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Brad Kearns

Get ready to go deep into the cutting edge of health optimization that is customized precision medicine!

I discuss my personal experience with WildHealth.com precision medicine, so this show talks about the results of my genetic testing, blood testing, and expert 1:1 physician and health coach support. Today, we have an opportunity like never before to personalize our health data and medical guidance, and strive for optimization instead of just disease prevention like the mainstream model.

As I detail the results of my genetic testing, you’ll realize how running your own DNA report can reveal numerous particulars in your genetic profile that influence your diet, exercise, sleep and lifestyle behaviors. You can learn how your genetic variations called SNPs – single nucleotide polymorphisms, aka “snips” expose your personal frailties, tendencies, and sensitivities, so you can dial in the right lifestyle practices like never before.

One profound example is my genetic report for muscle fiber ratios, where I’m around 54% strength/power and 46% endurance. This means I respond well to high intensity workouts, but require more recovery time, and that I have difficulty with high volume endurance training. Well, I battled against reality during my triathlete career, and wish I’d known this information so I could have designed a more appropriate customized program. Diet is also an extremely important area to apply your genetic insights to. You can discover things like an increased need for choline and B vitamins, tolerance to carbs and fats, and other things.

Then, cross reference your comprehensive blood panel to reveal the impact of your genetics and your current lifestyle behaviors. Some folks thrive off vegan plant-based, others on carnivore, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of following the latest fad or become convinced by who conveys their message the loudest. No more of that, and no more guesswork when it comes to matters of life or death. I strongly encourage you to consider the great offering from Wild Health. There are numerous other providers offering online precision medicine too, and I’m really impressed by the thoughtfulness and fantastic personal coaching I receive from my Wild Health physician, Dr. Tom McCoy, and my coach Ray Fernandez.

Here is the official promo message from WildHealth.com, and I can extend a generous 20% discount on your services with the code BRADPODCAST.

Wild Health is an online provider of comprehensive health consultation services. They offer DNA analysis, custom lab panels, extensive medical intake with family history and lifestyle preferences, and regular online visits with a board-certified precision medicine physician, and a health coach – whom you can message anytime through their convenient app.

Wild Health evaluates your data to determine what your body needs for nutrition, exercise, sleep, and supplements – you can experiment, consult, and re-test to get everything dialed in. You’ll get a cutting edge epigenetic test of DNA methylation to calculate your all-important BIOLOGICAL AGE, and have fun lowering your age over time instead of following the common path to ACCELERATED aging.

TIMESTAMPS:

Customized one-on-one testing and consultation are available in labs independent of the mainstream medicine. [01:57]

These tests can determine your ancestral genetic attributes regarding physical factors, diet, and maybe explain why some things work with others but not for you. [04:18]

Eighty percent of adult population in the world is lactose intolerant. [08:27]

LDL alone is not a reliable risk factor for heart disease. [12:48]

If your doctor still refers to LDL as bad cholesterol, they are 30 or 40 years behind the emerging science.  [15:53]

Methylation is representing the body’s ability to carry out the process of adding carbon atoms or methyl groups to compounds. It tells you how well you are processing nutrients and recovering from stress. [21:10]

When you have leaky gut syndrome, you are not extracting and assimilating the nutrients from your diet. [23:36]

Brad found out much about his entire physical being after these tests.  He found out many vitamins and minerals that he was sensitive to. It is very important to get Vitamin D from sun exposure. [28:32]

Another section of the report gives astonishing insight with strength to endurance ratio. Brad would have trained differently had he had that information. [36:46]

Even if you are training for short races, you need to emphasize comfortably paced aerobic training to build your aerobic base.  [45:07]

The report points out if you are getting enough good sleep, which is so very important. [51:52]

Brad finds out about his own genes that he has a slower breakdown of the cannabinoids. He also finds that his response to the ketogenic diet is associated with less cognitive benefit from ketosis.   [01:01:46]

Brad is encouraging everyone to get an analysis of their biological age, and your diet needs along with strength to endurance ratio. [01:06:40]

Deepak Chopra says there are three ages that are relevant: your birth age, your biological age, and your psychological age. [01:11:50]

The blood’s lab reports are very informative and should be monitored frequently. Some of the most important tests to get are testosterone, Vitamin D, and fasting insulin. [01:17:11]

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TRANSCRIPT:

Brad (00:00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world-ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple, actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype, hacks, shortcuts, and sciencey talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad.

Brad (00:00:36):
with my personal experience. I’m gonna go through my labs, my genetic testing, and how the consultations went, and you’ll get a great idea of,

Brad (00:00:49):
Hey, listeners, viewers, I want to do a show about precision medicine. It’s becoming very popular these days to access the internet, bypass the mainstream medical protocols, and try to dial in health optimization with some cutting edge strategies that are beyond the, uh, disease paradigm that you find in mainstream medicine. Everything’s great when you’re, uh, when you’re, when you’re, uh, dealing with illness and you need, uh, medical support. But the idea of wellness and health optimization is now taking off into incredible new direction where you can plug into these wonderful tools that we have, starting with doing your own blood testing, and I’ve talked about that on previous shows where you can now go on the internet and order up labs, drive to a blood draw placed near you, and then get the report and then engage with medical support if necessary.

Brad (00:01:57):
But taking it a step further is companies like Wild Health and there are several others out there doing a similar service where they’re doing customized one-on-one, comprehensive health consultation services that include targeted blood testing, including a lot of things that are way beyond your typical annual physical blood draw, which is the complete blood count and perhaps some other independent tests. But they’re going really deep into health markers and with the health consultation that Wild Health offers. You also get expert one-on-one medical consultation, as well as expert one-on-one health coaching consultation. So, with my personal experience, I’m gonna go through my labs, my genetic testing, and how the consultations went, and you’ll get a great idea of what’s out there and what’s possible if you’re looking for further than just disease care or disease prevention, which again, is super important to engage with and go get your colon cancer screenings and your annual checkups and all the things that are offered by mainstream medicine.

Brad (00:03:09):
But this is a refreshing new path that you can take and especially if you’re into, um, self quantification where you’re using things like HRV, or rings, heart rate monitors, tracking your, your blood or ketone values with a blood meter. And then you can gather all this data and then engage with, um, some expert support as well as the most advanced testing. And you’ve probably heard about genetic testing where you get a swab of saliva and send it off, and they will tell you all about your familial genetic attributes. And, single nucleotide polymorphisms, these are, they called SNIPs, and they are genetic variations that affect you personally. So if you have a snip for predisposition for heart disease, obesity, all kinds of things that they can now test for, they can even test your muscle fiber makeup to determine whether you have predisposition for endurance or predisposition for strength and power.

Brad (00:04:18):
And I’m gonna reveal the reports on my genetic test really quickly and just skim through these. If you’re watching on video, I’m gonna share my screen and show you the kind of report you get from Wild Health. But basically, when you sign up for the Comprehensive Health Consultation Services, you’re going to get complete genetic testing and a genetic profile with all these recommendations and defining what these alleles are that come out on certain genes. And these are evaluated to connect with risk factors. So if you have, uh, a, a great number of alleles, you have a greater risk factor for whatever it is. There’s other things that’ll determine whether you’re a fast or slow metabolizer of caffeine, whether you have an increased need for vitamin D or you naturally produce and, uh, maintain higher levels. And so when you can, uh, look at your particulars, then you can embark on strategic diet and exercise and sleep recommendations to align with, uh, your sensitivities and areas where, uh, you might be, you know, falling short of optimal genetics.

Brad (00:05:30):
So we take the genetic testing. Then we take the blood testing, see how everything’s going these days with your lifestyle factors as revealed by your blood markers. And when you consider both of that bank of data, then you can really go to the next level, especially with the expert consultation, again, to trained physician in precision medicine and a health coach. So this is all happening at wildhealth.com. You might get a little overwhelmed and you hit their website ’cause they describe everything, but it’s really nice and simplified. And you’ll see what I’m talking about is this combination of different tests and then you go off and running with the experts and with your own reading and interpreting of the values. So let’s see if I can share my screen here. And if you’re watching on video, that’s great. And if you’re not, I will just describe carefully what we’re looking at on the page.

Brad (00:06:27):
And I think I will start with, um, uh, the genetic testing. Super fascinating. It’s 44 pages, but you’re just gonna get a description of what you might find, um, in this personalized genetic testing report used to be super expensive. I did one, uh, seven or eight years ago for 300 bucks, just for the genetic test. No, no consultation, no, um, you know, further information. But now wrapped up in this package, you can get inexpensive genetic tests. It’s kinda like they do on ancestry DNA to see where your ancestors hail from and if you have any surprise siblings out there in the world. Um, so they’re taking that same information, but they’re, uh, going into detail with what these, uh, genetic snips and alleles mean for your personal health consequences. So the first thing that came up on my genetic testing report from Wild Health was diet and nutrition variables.

