Dirty Genes with Dr. Ben Lynch

A Personal Note from Orion

Everything that you put into your body is going to elicit a genetic response that will either hurt or help you. The food you eat, what you drink, the air you breathe – even the wireless signals around you, all enter your body and cause some kind of effect. Whether positive or negative, is something that we need to take responsibility for and educate ourselves as much as possible.

We all know about healthy eating and reducing our exposure to chemicals, but that’s not always possible in the world we live in. There are things like supplements that can help enhance our nutrition, but we must be careful in our use of them so they do not merely support our bad habits (like eating processed foods), but actually work in conjunction with a healthy lifestyle to maintain optimal health.

My guest is the best-selling author of the book Dirty Genes, and founder of the website Seeking Health, a company that helps educate both the public and health professionals on how to overcome genetic dysfunctions. He shares a wealth of knowledge on this interview will open your eyes to the realities of the over processed world we live in, and how you can protect your health.

About Today’s Show

Welcome to Stellar Life Podcast. My guest today is a megastar in his field. He is so famous that I had to use my special connections to get him. It was a wonderful conversation and I had a blast. I think it will be a total eye-opener for you. You definitely need to listen because he’s going to teach you some things that you probably didn’t know before. It’s always good to know the things you didn’t know because you can have a happier, healthier, and more productive life. Dr. Ben Lynch is a best-selling author of the book, Dirty Genes, and president of Seeking Health, a company that helps educate both the public and health professionals on how to overcome genetic dysfunctions. I use his products. I just started using them about four months ago. They are so good because he uses pure ingredients. In this world and market of supplements, there are so many charlatans. There are so many fillers. There is so many junk that goes into our supplements. It’s really good to find somebody who’s genuine, authentic, and produces super clean, high-level supplements. You can find them on his website, Seeking Health. I hope you will enjoy this show as much as I did. And now without further ado, on to the show. Hey, Dr. Lynch and welcome to Stellar Life Podcast.

Awesome to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Thank you so much for being here. This is going to be very exciting. Before we start, can you share a little bit about yourself and your passion?

My passion is helping people who are driven and committed to helping themselves. Truly helping themselves in an efficient, targeted, and directed way versus a chaotic – guessing ‘I wonder if this is going to help because I help so many other people’ – way. What I try to do is I try to offer people targeted support and then optimize their genetic function through various ways through my book, Dirty Genes, which is a great place to start. Then, if they want to dive deeper, they can use their genetics and dive through the strategy. Nutritionally, they can support themselves additionally with supplements. But I’m always trying to help people without supplements as much as possible, through lifestyle, diet, and environment. That’s first. Basically, what I love doing is working with motivated people to feel the best they can. Once they feel the best they can, take the next level and feel even better. It is fun. It’s a lot of fun and I meet people all the time that was kind of thinking that they’re pretty good and then they walk up to me after I give them some of our electrolytes—our electrolytes are really good—and it’s like, “God, Ben. I can’t believe it.” Just yesterday our builders came and walked around. I sent them a bunch of electrolytes at the firm and they’re like, “This is unbelievable. It’s cool. It’s really rewarding.”

That is very sweet of you and that’s awesome. Now your house is going to be better. You wrote the book, Dirty Genes, which is a super cool title. How do genes work?

Genes work in response to things. Think of your computer that’s sitting in front of you. Your genes are your computer. Basically, they’re sitting in front of you. Your computer doesn’t do anything until you tell it to do something. It doesn’t really act on its own unless there’s a program running in the background, maybe a satellite is communicating to the time on the computer. There are some things running in the background that are automated, like updating your time for Daylight Savings Time. Your genes are also on a timer, but what’s really most important to understand is the keyboard that you have on your computer is your input. Genes require input in order for them to do things, most of them. When you decide to stay up late at night, there are certain genes that are firing to help you do that. When you eat certain processed foods that you know you shouldn’t, there are certain genes that turn on and help you process those as well. So, genes are basically tools that our body uses all the time for repair and running the system.

Genes are tools that our body uses for repair and running the system. Click To Tweet

In your book, you’re talking about the super seven genes. What are they? What are the most important genes that we need to know about?

The most important genes that we need to know about, that’s a very individual question. The reason why these seven in the book, the super seven as you mentioned, is because they’re very well-researched, there’s a lot of evidence, and I have a lot of clinical experience behind them. But we have to keep in mind that there are about 20,000 genes in the human body. When we’re talking about seven, are we really making a dent? Is it really helpful? I say yes. The reason I say yes is because these are the super seven. Now, there are other truly important genes, too. Without them we are dead. But these are genes which are impacted by our choices that we make every single moment of our life.

