 Nothing like starting with genetics and folate in the morning, huh? Yeah Well, welcome to my Alma Mater. I love this place and I haven't been here since I struggled through three days of gruesome clinical board exams, but I made it What do you call a medical student who graduates at the bottom of their class not that I did a Doctor so dirty genes Concept is simple Many are thinking that their genes if you're born with snips or you're born with genetic defects that you're in trouble That's not true. You can be in trouble. Yes. There are some genes that are definitely a big issue There's other genes About 19,000 of them that if there are no defects the environment your mindset Food all these play a huge role in how your genes function Vitamins and nutrients or the lack thereof so we have to keep in mind how malleable our genes are So just because you're born with a bad set doesn't mean you're doomed and just because you're born with a clean set So they mean you live forever Who's that guy who smoked like crazy and drank like crazy? Lived to a hundred and some years old Name is George Burns. Was that it? All right It's in Churchill, too. That's cool. He deserved to live a long time This couple had a beautiful baby boy named Hugo Now it wasn't easy just a year and a half ago Prior to Hugo being born they had a baby born with no skull Obviously that does not work and so they lost their baby They contacted me and said look we both have empty jafar. We had a Significant baby with birth defects that did not survive. We're very nervous about trying again Shall we try again? I said well, I believe with the right tools that you can have a very healthy baby And they did and this was a result But it was a struggle. It was not easy and they were terrified But we made some major life differences, but the result is phenomenal now I Have three amazing boys. I didn't work hard at it. In fact, oops was said three times And every time was on vacation so I've stopped traveling That's why I do presentations now at home I live here in Seattle No, but seriously, why is it that I have three amazing boys without any difficulty and my wife as well Yet the prior couple had significant difficulties. Is it just genetics? Well, they definitely played a role, but I have empty jafar as well And so does my wife and thus so do my boys The environment is a really big thing to look at and it's one that we forget to even look at because we're so busy at Screens and food and supplements that we forget that our surroundings are extremely important. This is where my wife grew up literally, so this is about five minutes from her home and this is in Russia and This elevation is about sea level. She's really close to the Baltic Sea and What do you see here? Well birch trees vegetation low altitude Yes, there's a lot of Sun in the summer, but the rest of the year you got very little Sun This is me traveling. This was my End of my junior year at this institution. I did not know what I was going to do So I pulled the plug out of studies and I traveled the world India I'm up here at about 10,000 feet. There's not much vegetation. There is less oxygen There is pretty pristine air So my environment here is pretty good, but there are some elements which are you know stressful to the body Now here I am and out back Australia Yes, I was a cowboy Now I'm a doctor go figure But this environment very very hostile again pretty low level, but scorching hot Sun during the day and at night. It's freezing Absolutely freezing in Australia if you've been there they have burn times even the announcers on the radio between songs They say time to roll over time to apply more sunscreen because the UV radiation there is very very strong So again the environment plays a role food This is at my wife's cabin in Russia. What are we growing? Vegetables plants Okay, so this is their main source of food and they grow their own food because the family was really poor and so they didn't go out to the store and Buy stuff. That's perfectly, you know colored and shaped and so on It's full of issues but you know my son there is in the left with his cousin Pauline on the right and They're eating real strawberries that were grown at the right time of year without nasty chemicals Now here. I am on that Australian ranch and It was one and a half million acres to hold only about 12,000 cattle Why because there's little vegetation? Nothing can really grow out here. There's very little water Now I arrived on this station by chance. I was a lot of work to get the job, but I managed But I arrived as a vegetarian And I told the camp cook who was an alcoholic and grumpy where I could have made a reality show out of this and I said I'm a vegetarian first of all. I'm an American in the middle of nowhere and then I demand that I've that he cooks vegetarian and there's no vegetation So and there's nothing everything was flown into this place Males flown in doctors were flown in so there was seven employees on one half million acres in