Uncover The Links: Trauma Triggers & Epigenetic Diseases

Why? What makes the difference for deciding when, why and how? Why does someone have a mental breakdown at that specific time in their life? And then, as I learned from Dr. Walsh, who is our conversation expert today, what are those biochemical imbalances that seem to predispose us to these diseases and to trauma? And this is something where they have trauma patterns in their body, whether or not they recognize that they have had trauma, because trauma more than stress causes overwhelming oxidative stress that damages our DNA beyond what our repair mechanisms can handle. 

This is why it’s so important to understand the difference between stress and trauma, because they are very different physiology, very different biology happening in our body. To lead us in the conversation today. Is Dr. William Walsh someone who I have personally trained under in his position training program? He trained under Carl Phifer and has the largest database for schizophrenia, autism, I believe, and understanding mental illness, neurochemistry and nutrition. He is president of the nonprofit Walsh Research Institute near Chicago and a key scientist driving the development of advanced nutrient therapies for mental illness and acknowledged expert on biochemical imbalances, methylation and epigenetics. Dr. Walsh has lectured at more than 30 international conferences and is author of a book that changed my life called Nutrient Power and is finishing up his newest book on bipolar. Let’s jump in and start this conversation around the trauma disease connection and the actual mechanics of it. So the damage to our DNA, this has become a really important role in other diseases, a lot of symptoms. And you’ve been doing a lot of research on this. So what happens? What’s happening to our DNA that then is actually converting that into diseases?

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

Well, what I want to just learn to appreciate in the last ten years is how important DNA repair is to a human being. We have about 25 trillion DNA molecules, 25 trillion of them, and they actually supply nutrients. And yes, we need food to have nutrients to keep us going. But even at least as important is the nutrition we get from DNA that’s supervised by our DNA. And I call it the DNA restaurant because our DNA supplies, every cell in our body with protein, nutrients, special proteins. Now, if that were true, if we were to stop eating, we’d probably live for about a month before we would die of starvation. But if our DNA repair stopped or if our DNA stopped producing or expressing proteins, we’d be dead in a minute. So we really need this. And now the problem is that our DNA is assaulted. Every one of our DNA molecules, which has roughly 6 billion, what they call nucleotide complex molecules, they are ripped apart tens of thousands of times a day. In fact, they think really millions of times. 

So these little these are very fragile little DNA molecules. The double helix is actually you had singles threatened to actually break the strands, single strand break, double strand breaks if you get the wrong chemicals attaching to them. So all kinds of horrible damage every day. Well, about six years ago, Fianceé and just three scientists just got the Nobel Prize. And they were the they are people who actually discovered the detailed mechanisms of how DNA repair works. And they deserve this. I think it’s one of the most deserving Nobel Prizes ever, and they’ve got it all worked out. But it doesn’t work really perfectly and can’t. So when you have a cell that gets old and does it working well and you get cell division, you get a new cell. Well, that’s remarkable how you can get a daughter cell. It’s pretty accurate, but it’s not perfect. And there’s as time goes on, as we age, as you, then you accumulate problems and the genes stop working as well and the cells stop working as well. 

And anyway, that’s we now know that that loss of integrity of our DNA is what aging is. It’s why we age. And what it does is it’s changing the menu from these 80,000 or 100,000 proteins that we have genetically expressed. And the diet, our genetic diet gets worse as we get older. That’s why we age. And we now know that’s why we get cancer, heart disease, mental illnesses, why some people might develop, in your case, toxic reactions. And it has to do with your DNA losing integrity. And we don’t get quite the right recipe everywhere in the body. So that is really important. And so what is it that causes the DNA to start deteriorating or not function like it used to becoming imperfect? Oxidative stress is number one, and oxidative stress is something you can’t avoid as a human being for one reason. One of the major causes is cosmic radiation. One of the three guys who got the double prize, he he found how to have the body compounds, cosmic radiation. But then there’s other forms of damage. So we all have that immune function. If you have a bacterial infection or how does the body effects that surrounds it with hydrogen peroxide and yeah, it kills the bacteria but there’s leftover hydrogen peroxide so that’s that’s an accident. And so we have to mop it up. And the body has a system for coping with a little bit or the proper amount of oxidative assault, you might say, or oxidative stress. And so that’s really how the system works. And now there are some people who are not able to function that way. I want to mention also that energy production, every cell in our body needs energy or is it comes from a troublesome mitochondria. It makes this chemical called ATP. That’s our energy molecule. But in the course of making it, you wind up with some oxidative free radicals. It’s just a natural process, and you’ve got to get rid of that excess free radicals. And we have a system that does that. And it’s and we’re born with it as great. 

