Dr. Stickler explains exactly what 23 & Me genetic testing tells us and how we can use this and other genetic companies to create individualized life plans to heal our bodies and stay healthy into our advanced years.
Do not miss these highlights:
09:04 There’s never a root cause in a system. There are all of these things that contribute to it
11:06 Medicine is transitioning so rapidly in the alternative world
11:50 What is “Epigenetics”?
18:04 One of the aspects of medicine that is causing a failure is the “overvaluing of expertise”
20:43 What is Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms and its function
24:25 Why is it there are people with a homozygous MTHFR who have a healthy child without a birth defect if it’s a true mutation?
26:35 Anything that you find in 23&Me has some benefits and some risks…It’s just different based on the environment you’re functioning in
27:29 How can people use this genetic technology to increase their quality of life and their longevity
28:55 The human system is a complex adaptive system
32:19 Some of the latest findings in the RNA and age reversal
Resources MentionedWhether you are recovering from an illness or just looking to maintain your current overall health, schedule a consult with us at Serenity Health Care by calling (262)522-8640 or visit https://www.serenityhealthcarecenter.com
About our Guest:
Dr. Daniel L. Stickler is the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at Apeiron ZOH Inc. He is a leader in complexity & performance medicine and has special focus on age rejuvenation strategies. A physician to high-performing executives, entrepreneurs and elite performers, a speaker, blogger and podcaster on all topics performance. Dr. Stickler is clinical faculty for the Age Management Medical Group. He is a Google consultant for wearable technology, epigenetics, and AI in healthcare, and a guest lecturer at Stanford University on Epigenetics in Clinical Practice. In addition, he sits on multiple advisor boards in the longevity and Human performance realm; including medical advisory board of TruDiagnostics and Medical director at the Neurohacker Collective.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drstickler/
https://www.facebook.com/daniel.l.stickler
Transcription of Episode #154:
Debra Muth 0:02
Welcome to Let’s Talk Wellness Now. I’m your host, Dr. Deb. This is where we talk about everything wellness, and learn to defy aging, and live our lives on our own terms.
Debra Muth 0:15
Welcome back to this cold day here in Wisconsin. But I have a hot guest for you today. Dr. Daniel Stickler is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer at Aperion. He is a leader in complexity and performance medicine and has a special focus on age rejuvenation strategies. A physician to high performing executives, entrepreneurs and elite performers, a speaker blogger and podcaster himself on all topics performance. Dr. Stickler is clinical faculty for the age management Medical Group. He is a Google consultant for wearable technologies and epigenetics and AI healthcare maybe we can get some tips on what’s coming down the pike there from from him and a guest lecture at Stanford University on epigenetics and clinical practice. I am super excited to talk to him today about biohacking for aging, looking at the longevity and human performance, and truly getting into some of this deep hacking information that we can glean from epigenetics. So for those of you who aren’t yet familiar with what epi genetics is, basically what we’re looking at is your genetics. We’re seeing what you were born with, and can we create a path around it to help prevent or reduce the risk of disease. That is what we call biohacking. It helps us age more gracefully, stop age related diseases or slow them down and help you stay younger, healthier, longer and in the game. And all of you know like that is what I’m all about is getting you to stay younger, healthier and happy. Stay in the game as long as you can and just really enjoy your life.
Debra Muth 2:08
Have you seen 20+ medical doctors only to be told your symptoms are in your head? Or you need an antidepressant? We understand your frustrations? Are you tired of feeling sick and tired? Tired of not getting the answers you need to regain your health? Tired of not feeling listened to by your doctor? At Serenity Health Care Center, we understand and we will help you find the cause of your symptoms. Together we will create a path to health. We specialize in combining the best of conventional and natural medicine to get you back to doing what you love. We have worked with the most complex chronic diseases such as chronic Lyme, COVID long hollers, autoimmune disease, mold toxicity, and hormonal imbalances. But if you’re not sick, that’s fantastic. We will work with you to maintain your health so that you can prevent illness. Give our office a call to see how we can help you regain your health and vitality at 262-522-8640. Or check us out at our website at serenityhealthcarecenter.com
Debra Muth 3:27
Welcome back. I have with me my guest today Dr. Stickler, and we are going to talk all about biohacking and aging. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Daniel Stickler 3:36
Happy to be here,Debra.