the center at the Outback, so I lost my vegetarianism Three meals a day. We ate meat Now this is we're back in America We were in Russia. We are in Australia now. We're in America. This is our food and this is where it goes We have beautiful packaging and great commercials jeans now This is pretty intense biochemistry and genetics the little bubbles are genes But my point is that all of us in this room are about 99 percent to 99.9 percent identical That much that's very very similar So what is it here in these genes that makes us slightly different? So every one of us has some slight variation in those little bubbles that Full R2 DHR into Jafar. There's some slight variation in there, but the functions remain the same But they may act faster. They may act slower And then there's things which influence those said genes, but most of us are 99 to 99.9 genetically identical So why do we introduce folic acid? Our ancestors didn't have folic acid. So why do we need folic acid? well because we have neural tube defects and we We have the science and we said hey if there's neural tube defects that must be a folate deficiency So let's fix it by making a synthetic nutrient called folic acid and insert it in every single damn food that we have available and Give it to everyone because we've done the research Well, I agree with that right there's a main there's a huge public health crisis try to solve it totally cool with that Now sorry for the gruesome image, but a lot of people don't understand what a neural tube defect is So yeah, I hit you with it. This is significant now Neural tube defect can general heart defect extra nipples imagine growing up with extra nipples as a kid Then you have hypospadias if cleft palate tongue tie All these things are related to folate and methylation not folic acid Now the baby on the right is what Hugo's brother had Did not live he had no school. So there are different levels of severity and I challenge the notion that Pregnancy and all these midline defects are just a range of how severe the methylation and folate dysfunction is So can you know heart defect serious neural tube defect serious having no skull serious Miscarriage more serious down syndrome more serious It's a spectrum. Now. Why does this happen? Why are we having these midline defects? Well Because we figured hey We don't want to be making bread fresh every day Let's strip everything out of the wheat so it's shelf stable. It doesn't mold doesn't decay it can sit there for ten years and We can sell it more efficiently. It's good for business. We can grow a tremendous amount of grain and store it So that's what we've done We removed the whole grain the brand the middleings whatever they are the wheat germ the wheat germ oil and we are left with garbage So the solution is to enrich our garbage food with a garbage nutrient That's pretty clever Who has read the book the case against sugar? Gary I Highly recommend you guys read that book and ladies phenomenal book Cigarettes weren't addictive until they soaked the tobacco and sugar Then they soaked the tobacco and sugar and allowed the smoke to get in the lungs hit them with more nicotine in the brain Wow, who knew enriched flower Enriched flower What are our ancestors eat? We eat not really They ate real food right they didn't even grow wheat I'm not a paleo expert. I'm not going to step on anyone's toes there, but I know they didn't eat it in rich flower But what do we do look at this? This was a this was a comment on some food critics blog a food critic and she said this stuff is Gives me a high five to my taste buds Yes, please although. I'm pretty sure the sensation is more of a scalding one than a high five slap But whatever Through the fast food industry gets it food science probably taught here in this lovely campus Gets it they understand that if you make food like this It's addictive and it hits your dopamine receptors and you want more Despite the fact that you know it's gonna more give you more of a scalding effect. We all know that I mean how many of us go for that treat or the alcohol or those things which spike our dopamine yet We know we shouldn't do it. I do it and I know I read all the science and I still do it Did you know that winter wheat has over two million pounds of roundup sprayed on it every year? Why are there weeds growing on winter wheat? No No They do it because in the winter this the wheat doesn't ripen faster So if they you can't harvest a green plant, right? You got to have the the seed fully mature. So if you spray it with roundup It dies and the seed matures really really quickly now. This is not an approved use of roundup But it's done a lot Thankfully only 14 of planted wheat does this but they use a massive amount of roundup Food babe had a I took the slide out for the sake of time Which I probably shouldn't because now I'm talking about it anyway, but food babe if you google food babe Roundup PDF in foods She'll show you how much parts per billion and parts per million that