Also, they can be negatively impacted or they can be positively impacted by your choices. On top of that, there’s a potential that they can be positively or negatively impacting your life at birth, depending on how you inherit these genes from your parents. These super seven genes, if you clean them all up, you’re going to feel pretty good because every one of these genes that I picked in the book work on the main body system, they are two genes that work on your brain and your neurotransmitters. Basically, how you think, how you process information, and how your moods are. I pick the gene, those are COMT and MAOA. There’s a gene for detoxification, oxidative stress, and free radical elimination. That’s the GST/GPX, the glutathione genes. Then we have one for your cell membranes. Your cell membranes are super important. Without those, your cells are dead. That’s the PEMT gene. Then, we have a really important gut health gene. Extremely important and that’s DAO. This gene gets rid of histamine in the gut, which is incredibly important. Then we have MTHFR, which is kind of the kingpin for making sure that a very important cycle called methylation, which helps turn genes on and off, is regulated. If this gene isn’t working, then you’re going to have basically any condition known to man and woman. There’s another gene; I’m missing one. I don’t have the list in front of me.

They’ll have to buy the book.

Definitely. You’ll get to buy the book. You walk yourself through it. It’s going to be transforming because the book discusses the reasons why you are struggling with everyday symptoms. There’s a lot of books that are targeted, let’s say the Hashimoto’s, or ulcerative colitis, or celiac disease, or why you can’t eat wheat, or you can’t eat lectins. These are very sub-specific niches. Dirty Genes is the first truly holistic book that I’ve ever seen that encompasses the entire body in a way that you can understand how it works at the biochemical level and even further at the genetic level. There are quizzes to see. You can quickly tell how well your particular gene is working or not. You can use the steps to start taking action to make your genes work even better, which is really cool. Is it an informational book? Yes, but I like to call it more of a guide. It’s a book you’ll always use for the rest of your life. It’s not a book you curl up by the fireplace or a book you read once on vacation. It’s a tool book. It’s a guide book.

I heard in one of your interviews that when you wrote the book with your writer, you guys had a back-and-forth argument because you came up with this scientific language and she was like, “I don’t get it. Can you please explain it in different ways?” So, you rewrote it in a way that is very accessible and available for everyone.

That was the goal because the majority of people who need this book do need it written in this way. It’s not written down in a dumb level. It’s written in a way that’s fun, interesting, engaging, and where you can take action. There are comments and reviews on the book where people left a one-star review and said, “Oh I was expecting more rigorous science.” If you want that, then you can go to my site and buy the online courses that I have and you can geek out on the science all you want. This is the first book that really is a place to start. If you’ve already taken all my online courses, you’ve done all these things but you’re still lost, then Dirty Genes is still the place to go back and start because it is a foundational area. A lot of people do genetic testing or they know a lot about biochemistry or they know a lot about genetic function, but they keep forgetting the underlying basis in which our genes are functioning and bathing in every single day, and that’s our choices.

The two main issues in our environment are the chemical industry and the food industry, and they’re linked.

Let’s talk about the MTHFR gene. What are some pros and cons to that gene and what exactly does it do?

I love that question. I love how you phrase it because it’s not just the cons. That was also what Rachel brought forth in the book. Rachel was helping me write the book. She was a fantastic guide. We had one of our phone calls and she goes, “Ben, all these genes that you’re talking about, they can’t be all bad, right?” I mean, the original name of the book was supposed to be Seven Deadly Genes. That was three phone calls of fighting. Rachel came up with Dirty Genes, which is perfect. The pro for MTHFR. Let’s say you’re born with a gene of MTHFR that does not work as typically as some of the MTHFR genes that is working normal speed. Keep in mind that there are variants.

Let’s discuss this before we jump into MTHFR because you have to define this first before I answer the question. You can be born with the MTHFR that works typically. Note that I didn’t say normally. I said typically. The standard population has an MTHFR gene that works pretty quickly and typically then, there’s a subset of the population. Typically Hispanics, Italians,Chinese, and a number of Caucasian population as well, Americans, have an MTHFR gene that works a lot slower than typically. What happens when you say, “Okay, well that must be bad.” It’s not bad. If you have a slower MTHFR gene, that is helping the body conserve folate. It’s holding on to it. It’s not just letting the folate run through and do its thing. It’s holding it on longer.

