825: The Gaslighting in Female Healthcare & Finding Your Own Answers With Kash Khan

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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode is about the gaslighting that goes on in female healthcare and finding your own answers through a unique approach to understanding the owner’s manual of your body through functional genomics. And this was a really interesting episode to record. I’m here with Kashif Khan, who is the bestselling author of The DNA Way. He’s a celebrity longevity coach, founder of The DNA Company, and two times TEDx speaker. And he’s considered a pioneer in driving the functional approach to genetic interpretation, overlying environment, nutrition, and lifestyle onto our genetic blueprints to create personalized longevity plans. And he gives quite a few examples of how understanding genes at this level can impact your experience of life in quite drastic ways in this episode, including stories from his own life and within his family, and how understanding genetics and the right way to support them can make the biggest functional difference, including in things like metabolism, hormones, brain health, and so much more. So let’s jump in and learn. Kashif, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Kashif: Pleasure. Good to be here.

Katie: I’m excited to jump into a lot of topics with you today. But before we get into the deep dive of this podcast, I have a note from your bio that you have been kidnapped twice, and I have to hear how this happened.

Kashif: Well, two and a half times. One of them was like a semi-kidnapping, so I don’t consider it the real deal. But I used to spend time in Asia when I was early on in between high school and work and all these things trying to make money. So I used to go there, buy things, load a container, import them, bring them to North America and sell them. Interior design goods, furniture, all sorts of stuff. And I would go into little villages trying to find antiquities and literally go to a home and say, I want to buy your door. Because that door looks so beautiful, and I can picture it being embedded into some home in California. I got kidnapped because they’re like, hey, there’s a guy walking around in villages with a lot of money to spend. Maybe we should just take the money. And that’s what happened. So that was one.

Second one was a car accident somewhere near Afghanistan. I would say, again, traveling for the same purpose. And the response to the accident was, come to our, and not in these kind words, but come to our home and do not leave until our car is fixed. And I sat there with a hammer taking dents out of the car until I finally escaped. And I came back with other friends to get my car back. So that was the response to me hitting their car.

Katie: Wow, that is wild. And I would guess you’re my first podcast guest who’s been kidnapped multiple times. That’s an incredible story. Well, what I’m really excited to dive deep with you on in this first episode is kind of dissecting the topic of medical gaslighting, because most of the people listening are women. I know in my own personal experience, it took me years to actually get answers to what was going on with my health. And in that process, I heard things like, nope, that’s completely normal for a woman, or you’re just postpartum, or it’s all in your head. And it seems like there’s, first of all, a lot of misinformation floating around in that space. Women weren’t included in medical research until surprisingly recently. But also, I hear from a lot of women who have heard similar things from their doctors. So I would love for you to kind of give us a broad introduction into the topic of medical gaslighting, and then we can go deep on why it is different for women and how we can use that knowledge to empower ourselves.

Kashif: So in academia, what people are taught medically, it’s hard to acknowledge the gaslighting because the tools that you’re given as a clinician, scientist, what you’re told is your problem is actually believed to be a problem. So it’s hard to acknowledge that, no, it’s something else. Please help me. Well, academically, it sounds correct. You’re supposed to have a crazy menopause and that’s what’s going on. Right. So it wasn’t until we started researching women genetically, meaning we had their genome in hand, and we were studying their environment, their nutrition, their lifestyle, finding that the same inputs, epigenetic inputs, their choices, had a different outcome than it did with men. And the dials got turned a little differently, even though he would have the same genomic profile. And so we started to learn that all these things that we thought were innate, you know, infertility, fibromyalgia, crazy menstrual cycle with pain and cramping and mood disorders were actually genetic profiles that were misaligned to the environment, nutritional lifestyle of that particular person. And you could start to tweak the environment, nutritional lifestyle, and then that symptom would go away. They don’t feel like that anymore.

And big eye-opener, you know, in terms of infertility, all women that are told that they can’t get pregnant or, you know, we’re dealing with young girls who have anxiety issues. If I were to wrap this all up, I can tell you a story about my own family that really was the moment that took us from being a research company to I realize every woman needs to know this. And my niece, this was a few years ago had an anxiety attack. So she lives with my mother and my sister. And my mom called me saying that she can’t breathe. There’s something weird going on. Please help. So I went over there, called my friend who’s a pediatrician and he said, yeah, that sounds like what you’re describing is an anxiety attack. Let me know if it happens again. We’ll deal with it, right?