roundup is in Everyday foods. Yes, even organic full eight full eight foliage Green stuff This is what our ancestors eat Hopefully it's what we Because after all evolution takes a long time We haven't evolved to use folic acid yet is only introduced in the late 80s, but yet we're all consuming it This is what we should be consuming Folate is foliage Comes from Latin word folium folic acid I beg to differ is not folate my source of The information above is on the bottom. So these are full papers If you guys want to dig deeper and the research and make sure I'm not pulling this out of my Arse, you know, this is From pub med national library of medicine Methyl folate who's heard of it? Okay The main circulating form of folate making up over 80 percent of your folate in your blood Now it should it said it should be It's not it should be why Because this is what most people are getting and also in their food If you look at here, it says folate parentheses as folic acid Look at what is inside of the parentheses on your supplements Inside the parentheses is what you should be paying attention to Not the first word. Yes, those are all big words and we just glaze over them But you should start learning that because if you're swallowing it You need to know what it's doing and then pay attention to the other ingredients on the bottom because yes You need purply and glycol and propyl paraben in your multi vitamin because you are deficient in that genetic control Talk about this for a second Substrate is the stuff It's the raw material goods The end product is the finished product Say you're a steel manufacturer And you make well, let's say you're a shovel manufacturer and you need steel to make the shovel So the steel is the substrate the end product is the spade The very end The cofactor is the heat. It's the fire. It's also the oxygen Jeans can have multiple cofactors not just one mpg far has a couple So the steel comes in Goes through the machine, which is the gene make produces the enzyme So that's the machine of the body the end product is the shovel Things can increase or decrease the activity, right? If there's no fire or there's a little oxygen that fire is not going to be working really hard You're going to have very little output of shovels. You can have a build up of steel You have all the steel you want that you're going to have very few shovels at the end and you're going to go out of business Now if you've got a very talented worker who's right there And controlling the fire and they're skilled and they know just how to put in that Steel and the right mix of oxygen and heat Then they're going to be producing more shovels And you're going to increase the activity of that Machine it's going to do well Now If that worker stayed up all night and they're a newbie they're a novice And they're bored because they're sitting there and they're just letting the stuff come in and they start getting on their iPhone And the machine jams up and the shovel gets stuck in there Now that gene also gets messed up those things increasing decrease activity that's Your environment that's your mindset It's the chemicals that you're eating. It's the chemicals that you're breathing Things that are accumulating your body. They can't get rid of so your genes are constantly in motion and in flux if I say the word lemon lemon Happening right now in your mouth Little saliva. That's how fast they work If I say yawn Oops Next But just keep in mind that's how quickly they work if you're driving And you see police car lights behind you you get that immediate sinking feeling, right? And some people you can make it go away other people that sinking feeling will last them the whole rest of the day So yes, we are 99.9 percent identical many of us But there is variation in these genes But I also want you to understand that folic acid is at the very top And it has to work its way through every single one of these hopes To get to the bottom to empty jafar To then get to five methyl folate This green thing right here. That's a lot of work now. We also have things Here which slow down the gene organophosphates. Oh, wow those are everywhere By that view those are Drugs that we like to use when we need it to methyl trexate Those are drugs that we need sometimes and don't need oftentimes green tea extract because it's good for everyone, right? Um, folic acid on metabolize that causes issues So all these things will speed up and slow down genes, but yet We created folic acid for everyone You know what? folic acid can only Be incorporated into the cell because that's where you need nutrients to the job. You swallow a pill. That's that's step one Then you have to absorb it then you have to get it through the cell membrane Then it has to work with your cell to get the job done So folic acid has to be incorporated into the cell and it can only be done By the first gene that touches it which is dhfr Now look at the bottom citation. There's two Well, it's one actually a 19 base paired deletion. Basically