Biohacking Your Genes: Why DNA is a Blueprint, Not a Destiny

Richard Zwicky: Hi everyone, it's Richard Zwicky with High on Healthy, the show where we know there's no one path to healthy, so we explore them all. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening tool. Today's conversation is about genetics, longevity, and empowerment, and why your DNA isn't a life sentence.

Sharad Paul: Thank you so much for having me, Richard.

Richard Zwicky: I'm doc I'm joined by Dr. Sherad Paul a worldleading physician international health authority and the author of biohacking your genes. Welcome aboard the show Dr. Paul. So people hear biohacking a lot of people are familiar with it. Some people are less familiar and wonder exactly what it is. You're talking on your gene level, you're talking about health hacking and how just because something happened to your parents doesn't mean you've inherit this gene which is going to be a sentence or is going to guarantee that you live to 110. Yeah.

Sharad Paul: Look I think the way to look at it is genes are our blueprint, but they're not our destiny, right? And I think in any medical condition we deal with, there is a bit of nature and nurture, right? So you inherit some genes but the environment you create then makes a large difference to what happens as well. Right? So my interest actually came on it. So in my regular medical job I'm in my practice right now I deal with skin and skin cancer. So one of how I got interested first on the overall health and longevity and health span more importantly is because skin is our only universal organ that's the only organ we share with all creatures right like every creature even a bacteria has got a cell wall a membrane but every creature has got skin they're creatures without hearts and brains and so our genes are preserved through our skin more than anywhere else right and then I realized that in a lot of cases it is also linked with the brain how we function and our gut and so we have these skin disease people so there's a lot of things which are interconnected and I think for me the interest was what happens if somebody inheritated a certain set of genes by actions are they modifiable and so when I say biohacking I'm really more about health span which is optimizing performance right or optimizing your life for now. I feel that look even if you're super healthy bad luck something may happen at some time suddenly and that's always nature right but what you can do is at your age at any given point in time you can be the best you can be by taking certain actions which in turn then modify your genes so that's epigenetic so therefore you actually can do everything you want to do to the best of your ability so that's really my focus when I speak internationally a lot of people in the same biohacking space are focused more at the longevity end in the sense but they're much more involved in being in my view too interventional too many peptides or too many medications. So in my view some of the claims haven't kept pace with the biology right. So I know the benefit of when your peptides or stem cells or this or that but those are things sometimes you can't control them and I think when you hear biohacking particularly when I travel to the US a lot of it especially in Silicon Valley is at the other end where it's a bit extreme so the science hasn't kept up with what people are trying or the science isn't there right so Yeah.

Richard Zwicky: That's a really good point. I'll interrupt for a sec. I was speaking with Dr. Todd Coleman the other day who's at Stanford and he's doing a research project monitoring the stomach connection to the brain for aging and for a few other things and from my own personal experience I went through severe long COVID and I lost the ability to extract tryptophan from my food which is a reservoir is held in a reservoir in the stomach by supplementing I was able to recover but it speaks to what you were just chatting about the connection between the gut and the skin and the brain and how these different organs are all connected. And in many ways, we're not understanding. But when we become aware of how, the effect we see in one place could be caused by something completely different it allows us to for one better term, to biohack our genes. And as you touched upon, there's an extreme where this isn't what this mean. This is medical. This is actually a way to get at the root issues as opposed to just the symptoms.

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Sharad Paul: I think it's partly because

Richard Zwicky: Why has this been misunderstood?