Debra Muth 3:37
Hi. So tell us a little bit about how you became immersed in the world of genetics and epigenetics and walked away from your traditional vascular surgeon roots.
Dr. Daniel Stickler 3:49
Yeah, I mean, the the short story here is that I was somewhat disenchanted with medicine from from the day I got into medical school in the fact that I had a different perception of what it was. I was under the impression it was like make life better for people and and it does for some but it’s predominantly focused on disease model. So you know, when you’re healthy, there’s not really much of a role of medicine in in that category. So, you know, I went through the process surgery was my logical choice there because I liked working with my hands and and it was something where somebody came in, they have a diminished quality of life you intervene and usually at least get him back to baseline whereas rest of medicine was this stepwise postponement of death. And then, you know, over time and learning on my own outside of the medical school classrooms, I started learning more about different options that were available out there and I came across a company in Las Vegas called Cenegenics back in 2005, and I was really fascinated because they were actually working with healthy people with diets exercise and hormone replacement. So I was like all in on that. And I started doing that as a hobby, and realized that there was something that I really enjoyed doing. And so I opened a clinic in 2005. And and then in 2007, my clients sir, bring me genetics, and he was the new 23 and Me and it was, it blew my mind because I never learned genetics in this way. I didn’t even know what a single nucleotide polymorphism was, just wasn’t something we were taught in medical school in the early 90s. So I had to do a deep dive into that, because it was just so fascinating to me. And I did not like genetics in medical school. So it surprised me how much I enjoyed that and ended up developing genetic templates, doing all this research and finding all ways I could help clients by using genetic polymorphisms. And a couple years later, I was presenting on my, my experience at A4M in Las Vegas, and yeah, I had probably 40 People come up to me after the talk. And they said, you know, how do I learn this, I’d like to learn this. And so that kind of prompted us to start a training program. Because I realized there wasn’t anything out there. And that started our academy. In 2012, I got into epigenetics, because this was just fascinating, even more. So I mean, DNA is the most I mean, it’s most amazing molecule i but I’m in awe of what DNA is and how it works and the information it carries. And epigenetics was just another another aspect of that, that just was blowing my mind. And I understood then that, you know, all this stuff that we can do in life, every, you know, everything we put into our bodies, and every environment we interact with changes how our genes express and I was like, Okay, this is really cool stuff and when I dove into it, a lot of the stuff I was reading was more in the in a little bit of a woo type. kinetics, the concept was right, but the there wasn’t science behind it. And gradually, the science started coming in behind it. And, you know, even up until like 2019, people were asking me if epigenetics was a real thing. Yeah, there’s like 1000s of peer reviewed articles. You know, I was teaching a, I was a guest speaker at an epigenetics core course at Stanford for about six years, during that time, where I was teaching the clinical use of it to people attending this epigenetics course, and just blew my mind. And, you know, that led me down the road to understanding how the medical paradigm was so broken, because it was, it was focused on a mechanistic or materialistic paradigm. And the human system is a complex system. And you have to take a systems approach to analyze it. And this is why we’re so far off base right now, with medicine. I mean, we’ve been barely hanging on but the progress and the progress that we should have had is about 10%, of where it should it would be if we taken the systems based approach rather than this, this really reductionistic type of approach of looking at, you know, here’s the organism. Now let’s look at each individual, organ. Now let’s look at the individual cells within that Oregon. Now let’s look at them. The molecules within the cell are the organelles. And now let’s look even at the atoms and see if we can find the cause of this disease, well, then that’s a no-win scenario, because as soon as you start taking a complex system apart, you can’t tell anything about it, because you’ve lost all the interrelationships, that context, all of that in how it creates an outcome. And, you know, even when I was in functional medicine, I mean, the whole term root cause root