There are two types of folates in the body. There’s methylfolate, which is what MTHFR gene makes so it can go on and do something, and then there’s folinic acid. You need that type of folate for making your DNA, your RNA bases, your energy bases, and repair as well. You’ve got to have that, all that type of folate, for your skin health, your hair growth and your digestive lining repair every seven days or so. Having a slower MTHFR allows this other type of folate to be plentiful so it can work on repairing your DNA. If you go out in the sun and your skin burn, having a slower MTHFR is actually beneficial. It heals your skin faster because it has more folate to heal your skin. Now, the downside, let’s say you eat a lot of protein and you chow away on a paleo diet or a gas diet, and you’re eating all these steaks and so on, then having a slower MTHFR is going to increase a breakdown product of that protein called homocysteine, and that can lead to cardiovascular disease, neurological disease, seizures and so on, which can obviously cause a lot of issues. Some cancers are also increased as well.

It’s balanced but the cool thing in the book is I tell you these things. I tell you the pros and cons and I will also guide you through it. If you take the quiz, which we call a laundry list because you’ve got to clean your dirty genes—you’ve got your laundry list, you take some of the questions from the Dirty Genes’ MTHFR-specific quiz—and if it says, “I tend to have higher homocysteine levels from the lab,” that is a sign of the dirty MTHFR and you need to clean that up. You can take action on it. That’s pretty handy.

What are the best ways to test for our genes?

The best way to test for your genes is to use the quiz in the book first. I am not the type of doctor to run out and get a bunch of lab tests on patients. I don’t agree with that approach. This is actually becoming a huge problem in medicine where doctors don’t even touch the patient, they won’t talk to the patient. They jab, stab and scan them.

That’s terrible. When I was younger, I used to look at any doctor that is wearing white and be like, “Oh, they’re doctors. They know everything.” The older I get, the more experience I get, and the more exposed I am to different knowledge, sometimes I’ll have to almost fight with my doctor not to do things that I think that are good for me.

Health is complex. No doctor can know everything. Click To Tweet

You have to keep that in mind. Everyone has to keep in mind that the doctor works for you. The doctor serves you and you’re in charge of hiring and firing your doctor. They are not in control of you. You’re in control of your own decisions and the doctor’s supposed to be a guide to help you make those decisions. If you find that your guide is not providing the necessary, or the most complete, or the most unbiased information, or without conflict of interest, then you need to find a different doctor. If you enjoy working with your doctor, they’re a great person, they’re a great guide, and he or she is helping you, but they don’t have the necessary knowledge in a certain area, you continue working with that doctor. You can just add another doctor onto your team. I don’t believe any person should have one health professional working through their life. I believe that you should have 10 or 15 different health professionals working and understanding. These doctors and health professionals are collaborating, sharing labs, and sharing information back and forth with your permission because you really need a team. Health is really complex. No health professional can know everything at all. That is a very important point. There’s a lot of charlatans, unfortunately, in the genetics space, where they say that they understand, they read your genetic report and make recommendations based upon your genetics. That’s BS. You can’t make recommendations purely on someone’s genetic report without talking with them. And that goes back to the original question.

Medicine did get a little detached from looking at a person as a whole being rather than a bunch of systems that connect to some data.

Exactly. You cannot break the body down into systems. It’s helpful, we do that in medical school, but when you’re studying these systems, you eventually read as you’re maybe talking about the lung or the respiratory system, how it connects with the circulatory system, then how it connects with neurological system, then how it connects with the energy system, the mitochondria respiration and so on. Everything is connected to everything. People have a great saying, I’ve forgotten who said it but blood flows everywhere. You can’t segment the human body into multiple pieces but it’s convenient to do so because now we have a bunch of subspecialties. You can have a problematic lung function because you’re over-training or you’re breathing in mold from the environment. You have to have an environmental medicine expert who can look while your lungs on you have or you have asthma because you have mold in your environment. So now, you need an environmental medicine specialist, not a pulmonologist, who says, “Oh you have mold in your lungs.”

I guess there are some genes that are more susceptible to mold exposure. I have those. I’m so sensitive to mold.

Mold is very difficult and it’s going to take anyone down eventually. You don’t have to be macho and fight through it. I know there’s a lot of talk on the internet about certain genes increasing someone’s susceptibility to mold. That may be true. I haven’t seen public research proving this at all but there’s a ton of talk. There is even a lab test showing if you get this genetic test done, it’s going to say that you’re more susceptible to mold. Again, it goes back to not using a lab test but going back to history. That’s why, like the quizzes in the book, because you don’t need to go see a doctor initially, you can do a lot of work on your own, do a ton of work, and make some progress. When you get stuck, at the back of the book, I have a bunch of lab recommendations based upon each gene, and also a general screening section of all lab that you should do, regardless of your genetics, and regardless of how you did on the quiz in the book. It gives you a guide as well.