Brad (00:07:32):
So I have a score for the level of fat intolerance, carb intolerance, or saturated fat intolerance. So a high score in something like saturated fat intolerance means that you really wanna make an effort to avoid those in your diet, or you are likely going to have some adverse blood values. You remember that came out as a big deal when the keto craze took off and some people were not responding well to the bacon and butter emphasis, while other people were feeling just fine and losing weight and not seeing any trouble in their blood. The difference or the variation in responsiveness to a certain diet, especially a really strict and unusual diet, is going to be revealed by your genetic particulars, particularly where your ancestors hail from and so forth.

Brad (00:08:27):
And we have that amazing stat where, 80% of the adult population in the world is lactose intolerant. So we are not designed to drink the milk from another mammal our entire lives. We stop producing the important enzyme lactase that helps break down the prominent carbohydrate, sugar source, and milk, which is lactose. And so when you stop producing lactase, most people are done doing that by age 18, sometimes even younger. You become lactose intolerant. So, you’re most likely not gonna respond well to, uh, consuming dairy products that are high in lactose, the high fat dairy products. Of course, some people are confused and they say, oh, no, I can’t have butter. I need to use margarine because I’m lactose intolerant. Well, look on the label, there’s zero carbohydrates and butter, so you can enjoy butter all the time if you’re lactose intolerant. My friend Larry, shied away from it for 40 years or something.

Brad (00:09:28):
And, uh, so maybe he’s back into, uh, enjoying a nice, uh, butter on his, uh, sourdough bread from the farmer’s market <laugh>. But yeah, lactose intolerant, 80% of the world. But the point I was trying to make is that 90% of those with pure Scandinavian ancestry have lactose persistence. They are lactose tolerant throughout life because of the strict descending from herding population that developed genetic attributes to be able to digest lactose successfully. So interesting flip-flop, 80% of the world intolerant, 90% of Scandinavians lactose tolerant, the herding populations, of course, having a large amount of dietary calories from, um, from the, the cow sources and, and milk and dairy. So, looking on the screen, my scores are presented with a list of different genes. Not important for you to even see this, but if you’re listening or watching, you go down this list of genes under the scoreboard for fat intolerance, PPAR gamma one, ppa r gamma two TCL two G-I-P-R-I-R-S one.

Brad (00:10:43):
And then next to each gene, I have a color coded for green, yellow, or orange. And the green meaning zero, uh, risk alleles. The yellow meaning one, the orange meaning two or perhaps more, uh, going into brown. And so if you’re seeing, uh, green next to the list of genes, and the list of genes are presented in order of priority. So I have a bunch of greens on top of my carbohydrate intolerance scoreboard, meaning I have minimal risk of carbohydrate intolerance. Then I have a few orange ones as I go further down the list. So I’m kind of in the medium category of carbohydrate intolerance, thereby if I sat around and didn’t exercise and ate a lot of carbs, I might be more predisposed to add excess body fat than a person who had a smooth sailing and a green scoreboard there with extremely minimal carbohydrate tolerance.

Brad (00:11:48):
Again, this is strongly driven by ancestral genetics. They found that the number of copies of amylase, that’s a salivary enzyme that’s secreted by your saliva. The number of copies that you have is directly associated with your potential for carbohydrate intolerance. I wrote about this in a recent email newsletter. If you’re not on my email newsletter list, get on it at bradkerns.com. I’ll send you five awesome PDFs as a free bonus anyway, if you have, uh, a lot of copies of the salivary enzyme amylase, you are really good at digesting carbs, you can go eat a hot fudge Sunday contest and get up and walk out and go shopping and continue on with your errands where someone who might not have many copies of the salivary enzyme that’s responsible for breaking down carbs effectively, might feel like passing out and laying down on the couch.

Brad (00:12:48):
So just, uh, I’m still on one page of my DNA genetic testing report, but I’m learning a lot about my fat intolerance. I have a, uh, a green score. So I’m very tolerant of fat, and I’m even very tolerant of saturated fat. So I can thrive on a diet high in, let’s say, fatty cuts of meat or eggs, uh, uh, butter, high fat dairy products, and not have those concerns that other people have where the cardiovascular disease risk factors, uh, get out of hand. They get, uh, skyrocketing levels of, let’s say, triglycerides or small, dense LDL particles due to consuming a lot of saturated fat due to being very highly intolerant of saturated fat. You’ve heard of the important newly important blood marker called, uh, A POB, and that’s looking further into, uh, one’s cholesterol panel.

Brad (00:13:55):
Dr. Peter Attia talks about this a lot. He thinks it’s, you know, the single best predictor of heart disease risk factor far beyond, uh, the, uh, the, the basic, uh, examination of LDL because there’s so much behind, uh, that scoreboard. And if you go to, uh, mainstream medical testing and looking at your annual physical, they’re obsessed with LDL. They have been so for 40 or 50 years. And the emerging science is now revealing that LDL alone is not an independent or not a reliable risk factor for heart disease, as some experts have cleverly conveyed on numerous podcasts and in books, cholesterol is like the firefighter at the site of the fire. They’re present there, but they did not cause the fire. So, oxidation and inflammation are now being revealed as the root causes of heart disease.

Brad (00:14:51):
We talk about this a lot in the Primal blueprint. I highly recommend getting that book and getting a nice lay person’s understanding of all this complexity when it comes to tracking your heart disease risk factors, including your LDL, knowing the difference between small dense LDL particles, those are the ones that lodge on the sides of your arterial walls and have the potential to cause trouble. And then large fluffy LDL particles, which are, uh, generally harmless or far less concerning. And so when you testing, A POB, you’re also looking at your potential for cardiovascular disease risk in a much more refined way than just looking at LDL. I got some other numbers from comparing and contrasting, applying the blood work to my genetic test. So that’s pretty cool too. They, they slapped on my actual numbers from my blood panels, which we’re gonna talk about next onto my genetic report.

Brad (00:15:53):
So when I see that I have triglycerides of 39 and HDL of 62, which is an excellent ratio. Remember, we’re striving for trigs to HDL to be one to one or better is outstanding. And it’s urgent to have at least a 3.5 to one ratio between triglycerides and HDL. So if your triglycerides are up around 150, which mainstream medicine uses as the cutoff point for, uh, heart disease, uh, risk factor concerns, they wanna see you below one 50. Dr. Ron Sinha, Dr. Cate Shanahan, the progressive physicians out there would like to see you under 100 rather than one 50, but a lot of people are dancing around with those triglycerides at one 50 or even much higher than that. And when you start getting much higher than that, you’re kind of a ticking time bomb for metabolic and cardiovascular disease. HDL is also super important.

Brad (00:16:47):
We’ve all heard about HDL as the good cholesterol, and we’ve heard of LDL nicknamed bad cholesterol. And if your doctor still refers to LDL as bad cholesterol, they are 30 or 40, 50 years behind the emerging science. It is not bad cholesterol. On the surface or on a blanket statement. It has many positive effects and many necessary effects in the body, including helping to manufacture sex hormones and vitamin D. So, LDL is super important when you artificially suppress it with statin drugs, you have all kinds of side effects, one of them being reduced mitochondrial function and especially in the cardiovascular system. So you feel tired, your muscles work, uh, worse, and your physician is confidently saying that they are neutralizing or lowering your heart disease risk, and has been proven to be untrue by highly respective studies like the Framingham study and many others showing no correlation between LDL levels and heart disease rates of heart attack, and in fact a U-C-L-A meta study that was referenced really well .

Brad (00:17:57):
Dr. Ron Sinha on our podcast and in books too. We, we, we quote this, uh, this meta study is a study of many, many studies. So they’re looking at the data conclusions from many, many studies. So when you hear the word meta study the conclusions, the information is highly respected because we’re not talking about perhaps one sketchy study. A study came out recently, you see the headline stories on the internet. Uh, the tomatoes are bad for you. So one study can find anything you want. We’ve seen that from both sides of the argument about, uh, vegan versus carnivore and all that stuff. You always have studies to back things up. But when you examine a meta study of heart attack patients and determine that 80% of heart attack victims had normal LDL cholesterol levels. A significant portion of them had artificially suppressed LDL levels into the normal range through the use of statin drugs.

Brad (00:18:58):
So 80% of people had a heart attack, they dropped down even with a favorable blood report per their physician who was, uh, dosing them on statins. But of course, uh, this is an unhealthy population and many other risk factors brewing artificially suppressing that LDL did not prevent them from suffering from a heart attack. Uh, so that’s pretty sobering, and that’s when we really want to look deeper, get that genetic testing, determine your risk factors, looking at your very simple to understand scoreboard here, and realizing if you got a bunch of orange and brown, again, that’s the, uh, increased number of alleles, uh, risk factors in your genetics for intolerance to saturated fat that is gonna help guide you to, uh, making, uh, dietary changes. So, again, they, they slapped my, my HDL 62. My triglycerides 39 LDL was at 1 0 5, and that was a red colored LDL being over the recommended range.