a problem in this gene is associated with increased unprocessed folic acid in the blood and decreased cellular folate There's a variation in this first gene here So how many of us in this room have a variation in that very first gene? This gene is probably As important as mt. Jafar, but no one discusses it This is an extremely common variant in the population dhfr is Does 23 and me test it? No, I'm gonna It's big time mt. Jaf D1 the next one to hear right this one mt. Jaf D1 Very common many many people have it 70 times Increased risk of fatty liver 70 times I have it I have liver issues Had liver issues and I have mt. Jafar and I have slc up in the top, which is what carries your folate and so does my son It would be absolutely 110 autistic if it wasn't for me taking interventions The extremely slow dhfr gene in human liver and its implication for high folic acid intake There is a five-fold variation in dhfr activity among human samples human dhfr Activity is less than two percent Of the activity of a rat dhfr Human dhfr is only two percent of the speed of a rats What does that mean? all those studies That we're done to see if we can put folic acid into our food is legitimate or not They used rats and their gene is different than ours. Yeah, they're similar, right? You and I are really similar rats are pretty similar Pretty similar isn't good enough nine point nine percent isn't good enough I want a hundred percent. I want individualism Back into the world public health fantastic But with our technology today with the nutrients that we have today the food all that we can go back to individualized medicine Precision medicine no problem. It's fast. It's easy No problem, but yet They keep putting folic acid everywhere and it irritates me I prepared my I was reviewing my slides again last night. I shouldn't have done that because I got all worked up couldn't fall asleep So i'm metabolized folic acid. What is that? it's folic acid it's folic acid What is i'm metabolized folic acid? That means that it's folic acid. It's absolutely synthetic. It does absolutely no physiological benefit to your body at all Intel's processed by what gene? dhfr Have we even touched him dhfr yet? No, I thought you were the empty dhfr guy. Huh, so did I But I I kind of looked around more so 15 minutes after a 220 microgram dose of folic acid. What's the rda of folic acid? 400 micrograms so half the rda in a non-pregnant woman Which is 800 micrograms and if you have recurrent miscarriage, you know what? Let's give you a ton of it and we'll give you five grams of it five milligrams excuse me four milligrams four milligrams still a lot So 15 minutes after a 220 microgram dose which is half of the rda, which is half of the minimal amount that you need 80 of that was left in your body as folic acid 80 Okay, the human gut thus appears have a limited ability to reduce folic acid Ah, that's not that's fine, right? The authors suggested that chronic exposure to folic acid in physiologic doses, which is 400 micrograms You know physiologic you think ortho molecular institute. You're thinking major milligram doses, you know Let's give people a ton of it. No 220 micrograms But 400 micrograms is inducing saturation of the enzyme meaning the dhfr enzyme can't work anymore, right? I've got two hands I was carrying two of my kids the third boy goes hey dad carry me too. I'm saturated. I can't Use your own legs So that dhfr is saturated at a tiny tiny amount They deduct it detected unmetabolized folic acid and 96 to 98 percent of the people children and adults So if you're consuming any type of processed foods or any type of supplements that contain folic acid You are most likely in the 90th percentile Of having unmetabolized folic acid in your body That's not a big deal. It's allowed by public health. There's tons of evidence that is beneficial while there's snips And snips when they occur Inside of a regulatory region near a gene They may play a more direct role in disease by affecting the gene's function i.e spitting it up or slowing it down Just think of it like that There's a slight variation of the gene that makes it work not so effectively And there's about one and a half Million of them and every one of us have about 40 to 50 60 thousand of them Most of them are benign Most of them are benign Not so benign You go into pub med national library medicine And you type in mtg far And you get migraines carotid stiffness. You get leukemia. You get rheumatoid arthritis neural tube defects hypertension Whoa That's five out of thousands of papers now all of these aren't positive associations Some of them say it's not related some say there's no evidence Some say it's very related Now I say okay if there's papers that say it's very related and then they keep saying it And there's multiple papers. There's peer reviews and case reviews and all these things meta analyses And they keep saying you know what this is pretty pretty significant. Well, why don't we do something about it? Again, it's