We’re looking at things that have to do with your brain and your mood. So then we can get to the root problem of ADHD which actually isn’t even a thing anymore. There’s no such thing as ADD anymore. It’s a methylation problem. How cool is that, right? Now we can get to the root of it and not say, oh, we have to give you this stimulant. No, we have to actually get you properly methylated. That’s so cool. We can do the same thing for anxiety, brain fog, depression fatigue, insomnia, irritability, memory problems, cancer. 

We can look at detoxification pathways, not BRCA one and two. That’s so different. That’s heritability which is only 10% of breast cancer. So sure, you could be negative or positive for BRCA, right? But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re actually talking about how well does your estrogen move through your liver. What are the SNPs that cause problems with that? What about cardiovascular issues with NOS? We can actually point to that now and say, well, if we can build a little detour around this, so you don’t have to have the same problems your parents had. And then female hormones, the same thing with the cancer ones. Fertility and pregnancy issues. Yeah, we could actually look at these things through the SNP pathways. And gland and organ like fatty liver. 

I’ve seen with my, I told you I do genetics on everyone. So with my patients with autoimmune disease I’ve seen some patterns that are present in every single autoimmune patient, including myself. And one of them is a tendency towards fatty liver because phase one and phase two liver detoxification pathways are not equal and there’s problems with that but you can do something about it. That’s what’s so cool. Same with metabolism issues. So we know the abnormal epigenetics, okay? Problems. Remember that this is on the freedom framework on the third side of the puzzle, where we talk about connecting the dots between your lifestyle choices and the data that you’re getting from your testing. That’s the same thing we do when I do a genetics consult. 

I’m saying, what are the epigenetic choices that could cause trouble in your genetics to have you express them poorly as a disease. All right, so the idea though that we treat your genetics as if they’re the problem is like a mirage on a desert. It’s not true and it’s not accurate because your SNPs are only what you are wired for. It’s not necessarily what’s true for you. So the way that I look at genetic testing is I always call it like a pirate’s treasure map where X marks the spot where there’s a homozygous or heterozygous SNP and then we dig a little bit deeper. It helps us to know what you should be paying attention to for the rest of your life to age well. So this is the role of integrative medicine. You know, most health conditions are multifactorial. They’re genetic, they’re infective and they’re environmental. 

So we have to address them at all levels. A woman who smokes while she’s pregnant induces epigenetic changes in three generations at one time, herself, her unborn daughter and her daughter’s reproductive cells. So some of us are working on generation three with our own children and we know that trauma can express itself. Some studies say 12 generations ahead. Some say seven. That’s a lot of generations though. It changes our genetic expression, these toxins whether they’re mental and emotional or physical. So environmental exposures, stress, diet, and lifestyle, all induce epigenetic changes that determine whether genes are expressing themselves or not expressing themselves. They’re not actually turned on or off. 

So we have to be really, really, really, really mindful about how we are in our world with our thoughts and our feelings as well as what we’re eating and who we’re relating with and what we’re taking. All right, so I do genetics with an epigenetics consult which helps determine what nutritional testing, adrenals and hormones, mycotoxins, viruses, heavy metals. All of these are toxins. Now, one of the things that I teach and tell my patients is if you have heavy metals onboard, you do not go into a chelation process until your body is ready. If you start chelating heavy metals and your adrenals are tired and you have fatty liver you’re going to make yourself so much sicker. You could can really cause harm. So heavy metals come at the end, okay? This is how I do my testing. Genetics, I look at epigenetics, I look at nutrition I look at adrenals and hormones. Then I go further because we’re trying to support and stabilize and renew you before we start taking a bunch of stuff out. So again, everyone’s different. 

There’s no Dr. Keesha’s autoimmune protocol. And I teach you this in, if you want to become an integrative medicine certified health coach then you have $3,000 off this week during the summit. And you can join this amazing six month program which has mentorship way beyond the six months. And a really remarkable group of people that are engaged in this work also. And so when you go to this link, drkeesha.com/aimhc is Academy for Integrated Medicine Health Coach, AIMHC and this is the screen you’ll see. It has the $3,000 off already built in, along with payment plan options of $916 a month for six payments or $541 a month for 12 payments with a down payment of 1497. All right, everybody. 

So that’s day four. And I really hope you’re enjoying this series. And again, you can join the Reverse Autoimmune Disease Institute private Facebook group page, a few said yes, I’ll adhere to the rules of the group. And let me know what you’re enjoying about the summit the most and what you wanna hear more about ’cause I’m always doing these webinars. I found that people seem to really like them. So ’cause they get a lot of good information from them. And if you buy the whole series and you have these slides moving forward and you can go back and revisit and revisit. All right, until next time, I’ll see you tomorrow. Be well.