We have genes that produce and come to the fore and fix that. If we get too much of these free radicals and it’s things like lithium peroxide. So that’s what’s expressed. But it causes us to get as great antioxidant iron. We also get a number of other natural there’s actually a total of around 12 major natural antioxidants that are in our body where they’re when we were born and they’re protecting us and they’re covered with the oxidative or whatever oxidative isolation or stress you’re exposed to. So that’s what’s supposed to happen. And that’s why some people don’t seem to age if they got that system working really well. I remember the one scientists studied. Jascha Gabor You may not be able to remember who she was, but she was a woman who was gorgeous when she was 70, and she’s just an age. 

And there are people that have that kind of genetics and others do not. Well, we’re learning that even if you’re not perfect and that and DNA repair or in your antioxidant natural production, there are things you can do to fix that, to supplement it. And that’s and that’s really important because so many people, so many. Virtually every human has a problem with this because we all age. We’d like to we’d like. And so how do you we now know that the way to protect against aging, one of the major things you could do one of the major things you can do is to take antioxidants if you need them, to make sure that you that in case you don’t have enough naturally that you could do, we can do that. And I think that’s going to be a major thing. 

And health care in the next ten years. I think the world is going to realize that cancer and schizophrenia and all these whatever they are, things that, you know, ingrown toenails, whatever you don’t like that is caused by DNA damage. So I think I think the whole world is going to focus the medical system is going to focus throughout the world on protecting your DNA, which which includes being good and good environments. There are things that we can avoid. So what causes these free radicals? All of those free radicals basically are I think, are more like molecules that are like a thief that steals an electron and takes a good molecule. You need biochemical and damages it, and that can cause inflammation. It can affect your brain function, it can affect your body function. It can be temporary. Like if you’re wiping out a bacterium, that can be temporary and you’ll be fine in a few days. But it can also, if it gets really large, it can permanently damage your DNA, permanent damage. And that’s why we a lot that’s why we have late onset diseases like cancer, heart disease, virtually every one of these late onset diseases, even autism, it’s caused by DNA damage is not repaired, thereby changing and altering the menu of proteins that are supposed to make our cells work really well. So it’s sort of a summary of that. So and let me tell.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

You, I.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

Want to add that toxic metals, for example. Yeah. Mercury and the lead. They are terrible cause of really serious oxidative overloaded stress cigaret smoke pollution. So we’re going to learn more and more how to protect the human body. I really believe that within 15 or 20 years, we’ll move advanced to the point where people will be able to live well over 100 years and still be functioning, maybe even working and then that’s also because of the advances in DNA, DNA and genetic research. What we’re learning is that we’ve just begun to understand what each gene does. And now we’re learning about gene families like gene families like I found out there are 110 genes that are in a family and you need to have several genes for redundancy in case a couple of them don’t work well. And we’re now learning what these families do. For example, cardiovascular function, that’s about 800 genes that collaborate to make that all work. And as far as your brain function goes, we now know the few thousand genes. We know a little bit about what they do. But what’s going to happen is that and before too long, a newborn baby, we will be able to take a newborn baby and do a DNA test and we will find out exactly what their future problems are. And they’re going to learn how to prevent them, believe it. That’s coming. It’s coming. It’s going to take a while. 