Sharad Paul: To a large degree, medicine is very siloed into specialties, So, people once your training becomes so narrow that you stop really looking at outside your field, right? So for example, if you went for before you have a procedure and this is more typical in the US where I guess it's even more specialized than in other countries. So what we find is a cardiologist will say I'm checking you out before your procedure but I'm going to refer you to the pulmonologist down the room for him to check your lungs and we're hang on. So here for example in New Zealand being a smaller country we're not as well resourced so we may have an aesthetist just does the whole thing and he'll say look we'll check the heart lungs and things like that right and what I feel is therefore when your training is very highly specialized you really just focus on that so you're not actually looking at so if somebody comes with this skin condition always try and get to the cause of it and sometimes it won't be skin at all and I'll tell them look we need to look at your diet and maybe you're having too much gluten or maybe other stuff but that's not the norm right people tend to look and also from a consumer point of view sometimes people want a quick fix where they don't right and I'll give you a classic example of there was recent research and evidence on selection which is like a lavender oil which was used for depression and anxiety right and this is very interesting because it's been available in Germany and many other countries for 20 years as just lavender oil based supplement as a medication but it only came into the US I think last year or something and it's actually come in not as a medication but as a supplement called karmaid right but the study was very interesting when I looked at it is because compared it there's a very good study which compared this against standard anti-depressant and standard anti-anxiety medications and what they call the effects size which is a way of looking at how effective a drug is particularly in mental health or psychological conditions its effect size was 08 to 0.9 which was in comparison anxiety drugs are.5 and anti-depressants are.3 so it's twice as potent right but what was interesting is I saw an interview with somebody a psychologist in America talking about and what they were saying is don't tell your patients it's from lavender till after you prescribe the medication in the end you Look, it's a drug available in other countries. By the way, it was just derived from lavender just so in some ways people go and if as a physician you just give something which is readily available, I suppose people are paying fees and this and that and there's a little bit of mystique lost. So people don't respect it as much as well. So, I guess it's a catch 22. On one hand, it plays right into the hands of the big farmer because which means it medicalizes everything. But on the other hand, also I think the public perception of something being natural may not necessarily be effective as well.

Richard Zwicky: And that's a huge disservice to the individual when they don't look at I'll just go back in my case tryptophan is used to make serotonin and melatonin inside the body and when you don't have it you have fatigue and the inability to concentrate you don't form memories because you can't sleep properly. You can take medications for it sometimes, not for what I was dealing with, but for other things that are trying to replicate the process, but the reality is our body knows how to deal with it if we give it the right tools. It's like a vitamin deficiency. If you don't have enough vitamin C, your body still craves it, needs what to the building blocks to produce things. And I understand why people look for the easy button. And the doctor's prescription is the easy button because they think, "Okay, this will be dealt with and I can get on with my life." But that isn't necessary long from a longevity perspective and long healthy life, not just lasting a long time, but a long healthy life. That easy button isn't the best thing. In your book Bio by Hacking Your Genes, you outline seven essential health principles. What are the most overlooked?

Sharad Paul: I think the mo most overlooked is the impact of our diet and our own actions on how important it is or how much difference it can actually make. And look and sometimes an example was actually you mentioned tryptophan and

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Sharad Paul: I was going to say in my book there is a section where I'm talking about omega-3s and the L tryptophan CA ratio which particularly is important because it relates to both our dopamine which is of course a happiness molecule and serotonin which is a mood and everything else and how it's connected to the gut right so I completely understand that but going back to a question I think people don't realize so for example just lack of vitamin D for example right so study done just here in New Zealand which I mentioned in the book showed that in children with hyperactivity or irritability just adding vitamin D and reduced irritability reduce hyperactivity so things like that whereas you don't necessarily have to medicalize it in a bigger way but you just need to find out what the deficient in right sometimes but I think people just don't realize sometimes just doing a small fix can make a huge difference the power of exercise for example right the bone derived neurotropic factor which is a big thing which is from a brain connection is from human biology point of view as we evolved we started walking more we're running we're chasing animals the more you moved your legs the more BDNF you produce and Then some of it gets into your brain and then your brain also becomes bigger. So actually as we know things like dance or leg movement things like that reduce the risk of dementia. So I think the most important principle is that you can control your destiny more than you think and also that you need to take some personal responsibility. I think that's one thing I always say the difference after I did medicine I did medical law just for the heck of it and one of the things I often said is look in guild like professions medicine and legal system they're like guilds so they have certain rules and regulations and things like that but the way to look at it is just like law doesn't translate into justice always medicine doesn't translate into of unless you take personal responsibility and I think that's the fundamental message is you need to take responsibility saying the same way it's your car or something you wouldn't just put little bit of diesel in a petrol car to say let me just try it out and see how it's going to go right but we do that with our bodies but we don't treat our equipment the same way and I think we just need to look at it thinking I need to first take responsibility and not look for an easy fix so I'll give you one example on the same biohacking Eugene's book. I was traveling through Dubai from London after a book tour on September and I was asked to speak at a longevity event where actually American doctor from Carolina, North Carolina I think who was setting up a clinic there and it was interesting because they had a rapid fire question and

Richard Zwicky: There.