all about the capacity to do work a snip just alters the speed In which that gene or the enzyme works. Just think of it like that. How efficient are you? When you wake up in the morning without your coffee, how efficient are you? When you have your coffee, are you better? So it's the same thing genes have their efficiencies I had to stop drinking Completely because I would wake up the next day. I felt slower. I just didn't feel good And when I drink I knew all the science. I knew all my genes were struggling with it I knew I was giving them more work to do So I said, you know what? I have a 70% reduced capacity in my MTGFR gene because I have two significant snips in it So I said if I give my snip my gene less work Because I have 30 capacity of it remaining. That's pretty good Then I'll give it less work. I stopped drinking Well, was it hard? Not really Especially when you're an introvert like me. You don't go out to parties much So why MTGFR? That's a that's a snip in the communication between Microsoft and Apple So why why do we have MTGFR? I mean Humans have been around for a long time and a lot of people think that humans have been around on the planet for a long time Some don't but Why would there be a natural selection for MTGFR? We think of MTGFR is bad. I thought of MTGFR is bad And then after I kept working with it for some time. I was like, you know Wait a minute Maybe it's good Maybe it's selected for for a reason And if you look at MTGFR, it's at the bottom, right? It's down here Right there There's a lot going on up here, right? There's a lot of stuff going on up here. What's this? ATP 10 formal tetrahydrofolate, which is a form of folate Goes over here and makes your purines of adenosine and guanosine. You need your ATP for what? Everything Go for a run you're burning your ATP. You're done with your run You're making you using your ATP to process fuel in your body. You're using it to IE food. You're using it to get rid of chemicals. You're using it to create methylation reactions You're using for everything. You don't have ATP. You're dead GTP you need GTP to help make your neurotransmitters in your brain Some people know about biopteran while GTP is is the precursor it's the first step to making your biopteran Which is used for your norepinephrine your serotonin your dopamine your epinephrine and your nitric oxide Which is running your entire cardiovascular system? So yeah, those are pretty important. We're not done yet Then you have this step right here 5 10 methylene tetrahydrofolate which goes over here. What's that? That's the TYMS gene. What's that do? Oh, it makes your thiamine base for your DNA Thiamine is for your DNA So it converts uracil to thiamine You can test people's uracil levels And you can test their thiamine levels The accuracy of it. I don't know. I've been investigated but you can actually do this It's a commonly done thing for some doctors And so if your thiamine levels are low Then you can immediately say okay. Well, their natural folates are low because they're not getting enough 5 10 methylene tetrahydrofolate So let's say m teacher 4 wasn't around. It wasn't in existence What happens? Well, it's just burning through all these upstream folates and making 5-methyl folate right here Okay But that's just supports methylation So you have to use Other folates for different things. So I think in a sunny environment Which I showed earlier hot sunny environment. You burn your skin. What skin DNA? You got it. You got to make my skin back, right? I got to repair it So that's just one such example Now let's say you don't have m teacher far sniffs Well, dihydrofolate is a potent inhibitor of m teacher far And high intake of folic acid may exert an antagonistic effect towards natural folates Due to the accumulation of dihydrofolate Which is known to inhibit the gene for making your thymine in your DNA bases. Oops And m teacher far which is needed to support your methylation. Oops And where is that? Here's your dihydrofolate right here it inhibits this gene and this gene You have no snips Say you have no snips in those genes Let's say I make this genetic test which you can get later and you go through and they're like Yes, I don't have snips But if you're consuming folic acid It's the same effect or worse The folate receptor has a higher affinity for folic acid than for methyl folate And methyl folate is the main form that circulates in our blood. So what? Can you sit in your garage With the doors closed The windows down and a hose on your exhaust pipe into your cab in your car No, why? You'll die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Why? Carbon monoxide binds to your hemoglobin 200 times more effectively than oxygen So in the environment where you have carbon monoxide That binds preferentially to your hemoglobin over oxygen synthetic man-made Trash folic acid binds to your natural cells receptors and transport proteins Better than the natural folates Oops It is also not known why a substantial