Colorado Springs Functional Medicine

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Genetic Pet Peeves

I have a number of pet peeves.  For those that know me really well, you know I can go from zero to maximum irritability in 0.2 seconds when I see random shopping carts in a major retail parking lot.  If I see you NOT put it away, even though the cart return is only 3 spaces away from your car, I’m ready to punch a hole in your car.   I’m considering creating a personality assessment and job interview process centered around your shopping cart etiquette.  If you can’t push a Costco cart without walking half bent over, leaning on the cart, you’re not even getting an interview.

For the sake of this post, your shopping cart habits are none of my business…unless you don’t put it away.  But a more pertinent pet peeve of mine are the analogies surrounding genetics.  I’m sure you’ve heard them and you thought they were clever and didn’t even question them.  Hopefully these become pet peeves of yours as well.

Functional Medicine Colorado Springs

Your DNA is NOT a Loaded Gun

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MTHFR Myopia

If you happened upon this post with interest in how MTHFR can cause near sightedness, you’ll be sadly disappointed.  You’re probably looking for affirmation that the cause of all your problems stem from a MTHFR dysfunction.   Instead, I hope to provide information for those practitioners and general population people that learn just enough about MTHFR to become dangerous…and careless…and myopic.

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For those that are still hung up on the letters MTHFR and wondering if I just insulted you, let me explain. Actually, let me give you the meaning of life. Ready?  Life is like our favorite food.  You need ingredients and directions to create a finished product.

Substrate + Enzyme/Co-Factors = Product.

Substrates are your basic ingredients. These are your lifestyle choices, circumstances, perceptions, nutrition levels, social influences, movement patterns, and all the variables in life.  This accounts for 98% of your health outcomes (finished product).

The enzymes are coded for in your DNA. This is your recipe guide. It’s the constant in the equation, it doesn’t change. There can be tweaks here and there but any typos in that recipe can most often be corrected for by changing your spices, heating, altitude, etc (i.e. co-factors).

The product is you and your health expression.  You have an amazing recipe and access to ingredients to live a life your ancestors only dreamed about.

The better your ingredients, the better the product.  This life recipe has stood the test of time but because it’s a copy from your great-great-great grandmother x 10,000 years, some of the print may be a bit faded or maybe even contain some typos?  You’ve seen plenty of those in my posts.  Depending on your surrounding environment, you may get caught up on those typos and decide you don’t want to read any further.  You’re disgusted by my ineptness of editing and disregard anything I’ve ever said because I used the wrong version of affect versus effect.

For the majority of you, it’s no big deal, you’re kind and forgiving and will send a sweet email directing me to a correction that needs attention.  I appreciate those.

Typos

This ‘typo’ is a simplistic way of looking at MTHFR.  In essence there’s a deviation in the code from your DNA and it may or may not affect you…or is that effect?  I’ll never understand that one.

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Homophobia for Homocysteine

Homophobia is defined as a ‘dislike of or prejudice against homosexual people.’  I would rather you turn your attention to a dislike or prejudice of another word with the ‘homo’ prefix in it…Homocysteine.  If you want to change your future health outcomes, I would encourage you to create homophobia for homocysteine. 

I was delivering a recent workshop on the Thyroid and I was asked, “if you could only test for one value, what would it be?”  This was difficult to answer as your lab values interconnect so much and to base anything on one value is lazy and ignorant.  But to play the game with the audience member, I said I would test for homocysteine, not an analyte directly used to measure thyroid function.

Here’s why.

Homocysteine, when in a nice range of 4 – 8 umol/L  is a good thing.  This range is definitely tighter than what you see on a standard lab panel of 0 – 15 umol/L.  Why do I like a tighter range?  Because of what homocysteine indicates and contributes to when it’s elevated and I don’t want to wait until it’s outside the ‘normal’ ranges before action is taken.

homocysteine_metabolism

 

Homocysteine is actually a middle step in the formation of the amino acid cysteine, which is a precursor of one of the most power antioxidants in your body in glutathione so to be low is a bad thing as well.  Homocysteine is actually a good thing.  But often times too much of a good thing has the opposite desired effects.  

Homocysteine is one of those scenarios but takes it up a level too.  Homocysteine has been called the single best indicator of your longevity and quality of life.  It’s not just an indicator of many disease processes like cardio-vascular disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Auto-Immune disease, diabetes, Hypothyroid, Osteoporosis, liver disease, hormone imbalance, autism, and anemia, to name a few, but a massive contributor to them.

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