Sharad Paul: Answer thing at the end where they said just say yes or no stem cell body MRI and 1 medications like your rosepics and he is like yes for all and I was like no right but what I was thinking is that he was like no look people are just too lazy no point talking about all this just let's everybody should have the GOP one right and what I was saying is if you look at people they lose their sense of taste they don't have the same but I think life is to be lived we live once in this form right and I feel what sort of a life is it if you had no taste no happiness just because you're sky so I really felt that and also once people get on it you can never get off the medication right because you revert back so I just don't see the point in that kind of interventions that's where I feel people have to take responsibility and say no look I don't want to have a life where I can't even taste my favorite foods I can't be on it for the rest of my life. Okay. Maybe some people need it. Yes. But not everybody.

Richard Zwicky: There are some people who are in desperate shape and need that help. But for others there are lifestyle changes which will have a longerl lasting impact right.

Sharad Paul: The same and longerlasting impact and also because we just discussed because of the skin health connection overall, you'll be better for it rather than attending to just one chemical pathway.

Richard Zwicky: And something you touched upon earlier struck a chord with me is cognitive decline and dementia is I think most people's biggest fear with aging is dementia and the various forms of it and I witnessed it my grandfather went through Alzheimer's and I witnessed him losing sense of self among and awareness of the world around him and that's horrifying to see. That's an area of brain health which more and more is being pointed to is something we can mitigate the risks through exercise through diet. It doesn't mean we can eliminate it. There's two different parts of that question. What are genetic variants that do raise the risk and how can people realistically offset them and

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Richard Zwicky: Then everybody else who isn't necessarily at risk profile. How can they push that E day out?

Sharad Paul: So I think a very good question and for me as well it's a personal one because my father has Alzheimer's right guess and so he's had it for about 10 years. And you can obviously it's something all of us dread getting because you don't want to reach a stage where you just become like you said a shell of yourself. And in my book that's the very first chapter because interestingly there's a diet called the mind diet which is in the book which actually can reduce your risk of Alzheimer's or a delayed onset by up to 50%. Right? So when I first was researching for this, I was researching really for my dad and I was looking at all the medications out there and I mentioned the book a lot of the medications actually started off unfortunately on a flawed hypo hypothesis which turned out to be fraudulent in the sense everybody was talking about how the plaques were formed with the amaloid and now we know that there are certain proteins which are triggered but the original hypothesis which led research down a wrong path for 20 years was actually flawed and that's why we haven't made massive progress in that area right but what I actually found is that hang on before all that there's so much weaken to ourselves in the diet right so simple things like I'm mentioning just from the mind diet is avoiding too much red meat and dairy bees berries are superfoods particularly like blueberries of the meat chicken soups and things are fine and if you're a meat eater and then importance of vitamin D everything green foods which a lot more like your carrots and your spinaches and the broccololis and those kind of stuff and then fish is particularly good and from that point of view because we were talking about omega3 earlier just from a point of view of getting omega3 into your system for the tripan and everything else so there's a whole range of other things and then of course the power particularly leg movement exercises for the sake of leg movement right so cuz normally people just walk or something but if you're going on a predetermined path it's not quite the same as if you're changing around things so you're having to think about it so that's why the random dancers for example tend to do better than the structured one. So for example, tango was actually one of the studies they did which reduced the risk of dementia more than others because it's really free form. You're not just going one, two, three like a wall, right? You're just going with the flow with the person and similarly if you're running or it's good but then change up your route so that you don't know try and memorize the roads while you're running. So it's that kind of stuff where they found taxi drivers for example in London taxi driving right they did a study

Richard Zwicky: They have to memorize the city.