They have to not only get the genetics, but the epigenetics. The epigenetics, which are the changes in the gene expressions or the rate of gene expression. So I think it’s a wonderful thing that’s coming. I’m hoping to live a long time so I can. I want to be here when all this happens. That’s coming. But for now, what could a person do now? I think it depends on how well a person is. In part, if a person has some, you know, some kind of an illness or a health problem, you need to make sure that you’re not having an oxidative overload now. So what can you do? First of all, I hope you know that I get focused on zinc a lot. Well, zinc deficiency, if you don’t have the ideal amount of zinc in your body and in your bloodstream, you are going to have oxidative overload. That’s one of the major ones. But there are so many other things that can cause that you can have a genetic weakness in your mitochondrial function. You could have a weakness of DNA repair. So you need to supplement that. What I don’t talk about necessarily vitamins, but you need to do something to get your oxidative protection at a level that’ll help you be healthier, happier, live longer, and all of those good things.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

I have had a number of patients that I’ve seen and then people who’ve come through my 21 day Journey program since then, and they can have a common story like this, which is something significant happened in my life. For one person, it was the death of her sister. She wasn’t. It was an unexpected death. Put her in a big shock and grief. Two years later, she has breast cancer and the stories like this go on where there’s this clear, dramatic event, or maybe just an even not an event, but something that they experience. Where they experience that what we talk about is overwhelm, the emotional overwhelm. And that seems to be triggering these conditions that you are seeing are epigenetic triggers as a result of oxidative stress. And so that’s why I really wanted to highlight this topic for people, is because there is a strong connection between what we, what we experience in life, that converting into oxidative damage to our DNA. And then a few years later or it depends, I guess, on how much accumulation of oxidative damage we already have that at some point, it just it crosses a line.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

That’s absolutely correct. Very good. And the scientists have now work this out. We now know that severe emotional trauma produces isolated assault. It produces oxidative stress in the brain primarily. And so that’s why people who develop schizophrenia very often have what you would call a breakdown or person with bipolar disorder. What we’ve learned is that it I’ve seen more than 3000 families with a schizophrenic patient and nearly always there’s something trauma event maybe the loss of a girlfriend or a or entering basic training or some event that’s traumatic or a death of a loved one or a frightening experience like a PTSD thing. And we now know that that changes permanently. It can permanently change gene expression. Now, the what you’re leading up to is really profound, I think, because we have again, well, we have 21,000 genes, 21,000 of them that do all this good work. And what happens is when you have a traumatic event, depending on your natural protections, DNA repair and all of that, that’s going to change the number of genes. And we don’t know which ones. 

But so let’s say that you’re 15 years old and there’s a horrible accident and maybe your life is threatened or a loved one dies. It’s going to change maybe two dozen genes, and we’re not sure which ones they are. And we’ve known for a long time that there are some when a person gets older to have an injury, like if somebody falls or breaks their hip, they’re likely to die. And next year, if they’re over 80, why is that? It’s because the traumatic experience has changed so many genes that are already weakened that’s the cause of that. So that could happen at any age. That’s what PTSD is for people in the military and, you know, everybody really. Yeah, we’re learning we’re learning the science of it. We know there are no scientists who are studying the exact mechanisms by which emotional trauma changes the genes that are trying to identify which genes are the most vulnerable. And what can we do to protect the genes, or how can we cope with the absence of these genes functioning properly? It’s I think that is that’s really a key aspect of human existence.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And I think that this is also part of the correlation or association that the spiral disorder has with autoimmunity, where that payroll disorder is causing the functional deficiency in zinc and B6, but it’s also causing a significant increase in oxidative damage. And then years later, right, adulthood, you’re possibly showing up with an autoimmune condition.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

Yeah. The good news is if you get it early, you can correct it. But if you don’t, then the cumulative damage can cause a problem that might be there the rest of your life. Yes.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And so you see, you may look at someone with that payroll disorder and who then has some significant life events that have been traumatic. And you can see just how the accumulation can quickly happen. And then if they if their DNA repair mechanisms are not optimized, if they have some mitochondrial compromises, you’re going to be seeing those diseases or conditions that are actually epigenetic triggers happen earlier in their life, whereas for others it may happen later depending on what their life experiences or their DNA repair mechanisms or mitochondria are like.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