cause goes completely against systems approach, because A, there’s never a root cause in a system there, there are all of these things that contribute to it. And I’ve been teaching this to two physicians lately. And they’re like, What do you mean, there’s no, I was like, give me any example of anything that is a root cause. And they would name all these things off, and I could go through it and say, Well, what about this, what about this? How does this contribute to it? What about this now? Yes, that is a a major part of a combination of things. They created this root cause but you have to look at all this combination of things that contributed to it. You know, urinary tract infection is one that they like to use and like, Okay, well, yeah, it’s an equal a urinary tract infection. So what do you do? And they’re like, Oh, well, you just treat it with antibiotics. Well, that what caused it in the first place? What’s the origin of this not the mechanism, so we’re treating the mechanism, not the, the the true process that created it, the origin of it. And, you know, I’m like, What about anything anatomic with with this person with a UTI? What about hygiene with this person? What about their gut microbiome? I mean, are they do they have the gut bacteria that produce aromatics that actually impair the growth of ecoli? And, you know, you just keep going through the process. And with a complex system, you almost never get to an endpoint of questions. You’ve always got this, this this this longer than a short story?
Debra Muth 10:42
No, that’s perfectly awesome. I mean, I’m glad that you’re, you’re talking to the fact of what we knew as medicine before, and what we know of medicine and future are so far apart. And, you know, we’ve had great things in between, we’ve had that traditional functional medicine, integrative medicine, all of these great marketing terms. Right. And they were, they were good bridges. But I think now what we see is medicine is transitioning so rapidly, in the alternative world, we’ll call it alternative because it’s just different than mainstream. But it’s, it’s transitioning so fast that if you don’t stay on top of this, you’re losing sight. And then you’re still stuck in an old model, you’re still using old principles. I had similar experiences you you know, 2011, I started getting a lot of 23andme is and knew very little, you know, we knew MTHFR at that point, was the biggest thing we were talking about. And still today have some people come in and say, Well, you know, I have an MTHFR mutation, so I can’t and I’m just like, that is such a small piece in the pod, you know, but they’ve done a great job at marketing and MTHFR mutation is the end all be all. So can you you talk a little bit about what epigenetics actually is, for our listeners who don’t quite understand that term? What does that mean for the average person listening?
Dr. Daniel Stickler 12:00
So epigenetic and translation means on top of the genetics on top of the genome. So our our genetics are fixed for life. I mean, you know that we have this I mean, unless we have some technology that’s going to go in and insert or change or a virus that does it. Our code doesn’t change over time. And so every cell in our body has the exact same genetic blueprint. So why are all the cells in our body? Not the same types of cells? You know, why do I have a skin cell here and a retinal cell here? They have the exact same blueprint. What it is, is epigenetics is this overlying component of genetics. And there’s a couple of ways epigenetics work. So some of them work on the on the the genome string itself. So the DNA string, you will have these, these methylations, phosphorylations, all these different things that control which genes are turned on how much they’re processed, and which genes are turned off. And this is happening in every different cell type in our body in a different way. So that even though we have this huge blueprint, in every cell, there’s only certain parts of that blueprint that are being used to create that particular cell. Now, on top of that, we have what and these these are more of the epigenetics that we say they’re more written in pen. So they’re not really changeable when they create organ systems like that. Now, when we talk about epigenetics from a, from a standpoint of being written in pencil, where we can erase and modify, and things, we’re talking more about, what we would call histone modifications is the most common thing so that our DNA wraps around these proteins, just like if you take a wire and wrap it around a tennis ball, that’s, that’s what our DNA is doing inside the nucleus of the cell, it’s wrapping around these proteins. And these proteins have little tails that stick out off of them. And at the tip of the tail, you can impact the expressions of genes. So you can go in