Sharad Paul: Where they found that they had a lower risk of dementia compared to standard and that's because in London they don't like the navigational Uber stuff which is much more widespread elsewhere and they have what they call the London knowledge where every taxi driver has to know every little 20,000 roads or know the ins and outs of it. So you literally just tell them, I'm often astounded like you literally always just give them the postcode and then they say is that the street and then they'll take you there, There's no navigational map and they have to pass that exam. So they got to memorize the whole thing and what they found is what you can do from day basis other than the diet I mentioned is memory stuff leg movement, exercises, there's plenty you can do. And the last thing you want to do is just wait for a medication to be developed at some stage. If it happens, so well and good. But till then, there's plenty we can do to at least have our risk.

Richard Zwicky: And it's a little bit of being mindful about the sort of things we do as well. You touched upon people going running versus, doing different routes. I hike 15 to 20 km at least once a week. I've had nine knee surgeries, but it's actually much less painful and easier for me to do a 20 km hike than it is 10 km on pavement because that uneven surface forces my brain and my muscles to be moving constantly in different ways,

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Richard Zwicky: Which has a broader impact across my entire system. And that's something anybody can do in their own way. It doesn't mean you have to go hiking. It just means do something a bit differently. A treadmill is great as exercise but it's constant. Do something differently Run up and down some stairs doing corners. You're going to have different movement than you would just running in a straight line. Any number of things. But those are functions we can do to add things differently and even driving differently. We're using our brain in different ways which helps us keep it alive, right? It does atrophy if we're not using it. But you touched a bit about the food effect and some things we should think more about having the greens, the berries. Blueberries are amazing and tasty, but the people look at and go, I need a quick meal. I stressed. I'm at my desk. I barely have enough time. H How do I get it in enough without interfering with the rest of my day? Because once again, people do want that easy button. Yep.

Sharad Paul: I guess that's part of the problem like I was saying is you need to take some personal responsibility and I think the big thing I probably should have mentioned when I was mentioning all these other things in the diet is how bad processed foods or artificial oils are for us, right? So the trans fats and things like they're particularly straight away bad for our brain. They reduce, our ability to function. And so that's the problem with fast food as well, and I've been in America many times and I have a lot of American friends, but I'm always astounded as you guys are fast food capital, right? When you come there, literally everywhere there is fast food. If I go to Europe, you wouldn't see as many fast foods at all, in Italy or France or something like that, They're still there.

Richard Zwicky: They're still there.

Sharad Paul: That's right. But they're not but they're not as common, But it's what I mean is it's not so Yeah,

Richard Zwicky: It's not the same culture around it. Yeah.

Sharad Paul: They're not as part of the mainstream kind of a diet, And in a large part of it is you're saying like that because people are looking for convenience. People are looking for what can I get quickly. But I think sometimes we underestimate lots of stuff like people can do is you can make your own foods with the things we discussed which are healthier for you. You can freeze them more. You can do other things. So in many ways once you start doing it as a habit just like you going trekking or tramping what you actually find is once you get that discipline you actually find it's actually not that difficult. It's just more getting started, and wanting to take charge of your health. I think with anything else, if you don't take charge of it, if you're not saying, "Okay, look, I'm going to fix myself." Just like I said earlier, I'm going to fix my car or I'm going to optimize my performance. I'm going to be the best I can be, nothing will happen because you need to take that responsibility because then you start looking at what can I do kind of stuff, And look for that self-improvement. So I think in some ways you're right, there's a bit of laziness. There's a bit of the reality of the industrial u diets making it so much easier for people to access them and the cost of living all the kind of stuff. But I think it's still not impossible, if you want to do it.

Richard Zwicky: And it's I'm not calling anybody lazy. It's more people have so many priorities and pressures on them and they don't ascribe the necessary important to this area because they think they can get to it later or here's an easy path that I can get through 90% of it. But that's something which ties into mistakes people make because even though they have goodwill and good intent they still go down the wrong path. Apart from, depending on, a GLP-1 inhibitor or something like that, what are the biggest mistakes you see people make when they're trying to optimize their health or and are trying to do things the right way, but don't understand, so they make the mistake. Come on, heat.