proportion of women who take folic acid supplements In the preconception and during pregnancy still give babies have babies with neural tube defects Neural tube defects and folate case far from closed nature 2006 Neural tube defects looking at the genes is a huge navigator website 190 genes have been reported with neural tube defects and teach far number one with over 132 publications 11 meta analyses should we use folic acid? No All these genes are associated with neural tube defects. These are the top 15 genes That have been looked at in the research We are paying researchers all this money and they're dedicating their lives to it and no one's reading it They're ignoring it University of washington top medical school in the nation Yes and They don't read look Look look This is readily available You can buy this now. It's not expensive You can buy this too. You can even get it as a drug. You can get both these drugs Screw the supplement companies make them pharmaceutical drugs. I don't care Start using them Stop using the folic acid has to go through all these things that blocks and gums up people's machinery And results and miscarriages and ruins people's lives It's bad Now you can see why I didn't sleep last night This is powerful look at this Mothers who have a significant mt. Chifar problem have a 60 percent increase of giving birth to an infant with neural tube defects Homozygous offspring themselves Mom and dad they could be heterozygous. They could have one copy They baby gets unlucky. They become homozygous. They have a 90 percent increased risk Mom's taking a prenatal with 800 micrograms of folic acid that will carry it, right? Nope Transportive folates is done by folate receptors Okay But what binds to these better than natural folates? So folic acid in the blood might inhibit the transport of the body's most preferentially form of folate into the brain And it will do same the same into the breast milk Does the same to breast milk too The breast is best but not when there's folic acid in it. Look at this cerebral folate deficiency It's defined as any neurological syndrome associated with low csf concentration of methyl folate of methyl folate In the presence of normal peripheral folate status You go to the doctor you get normal blood levels of folate, right serum folate fine back is even high But in your brain, there's a low level of methyl folate. Who's testing that? No one very very few It has a wide clinical presentation Beginning around four months of age with irritability and sleep disturbances My kids were Angels never had any irritation or sleep disturbances, right? and adults Now these can be followed by psychomotor issues visual disturbances hearing loss Identification of cerebral Deficiency is achieved by determining five methyl folate concentration in the csf Now look at this Look at this supplementation with folic acid is Contra indicated and if used may exacerbate the methyl folate deficiency Right? How is this stuff even anywhere? It's everywhere This is phenomenal 2010 Inheritable metabolic disorders journal, okay What to take? Well, let's take a gummy With some folic acid in it and they didn't even they even put folate on there They just put folic acid because that's what people want 800 micrograms No Look you need to read this folate inside the parentheses methyl folate Calcium folinate is the other naturally preferred form of folate now. Why do they call it crotch or folic? Because everybody is confused around folate Everyone's confused around folate even the manufacturers of methyl folate are confused about folate And they branded their product as quatra folic not quatra folate Ah Does it work? Hugo knows it works Hugo it worked. She didn't like her leafy greens. She didn't eat it She loved she just loved her soups that were meat based She had choline, which was great, but she did not get her leafy greens So she took a lot more methyl folate and folic acid These papers you can read on your own time because we're running out of time But methyl folate increases to plasma folates more effectively than folic acid And why wouldn't you want to take the more bio available form of any nutrient if it guarantees The end result, right? It's readily available now. I get that folic acid was created at the time when we didn't know about genetics That's fantastic. I get it it helped people But now we've moved on we had horse and buggies many many years ago. We're still getting around with horses and buggies No Okay, we've we've moved on we got ubers. That's how I got here today Low maternal folate status is causally related to neural tube defects Five methyl folate is a predominant natural form that is readily available for the transport and metabolism So let's Wake up. Let's stop using Horses and buggies unless you're on vacation and it's cool and you want to photowop But switch to something that is better available and get it from Your leafy greens food as medicine first as our ancestors once did and go on vacation more. Thank you