Everybody’s looking for an instant answer, the magic pill that will change my life. There is no magic pill.

But first, I want you to do a lot of cleanup on your own. Imagine if you hired a moving company to come into your home without doing any prep work. You didn’t get any boxes, you didn’t take out the trash, you’ve got stuff everywhere, you had a party the night before, there are people all over the floor. They’re going to charge you a lot more money. Whereas if you got rid of all the garbage in your home, you went to goodwill already multiple times, you donated a bunch of stuff, you organized things and all that, the moving company is going to charge you a lot less since they’re going to be more efficient. I look at Dirty Genes as saving you a ton of money, because you’re not only understanding how your body works at the genetic and biochemical levels so you can really understand how you’re feeling and take action, but at the same time it’s going to give you tools in order to optimize each of these super seven genetic functions so they’re all moving at the same time. You’ve got two wheels on a bicycle, you have four wheels on a car. The super seven genes, if all seven are humming along, you’re going to be rolling and flying through life. Otherwise, if you have one of them dirty, it’s like you have one wheel on your car stuck and the other three you can turn, you’re going to be going in circles in life.

You literally go in circles in life when you don’t feel well. You’re not going to be motivated, you’re going to be dragging out of bed, your cognitive abilities are not going to be as good. Your emotional dexterity is also going to be off. Those around you are not gonna be happy with you. It’s going to further drive you down. Then another wheel is going to get stuck. You’re not going to even go in circles anymore. You’re just not going anywhere. You got to have all seven clean. That’s what Dirty Genes really affords you to do. It’s really a lifestyle book. Someone commented in the Dirty Genes course Facebook group and they asked a question about how they clean up this one particular gene. This one lady wrote back and she goes, “You know what? I cleaned up that DAO gene but it really was a process. I really realized that to change my lifestyle, I cleaned up my environment, I had mold, I’ve got infections, I was really high-stressed, I was eating a lot of these foods which is increasing the histamine. So I did all that and I changed my diet.” Then he goes, “Wow, that’s a lot of work.” The lady who felt much better, she goes, “You know what? I look at Dirty Genes not really as a how-to book but a guide. It’s a lifestyle guidebook. A how to live book, which we never really got in life.”

I love your holistic approach. Everybody’s looking for an instant answer, the magic pill that will change my life. There is no magic pill.

That just actually happened to my wife last week or two. She bought the book Plant Paradox, which is helping a lot of people feel a lot better by removing lectins from their diet. She’s now removing lectins and seeing how that affects her and it is helping her. But the problem is that she was eating the same foods over and over again. I was like, “Nadia, you can’t be eating the same food over and over again.” She was, “Well, in Plant Paradox, this food was really good for you.” I said, “Well, it may be really good for you, but if you have a leaky gut or even if you don’t, if you continue to eat the same food every single day, you’re going to start reacting to it, you used to develop an immune response to it, and now you’re going to feel worse from it because you now have a food allergy. She goes, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense because it says it’s good.” I said, “Well, you need to know about the rotation diet.” She was, “What’s that?” I said, “We’ve been talking about that for 20 years. You know what that is.” She was, “But, it doesn’t talk about that.” “Because no book has all the same single answers.” You have to take every single book that you’ve read and apply it to your life. Every book has something good in it, I hope, but like you said, no book has all the answers. Dirty Genes doesn’t have all the answers. Not even close. But it has a really good starting point to understand how your genes work so you can get going in the right direction.

It’s the individual’s responsibility to go out and search for themselves. First, tune to your body, your intuition, and listen to your body because people get detached from their bodies. I feel like more men than women, but women as well, especially businessmen, they live from the neck-up. They tend to neglect their bodies and also not tuned to their bodies.

I talked about tuning in a ton in Dirty Genes. You cannot start to feel good unless you are aware of the actions and how they make your body feel. For example, my kids one day when we were at the grocery store, we walked by the pastry section, then the cream-filled donuts. They’re like, “God, dad those look so good,” and I said, “Yeah, they do.”