and you can methylate a little tip of the tail, and it will either open the it changes the charge difference between the protein and the DNA strand. And if it’s if it makes it more opposite, then it will push the DNA off of the protein. And what that does is it allows it to be read by DNA transcript reading DNA polymerase, essentially, but it’s reading that that segment of the DNA now, if you go in and you put a methylation group on, it’s going to squeeze it tighter because it makes the charges a plus minus so squeezer against the protein. And now nothing can attach to that strand because it’s so tightly bound to the protein. And that’s the simple, simple way of doing and there’s a lot of a lot of processes in there. But this, this changing of these charges on these little tails occurs all the time. And with interactions with the environment, with signals from other cells with foods we eat, they can all alter. So you know, one of the things we say is you got to quit looking at food as a macronutrient. Food is a biologically active, it’s a bioactive substance that you’re putting in the body. And what I mean by that is it has impacts on how how your genes express. And once we start looking at food as a bioactive that changes the ballgame a lot, you know, why am I taking fish oil? Well, it’s allowing for upregulation of anti inflammatory gene expression, it’s allowing for the upregulation of metabolic gene expression. And so these are positive things. So you can talk about all you want about, oh, you know, this study showed this, this study showed this and then they’ll come out in the same week, fish oil is great for you, fish oil sucks. And, you know, you just read headlines and you get confused. But understanding the, the process that’s taking place in this big dynamic of this human organism is is essential. And this is what’s changing medicine. Now,
Debra Muth 16:34
it’s an exciting time to be part of medicine, because it truly becomes that individualized approach, you know, everyone’s genetics is has a variant is is different. And when you can look at the genetics, and you can say, okay, you know, based on this, these are the supplements you’re going to want to take for the rest of your life, maybe these are the foods that you want to eat, this is how you want to consume them, there’s no more of this calories in calories out macronutrients, you know, you’re 100 pounds, you have 250 pounds of protein. All of that has significantly changed today, because of epigenetics. And because of the ability for us to measure genes. And I think what people need to understand is, this is evolving, literally every hour of every day, every day, you’re learning new things about genetics that we didn’t know about before, it is so rapidly changing.
Dr. Daniel Stickler 17:26
I spend, I spend two hours a day on average reading papers. So I have, I’m in a couple of groups that will curate topics like I’m in a longevity group with a bunch of longevity, Doc’s that, they’ll just funnel new papers in on that I have a, like a Feedly feed where I have all my keywords that it’ll search everything on the internet. And so I can every morning I get up and I, I go through it, and I’ll pick out five or six articles that I want to read through for the day. And you know that and they’re not like, like specialty things, you know, one of the one of the aspects of medicine that’s causing a failure is this, this real overvaluing of expertise. And, you know, I say that having been a surgeon, which is essentially an expertise in that area. But in analyzing a complex system, it’s not about the individual pieces, it’s about the whole overview of how all these pieces interact. And really, the most valuable person in your medical care will be the generalist who can look at everything, and then call on the experts to give their input. But then you take that input, and you compare it to how that’s going to work. I mean, the cardiologist is so good at the heart, they know the heart, but their their focus is save the heart. Well, that’s an isolated organ in the system. And our system is like I said, it’s an interactive system. So it’s not something you can just focus on that and say, Oh, that’s gonna take care of it, but you don’t die of a heart attack, they’ve done their duty, but they put you on a medication that burns your kidneys out and then to a nephrologist. And so you need to have that one person that can oversee that and, and that person, you know, general knowledge is hard to come by anymore. And because number one, it was not valued, you know, the generalist was was the lowest paid of the of the medical community. And, and yet, they are truly the most valuable piece that you can have where they can look at the big picture of things and integrate plan that works with all of the expert opinions that are coming in on you.