Brad (00:19:58):
And my expert consultant that went through the report with me said that was nothing to worry about due to the favorable results over in the category of triglycerides to HDL ratio. Then you get some recommendations based on the genetic report and the scoreboards for fat intolerance, carbon tolerance, saturated fat intolerance. Wouldn’t you know what I’m recommended to eat a balanced diet where I’m, I’m getting plenty of carbs, plenty of fats, plenty of proteins how about that? Although you are somewhat genetically sensitive to carbohydrates, you appear to have normal insulin sensitivity and should be able to consume complex carbs, normally continue to monitor insulin resistance markers. So I did have two risk alleles in the gene called IRS one for increased risk of insulin resistance and diabetes. So again, helping to completely neutralize that increased risk because I’m eating, uh, natural nutritious foods.

Brad (00:21:10):
Now, the next, um, section of the report, uh, was fascinating to me. Um, and it was focusing on methylation. Have you heard of that term? I’ve heard it bantered about for years. It didn’t really, uh, know what it meant exactly. So I’m gonna describe it to you reading off my report. Methylation is representing the body’s ability to carry out the process of adding carbon atoms or methyl groups to compounds. It’s sort of how well you are processing nutrients and recovering from stress. So it’s converting enzymes, neurotransmitters, chemicals, regenerating muscle tissue, basically recovering and operating, with optimal metabolic function. So, are you a good methylator of B vitamins? Are you a poor methylator of B vitamins? Are you a poor methylator of important nutrients like choline? And, you’re gonna find genetic attributes that determine your methylation status.

Brad (00:22:22):
One great way to assess methylation status is by measuring one’s homocysteine levels, homocysteine, you’ve probably heard of that as a prominent marker of systemic inflammation in the body, um, along with high sensitivity c reactive protein. Anyway, homocysteine builds up when methylation is stressed. So if you’re not converting energy well, um, you’re going to build up some of these markers that can be revealed in your blood. High homocysteine levels have been associated with cardiovascular disease and chronic C So if you’re chronically high and elevated, homocysteine also appears to irritate the arterial walls and so forth. So, uh, unfortunately, when you are low in something like choline, the answer isn’t always as simple as taking more choline. This is an important point because we can bomb out on the vitamin shelf and have all this stuff that we take when we’re trying to be healthy, but if we have poor methylation, we’re not going to absorb and benefit from these supplements that we’re taking.

Brad (00:23:36):
One thing that gets in the way is leaky gut syndrome. So, that’s pretty obvious that you are not, uh, extracting and assimilating the nutrients from your diet, even if you’re eating healthy, nutritious foods due to compromised gut function. So, uh, the, the report is going into detail and showing a chemistry class graph of how methylation works in the body. And ta-da. Here comes my score as a methylator. Not too good. My homocysteine level was elevated outta the normal range at 8.1. So, this is a huge concern for me. ’cause as an athlete, you definitely want to be good at methylation, so you can train hard, work that body hard, produce free radicals, produce inflammation, of course, as a consequence of training, and then go home and rest and recover and restore and replenish and renourish. So, with my elevated homocysteine, as I just read from you in the package homocysteine builds up when methylation is stressed.

Brad (00:24:44):
Now, I’m also, uh, predicting that when I take a future blood test, I’ll have a better score. Um, because just as I notice with my testosterone levels on this particular test, they were significantly lower in free testosterone than they have been historically with my some, somewhere around 25 tests over the last five years. I test that all the time, and I notice the fluctuation, and I believe it’s strongly tied to my level of exercise, stress and overall life stress, of course. But it’s mainly trying to perform and recover in my workouts. And when I go into some big cycles and I’m, I’m pushing my body pretty hard. I think some of these scores will tip into, uh, unfortunately into the, uh, the, uh, the elevated homocysteine is one of the markers I see here. However, I also know from my genetics that my basic status is not superior.

Brad (00:25:47):
So my choline risk score, my risk for choline deficiency or poor methylation of choline is over in the brown, not good. My folate risk score is right in the middle. Um, so it’s not, I I wanna see green, but instead I’m seeing yellow and, um, that is also supported by an elevated level of folate in my blood tests. You don’t want to get too high, or you’re starting to get, um, accumulation of, uh, a folate of iron in the organs and, and causing trouble in the extreme example. So, um, I had some great supplements recommended to help me improve my methylation, and I will be starting on those immediately. I’m also recommended to increase my consumption of foods that contain high levels of choline, which include eggs. I believe eggs are the superstar, especially the egg yolk being one of the highest foods in choline.

Brad (00:26:50):
And also, uh, oily cold water fish, high fat dairy products, green vegetables. And, uh, also to supplement with creatine being the essence of, uh, cellular energy production, ATP energy production in cells throughout the body. Wanna make sure that my cells are making energy really well and replenishing energy really well. Because I’m an average methylator <laugh>, and I’m, I would love to see the reports of some of those genetically gifted, high performing athletes who tend to who are able to, uh, handle more training load. I knew a lot of these guys when I was competing on the professional triathlon circuit, and there were some superhuman guys out there. They didn’t win every race by a mile. I was able to compete, uh, pretty well when I was, uh, careful with my training and very mindful of my recovery.

Brad (00:27:41):
But there were definitely some people that were in a whole nother category of being able to work hard and bounce back the next day, recovering when I needed two or three days. And thanks to my close association with my coach, Mark Sisson, during my years competing on the professional triathlon circuit. We designed a program that was optimal for my unique personal attributes. I didn’t have any genetic or even blood, much blood testing back then, but I could tell if I was wasted and not ready to go back and sit on my bike for another four hours the next day, where a lot of guys would just get up, flip the switch, and they’d be out there all day training. Oh my goodness. So it’s so important to dial things in, get these advanced tests that are now available for an affordable price and see what you’re all about.

Brad (00:28:32):
So then we go into a huge chart representing my sensitivity to various vitamins and minerals. So I learned with my alleles for the gene, ADOR two A, that I am a fast metabolizer of caffeine, and I’ve known that for a long time. I’m, you know, minimally sensitive. I don’t get shaky or herky jerky. When I ingest caffeine. I actually don’t take much caffeine except for dark chocolate. I don’t drink coffee or caffeinated beverages. But we go down this list, for vitamin A choline, collagen, caffeine, vitamin D, omega threes. Sensitivity to iron overload, copper, zinc sensitivity to gluten, vitamin C, antioxidants, B12, and magnesium. And each one has a color, green, yellow, or orange. And if I jump over to the orange ones, my ability to synthesize vitamin D is not terribly strong.

Brad (00:29:36):
And so, despite getting a ton of sun exposure, I’d say vastly more than the average person in the times of year and times a day when the rays are at peak sensitivity enough to synthesize vitamin D from sun. Of course, I get some from diet, but we should all understand that the main source of vitamin D is not diet. And it’s certainly not supplements. It is sun exposure over the large skin surface areas of your body during the times of day and times of year of peak solar intensity in your area. So we’ve been programmed to fear sun exposure by mainstream dermatology, looking out for us that we don’t want to get excess exposure burning skin, which dramatically increases our risk of melanoma, of course, of carcinomas, the less serious kind of cancer that they, uh, scrape off or burn off, commonly appearing on those overexposed areas like the back of your hands, your ears, and your face.

Brad (00:30:32):
So if you’re worried about your complexion and you wanna look great and not get wrinkly, go ahead and cover your face anytime you go out, which I did all the time when I was out there training during my career and spending hours and hours on the bike and in the swimming pool. But, you know, get that sun exposure over the, your back, your abdomen, your legs, the large skin surface areas where the potential for manufacturing vitamin D is elevated. And that’s how you’re gonna get optimal vitamin D status if you live an extremely sun challenged lifestyle, such as those of African descent living in Scandinavia or Canada or otherwise being indoors in the office all day or otherwise, minding the recommendations to slather up your entire body with sunscreen. If you’re ever gonna go out in the sun, realize that you have a huge challenge here, and it’s a huge health risk, especially when you, uh, look at genetic predispositions.

Brad (00:31:30):
So definitely a lot of people are gonna be warranting, supplementing taking 2000 IUs every single day or what have you. But you have to make that effort to try to achieve a slight tan and maintain it as long as possible throughout the year. Again, tanning never burning. So when it’s time when you’ve had enough sun, that’s when it’s time to cover up with clothing, ideally, instead of the adverse chemicals that are in almost all, uh, sunscreen products. And you want to achieve that vitamin D status no matter what. Nearly all humans are now low or suboptimal and vitamin D due to the nature of modern society. And we need to monitor that carefully, especially if you have the, uh, genetic predispositions. It turns out I have a risk allele for increased sensitivity to gluten and wheat. And I pretty much found that out many years ago and backed away from a diet that had inordinate amounts of, uh, bread, pasta and whole grains and things that I used to consume in large quantities when I was, uh, training a lot as a triathlete.