Absolutely right. And I want to point out there are other aspects of biochemistry that can get involved, like the p450 system in the liver. Now whatever we get things that are supposed to be in your body that are perhaps toxic, you got to get rid of the p450 enzymes to take care of that. Well, what happens if you have a but there are genes that enable that and they’re getting weakened or you might or a person might be born with weakened protection from that. So what happens let’s say if you was take an example of a muscle disorder. Let’s say somebody has that’s a system that gets those mold molecules out. They kick them out of your body. Some people don’t have that for functioning very well already. Emotional experience, trauma or just aging or being exposed to too much oxidative stress, too many free radicals that can damage that. And then this person who might have sailed through the first ten or 20 years of our life suddenly has sensitivity that can be pretty terrible. So that’s part of it is that it depends on what part of your body, what systems are being damaged that are functioning like they used to.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

So for someone who has an under methylation status, is that going to also indirectly be increasing their risk for an epigenetic trigger because of its effects on the detoxification system or their ability to really protect their DNA? Well.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

It does that. And moreover, if you’re under methylated, the fact that your DNA is under methylated, not just your body, but your DNA is under methylated, that means that you’re vulnerable to things that you would be if you had normal methylation. So basically you can make your more vulnerable. And yes, whatever causes that to to get weaker, then you have the problem with repairing a lot of the things in the body that go wrong. We need methylation reactions for so many things. There’s 80 and 80 I’m sorry, 80 methylation reactions that do most of that work for us.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

So if your DNA is under methylated, you will be at more risk. Your DNA would be more vulnerable to oxidative damage.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

Yes, it would. And there there’s advantages of being under methylated DNA. It affects really the expression of every gene in your body, the degree to which is expressed in is it going into the proper is it working in each cell that needs this functioning? And we now know that if you’re under methylated DNA, there are some diseases you’re prone to. You’re prone to low serotonin activity. You’re prone. But and if you’re over methylated, you’re prone to excessive dopamine activity. But in terms of every cell in your body and every expression, yeah. That that can that degree, whether you’re over methylated under methylated or have ideal methylation that makes you more vulnerable or more protected depending on what it is, it’s all true. And we’re getting we’re learning more and more about the intimate details, and that’s going to help us keep ourselves healthy as we get more of this information.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

What about the copper excess? What is its relationship with oxidative stress?

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

Oh, copper excess is one of the few necessary, essential nutrients that can harm us and it can harm us if it becomes a free, radical. You the we have a system and that’s genetic involves for four genes called Battelle defining genes telephone one, two, three and four. They’re side by side in our DNA. They regulate copper and zinc and that. And if that’s working well, then you won’t have a problem with too much copper or too little zinc or something abnormal with that. But there are many, many people who don’t have that system working at all. And there’s many snips and these four, four, four genes, and we’re learning more and more about which ones they are. But that we’ve learned advanced the primary cause of postnatal depression it’s affected it’s some people that have elevated copper our estrogen intolerant and it has and it’s a measure of oxidative overload. So the clinical work that we do, we have several different lab tests that are markers for oxidative overload. One of them is involves copper and the amount of copper that is safely sequestered in is through a plasmid. And then but the rest of it, ten, 15, in some cases, 50% of your copper is not safely bound, but is a free radical that could do terrible things to us. So that’s where that fits in.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

So for any of you who’ve been into one of my health coaching sessions, you will know now why we always test that the rule of plasm with the copper so that we can test that free copper in the blood and not just the total copper. Very important distinction is there another. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

I was going to say we’ve had more than 800 patients who’ve had postpartum. And we and, of course, many, many, many emails who had other problems like depression, who’d never had that. And we’ve now learned that if we simply normalize their copper, more than 95% of them get completely better, even if they’ve been suffering for years. Usually after the birth of a baby with your copper level more than doubles. And for some people that does come back down. I just noticed today that there are no other now found a pharmaceutical drug for postpartum depression. I think how unnecessary it’s something we can we can we can almost always correct that. I’d love to do a double blind study where we measure the effectiveness of that drug or any any drug against just normalizing copper.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And it would include even things like the post partum anxiety, right. Not just postpartum depression, but any of those postpartum anxiety psychosis that worst that can all be due to the copper excess.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