Debra Muth 19:48
Yeah, and you know, I remember in the late 80s and early 90s, the generalist really was just the gatekeeper. Your primary care doctor was the one that you saw to get the referral to see the specialist and everybody wanted to see us better So that’s the only reason they saw the generalist. And today, it’s a little better than that. But it still feels like that’s their role to decide whether or not you see the specialist. And unfortunately, the generalists haven’t kept up with a lot of this knowledge to be that person that can put all these pieces together and be the one that unlocks the door for a lot of complex patients. Right? So can you talk to us a little bit about what people can do? What kind of behaviors can they do to enhance or detract from DNA mutations or DNA damage from a health standpoint?
Dr. Daniel Stickler 20:37
Yeah. And really, I want to, I want to start off with this saying, you know, the these, the genetics that most people get, are what’s called single nucleotide polymorphisms. So when you run 23andme, or if you run your test through through our company appear on or DNA fit or any of the others, you’re getting something called single nucleotide polymorphisms. These are not mutations. So you don’t believe it, when somebody tells you you’ve got a mutation, if they’re reading your 23andme, or any of these other ones that are looking at single nucleotide polymorphisms, single nucleotide polymorphisms are selected over time to be the give you a survival advantage in your environment. And so, you know, now we don’t live in the same environment as our ancestors, every you know, here in the United States, especially, I mean, we’re a melting pot, you look at the genetics, and you got genetic, smaller world. Yeah. So, you know, the, the single nucleotide polymorphisms are wonderful, because we can look at and see, what did you inherit, from which group that, you know, it’s just like the Inuit Eskimo who grew up or their ancestry was living off high fat diets. I mean, they’re gonna have genetics that are optimized for eating a high fat diet. And, you know, you change that diet dramatically. And it’s going to increase the risk of heart disease, Southeast Asia, that it’s mostly starchy diet. So you know, these, these little things that you keep in mind, that you’ve inherited are important for creating lifestyle. And, you know, the lifestyle is everything. I mean, we’ve we’ve known this simple stuff since the dawn of medicine with the Greeks. They knew everything that we don’t do now. mean they considered dietetic was what a man ate and how much he ate. But it was also, you know, what did he do for a job? How was his home life? What was his activity level? That was dietetic, so they, they knew all this stuff interacted as, as a whole. And, you know, that was right after the Greeks towards the end of the Greek medicine era, actually, they started getting into more of the, the reductionistic aspect and away from the systems aspect, but it was systems was the original approach to dealing with human health.
Debra Muth 23:05
So if somebody has a 23andme, and it shows, like a plus plus on it, we’ll just use MTHFR. Because that when people know very well, and they come in, and they say, Well, I’m double mutated on MTHFR, is that truly what it means with 23andme, then that they have a blocked mutation, or they just have adapted?
Dr. Daniel Stickler 23:24
No, they have a variant in their DNA that is not not conducive for their environment, is the best way to put that. So, you know, if you look in Africa, you’re going to find a lot of homozygous, what we call risk MTHFR. So they’re going to be the risk category. But every variant has a positive and a negative to it. So like the MTHFR. If you’re in an environment, that’s folate, rich MTHFR variants are advantages, because you can look at it and fetal survival of a fetus that is double double risk MTHFR is going to have a higher survival advantage than a non variant MTHFR in a high folate environment.
Debra Muth 24:25
I questioned I wondered about that, because there’s so many people that we see with a homozygous MTHFR, but yet they have healthy children. And the only thing they took during pregnancy was folic acid, and nobody gave them fully and you go, Okay, how is this possible that they didn’t have a child born with a birth defect if it’s a true mutation, so that makes sense now.