Brad (00:32:43):
So, um, definitely felt a health improvement when I cut back and even cut out grains for a significant period of time, especially when I first went to the Primal Blueprint Diet in 2008. When I got together with Mark Sisson and we started working on books and lifestyle programming, um, around the ancestral diet, I was pretty strict cutting out all grains for quite a number of years. Now I’m allowing things to leak back in with less diligence, especially when it comes to going to the farmer’s market and finding that fresh baked sourdough bread. You know what I’m talking about, the kind that gets stale in three or four days. That’s the only kind of bread I will ever eat. And it’s a huge difference in quality and probably in the impact of those who are gluten sensitive to eating a properly produced bread without the preservatives and the chemicals and the additives that are in the loafs that stay on the shelf and don’t get stale for weeks and weeks.

Brad (00:33:43):
So, because I’m a fast metabolizer of caffeine, there’s a recommendation, Hey, you might find improved athletic performance with caffeine intake prior to exercise. Not sure I really, um, um, uh, looking down that path, but, uh, it’s nice to know that, uh, I guess, I don’t need a lot of caffeine and, um, uh, I can burn through it quickly. Uh, I also had a, a gene that puts me at increased risk for hemochromatosis. That’s the accumulation of iron in the blood. So I’m gonna be watching those blood values for the rest of my life and watching my iron intake in the event that I need to tone it down. I use a cast iron skillet all the time to stay away from the chemicals that are in the non-stick pans, but there might be some cause for me to, for example, donate blood if my iron levels get elevated in the future.

Brad (00:34:37):
So this report is mentioning a number of other genes and the number of risk alleles associated with that gene. So I have reduced activity of some of the very important internal antioxidants like superoxide dismutase, as well as glutathione. And so I have a justification or a recommendation to consume increased intake of high antioxidant foods such as fruits, nuts, and dark green vegetables. I’m going to, um, uh, continue my pursuit of high fruit intake, uh, accordingly. So it, it’s a lot of information here when you get your report, um, you know, you can read through it and pull away the most important insights, especially as it comes to modifying your diet, your diet, uh, to stay away from trouble, um, such as having gene variants for gluten sensitivity. So, in my case, watching that iron intake and not overdoing it and zipping down here more.

Brad (00:35:50):
Some of these, uh, liver enzymes were elevated. Um, that means that I want to increase my choline intake and also take those targeted supplements that I mentioned. The eggs being the superstar there. I eat a ton of eggs, but yeah, I need to eat another ton. Now, um, also, I have a, uh, genetic SNP Again, SNP is single nucleotide polymorphism. That’s a variation in your personal genetics that leaves you predisposed or, um, particular to, uh, certain diet, exercise, lifestyle recommendations. I have a genetic SNP associated with tendinopathy tendinopathy, and I may benefit from increased collagen consumption. So go looking for bone broth, sardines. And of course, meat on the bone are the best sources of dietary collagen. And I supplement aggressively with collagen.

Brad (00:36:46):
Now, we get into the fascinating exercise section of my DNA report, and I learned the astonishing insight that my strength to endurance ratio is somewhere around 50 50. I actually learned this seven years ago when I took my first genetic test. And I was flabbergasted because I’ve always been a lifelong endurance athlete. I wasn’t particularly fast, naturally fast running for, you know, the 50 yard dash races that you have when you’re a little kid. But of course, I had, um, extremely high scores in endurance. I had one of the highest VO two max values ever tested at Dr. F’s laboratory in Southern California in 1987. Um, it was 80.2. And, um, you know, that, uh, gave me, um, a high predictability for potential in the endurance sports. And so I, I gravitated toward those, and I assumed I was predominantly endurance in my genetics. And now I learn otherwise from my genetic testing. And what’s interesting to reflect now on my triathlon career is how difficult it was for me to try to maintain the extreme training regimens that were followed by the vast majority of my peers on the professional circuit.

Brad (00:38:09):
I’m talking about the sheer volume of daily, in and out weekly and, uh, yearly, uh, year after year training for many, many hours a week, uh, in, uh, in endurance mode and, uh, comfortable heart rate mode. And it was just really tough for me to be out there all day. Uh, in contrast, I excelled at the shorter distance races. So whenever there was a sprint distance triathlon, which was unusual, we usually raced Olympic distance. That’s a mile swim, 25 mile bike, six mile run. But when we had those sprint distance triathlons, I felt like I had an advantage because I was more powerful and explosive when we only had to ride our bike 10 miles and get off and run three miles. Um, I’m gonna attribute some of that to my genetics as well as my, um, uh, my, my best response to training was when I cut back on the extreme volume and instead took more rest time.

Brad (00:39:07):
Now, someone with a balanced, muscle fiber makeup where I have a lot of fast twitch fibers, that fatigue easily are powerful and explosive and can make me go relatively fast for, we’re talking still about an endurance event when we’re talking about running three miles or running six miles, but they fatigue easily and require more rest. Where if someone coming up with a test with 80%, uh, endurance fibers, um, and 20%, uh, strength and power, they would be, um, even more visibly deficient, I guess, in pure speed. Or being able to, uh, dabble in something like the high jump where I have a little bit of competency, especially in comparison to the people in my age group, maybe not in my, uh, group of high school athletes who were, we had some amazing high jumpers at my high school to the extent that I couldn’t even dream of even trying to compete in it in a meet ’cause there were too many guys over six feet.

Brad (00:40:02):
We had six three, we had six six, we had six eight at our high school. And, um, I was just having fun after practice because I loved the event, but I had no natural genetic aptitude, unlike my natural aptitude for endurance. But with that 60 40 split, when you go and start to train the body for explosive high performance activity, we now know from, uh, emerging research, and there’s, uh, great books and experts talking about this all the time, that you can train muscle fibers to go over to be more fast twitch predominant than slow twitch, especially the category of oxidative fast twitch muscle fibers. So in general, I don’t want Steve Magnus to get mad at me. A fantastic author, blogger, coach, and former elite runner. I’m listening to his book, the Science of Running right now. And he talks about how we make these generalizations about, uh, training, uh, strategies, and even, uh, zones that we train in.

Brad (00:41:03):
And it’s possibly off base because every type of workout has a, uh, important training stimulus. So any speed that you run at is delivering a training stimulus, and the body’s going to adapt. So this obsession with different heart rate zones and, uh, training at anaerobic threshold, is possibly misappropriating scientific insights into real life humans that want to get fast and excel in races. Oh, so it’s gonna make the generalization that we often hear about muscle fiber types. But the actual fact is that there’s a range of muscle fibers from being pure oxidative slow twitch endurance fibers that can go all day long, and not fatigue, but not very powerful, not able to generate a ton of explosive energy. And then you have the pure non oxidative fast twitch fibers, which are very explosive and fatigue very easily.

Brad (00:42:04):
So the non oxidative pure fast twitch fiber, it’s often called type two B or two, type two X. That’s what the high jumper is using, uh, for their four second effort of running the approach and exploding off the ground. Or in the slam dunk contest, uh, for that one, one shot. Uh, you know, uh, single rep maximum deadlift bench press, those are the pure fast twitch fibers. And the slow twitch fibers are the ones that are recruited when you’re doing an ultra marathon or hiking all day, and so forth. And, uh, somewhere in that middle ground, we have what’s called oxidative fast twitch fibers. So these fibers have the potential to utilize oxygen. Therefore, when you’re an endurance athlete and doing endurance training or competing in a grueling event like a marathon, you’re going to recruit oxidative, fast twitch fibers to perform endurance sustained activity and use that oxygen.

Brad (00:42:59):
However, they are also fast twitch by nature. So you can recruit those to do brief explosive efforts or those in-between type of efforts, which are a balance of aerobic and anaerobic. And as I’ve written about a lot in the primal Health Coach Certification program, primal, uh, fitness, uh, expert certification program, um, you, you’d be amazed at the, uh, exercise physiology research, uh, defining, uh, the percentage of contribution between the anaerobic system and the aerobic system for all out efforts. Or at least I was amazed to realize how much the aerobic system contributes even when you’re performing for very short time. So, really quick overview. Zero to seven seconds. Maximum effort is purely anaerobic. And even at an all out effort for as short as one minute and 15 seconds, it’s 50% aerobic system and 50% anaerobic. I mean, we would generally think of a one minute, 15 second all-out race as almost all anaerobic, right?