Well, I’ve done a careful study of the postpartum people that we’ve worked with, and I learned that they shouldn’t call this postpartum depression. They should call it postpartum anxiety, because that is the number one. We’ve surveyed hundreds of these postpartum patients, and they suffer terribly. But it’s primarily anxiety.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Yeah, that’s what they come in saying to me, right? Yeah. There’s the depression there. But the anxiety is reaching levels that are very uncomfortable for them.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

My wife was a high copper person, which we did not know in the beginning. And after her second child, she started having difficulty in really great anxiety and then just happened to be at the same time I was beginning to work with a great Colonel Phifer, the at that time the world’s greatest nutritional scientist in Princeton, New Jersey. And so I brought her there and you saw what it was, and he fixed it. So she’s with five children. She’s never had a touch of this. It’s this involves millions of people. And in USA alone, it’s completely correctable. We publish this I published this with the University of Chicago and showed all the data and nobody pays attention because everybody wants to find a drug to fix it, not realizing that you can completely fix it. That particular problem naturally.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

We’re working on that, Dr. Walsh. We’re working on.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

What other.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Information that we’ll get there. So in summary, my goodness, like protect your DNA. Yes. Above all, protect your DNA and be intentional about bringing in oxidative support. Those antioch’s guidance, because you may not always know how your DNA repair mechanisms are. You may not know how your P450 enzymes are in your liver, but at the end of the day, everyone, everyone should be taking antioxidants. I feel, given how important this is.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

They need to make sure their zinc is normalized. They need to make sure that they don’t have toxic metals, but they also need to be in a good environment. They need the and eating fruits and vegetables as a way that you can really help yourself myself. I think everybody would be better off if they took a couple of thousand milligrams of vitamin C. And I think there are a number of really great antioxidants that are commercial. And right now, what I’m doing in the next month, I’m going to put together a really powerful antioxidant supplement, a combination of all the great ones, and jam it all into one capsule. And I think that would help not only our patients. It would certainly help all of us.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

But help all of us. Yes. Please let me know when you’ve done that.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

I will.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

I will be your biggest promoter for that.

William J. Walsh, PhD, FACN

That’ll be about June, I think. Great.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Thank you so much for joining us for this interview on the Biology of Trauma Summit 3.0. That trauma disease connection and this is just central message, such a key principle of the trauma disease connection and how it actually happens. And so I’ll oh, my goodness, I know that you got so much. And as you can see already that there is so much information that you might be wanting to think about just purchasing the whole summit so you can have these recordings and watch again for as many times as you need to. When we look at the oxidative stress, the oxidative damage to our DNA, there are key. There are things that we can do that he mentioned there at the end, taking a couple thousand milligrams of vitamin C every day. You can do that. What about eating more fruits and vegetables, especially those high in phytonutrients? And so the most colorful fruits and vegetables, those are going to be powerful. Antioxidants need to be thinking about how can you create the environment around your DNA that it is being protected and it’s being supported in its ability to do the repair that it needs to do. We all have exposures. We all have vulnerabilities living in the world that we do, whether that be from people and the actual emotional traumas or even toxins having metals, the copper access, the zinc deficiency, these are all things that influence our level of oxidative stress. And so that point at which our body, our mind is going to have a breakdown and we can prevent that. And there is so much that we can do to pull ourselves back. 

Once that has happened through the integration of all the stuff that we’re talking about in the summit, the somatic work, huge component of actually being able to take our nervous system and get it back from that, from the trauma responses that is that are creating the oxidative stress, the parts work that is very helpful and again, pulling ourselves back from that sense of overwhelm and I’ve lost control of my life. I feel disconnected. That is going to be creating more oxidative stress. So we have to look at those things and then actually bringing in these biology tools, the vitamin C, the antioxidants. There are other antioxidants that we can use out there. But bringing in those pieces and bringing them together, that’s where the magic happens. So I want you to be thinking of. Yes, creating the biology environment around your DNA, but then also upstream, preventing and and stopping that influx of oxidative stress that happens from trauma, toxins, heavy metals and other things. On that list. We need to be protecting our DNA. So with that, go get some vitamin C, go get some vegetables and fruits that are high energy. And I will see you for the next interview on this biology trauma summit 3.0.