Sharad Paul: I think one thing possibly may be even in a simple way taking too many supplements without even knowing what's right for them. So for example biohacking your genes in my book my lab we actually do genetic testing for wellness as opposed to illness right so basically it literally is just we test for things like lactose vitamins various things diets and exercises so what's the best type of exercise for you what the kind of diets for you all that kind of stuff but what we find is then you can actually give tailored supplement advice for example

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Sharad Paul: For somebody like you, he would come up with, your tryptophan or, you're needing your vitamin D, things like that. And so then you're more targeted, So I think sometimes what happens is because particularly in this day and age of social media and everything else, there's just lots of noise and lots of different influences. So I think, yeah, no, I didn't mean the laziness in a negative way. What I meant is sometimes you're just so caught up in it in parts of our life. We tend to be less having the ability or the bandwidth to do things right and I think so that's one thing is people sometimes straight away they see another supplement on they're like let me try that. So people then take peptides let me try this. So I think in some ways you have to set some as with anything I always say as a writer I often say and everything else when you're structuring a story or whatever you first set the context then you develop the character and you resolve conflicts. So my view the first thing is set the context what are the improvements you want to see right and sometimes I just feel I have a simpler approach is optimize your performance what is it that you want to do in life so I do the same thing with patients if you are older and somebody comes in what's your main priority do you want to play golf because some of them those are the things you first need to optimize rather than coming at it from a doctor's medical point of view not knowing the patient's lifestyle is if you had to list the top 10 things you wanted to continue being able to do which gives you so much joy. What are there right and then you start from there and then you can work up a plan and like you said absolutely the muscle brain connection is so important. So for you for example if you had that list you would have your tramping at the top of the list or close to the top of the list because that not only gives you pleasure but it is actually giving you a health benefit and you will accept the fact that sometimes your joints are going to be sore doing it but the reality of it is right yeah that's it and

Richard Zwicky: They hurt every time, but that's okay. Right.

Sharad Paul: And the benefits and the endorphins you get outweigh the negatives

Richard Zwicky: And that speaks also to one aspect we really haven't touched on, but you touch when you mentioned joy. It's emotional health and that's part of aging as well. That's something which people don't usually go to their doctor about.

Sharad Paul: And I also think we tend to again overmedicalize that as well. So in my view, look, it's natural for humans to want it as a not be hungry or not be, but it's not normal for any animals. To be naturally happy because you know what I mean so there is a bit of learned happiness we need to have so what I'm trying to get it is if you look yes That's right.

Richard Zwicky: Animals are in the moment. They don't dwell on what happened a week and a year ago. They dwell on the moment, So there's happiness and there's joy from I remember this was a wonderful experience and there's fear I remember this was a bad experience and they run away but it's not that we're unique because I think they found orcas also have that kind of memory in terms of an emotional state but it's not the norm in the animal kingdom

Sharad Paul: And so one of the chapters in the book is on what I call hacks for happiness is where you actually can practice certain steps which actually helps you find joy in your day-today life but without automatically medicalizing it yes obviously some people need help but broadly I think low moods anxiety things are normal right everybody goes through it but in some ways it doesn't have to always have a medical diagnosis because a lot of things you can do as well right and I think there are lots of steps like visualization reinforcement like doing things which give you joy what's called an optimism orbit surrounding yourself with people who are supportive and make it more positive understanding the cause thinking look sure I'm going through a difficult time so therefore it is natural that I'm going to feel like that for a while kind of stuff right and so keeping a journal for example writing down his thoughts so there many steps which have shown that if you practice it you actually learn there in a way you're learning how to be happy so you find the joy and it go you reclaim the joy sometimes because of this like you said you stop feeling the joy in certain things you stop feeling that and yeah absolutely there's a lot again there you can do again As with anything else, like we were talking about the muscle brain connection, it needs a little bit of effort. And sometimes you have to think, okay, the quicker fix may seem to be,

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Sharad Paul: Look, I'm not feeling that positive. I'll go see somebody and then I'll take a pill, But then it comes with all the negativity and everything else because of course it's going to mess up the chemicals in your system and things like that. And yes there's some people who need it who will reach it at a medical level but I think largely we underestimate the power of our mind in every medical condition be it I can speak from skin from my specialty absolutely like people who are lower mode people who are negative there's a study I mentioned in biohacking eugenes that even like skin biopsies and this was something which stunned me like a study done on people who had skin surgery. What we found is that people who had low mood or who were not optimistic heal slower than people who were positive and so you can see the power of the body to heal is also dependent to a large degree on how we're feeling mentally at the time.