They smell good, they look good, and they even taste good, usually. And it’s like, “Dad, how can you just walk by that without getting it?” I said, “Because I look at that, I know it tastes good, I know it smells good, I know it looks good, but I pretend I eat it, and then I think about how it made me feel after I eat it. It always made me feel hot, irritable, and I got really tired. I got light-headed, my tongue would get burned because that’s what happens to me when I eat gluten. I get a really hot red-tipped tongue and then my feet are getting hot. And I get irritable.” So, I say, “I think of all those things. The negative outweighs the positive, so I don’t eat it.” They’re like, “Oh, that makes sense,” and we keep going.

If I didn’t tune in, I would just have been enjoying the donut, feeding my senses, not thinking the aftermath, and then later on, maybe an hour later, I start struggling with these things and I was like, “Alright, now I don’t feel good and I need something to make me feel good again.” You’ve got to think of why you don’t feel good. A lot of people don’t do that. They just need to pop something else so they can keep going with their current decisions so they can satisfy their senses. You can’t. You just go on through life satisfying your emotions and senses because that’s a lot of false advertising and bad marketing does or good marketing a bad product. A lot of health issues is actually a result of really effective marketing of bad products.

Even in the vitamin world.

And the medical world.

A lot of health issues is a result of effective marketing of bad products. Click To Tweet

Let’s talk about vitamins. I love biohacking. Every time I read something, or go to a conference, or I listen to a podcast, it seems like there are more supplements I should take. There is an abundance of them and there are many claims like, “This is amazing for you,” and you end up with a list of 300 supplements that you need to take. Some people take them, especially people that are in the longevity space. They take up to, I don’t know, 180 pills a day. For somebody who is not so extreme, what are some of the vitamins we must take that will really help us?

First, we have to define the word supplement. When you hear the word supplement, what do you think? How would you define supplement? Not to put you in the spot or anything, which I am doing, but there’s no right or wrong answer here. How would you define a supplement or vitamin? What is supplement mean to you?

Something that will help me optimize my health.

Perfect. Something that helps you optimize your health. But why do a lot of people take supplements or vitamins for?

It reminds me of cat treats, where they say on the label, “This is not food. This is just a supplementation for your pet.” Some people take vitamins instead of a healthy lifestyle.

They use supplements to fix their bad habits. If you have a donut, then you can take a supplement to digest that gluten, you can take a supplement to reduce the histamine, you can take a supplement to fix the leaky gut that you’re going to get from it, you can take a supplement to help you calm down from the nerves that you can get, you can take another supplement to help to absorb the glucose and the garbage from there, you can take another supplement to fight the oxidative stress and the free radical damage that can be produced from it, then you can take another supplement for the nutrients that are going to suck out of you like the zinc and the magnesium and the chromium.

Any processed food is going to do that to your system. You have to think of what is going to happen when you eat food. When you eat food, it’s going to do one of two things. It’s going to support your biochemistry and enhance your ability to function. It’s going to provide what your body needed. Or it’s going to be harmful to your body, it filled your taste senses or any sense or an emotional sense while you’re eating, but there’s biochemical aftermath of that decision of why you put that food in your mouth.

Everything that you put in your mouth, everything that you breathe, everything that you touch, has a genetic response to it. Everything. It’s either going to enhance your genetic function or it’s going to alter it. If it alters it, and those certain genes have to fire, those genes are producing enzymes which also require nutrients to work. If you’re eating a lot of sugar, you need to increase chromium. If you’re eating a lot of gluten and you’re gluten-intolerant, then you need to increase your nutrients which calm your immune system. You need nutrients which help repair your gut. You need nutrients which fight pro-oxidation. See what I’m saying?

Supplement to me, if you look at it in the dictionary, is defined as to add or enhance. You said the same thing. A supplement is defined as something to optimize your health. But a lot of people are taking supplements to fix their “bad decisions” in life, just like a lot of people are taking prescription medications as a crutch to fix their bad decisions in life. Now, not everyone is doing that, of course. Some people are taking supplements because they’ve got dealt a bad hand or they got exposed to an infection or they got exposed to something. The main point I want to make is all of us, including me, are making decisions that are harder on our genetic function and we could be changing our decisions and our choices to help optimize our genetic function without the use of supplementation.

Can we over-supplement?

100% for sure. The first time that question was posed to me, I thought, no way. Here I am, sitting in nutrition class, which is a nutritional biochemistry class. Somebody asks basically the same question as you and the professor said, “Yes, you can actually over-supplement.” I was sitting there, smug, with my arms crossed probably in class, thinking he’s wrong. You cannot over-supplement. I think what a stupid answer because supplements are helpful, they’re nutritious, they’re designed to help us. But he was absolutely right and I was absolutely wrong and it took me probably eight years after that class to realize he was right.

