Dirty Genes

Ben Lynch

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062698209
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nutrition, Dietics & Bariatrics

Instant National Bestseller

After suffering for years with unexplainable health issues, Dr. Ben Lynch discovered the root cause—"dirty" genes. Genes can be "born dirty" or merely "act dirty" in response to your environment, diet, or lifestyle—causing lifelong, life-threatening, and chronic health problems, including cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, anxiety, depression, digestive issues, obesity, cancer, and diabetes.

Based on his own experience and successfully helping thousands of clients, Dr. Lynch shows you how to identify and optimize both types of dirty genes by cleaning them up with targeted and personalized plans, including healthy eating, good sleep, stress relief, environmental detox, and other holistic and natural means.

Many of us believe our genes doom us to the disorders that run in our families. But Dr. Lynch reveals that with the right plan in place, you can eliminate symptoms, and optimize your physical and mental health—and ultimately rewrite your genetic destiny.

PART I

CAN YOU CONTROL YOUR GENES?

1

Cleaning Up Your Dirty Genes

When Keri and I began our session, she was distraught. She held a wad of tissues in one hand, and with the other she was continually wiping her runny nose or dabbing at her streaming eyes. Her skin was red and scaly. Her hair was limp and stringy. Almost before I could introduce myself, she burst out, “I’m such a mess!”

As we talked, I could see that Keri already understood quite a bit about her situation. She had already figured out what was making her sick: chemicals. “Just a whiff of paint starts me wheezing,” she told me, between efforts at repair work with the tissues. “Every time I clean the kitchen floor, my eyes tear up. I can’t even find a shampoo or a bar of hand soap that doesn’t make me break out. I’ve tried to clear all that stuff out of my house—but every day, it seems like I develop a reaction to something new. I feel like I’m going crazy—but I’m not, am I?”

No, I reassured her. From her symptoms, I was willing to bet that Keri had at least one dirty gene. More specifically, I suspected one or more SNPs in her GST or GPX. Those are the genes that help us use glutathione, a key detox agent that our body produces. Without glutathione, we have a heck of a time ridding our body of toxins. And in our modern world, we’re surrounded by toxins all the time. Industrial chemicals and heavy metals are in our air, our water, our shampoo, our face cream, our food, our dish soap, our laundry detergent—the list goes on and on. And on.

Yes, your genes will thank you for buying organic and using only green products—that’s a great start. But your body also has to filter out the toxins that you just can’t avoid. How about the daily eleven thousand liters of air you breathe, the eight cups of water you drink, and the four pounds of food you eat? These are all infused with at least some of the 129 million industrial chemicals currently registered. And filtering those chemicals out of your body is nearly impossible when your GST/GPX gene is dirty. (Because it’s hard to tell, without genetic testing, which of these two closely related genes is the culprit, I often refer to them jointly as the GST/GPX gene. If you have other dirty genes, the whole process is even harder. To get rid of her symptoms, Keri was going to have to go beyond buying organic, and clean up her genes.

Jamal was nervous, and rightfully so. He came to me because both his grandfather and his uncle had passed away in their fifties from a heart attack. Now Jamal’s fifty-six-year-old father was also seeing a doctor for cardiovascular issues.

“I’d like to understand what’s going on with my family,” Jamal told me. “I feel like I’m facing a death sentence, and I don’t want to be next.”

No, I assured Jamal, he was most definitely not facing a death sentence. And I was impressed that he was being so proactive in taking charge of his health. Yes, from the number of cardiovascular issues that ran in his family, he very likely had been born with a dirty NOS3, a gene that plays a central role in heart function and circulation. His family history was powerful testimony to the way genetic inheritance can affect health.

Can affect health—but doesn’t have to. A whole world of nutritional and lifestyle support was waiting for both Jamal and his father, treatment options that went far beyond those provided by their doctor.

“You’ve taken the first steps—and there’s so much you can do,” I told him. “You just need the right tools.”

Taylor had struggled with depression ever since she could remember. As a child, she had been moody and often inconsolable. As a college student, she now struggled with depression and anxiety.