Brad (00:44:08):
Nope, it’s 50 50. And when you get up to a race as short as the mile where these guys are going very, very fast. The 3:43 I saw in front of my own eyes, Jakob Ingebrigsten and Yared Naguse run in Eugene at the Diamond League finals last year. They’re flying around the track for four laps for three minutes and 43 second race. That’s 80% contribution of the aerobic system, and only 20% contribution of the anaerobic system. That is why you see the world’s elite middle distance runners running seventy, eighty, ninety one hundred, a hundred and twenty miles per week to compete in a race that lasts only three minutes and 43 seconds. Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer of all time with his 25 gold, 28 gold medals, whatever he had, his races ranged from 51 seconds to four minutes at the very longest he would compete. I think that was in the 400, IM maybe less than four minutes, sorry.

Brad (00:45:07):
But he trained for five or six hours a day for a couple decades to excel at those extremely brief races. The takeaway message for most of us listening, especially those with endurance aspirations, if you think that you’re, you’re building your speed, uh, because you’re going to the track and doing, six, eight hundreds with the Tuesday night group, or you think that a 5K is all about speed, whereby a half marathon and a marathon is about endurance, a 5K is an extreme endurance event, even doing half mile repeats, you are mostly fine tuning the aerobic system. That is the rationale and justification to emphasize comfortably paced aerobic training and build your aerobic base in order to excel even at very, very fast races, like the three minute and 43 second mile. So this was all origin from my learning that I was a somewhat around 50 50, power, strength, explosive, explosive strength, power to endurance, and how that, boy, I would’ve loved to have this genetic information back when I was training for triathlon, because it would’ve really directed me to doing what was right for me and honoring my genetics rather than struggling in vain to try to maintain the training volume of my peers based on insecurity or based on cultural parameters where you’re trying to follow the pack.

Brad (00:46:42):
And you know that the top guys on the circuit are generally riding their bicycle for 300 miles a week, running for 40 to 50, and swimming for, uh, 20 to 25,000 meters, totaling up to 20 or 30 hours of pure endurance training every single week. It was simply too much for me largely due to, um, some genetic factors like my average ability to methylate and my predisposition of, um, fast switch muscle fibers. Then, uh, in another chart with probably two dozen genes listed with different color coding, uh, based on the number of alleles and number of risk factors, I am determined to be, uh, intermediate or average in my ability to recover. So I’m right smack in the middle of someone who, uh, is slow recovery versus fast recovery. And I also have a, um, a, a, a stronger tolerance for high intensity exercise.

Brad (00:47:41):
So an athlete, uh, like myself, I would want to, uh, I would be comfortable performing high intensity sessions and then getting a lot of rest afterwards. And I have, uh, I’m sorry to admit that I’ve, uh, pretty much banged my head against the wall for a large portion of my, uh, athletic training in my lifetime, because I didn’t respect that genetic attribute that I can go hard and, uh, respond to the training, right, and not, not fall apart, but require tons of recovery and require less endurance volume due to my, uh, genetics. And so then I have the, after the chart, there’s a nice lengthy report. I underlined a few things to mention, and of course, these, um, are just, uh, to kind of intrigue you and perhaps, uh, compel you to go and get tested yourself at Wild Health. I have a 20% discount code, um, and, and that, uh, might entice you further.

Brad (00:48:43):
But you know, when I’m, when I’m reading through this stuff, boy, it is really I think as a strong motivation to modify my behavior and respect these, um, conclusions. My recovery time is intermediate. Be mindful of excessive soreness after intense workouts, and use that time for recovery. And boy does that happen to me. Uh, throughout my life, I have a huge predisposition for increased muscle soreness. And that is to, that is due to the two risk alleles for the gene SLC, like Salt Lake City, 30 A eight. You’re an increased risk for delayed onset muscle soreness related to impaired zinc transport. Oh, how about that? Dang man. Sorry to hear that, Brad, but have to respect the information. As I said earlier, they’re talking to me about the gene COL five A one. Um, I have increased risk for tendinopathy, more specifically Achilles tendinopathy, which I’ve been dealing with for the last couple years.

Brad (00:49:50):
First with my left foot ending in a surgical procedure at the end of 2022. Took a year to fully recover from that. And now I’m dealing with a condition on my right foot, very similar. I’m not gonna end up in surgery this time ’cause I’m doing all the rehab and the strengthening, but super interesting to know that on this genetic report, they basically told me what’s up with, you know, my struggle with injury. Interestingly, I also have a, uh, risk allele for gene UCP one. You are prone to having a lower resting metabolic rate and cardio respiratory fitness due to decreased mitochondrial density. So they are making the recommendation for me to engage in more cold plunging, to help with those genetic attributes to be a little slow on the metabolism, of course, exercise, helping tremendously my whole life probably, in this realm.

Brad (00:50:47):
More about my, uh, reduced levels of scavenging for reactive oxygen species. So that is, uh, kind of, uh, delayed recovery. Um, decreased antioxidant production resulting in increased muscle breakdown, requiring more rest between bouts of high intensity exercise. Um, hey, guess what? I got some good news on the gene. ACTN three that is associated with more functional fast twitch muscle fibers. Type two fibers. This has been associated with improved sprint and power performance and less, uh, exercise damage after eccentric exercise. Okay, so we go down and down and read more. I have more information about, uh, irritability to manage oxidative stress and longer recovery times recommended. I think I got the message now. Then the next section, and I’m almost done. If you’re getting, you know, encumbered here, but I think it’s important to give you this full picture of what you’re gonna get when you test your genetics.

Brad (00:51:52):
There’s a bunch of genes that are associated with your circadian genetics. And guess what? I got a bunch of green lights on this scoreboard. A couple yellow, one orange, but five green lights, which means I’m a good sleeper. And, uh, I would, wouldn’t, you know, I’ve known that my entire life as I report often I sleep an average of nine hours every night. I tend to be very, very consistent because I simply can’t keep my eyes open after 10:30 PM. I start to get the heavy eyelids and I’m gone. My brain doesn’t function and I have no trouble falling asleep. Almost always. Maybe one out of every 60 days I might have disrupted sleep and I have plenty of ability to sleep for plenty of hours, such that I’m getting that usual average nine hours of sleep, maybe eight and a half to nine and a quarter.

Brad (00:52:50):
And I do notice that, um, in the aftermath of hard workouts, I might need even more than that. I know it’s a ridiculous amount of hours in comparison to most adults, but I get to point to some genetics now as well as my, difficulty in methylation and recovering fast, being associated with needing to sleep more. And so, um, guess what? I have some markers, some risk alleles on certain genes, indicating that I have increased risk of cancer and Alzheimer’s associated with alterations in circadian rhythm. So guess what, Brad is not going to be on the night shift anytime soon. And boy, I, you know, I can imagine some people that are struggling right now with the extreme difficulty of working on swing your night shifts if they have genetic predispositions toward disease. This is one reason why we see higher rates of disease in people struggling, uh, on those shifts.

Brad (00:53:55):
And some people probably don’t, and they probably just adapt better. And those are the ones that are comfortably I can think of. Definitely, several members of my family who somehow are able to thrive and survive on extremely, very disrupted and minimal sleep compared to me. One of ’em sleeps in the same bed, and I do not know how she does it. But, Mia Moore, I’m gonna test her genetics next. ’cause I’m predicting that she has those, um, those snips, those single nucleotide polymorphisms for short sleeping. But I talked to my consultant about that and I said, you know how people think they are short sleepers, or they’re genetically, they have a genetic ability to get by on less sleep. And he said, yeah. I think there’s an article I read that 15% of the population believes they have the genetics for short sleep.

Brad (00:54:46):
And less than 1% of the population are true outliers that can respond favorably or can adapt and thrive even on drastically reduce sleep. And I believe the cutoff is sleeping, uh, six hours or less per night. And, uh, Mia Moore is not that freakish, but, um, what I do find is she has a lot of nights of normal sleep, but if she has a night of drastically reduced sleep <laugh>, we both still wake up at 7:00 AM and she goes about her busy day just like I do. And I’m like, dang, <laugh>, you went to bed at 2:30. I went to bed at 10 30 and we’re both acting the same. And I’m complaining of, uh, getting sleepy on the long drive and asking her to take over. I feel terrible, but, oh, it is what it is. And on this sleep category and moving into neurobehavioral genetics, I was very interested to read, um, some of these you’ve heard of brain derived neurotropic factor, miracle grow for the brain, Dr. Rady

Brad (00:55:47):
calls it. And, we talk about how walking and aerobic exercise is so great for BDNF production, and it helps with neuroplasticity. And, I have a gene associated with reduced activation of BDNF and brain plasticity. So, exercise is going to be super important for me just to, for example, hang on to baseline because I have genetics for reduced neuroplasticity, so I gotta keep, gotta keep sharp, gotta do my puzzles, and gotta keep exercising every day. I also have a COMT is another gene. Dr. Ben Lynch in his book Dirty Genes, had a long section about COMT, which was interesting to read. Um, so it’s a pretty prominent gene. You could probably Google it and read some interesting articles, but my enzyme function associated with less dopamine in the prefrontal cortex.