Let me give you an example. I talk about this nearly at the end of the book called the pulse method on how you should supplement. The pulse method is a system where I educate people on how you should take supplements. I lot of people take supplements where you read the back of the label, it says, “Suggested use: take two tablets twice a day with food, preferably in the morning with breakfast,” and that’s it. You follow that, You buy it, you run out. You buy it again, you take it again, follow that. Eventually, you start feeling sick. That supplement which used to make you feel good is starting to make you feel sick. Like you said back earlier, you do not tune in and realize that supplement made you feel worse, you’re going to continue taking that supplement as it’s directed on the bottle, and then you’re going to add another one because you don’t feel good anymore. Now, you add a supplement to combat the supplement side effects. What happened is initially you had a nutritional deficiency or something and that supplement helped you. You were swallowing it and you had genes saying, “Thank you for providing me these nutrients.” You started feeling better and then the nutrient density got to a point in your body where it’s no longer was beneficial but harmful. Now, what happened is you have this excess amount of nutrients which is pushing certain genes, or blocking other nutrients from doing their job, or pushing other genes to work harder to get rid of those nutrients, or it’s interacting. Now, it feels worse. Makes sense?

Everything that you put in your mouth, everything that you breathe and everything that you touch have a genetic response to it. Click To Tweet

It’s a problem if you take out 30 supplements, you have to do almost an elimination diet?

In the book, it’s called soap and scrub. In the book, the soap and scrub process is defined basically what you just said. I have everybody stop all the supplements that they’re taking and all the over-the-counter medications that they’re taking that are not prescriptive. If you’re taking something prescriptive, yes keep going. But other than that, you remove all of them because you’ve got to find a new baseline and then you start changing your lifestyle, your diet, your environment, and your habits, and then you start adding supplements as you need to later. But I don’t want people supplementing in the beginning.

So, you clean your body for what? Two weeks? Three weeks? And then start again?

Yes.

Let’s talk about folic acid, one of your favorite topics.

Yeah, one of my nemesis. This exactly goes on point of what we’ve just been discussing. What is folic acid? Why was folic acid made? Folic acid is a synthetic nutrient designed to replenish our folate levels. Folic acid is a type of folate and a lot of people think, “What are we talking about? It’s the same thing.” It’s not the same thing. There’s a bunch of cars out there. You have pick-ups, you have dump trucks, you have motorcycles, you have smart cars, you have diesel. Folate is like the word ‘car.’ You have different types of cars and you have different types of folate. Folic acid is one type of folate. Then you have methylfolate and you have folic acid. Those are the two main types of folate out there that can find, buy, and use. Now, folic acid had a run and did serve people who were not getting enough folate from their food. Folate comes from the word ‘foliage.’ I always loved defining things. My grandfather really instilled that in me. He goes, “Ben, when you’re working with people, you really need to define what the word means. So, folate comes from foliage, and foliage provides folate. Foliage are green things. Leaves. You find folate in these types of foods. So, if you’re not eating a lot of these leafy, green vegetables or organ meats like liver, then you’re not going to be getting sufficient folate. So, what a lot of people do is they take synthetic folic acid, thinking that it’s helping them. It may be helping them, but in the long run, it could be harming them. Folic acid was invented because the industrialized revolution was happening and they stripped the nutrients from the greens and processed it into white, bleached flour or white unbleached flour. Flour is typically brown and full of protein and other nutrients. The greens naturally have a lot of bran, protein, and other nutrients in them, but when you process them and you strip that stuff out, you’re left with basically garbage, which is white flour. People were eating that and the industrialized revolution was saying, “Hey, look how cool we are because now we can have bread sitting on the shelves for a couple of months versus a day or two. Now we can make a lot faster and ship it all throughout the United States. We don’t have to make as much anymore and it makes our systems more efficient. What happened is people started getting birth defects. Women were delivering their children while birth defects were happening because folate levels were low in these foods. Instead of saying, “Oh, we no longer can strip out the nutrients from the foods,” they invented a type of folate, made it in a lab, and then stuck it in the flour.

That is so stupid. It’s annoying me that the food industry… let’s not even start.

The two main issues that I see in our environment is the chemical industry and the food industry, and they’re really linked. They’re linked.

They support each other.