Richard Zwicky: It's undervalued in the treatment process is our own right and it's like how the studies with placeos how effective they can be.

Sharad Paul: I mean in my previous book the genetics of felt I actually talk about a noibo trial. I think Ted Capek at Harvard they did one where particularly these are good for pain syndromes and things like that. Right. So what they did is they did a study where they had three groups of people with intractable migraines and they put a third on a medication, a third had acupuncture and a third had a migraine pill. And then what happened was sure enough the people who were on the migraine pill did 70% or better versus only 30% who were on nothing which they called placebo effect. But what was interesting was a nobo trial they had actually reversed it. So the people who took the migraine pill were the people who were getting nothing but it was a dummy pill. So what they found is but when those people thought they were actually shaking something what they found is those people got bitter. So that's the power of the mind and in fact we know the people there is the gene which it's almost like the faith gene right so people who would tend to be believing in something more either they are more likely to be more religious or more likely to be gullible as well and on the other end of the spectrum are people who can also benefit more from place right because of the fact that there are certain people for whom acupuncture and hypnosis will work better than other people. So we actually know that. So, the power is huge. This study was astonishing because 70% of the people got better and they weren't even taking anything. It was just a dummy except it was packaged as if it was one, right?

Richard Zwicky: Belief is incredibly powerful. And have you looked at this from the perspective of the different cultures and how the cultural beliefs affect longevity and ability from a plasticity perspective to reshape and reform to a better operating standard I guess would want a better term because I'm not think of the appropriate term.

Sharad Paul: That's actually interested me but obviously I haven't done as much deep work in it as I've done in the genomic side of things, but actually just came back from Japan just literally last week and look, that's an example right in that society people live quite long but they have very deep rooted spiritual beliefs in a lot of their things which date back a very long time and with all of it so even like we did one tourist thing we do like a sumo wrestling show right and they were talking about how that was from 580 it's 1500 years old and what they were saying is it was actually for the gods they used to have a kind of a competition as a harvest festival and there the origin so that's why each of the ritual they did along with it had a deeper meaning and manifest and a lot of those cultures therefore believe in that's why when you're giving respect to certain things or the belief that you are not alone and everything is in a way interconnected and things like that.

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Sharad Paul: So yeah, absolutely. And I think definitely where you lose that sense of faith in anything, it doesn't have to be necessarily religious faith but if you have nothing that you can manifest about or believe in or be positive about, you don't then have a sense of purpose as well. Yes. Yeah,

Richard Zwicky: Which is a sense of per purpose is powerful to every aspect of life. Shroud, unfortunately, we are out of time for today, but people who want to learn more about you, who want to pick up a copy of your book by hacking your genes, where can they go to learn more?

Sharad Paul: I think they can just put my name do and.com or they put biohacking jeans.com you will come to the book. There's a blog which people can follow if they just put drsherpaul.com. I mean the book is freely available in bookstores, Amazon, everywhere globally and in America and if people are interested doing it they can order their gene test as well which gives them more advice but if not even otherwise most of the book is really about day tips which are quite easy and simple. They can just order it online just biohackingyou genes.com just the name of the book.com and

Richard Zwicky: And if people want to do the gene test the results and data is through no New Zealand or

Sharad Paul: It takes you to the site and people can order and my lab sends the kits out globally. So thank you Richard.

Richard Zwicky: Wonderful. Thanks for joining us on the show today, Shrad, and

Sharad Paul: It was a real pleasure.

Richard Zwicky: Thank you to everybody for listening. I'm Richard Wiki with High on Healthy, and we'll be back again with you soon.