One of her worst problems, she told me, was the way she froze up whenever she had to present in class or take a test. Material she knew perfectly well when she was relaxed seemed to fly out of her head when she was under pressure.

I recognized Taylor’s performance anxiety because I had seen it in so many patients—and in myself. I also recognized the mood swings—those blue days when it seemed like nothing would ever go right again. From her symptoms, I became certain she was dealing with a dirty MTHFR gene.

“If your MTHFR is dirty, it can mess up your mental and physical health in a bunch of ways,” I told Taylor. That’s because MTHFR is crucial to one of the body’s most important biological processes—methylation. As a result, a dirty MTHFR creates not only anxiety and depression, but a whole host of other symptoms, including weight gain, headache, fatigue, and brain fog. Cleaning up a dirty MTHFR is a critical step in balancing your mood, improving your performance, and supporting your health.

At first, Taylor was discouraged to think of having been born with a dirty gene. “So, I’m like, what, a mutant?” she asked me. But when I explained that all of us have from one to several dirty genes just among the seven important ones highlighted here, and that the Clean Genes Protocol could enable her to scrub her key genes clean, she became excited at the prospect of overcoming her depression and anxiety for the first time in her life.

Keri, Jamal, and Taylor were all struggling with dirty genes—the root cause of their health troubles. If you’re suffering from any of the symptoms listed in the introduction, dirty genes are likely at the root of your health problems, too.

How Dirty Genes Mess with Your Health

Most likely, neither you nor your doctor is used to thinking about your genes as an active, dynamic factor affecting your present-day health. Instead, your genes seem like an unchangeable, unavoidable set of hardwired instructions passed on from your parents at the moment of conception.

I want you to shift that mindset. Instead of seeing your genetic inheritance as a fixed set of instructions from the past—instructions written on a stone tablet handed down from the ancestors—I want you to see your genes as active participants in your daily health. Right now, while you’re reading this, thousands of genes throughout your body are giving instructions—to your brain, digestive tract, skin, heart, liver, and many other aspects of your anatomy. Those genetic instructions shape every facet of your experience and your health, and your genes are handing them out every single second. With every breath you take, every object you touch, every thought you have, you give your genes instructions—and they respond.

Let’s say you eat a big lunch—too big, more than your body can handle. Oops! Your genes are overloaded. They stagger under the burden of all that food. They tell your metabolism to slow way down. They have trouble methylating—a key process that facilitates at least two hundred functions in your body, from skin repair, digestion, and detoxification to mood balance and clear thought. Because of the challenge posed by that overly large meal, hundreds of instructions are being given differently—and badly. You might promise yourself to eat light that night to make up for it, and maybe you even will. But that won’t prevent the damage you inflicted at lunchtime, when you didn’t give your genes the conditions they needed to do their job.

Or let’s say you stayed up late last night, playing a video game or answering email or binge-watching your favorite show. Now the alarm is going off and you can barely drag yourself out of bed. “I’ll make up for it this weekend,” you promise yourself—and maybe you will. Meanwhile, though, your genes are living in the present, and they aren’t happy about the lack of sleep. They give instructions that alter your digestion, your mood, your metabolism, and your brain, so that right now—not when you were first born, but now—your health shifts and slips and declines a little bit.

Of course, if most of the time you’re eating well and sleeping deeply and limiting your toxic exposure and managing your stress, an occasional big meal or late night doesn’t make all that much difference. Sure, your genes alter their responses for a little while, but your body is strong and resilient, and it can handle the extra challenge. If one gene staggers, a second one steps up. If that second gene stumbles, a third one takes over. Your body has lots of built-in backups, which is terrific.

However, if you consistently give your genes poor working conditions, they’re going to consistently hand out poor instructions. Why? Because each backup gene is going to push on the next backup gene, one after the other after the other, and before you know it, too many of your genes are struggling. Your health will suffer, and in way too many cases your doctor won’t be able to do much more than prescribe a few drugs to medicate your symptoms.

I want somethin...