It’s very hard to find healthy whole food. It’s very difficult. When you walk into the grocery store, you need to walk on the perimeter aisles. You don’t even need to go in the middle aisles. That’s all the garbage. You walk on the perimeter. I learned something the other day which really blew me really away. I learned that in Florida, there were spraying half a million acres of oranges with an antibiotic of streptomycin because the trees were unhealthy. Well, the trees were unhealthy because the soils are so depleted from lack of nutrients, pesticides, herbicides, and all the flora from the soil is dead. There are no nutrients in the soil anymore. Everything was just gone, so the trees are naturally sick just like people. When the trees are naturally sick, instead of restoring the soil with natural fertilizer and restoring the soil with good bacteria from compost mixes and so on, or kelp or what have you, or mulch, they spray trees with antibiotics. You can spray streptomycin and one other antibiotic, I’m not sure what it was, on organic fruit and can still be labeled as organic.

Here we are wondering why we can’t eat lectins, why we’re reacting to histamine, why we’re reacting to all these certain foods where we weren’t reacting before. All these people in probiotics are a hot seller for most companies. You can avoid so much food but as you continue avoiding more and more foods, you’re left over eating nothing. Even air. People are having even more restrictive diets. So, it comes down to what you’re eating. Roundup has been shown in labs to wipe out the beneficial bacteria in your gut. The bifidobacteria, the lactobacillus, but really the bifidobacteria, which is really, really important for gut health, and Roundup kills them.

Genes require input in order for them to do things.

Roundup is found in wine, it’s found in almost all of our food, even organic wines, even organic foods because of cross-contamination. Then, people start reacting to all these things that they should be eating healthy but they can’t because the bifidobacteria are gone from Roundup. So, it’s really a vicious cycle. Not only that. Roundup not only kills the good ones, but it also supports the growth of the bad bacteria. When I was reading this research, I was blown away. I was like, “This answer is so much.” And the plastics industry, that goes back to chemicals. Plastics is a nightmare because if you watch the video Tale of Two Mice on Nova, and you can see that on Youtube, the researcher talks about how she introduced phthalates in pregnant mice and how it messed up the future babies when they’re born. It makes me wonders if phthalates link to autism, most likely.

It’s a pretty scary time. I wasn’t attending but I was watching the live stream of Abundance 360 from Peter Diamandis. They talked about augmented reality, new technologies, 3D printing, and then the spoke about 5G like 5G is going to connect everything. But all those technologies have a psychological effect and also health problems. 5G research shows that it can cause tumors, skin problems, cognitive problems, so many things. So, how can we protect ourselves from the Roundup and the 5G without going crazy?

First is awareness. That is everywhere, and tctually lead a life of normal sanity without worrying about it too much. I don’t obsess over it. That’s first. I’m going to consume Roundup. That’s going to happen. I’m going to be exposed to wireless technologies. That’s going to happen. My thought is, how do I prepare my body to manage this? Well, this is where supplementation comes into play. You cannot avoid these things and you know they’re going to hit you, so you need to make decisions. Right now, you and I are having this interview. I could be using wireless technology, but I’m not. I built my home where I have ethernet wires in the walls, my computer is actually wired, and I have ethernet cables to my computer. Our home is built with aluminum roofing, aluminum siding, and double-glazed windows, so salient signals do not really penetrate into this home. It’s a fortress; it’s crazy. It pissed off my kids and it’s inconvenient because the phone rings, you literally have to go outside and talk to people. It’s been difficult for the builders, too, because they were having to go outside and answer phone calls. It’s hard to move through. You have to make these decisions and move forward from it.

I just want to close the corner on the folic acid so people will know what not to take. Do you need to take L-methylation folic acid?

L-methylfolate. It’s shortly called methylfolate or folic acid. These are the two main types of folate. You want to limit your intake. You’re going to consume folic acid. It’s pervasive. It’s everywhere. So don’t freak out. Again, you just can’t avoid everything, so just limit the intake. You just limit your intake of folic acid. If you’re taking supplements that says folic acid, that’s easy. You can make a choice, “I’m not going to use that supplement. I’m going to look for supplements with folinic acid, also known as calcium folinate, and I’m going to find a supplement that has L-methylfolate in it or L5-MTHF, which is also another name for the same thing.

A supplement is defined as something to optimize your health. But a lot of people are taking supplements to fix their “bad decisions” in life, Click To Tweet

Going to your website, seekinghealth.com and get your supplements because you’re producing high quality, high-level supplements that don’t have junk in it.

Yeah, we’re really strict for sourcing ingredients and we have no folic acid anywhere. We had stevia. We’re using stevia recently. Read in some press that I didn’t like about stevia and we’re removing stevia from all our supplements. Even if we did have a nutrient in there which we were using for a long time because we thought it was fine, we’re removing it now based upon our ongoing knowledge. I’m always researching or always digging or I will always constantly make our stock optimal, which is why you see everything named Optimal something that’s SeekingHealth for the most part because I believe it truly is optimal. My shelter is full of SeekingHealth products and that’s what I give to my family.

