Anonymous says, Dr. CMJ in a previous email you sent out, you referenced Self Decode as being a
game changer. I also heard you in a podcast that you do not use genome analysis very often in your
practice because you don't find it reliable. I believe I'm paraphrasing you correctly,
but please correct me if I'm not. Can you please elaborate on what you believe is useful and not
useful with regard to genome analysis generally in Self-Decode, specifically? Additionally,
if there are specific areas you believe are especially helpful, for example, identifying
MTHFR or not helpful for people to identify through genome analysis, I would really appreciate
hearing your thoughts. Thanks in advance. So the quick answer on this is that
there are very, very few genes where we have really good information on how they impact
nutritional requirements, but we have many, many, many genes where we have decent information on
what they do mechanistically and where we can speculate things that might be helpful.
So genome analysis is very useful as a brainstorming mechanism. And of course, there's
genome sequencing in a clinical context to identify rare metabolic diseases,
a totally different thing. That's obviously useful for where it's been defined as being useful, but
doing a 23andMe analysis and submitting it to a report is useful for brainstorming and
potentially generating some explanations for things that you observed. If you want to get
deep into pattern analysis and try to explain something that you can't explain otherwise.
And I think Self-Decode did a really good job in distilling, first of all,
taking a lot of conflicting polymorphisms and distilling them into a net result.
And then, second of all, distilling some actionable principles. Third of all,
noting where they're brainstorming and providing references to give some reasonable level of
confidence of exactly, I mean, some reasonable level of understanding of their confidence
in what they're saying, which is largely limited to this is going on in your genes. This might
be related. This might help. So it's really for the most part, a brainstorming tool. But there's
very specific things where for MTHFR, we know it increases choline requirements. It's reasonable to
think that you want to watch your folate intake and so on. But even my MTHFR protocol is driven
largely on mechanistic understanding that seems to result in strategies that have worked for people.
So like creatine supplementation there is a study of it lowering homocysteine, but the logic there
is mostly understanding the mechanisms, but the choline requirement, there are studies justifying.
So it's rare that there are studies justifying the nutritional approach to the genes. And it's much
more common that it's great brainstorming. Thank you Anonymous for your question.