What To Do About Your Problematic Genes

The real value in a personalized genetic report is the insight into the potential health disasters looming in your future.

Cheesy metaphor ahead: If your body is the planet Earth, then these genetic reports are like asteroid early-detection systems, and specific supplements or lifestyle interventions may be your personal Bruce Willis!

So you’ve got your personal genotyping done (or you’re thinking about getting it done) through Sequencing.com, 23 and Me, AncestryDNA, or one of the other genetic testing services. These services provide you with a vast amount of information that’s not readily very useful. They give you a giant text file containing many thousands of indecipherable SNPs (sometimes phonetically called snaps) - the base level of your genetic code.
Disappointingly, these companies are forbidden by the government regulating agencies from telling you what diseases and chronic health conditions your genes predict you may suffer from in the future. They are also forbidden from making recommendations based on what they ascertain about you. Likely this is just the regulating agencies protecting their friends in the hospital and pharmaceutical industries that pay them billions in fees.

Luckily for you, I’m just a freelance biohacker, researcher, and self-tinkerer not similarly forbidden from expressing my opinions - at least until a big pharma hitman comes knocking on my door.

In this article what we’ve done is list some common genes, alleles, and SNPs along with associated health conditions AND supplements and lifestyle interventions that prevent or treat the condition. To identify your problematic genes you'll save a lot of time by interpreting your raw data with very affordable software like Sequencing.com's Genome Explorer, SelfDecode, or Promethease.

Taking the supplement listed for the problematic gene(s) you have is a pretty good idea. It’s NOT guaranteed to treat or prevent the condition that you may or may not suffer from, but a smart Lifehacker is always looking to tame the black swans in their future, take advantage of asymmetrical upside, and mitigate asymmetrical downside.

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The methodology...

For determining these specific supplements or interventions was to look at meta-analysis papers about these conditions. The meta-analysis will recommend supplements or lifestyle interventions.
A meta-analysis is a paper where a group of scientists meta-analyzed multiple human, placebo-controlled studies and clinical trials. Often a single study may be misleading or unhelpful because the sample size was not big enough, the study was done 40 years ago or the researchers had a conflict of interest but ten, twenty, or more studies done on a topic capture the big picture.

Science is the endeavor of asymptotically approaching the truth of reality and meta-analysis papers more often than not are the asymptote.

Then we used the objective website Examine.com to select supplements that have substantial scientific evidence supporting their usage to treat or prevent the undesirable conditions.