That’s beautiful. What are your three top tips for living a stellar life?

I have a bonus chapter at drbenlynch.com. Those are my 26 steps, I would say, and I really wanted to include that in the book, Dirty Genes, but the publisher says, “No. It doesn’t fit.” Relatively speaking, it’s really a great bonus chapter. So that’s freely available at drbenlynch.com. I would say that the A-B-Cs, the first three are great. Letter A stands for Avoid. Avoid is really important. I avoid wifi. I avoid folic acid. I avoid stress. I avoid negative news. I don’t watch that the government has been shut down for over a month because of some idiot in the White House is trying to make a wall and ruin everyone else’s lives. I just don’t listen to that. I avoid things that I know stress me out.

I also avoid chemicals as much as I can. But they’re everywhere. I avoid stressing over. I’m not going to avoid all the chemicals in my life, so I’m going to avoid that stress. So avoidance is really important. Another part of avoidance is learning to say no. There’s a lot of people that request interviews with me or request me to do this or request me to do that. I want to be everywhere, I want to help everyone, but I can’t. You have to learn to say no. If there’s someone in your office keeps coming to you because you’re the go-to guy or you’re the go-to gal, and you keep saying yes to this, no you don’t. There’s a contractor here at our home and he’s spread thin. He’s got to learn to say no on certain projects and say yes to others. There’s a great book called Essentialism. You’ve got to read that.

B would be Breathe. A lot of us don’t breathe very well and are being focused on with our breath. You got to make sure that you’re focusing on your breath. And then, C would be Chew. Chew your food versus swallowing it whole, you’re going to be doing your body a lot of better service. Part of chewing is eating until you’re 80% full. I always stop eating when I always like probably 99% of the time, I stop eating when I’m 80% full because there’s no point to keep going. Those are really very big ones for me.

Thank you so much, Dr. Lynch. Again, your website is?

SeekingHealth.com and then DrBenLynch.com.

Go there. Get the book. Buy supplements. Learn from this guy. He’s phenomenal. Thank you so much, Dr. Lynch. I know you’re so busy. I’m honored to have you here and I really appreciate you, sharing your knowledge with us.

My pleasure. Thanks for the invite.

Thank you and thank you, listeners. Remember to avoid stress for healthy boundaries and say no to what doesn’t serve you. Focus on your breathing. Eat well and live a stellar life. This is Orion. Until next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

✓ Live a healthy lifestyle through a balanced diet and nourishing environment so that your body does not depend too much on supplements.
✓ Treat your genes like a computer or an intelligent machine. You need to provide your genes with direction so that they might reach their highest potential and work as they are meant to.
✓ Keep in mind that your doctor works for you. Not everything they say is 100% true or effective, and not all of their solutions will work for you. You know your body best, therefore, it’s okay to look for another physician if you think it’s not working out.
✓ Beware of charlatans and trending fads in the medical world. Just because someone or something is getting a lot of press doesn’t mean they’re good for you. Always research before you buy products that have been hyped.
✓ Regularly check your house for molds. There are many cases of mold infection and people aren’t aware of how serious it is until they have to deal with the symptoms. Keep sensitive areas in your house clean and dry all the time.
✓ Vary your food intake. Eating just one type of food every day, even if it’s healthy or organic, is not good for the body. It can create an unpleasant reaction and affect your immune system.
✓ Read as many medical and health and wellness books as you can. There is no one book that has all the answers. Apply the knowledge you’ve learned to your everyday life.
✓ Avoid processed food entirely. Any type of processed food with ingredients you cannot even pronounce will always cause a certain reaction to your body. It may not happen right away, but it will take a toll on you eventually.
✓ Grab a copy of Dr. Ben Lynch’s book, Dirty Genes: A Breakthrough Program to Treat the Root Cause of Illness and Optimize Your Health.
✓ Read the bonus chapter of Dr. Ben Lynch’s book, 26 Steps to Clean Genes, on his website, drbenlynch.com.

Links and Resources

About Dr. Ben Lynch

Dr. Ben Lynch is the best-selling author of the book Dirty Genes and President of Seeking Health, a company that helps educate both the public and health professionals on how to overcome genetic dysfunction. He lives in Seattle, WA with his wife and three sons. www.drbenlynch.com.