Brad (00:56:47):
These patients are often referred to as warriors. They’re more comfortable with quick task switching and making quick decisions. They’re generally less anxious and more calm in stressful situations. And that absolutely hits me on the head. I just somehow ended up this way and I have no problem under extremely high pressure situations. I maintain my calm, I’m I’m level. However, they also have strong no SIBO effects. Oh, excuse me, that’s negative outcome, um, from instead of placebo. We have no sibo. Uh, but also there are other symptoms of low dopamine, which include temporary mild depression, lack of motivation, fatigue, constipation, gerd, and muscle cramps. So, I get the pros and cons here, or that when I, when I’m, uh, this calm, chill, low dopamine person, um, I thrive and respond to dopamine stimulating behavior, such as exercise, such as quick task switching and making quick decisions.

Brad (00:58:02):
So we’ve heard so many shows about dopamine and how it affects people’s personality behavior. It’s the motivation hormone. They talk about a DHD, the true diagnosis, uh, is, uh, associated with, um, things that are below one’s, uh, interest threshold. You get distracted. But when you become interested, when it’s compelling enough to stimulate the dopamine pathways, then you can walk in. So people have accused me of being scattered and juggling a lot of plates. And indeed, I do. So with my career and my daily endeavors, I have a lot of disparate interests. I like speed golf, I like high jump. I like sprinting. I like riding my bike. I like doing long hikes. Oh, all this stuff. I’m trying to be all things to all people, you know, that kind of personality where I’m excited and engaged easily. But on the flip side, I can totally relate to that.

Brad (00:58:54):
These kind of lulls where I’ve always described myself as a crash and burn type of athlete where I can feel fantastic. I can go out there and push myself. I have no problem pushing myself hard and doing, uh, these, these amazing workouts or blocks of training or, uh, big challenges like, uh, hiking the, the cactus to clouds trail, or beating my personal best time in, in the mile or whatever I’m going for on the speed golf course. Breaking the world record A isn’t that great. But then, in tandem with that are times where I have difficulty get getting going and perhaps difficulty staying focused on things that are beneath my level of interest. And so I have some, uh, supplements to, uh, that are recommended, uh, for this, uh, this type of genetic profile. Tyrosine being, uh, one of the main ones.

Brad (00:59:47):
And I also heard this from, uh, the great podcast with Christian Thibaudeau. You can search for him on your podcast app, and he’s been on a, a particular, uh, athletic podcasts like five times talking about his, uh, neuro typing. You can also google that term Christian Thibaudeau neuro typing. And he’s done some wonderful work, a quiz you can take, I think it takes costs 15 or 20 bucks on his website, and you can determine your neurotype and thereby plug in the most appropriate training program to answer to your neurotype. And I think I’m a Neurotype two A. So it aligns very closely with the attributes that I’ve mentioned in this genetic report. I need a lot of recovery. I need a lot of variation, um, in my training protocols. I don’t like to go and consistently crank out four hours a day.

Brad (01:00:41):
In the triathlete example, and even now, I like to, I don’t have a consistent week in, week out every Tuesday. I do this every Wednesday. I do that. I’m very intuitive and varied, and I require different workout challenges to maintain my interest. I kind of thought, I kind of felt insecure about that. Why can’t I adhere to a consistent schedule? Wouldn’t this be better for me? But it was really heartwarming to learn more about, Christian Thibaudeau’s work. Tara Garrison at the Inside Out Health podcast, I think she had a couple great interviews with him, so maybe I should direct you straight there as well as the Just Fly Performance podcast. That’s, I finally remember the name where I heard some interviews with Thibodaux. But, uh, go check out Tara’s thing ’cause she kind of broke it down to lay person’s interest and learn more about Neurotyping that podcast. And, ara, as you know, is a coach and she’s been trained in this neurotyping. So that’s part of her game. If you, uh, look at her offerings on her website,

Brad (01:01:46):
Oh, ere’s a funny one. The gene, FAAH, you have one risk allele. So you have lower fatty acid hydrolyze function and a slower breakdown of cannabinoids CBD and THC. This means you’ll have less improvement in anxiety, and if you’re taking CBD or THC and a faster metabolism and less addictive potential. Unfortunately, I’ve never tried it so <laugh>, I can never, I can’t validate whether this is right, but it’s kind of interesting news that apparently, it’s not gonna have as much of an, an effect on me as someone who might have a different genetic profile and perhaps a more profound response for an, for example, anxiety reducing response when consuming CBD or THC and thereby perhaps more potential for a addiction.

Brad (01:02:40):
Interesting. We go to, finishing up this report. There’s, so much written here, um, on, on the topic of cardiovascular disease risk. I have low disease risk factors. I’ve confirmed this with a bunch of tests. I talked about my coronary artery calcium scan. Then they have your risk factors for, uh, dementia, which so many people are concerned with these days, especially the all important status of your APO, gene that is predictive for Alzheimer’s. Fortunately, it’s not, too troubling. However, I do have increased risk for late onset Alzheimer’s disease associated with sleep disturbance. So, again, do not work those swing shift jobs, Brad. Thank you. Um, interestingly, they have one associated with ketosis and the ketogenic diet. And, my interleukin one B polymorphism is associated with higher neuroinflammation and less cognitive benefit from ketosis.

Brad (01:03:46):
So, when I plunged deep into the ketogenic diet, in the experimental phase, when Mark Sisson and I were working on the Keto Reset Diet, so I adhered to a ketogenic diet pretty strictly for many months. And, during this time that keto was getting popular, I heard all these people reporting how they had amazingly increased cognitive clarity. And I’m like, I don’t feel shit except for maybe a little tired in the afternoon sometime when I’m trying to work out and adhere to this ketogenic diet in the name of writing a book responsibly and learning all about it. Um, so I kind of felt like, uh, dang, how come, maybe, maybe I’m already so cognitively sharp that there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nowhere up to go <laugh>. However, um, it turns out that possibly, uh, my genetics influence the lack of amazing response, uh, to cognitive clarity when going in the ketogenic diet.

Brad (01:04:41):
So then there are, uh, talking about the inflammatory markers. Fortunately, with the very prominent blood tests for high sensitivity c reactive protein as a great marker for system-wide inflammation. My number was very low. So that’s, again, coming over from the blood work to the genetic testing, to confirm that I have a sensitivity to increased inflammation after intense exercise. However, my H-S-C-R-P level is low, which suggests that I’m, you know, responsibly, um, handling, uh, my training load at the time of the blood test anyway. And interestingly, in, in case you’re not aware, the blood test, of course, is a snapshot to see how you’re doing right now and how your lifestyle patterns of the last year or five years or 10 or or five weeks or five days are affecting the various levels. But your genetic results never change.

Brad (01:05:41):
So if you get your act together and get in shape and lose weight and go back and do another genetic test, you’re gonna have the same report. So that’s the difference right there. They have a calculation to determine your chronological age. I mean, excuse me, your biological age. And we’ve played around with this so much, and they’ve had things on the internet, I know going back 20 years, there was a website called real age.com or something like that, and you can answer all these questions. And nowadays, um, they’re inputting, uh, blood results, genetic data and calculating a biological age. And, I’m sure it’s cutesy and fun. And I’ve heard health promoters, uh, most laughably Dr. David Sinclair, claiming that his biological age is 10 years below his chronological age, and then turning around in the same article, reporting that he suffers from low testosterone.

Brad (01:06:40):
So, what I wanna do is put in a vote for the practical determination of your biological age through fitness markers. And there’s tremendous research backing this up. We talk about this at length in Keto for Life, and also in our new upcoming book with Mark Sisson and I, I’m talking about, Born to Walk, where your competency at things like performing squats or pushups or the one-mile run. The famous research from the Cooper Institute in Texas A and M concluded that once time in the mile run all out effort at age 50 is highly predictive of your health and potential lifespan, how successful you will be to reach age 80. And if you have a superior time, then you’re gonna be highly predictive of longevity Superior, by the Cooper Institute report is males under eight minutes and females under nine minutes at age 50.

Brad (01:07:38):
And in the fail category, the extreme health risk and poor longevity prospects is males exceeding 12 minutes and females exceeding 13 minutes. So how simple is that, that you can go and measure your time in the mile, no blood drawn, no genetic tests. Just see how you’re doing at age 50 and have that be a great marker for longevity. Now, uh, the emergence of the VO two max test has exploded in popularity. You hear a lot of health promoters talking about how this is the single best predictor of longevity and your cardiovascular status. There was an entire chapter in Steve Magnus book, the Science of Running refuting, the obsession with VO two Max Tests, because, um, it’s not necessarily the end all, especially for a fit athletic person, it’s a value that does not change much with training.