Dr. Daniel Stickler 24:44
And there’s also you know, when you look at that pathway, there’s a lot of backdoors to that pathway, and there’s a lot of other mechanisms that can create that a man I’ve see I see double, homozygous risk MTHFR is that have a homocysteine level of seven Hmm. And, and you look and of course their folate scores are like 25 or higher. Yeah. So, you know, their lifestyle has been conducive to the genetics that they carry, and they have a very healthy lifestyle. So, you know, none of these things, even a bow II, I mean, you know, they go eat fours, everybody freaks out about, yeah, oh, early Alzheimer’s, heart disease, all this bad stuff. But there are advantages to a bow II. But they’re more survival advantages in the younger years. I mean, a bowI fours are typically more intelligent in the younger years than others, they also have a slight advantage in most viral infections of fighting viral infection. So, you know, if we’re in an environment, oh, I’ll give you a perfect example. And this is, this is actually considered a mutation outside of outside of Africa, but sickle cell? Oh, yeah. You know, you look at so in order for something to be a mutation, it has to occur in less than 1% of the population you’re looking at. Okay, so in Africa, it’s a little higher than that. So it’s actually considered a variant, not a mutation. But it protects against malaria wellness. And so they’re prone to get that A po e fours are advantageous if they don’t eat a lot of red meat, because then you don’t get the activation of the negative impact on the brain. And so in an environment where you’re mostly vegetable based, I mean, the AP four has other advantages to it. So every variant that comes from polymorphisms, so anything that you find in 23andme, has some benefit and some risk, it’s just it’s different based on the environment that you’re you’re functioning in.
Debra Muth 26:49
That makes perfect sense. I’m glad you explained that because so many people do the 23andme. And originally, when 23 and make came out, it had a lot more medical stuff. Now it has more of the looking at relatives and things like that instead of the medical piece to it. But there’s still quite a few people that are doing that, trying to find answers for their health. And the It’s good that you’re explaining this, because now they understand that just because they have that doesn’t mean they have disease doesn’t mean that they’re doomed. Doesn’t mean that things don’t work. It just is another window into that person’s health and looking at different ways to work around that. Right. Awesome. So how can people use this technology to increase their quality of life and their longevity of life?
Dr. Daniel Stickler 27:39
It’s hard to do that on your own with that. So when it comes to genetics, and epigenetics, it’s best to get somebody who’s actually trained in one reading the genetics and two and understanding how epigenetics can be leveraged. Reason for that is that, you know, epigenetics is a lot of it’s based on symptomatology, it’s in, you know, somewhat in the labs, but not much. So you have to understand the person’s lifestyle pretty, pretty intently, and then you correlate that with their genetic polymorphisms. And you can say, Okay, well, you know, this would be a high probability of working well for you to achieve this. But it does, it really takes somebody who understands both the genetics and epigenetics to fully create a plan for somebody to optimize all of these gene expressions and
Debra Muth 28:35
and then once you figure out what that plan is, does that plan stay with that person for life? Does that plan change over time, you’re constantly working with it, like any-
Dr. Daniel Stickler 28:45
Change is inevitable. One of the things that’s really cool about epigenetics is that, you know, the human system is a complex adaptive system. So it adapts over time to, to changes in it, especially things that stress it. So unfamiliar environments, and, and things that it’s not used to functioning in, like exercise. I mean, exercise is one of the biggest stressors you can put on the body in a day. I mean, you measure somebody’s cortisol and stress markers right after exercise, and they’re off the charts. And yet, it’s a healthy thing for us, right? So why is it healthy, because you know, you are damaging the body, you’re tearing muscle, you’re stressing the heart. You know, all this stuff is occurring. And we say that this is something we should do. It’s advantageous. Well, the reason for that is because of this adaptation and epigenetics. So when we exercise and they’ve shown this, you know, somebody who exercises for six months, they have changes in over 7000 gene expressions, wow, in a very positive way. So what’s happening is the body gets stressed and says, Well, Oh, this is an unfamiliar environment to me, I need to adapt and make myself so I can function in this environment. So it makes you more resilient over time. This is one of the basis behind hormesis. And, you know, they’ve even looked at, there was a study done by the government that was really just kind of pushed under the table, but it was about workers at the Nuclear docks in Philadelphia during World War and or after World War Two. And they, they kind of suppress it, because what they found is studying these people over time, they actually had greater longevity than the average population. And what has since been discovered is the fact that low levels of background radiation actually make the body stronger, because it’s putting a stress on the body that says, Oh, I have to, I have to optimize for this environment. So it makes the body stronger in that regard.