Brad (01:08:33):
But for an unfit person, tracking that VO two max, at regular intervals throughout life is highly validated to be, um, a nice correlator to your longevity. Um, the research reveals that if you have a VO two max result that drops below 19 milliliters per kilogram per minute, that’s how much oxygen you can process per minute in the body. So if you can’t process much oxygen, in contrast to a top athlete with an extremely a high VO O2 max, someone under 19 is about to die <laugh>, because basic metabolic function takes up too much energy, takes up too much oxygen just to get up outta the chair and walk over to the dining hall and sit down again, and they’re huffing and puffing climbing stairs is an extreme effort for someone with a VO two max under 19.

Brad (01:09:31):
So it’s kind of sobering. Look at, you know, when we’re seeing people toward the end in the nursing home, that’s basically can be you strap up a gas mask to ’em and make ’em walk on a treadmill, you would reveal that you’re almost there at the end, pal. Sorry. Now on the flip side, the elite athletes have been obsessed with VO O2 max values for decades because it is believed to be pretty predictive of one’s potential in endurance activities. So a high VO O2 max, someone who can process a high volume of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute, is going to be able to sail up the mountain on the climb during the Tour de France, or be able to hang in the lead pack in the marathon with appropriate training, of course. Uh, but there’s so many other factors when it comes to endurance potential, for example, technique and running economy such that VO two max is sort of, it’s not the end all.

Brad (01:10:28):
So for the average person that’s wanting to be in shape, wanting to get tested, see how they do, I strongly recommend performing a VO two max test. I just did my first one in probably 30 years, at Dr. Judson Brandiss office, Brandeis md.com clinic. Listen to our two recent podcasts where he talks about male sexual health and overall hormonal endocrine health. And he has a VO two max machine right there in his office because it’s so strongly correlated, um, with sexual health and overall health, let’s see, my result was 53. So I went down from 80.2 when I was at my peak as an endurance professional athlete. But I was pretty pleased with that result because my endurance training is now de-emphasized in favor of sprint power and explosive training. Uh, but I will contend because my interests lie elsewhere, that I’m going to stack my 400 meter time, or my 200 meter time, or my high jump clearance as a reliable marker for my longevity potential, along with my VO two max, along with my blood values, and along with just the practical markers of day-to-day life and your disposition, mood, energy levels and so forth.

Brad (01:11:50):
And I also wanna put in a plug for Deepak Chopra and his great work in the book, Ageless Body Timeless Mind. I think it’s one of the greatest books ever written, back in the eighties, and then he wrote 20 more books, perhaps diluting his brand a bit. But if you just buy that single book, one of the, maybe his first book, or really one of his oldest books, um, it was a real mindblower. And one of the important points that he made is that we literally have three ages that are relevant. There is one’s chronological age, how many years since your birthday, one’s biological age, and that’s the relative state of the health and, uh, vitality, fitness, peak performance, uh, comparison to chronological age. And I guess if you naming a biological age, I guess you’re comparing to your peers.

Brad (01:12:45):
And that’s kind of disturbing because, um, the average health status is so pathetic these days that anything less than superior isn’t really that impressive. You get what I’m saying here. Um, if you come out and, uh, fill out a website questionnaire and, um, get your biological age calculated at five years below your chronological age, who are they comparing that to? Um, <laugh>. Okay. Quit patting yourself on the back. Now the third one, and Deepak Chopra makes a compelling case that this is the most important age of all, and that’s your psychological age. Of course, it is directly associated with your biological age, because if you maintain a youthful spirit and a youthful disposition and engage in curiosity and extend yourself outside your comfort zone to make new social connections and try new experiences and new challenges, and of course, are pushing your body for physical fitness challenges as part of that too.

Brad (01:13:47):
But also other challenges like joining the Toastmasters Club and giving your first public speaking all those things, nurture a healthy psychological age. And in Chopra’s work, he mentions the most, the strongest correlation between centenarians across the globe was not diet. It was not even their fitness protocols. It was their maintenance of a youthful spirit. That was the number one longevity factor, or the most profound longevity factor observed in people over a hundred. And I never forgot that I read the book in the late eighties, and I think about it every day, is that maintaining a youthful spirit is number one, a positive cheerful disposition, uh, nurturing healthy social connections. The Blue Zones work, which has now become so controversial because they are inappropriately pitching things like a plant-based diet as a centerpiece of longevity and its absolute nonsense.

Brad (01:14:50):
Dr. Paul Saladino did a fantastic job taking that apart and revealing the actual data in these blue zone societies, which are cherry picked. Anyway, the actual data shows that, uh, animal products are, um, a prominent part of almost all of their diets. But they’re other important conclusions. They call ’em the Power nine. You can Google that and learn about the Blue Zones Power nine. And number one was an active lifestyle based on walking and movement. And right up there with that was, uh, social connections and, um, oftentimes blended. So, um, social connections centered upon walking movement, exercise. And, um, boy, if you can put those two and two together. So nurture, healthy social connections and walking and moving throughout the day. Those are great longevity factors. And so, nurturing that youthful spirit, that young psychological age is perhaps, uh, even more important and obsessing and quantifying and stressing about all this, uh, biohacking that we are engaging in today.

Brad (01:16:04):
And I remember some choice quotes from Deepak’s book where they were interviewing one of the oldest people on the earth. I believe it was a female from the Caucasian Mountains in Russia, another pocket of longevity. Uh, they did not, were not listed as one of the blue zones, but, um, it’s, it known that long-lived citizens out there. And they were interviewing her as she was working in her garden. And the interviewer asked the person who I believe is 112 or 113, um, why don’t you get someone to help you with all the work that you have to do in your garden? And the 112 year old, uh, shot back because it’s my garden <laugh>. Okay. Um, that’s, that’s pretty awesome. Uh, so I’m, I’m wrapping up this lengthy, uh, discussion of my, genetic testing. There’s many more pages of me to read personally about how I have decreased glutathione production and warranting consuming more of the healthy foods that I definitely engage in.

Brad (01:17:11):
And then I’m gonna quickly jump over to the labs. We don’t need to spend much time on here. You’re probably all familiar with a complete blood count where you get the basics of what’s running through your blood, your, your white count, your red count, your hemoglobin, your hematocrit these terms like platelets, neutrophils, limps, monocytes, um, and you just kind of, uh, for a quick overview, you’re, you’re kind of looking to, uh, land in the normal range here. And if you’re not in the normal range, then this is a cause for concern and you want to go looking deeper. Um, one thing I should mention briefly on that note is one hematocrit. That’s the percentage of oxygen in your red blood cells. This is the thing that endurance athletes dope to increase so that they have more oxygenated blood.

Brad (01:17:59):
But Mike Mutzel has two excellent videos talking about how an elevated hematocrit is essentially referencing, sludgy blood, perhaps, too iron-rich in my case, as I mentioned in my genetic test. And so if your hematocrit is up too high, uh, the athletes will dope up to 50.0 or above. But if you’re up in the high forties or touching 50, you wanna take a look at, um, lifestyle intervention because this is indeed a pretty serious risk factor and a pretty serious sign of, uh, poor health. Then in the, uh, metabolic category, my glucose was flagged at as high at 1 0 2. But they have this phenomenon called the dawn effect, where you’re, uh, you’re, you’re supposed to spike cortisol and spike glucose in the morning in order to wake up feeling alert and energized. And so there’s really, um, no concern when I’m looking at a glucose of 1 0 2 in the morning.

Brad (01:19:02):
I’m pleased to see it there. And I think there’s been some obsession, especially in the craze of keto, of people wanting to come on, on the airwaves and report that their glucose is now down at 86, or it was at 78 last week, and it’s usually at 89, and isn’t that great? The lower the better. We need a healthy amount of glucose circulating the bloodstream to give us energy and clarity. The brain is the most ravenous organ in the body for total calories burned, and it burns primarily glucose. So, low blood sugar is not a great sign to see on your blood result. If you’re engaging in an extreme restrictive diet like keto, you might see that. But, um, we gotta get away from this black and white thinking there. I came through with some slightly elevated liver enzymes that I talked through with my coach, and learned that it was, um, no big deal.

Brad (01:19:58):
This time with testosterone. I was surprised to notice, a healthy serum, uh, total, it’s called serum or total testosterone of 683. And by 25 tests that I’ve done over the past five years, um, generally between, uh, six 50 and seven 50 had been as high as 1,004 and maybe down in the high five hundreds, at the worst. But my free t uh, was down at 7.6 on a reference interval of seven to 24. And the last time I tested it was up at 21 or 22. So I went from super high free testosterone down to pretty low. And again, I’m gonna point directly to my training load and my recovery state. It’s also interesting to note when a lot of people say that free tea is more important than total t and I heard direct contradiction, um, from the highly respected Dr.Tommy Wood,

Brad (01:20:53):
where he wants people looking at their total t their serum tea with free tea as a secondary, secondary marker, because free tea is so small, it’s so sensitive, it’s measured in pictograms that’s like, uh, I believe a millionth of a gram or something. And they’re actually guessing it, uh, by making a calculation. So they’re not actually, uh, determining and counting the amount of testosterone, that’s freely circulating their bloodstream. They’re just doing a deduction based on your levels of sex hormone binding globulin, and total testosterone. So it’s not as worrisome as tracking your total testosterone. And if you see that starting to drop below the mid range, again, we don’t wanna be average. We want to be superior in every way, based on the pathetic state of society’s average these days, and the new reference range for testosterone, it was famously lowered due to the global obesity epidemic lowering everyone’s testosterone around the globe systematically, it’s been lowering by about 1% per year since the 1980s, on average, on people of all ages around the globe.