Debra Muth 31:00
So opposite of what we’ve been taught all these years. Yeah, yeah. So does it make sense for somebody to repeat a genetic test over time? Or is it a one and done?
Dr. Daniel Stickler 31:10
No, I mean, the different companies have different sets of polymorphisms that they look at. I mean, there’s about 10,000, polymorphisms, in the in the 3 billion base pair genome, and polymorphism is one base pair. So you know, you’re looking at, like, MTHFR, you’ve got these, this, this one, you know, one variant 677. And it’s one of I think, 50,000 base pairs in, I may be wrong on that. But it’s something close to that it’s 50,000 base pairs. So one of 50,000, that is different, that’s going to create a catastrophic outcome. Now, it doesn’t doesn’t quite work that way. Yeah. Even though it does change the structure of the of the MTHFR protein with this one, it still is just a small piece of the entire puzzle.
Debra Muth 32:16
Gotcha, gotcha. So are there can you share with us some of the latest findings in the RNA and age reversal?
Dr. Daniel Stickler 32:26
Well, most of that is starting to come with micro RNAs. So what we’re looking at, and micro RNAs are these short RNA segments that they’re secreted by all the cells in the body, and they’re, they’re secreted to send signals to the rest of the body and other surrounding cells. And so it’s telling the body what’s happening, telling all communicating to all the cells, it’s like an email, it’s going out and saying, you know, there’s these little exosomes that cells secrete and they’ve got the micro RNAs, messenger RNAs in them. They go out throughout the body, and so they inform other cells, what’s going on with them, and you get enough of a certain message like, Hey, I’m getting a lot of stress in life, right? Now, suddenly, your livers gonna gonna start up regulating expressions of detoxifying enzymes, because it’s like, okay, there’s a stressful environment, what’s going on? We know a lot about this because of, in pregnancy, sperm takes about three months to fully mature. And during that three month period, you know, everybody used to think, Oh, well, the father is just this little DNA donors donating a strand of DNA to to the child, but what they now realize is there’s a large amount of micro RNAs that accumulate in the sperm. And they’re actually informing that potential fetus of what the environments like out there in the world, and setting that child up to be able to function well in that environment. So a father who is severely stressed in three months leading up to pregnancy is going to give abnormal stress expressions for the child because the child is going to feel like the programming in there is going to say, it’s a really, really stressful world out there. So we’ve got to make gene expression that works with this. And so it’s, you know, it’s important to maintain a healthy lifestyle as as you go into that three month period prior to pregnancy.
Debra Muth 34:29
Interesting. Well, thank you for sharing all of this. This is amazing, and it’s really cutting edge. It’s exciting. If somebody’s listening in they have a genetic test that they want somebody to look at, how do they find an expert in epigenetics and reading and understanding all of this?
Dr. Daniel Stickler 34:48
Really, I mean, just look for do a search for epigenetic coaches. There’s, there’s a bunch of them you can find online, just you know, connect with them. Kind of get a grasp of their knowledge. Have both genetics and epigenetics. If they mentioned mutation, I would probably not go with them.
Debra Muth 35:07
Because they don’t quite understand that part. Yeah. Gotcha. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate you taking the time from your busy day. I’m sure you’ve got lots more things to do. But thank you.
Dr. Daniel Stickler 35:19
Thank you.
Debra Muth 35:21
Hey, it has been really great sharing this time with you guys on the let’s talk wellness now podcast. If this episode has helped you, or you feel as though this episode would help someone else we’d love for you to leave us a review. Share this podcast. And if you don’t want to miss the most exciting episodes we have coming. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Google Play. Until next time, live everyday to the fullest.