Brad (01:22:08):
So today’s 26-year-old has less testosterone than dad did at 26 who had less testosterone than grandpa did at 26. That’s pretty sobering. So today’s reference intervals, you know, normal range for testosterone, free testosterone is 2 64 to nine 16. It used to be three something to a thousand. That’s crazy. <laugh>, what do we do when we have global obesity epidemic and other things that are harming male hormonal health like plastics and like EMFs and all the rest? Um, we just lower the, the normal range. So another justification for wanting to be superior on things like testosterone. So anyway, checking your, your, your serum testosterone or your total testosterone as your priority, that means your body, your testes are making, uh, an appropriate amount of testosterone. And if your free T is a little low, you can go digging.

Brad (01:23:05):
You can look at your sex hormone binding globulin levels. And if they’re elevated, like mine often are, that in many ways, is a sign of robust health. And I just need to, uh, release more to the, uh, the destination, uh, organs and possibly due to training variations. I might come back next week and it would test in the middle of the range or even on the high range. You’ve heard of HB A1C, that’s the average, um, uh, blood glucose value over a calculated over a longer period of time. So you wanna have that in the healthy range, which is under 5.7. And if you’re over six, you’re pre-diabetic. And we want to get outta that category quick. I’m almost finished here, but I wanna point out to some of the most important blood values that I want you to order up for yourself if they’re not on your basic annual physical.

Brad (01:23:57):
One of ’em is vitamin D shockingly often doesn’t come on the routine blood test, and I had to argue with my wife’s healthcare practitioner to add vitamin D to her annual test as a special request. The other one that’s not, uh, hardly ever on there routinely is fasting insulin. And you can hear great content from Dr. Paul Saladino arguing that this is his single most important and most favored tracker for metabolic health. You wanna have that fasting insulin down below five, ideally and urgently below 15. That is another sign for insulin resistance, which is the essence of the global, uh, the most prominent global health problem, which is called metabolic syndrome, or insulin resistance. And vitamin D, you generally get a passing score if you’re over 30. The reference interval, the normal range is 30 to a hundred. Um, but the vitamin D experts, including, Dr. Michael Holick, the author of the Vitamin D solution, I absolutely love that book and was inspired to write a vitamin D pamphlet, A PDF that will give you the overview so you don’t have to read the whole complicated book that’s offered for free at bradkearns.com when you sign ‘up for the email newsletter and download the, the prefs.

Brad (01:25:15):
One of ’em is the comprehensive guide to vitamin D Health. Um, he argues persuasively that 30 is way too low to be considered healthy, even though it’s in the normal range and you really wanna shoot for getting up to 50 and above. So my vitamin D was 48.5. Surprisingly it’s been 55 or 60 at other times. Uh, but again, I learned from my genetics that I am, uh, not a good vitamin D maker. So I am going out there and soaking up as much sun as I can. And this test was conducted in April, which is the absolute lowest ones vitamin D will ever get in the Northern hemisphere because we are just now able to start manufacturing vitamin D during the winter months, depending on your latitude, right? If you’re in Seattle, Washington, it’s different than San Diego.

Brad (01:26:05):
Florida is different than Maine and New England. But if you’re in the, you know, uh, the, the middle latitudes, let’s say from 30 to 45, uh, you have a few months of the winter where vitamin D production is impossible, how can you tell if you’re making vitamin D or not? One, you can download this cool app called vitamin D minder, I think it’s called. And two, you can determine that you’re making vitamin D by your ability to tan. So if you imagine going out in the middle of winter on a sunny day and laying out in a beach chair in a bathing suit in Portland or in, Cleveland, or Milwaukee, you’re not gonna tan at all. <laugh>, you’re probably gonna get cold too. But I’d, I’d even set the example of let’s say Los Angeles where I grew up, uh, in the middle of January or December, even on a sunny day, the air temperature might get up to, uh, 75 or even 80 on a rare occasion.

Brad (01:27:04):
But the sun’s rays are too oblique to warrant, uh, to generate tanning, uh, nor vitamin D production. So you have a dead zone over the winter where you’re not making vitamin D and your vitamin D is stored when it’s, uh, uh, absorbed by. When it’s manufactured from sun exposure, it’s not stored very, very well from supplementation or diet, interestingly. So you will work off your storage over the winter, and it will slowly deplete until you have that increased need for sun exposure as your vitamin D levels drop, drop, drop as we get into February, March, April. Here’s my testing date. My number’s 48.5. I’m gonna predict it’s gonna get up to 60 or higher as we get into May, June, July, August, the prime time for sun exposure over the large skin surface areas of my body, while I’ll maintain as good a tan as I can, man, and get that vitamin D status up, and that’ll carry me through the, uh, winter months.

Brad (01:28:04):
I talked about AOB at the outset. Dr. Attia is obsessed with this marker as a superior way to track cardiovascular disease risk. This is another molecule that’s carried by the lipoproteins through the bloodstream. So if you have a lot of AOB, your heart disease risk is determined to be very high. And here the ranges that are often communicated under 90 is healthy, borderline is 90 to 99, high is a hundred to 130, and over one 30, you are at a high risk of coronary artery disease. Attia is so obsessed with this. I’ve heard him, uh, proclaim that he wants to, uh, medicate his patients to get it down to under 30 through the use of prescription drugs. Who am I to argue with, uh, one of the leading longevity physicians? But I am resolutely marching through life with a philosophy and a belief system that I am not going to take a prescription drug unless absolutely necessary.

Brad (01:29:09):
I’m inspired by the commentary from Dr. Phil Maffetone that every prescription drug has side effects, um, some of them serious, that, uh, are less respected by the medical community that is focused on solving the problem or attacking the symptom rather than addressing the cause. And there’s no free lunch. So medicating things down, I think is it’s already shown to be blown up in, um, in, in a lot of occasions to be less than magical. Remember all the h hype and hoopla around metformin and resveratrol and these miracle agents that were gonna help you, uh, prevent heart disease. And so far, we still have not invented a pill that’s superior to exercise as Peter Attia, proclaims, as well as anybody else, exercise quote, is the single greatest longevity intervention ever discovered, and nothing else even comes close. So I am going to work through all those genetic particulars and frailties that I mentioned, through the use of exercise and also through diet to be the healthiest I can be and thereby neutralize all these risk factors that I might be baking due to my genetics and whatever imperfections that, you know, are, are happening in my lifestyle routine.

Brad (01:30:29):
Uh, boy isn’t that scary to learn that, um, I have increased risk of Alzheimer’s and adverse health outcomes from, uh, compromising, uh, my circadian rhythm. And, uh, wouldn’t you know it, I have a tendency to be locked in there, probably due to that extreme sensitivity. And I, as I report to people a lot, I do wonder if I’m a wimp sometimes, but if I miss a night of sleep or my night of sleep is not perfect, I feel like hell throughout the next day, my eyes feel heavy, I can’t concentrate well, I need to take a nap. I’ve been known to take two or three naps, all of ’em, short duration, but just trying to get back to baseline after a slightly disturbed night of sleep. And there in contrast is Mia Moore, who disturbs her nights of sleep frequently with absolutely no adverse effects.

Brad (01:31:19):
So it really helps to, get to know your genetics and, you know, dial things in. So that 20% off code that I want to convey to you is a Brad podcast, B-R-A-D-P-O-D-C-A-S-T Brad podcast at wildhealth.com. You’ll see a number of options and I highly recommend signing up for the whole Precision health package where you get the DNA testing, the comprehensive blood testing, and the consultation with a highly trained precision medicine physician, as well as a health coach for ongoing needs and repeat testing. It’s great to get on the cutting edge here, so a vote for the cutting edge, and then another vote for just engaging in the basics of healthy living so that you can be the best you can be with respect to all your genetic particulars. Thanks for listening, watching. Lemme know if you have any questions. Maybe we’ll do a Q and A show on some of these particulars. ’cause so much information has been thrown out here. Maybe you have your own genetic testing that you’re intrigued about and wondering about, and we continue talking about this important topic. Okay, thank you.

Brad (01:32:35):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email, podcast@bradventures.com and visit brad kearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.

 

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