So, about a month later, my mom calls me again saying this time it did happen again. And this time she fell over and hurt herself. And we think she broke her leg because she landed on this glass table. Can you take her to an emergency clinic? Call my pediatrician friend, he gets me into a clinic, blood work, x-rays, all this stuff. We spent about six hours there. And the answer I got was, if it happens again, let me know. And I realized at that point what that meant was we’re diagnosing her with an anxiety issue and going to tell you what pill she needs to take, right? So I had her genetics already run, but I, like anybody else, went back to work, got busy and just didn’t do anything about it, to be honest. I then got a third call where I was told your niece’s run away from home. And if you met her, this is completely out of character. Innocent, sweet young girl, doesn’t even leave the home by her own choice, by herself. She’s that somewhat innocent, right? So I went over there saying, don’t worry, she can’t have gone far. Like, it’s not like her to do this. Find her literally standing outside, not knowing what to do. Pull her in, like, what is it? Is it social media? Is it homework? Is it a teacher? Like, what is happening? Just tell me. And I realized she had no clue. She was just running away from the feeling, like trying to escape how she felt.

So literally at that moment, I called my office and said, email me her DNA report. I want to see what’s going on. And I didn’t look for anxiety. What I look for is what biology is broken. And this is the big gap between how women feel and how they’re treated. It’s not about the symptom. It’s not about the label. It’s not about the thing that’s diagnosable. It’s about the broken biology that eventually equals that thing. So what did I find? I looked at our hormone cascade, how certain genes direct the creation, the metabolization, and quality of hormones. And I found that she is somewhat androgen dominant, doesn’t make enough estrogen. So there’s a much bigger, the beginning of the cycle, no hormones, you just finish getting rid of everything. She went into a much deeper decline than a typical woman does, right?

So I texted my mother saying that, can you tell me about her menstrual cycle around the time of these attacks. She said, you know what, you’re right. It happens right at the beginning of her cycle. And it’s been happening the past three months in a row. Why now? Because she’s been having her cycle for a year and a half at that point. Why all of a sudden in these three months? This happened during peak COVID in Toronto in the winter where she hadn’t been outside in four months. Zero vitamin D. I look at her vitamin D genetics, and what do I find? There’s a gene called CYP2R1 that takes D2 from the sun and converts it to D3. That’s step one. There’s a gene called GC that takes that activated D3 and transports it to the cell where you actually need it. Not in the blood, you need it in the cell. And there’s a gene called VDR that connects it and puts it into the cell where your body actually uses it. All three genes, she had the worst version. So her ability to actually utilize vitamin D, horrible, probably because her ancestors overdosed and her body was mitigating. That triggered, on top of this hormone decline that she was already in, a complete system failure because this key micronutrient also regulates hormones in the mood.

So why did it express as an anxiety issue? Her dopamine levels, dopamine is this chemical that allows you, and this is the last part of the story, allows you to experience pleasure and reward. I enjoy some tasty food. I achieve something at work. Her ability to experience that is horrible because the DRD2 gene, which determines the density of receptors, like how much dopamine you bind, works towards the gene. Her clearance comped as a protein that gets rid of it fastest possible. So she feels it way down here. It’s gone like that. So she was already teetering on, I can’t get no satisfaction. The world sucks. Then you add on top of that no vitamin D for three months. And this is driving both the hormones and the neurochemicals to fall apart equaled what was described as an anxiety attack. That was the symptom.

What did we do? I literally gave her L-theanine to boost her dopamine levels and 10,000 IU of vitamin D but split in three doses because she doesn’t transport or bind it efficiently, so she needs it multiple times a day. The problem never happened again. It was fixed in that day, and it never happened again. If I didn’t know this, she would still have an anxiety issue today likely, and she’d be on medication believing that was her truth. Now, this type of story you can tell about infertility, fibromyalgia, name all the areas where women are stuck, weight loss, et cetera. The biology is now understood. We need it to be out there so people know how to access this stuff.

Katie: Yeah, I feel like this is such a big topic. And I remember when I was in school and when they first sequenced the human genome and how big of a deal that was. And we now have this ability, I feel like very inexpensively and at home. But I also feel like there’s still this hurdle of people might get their genetic reports and there’s a lot to translate to try to understand what it means and how to like in this case with your family member, like put those pieces together because there can be a lot of things going on at once. So what are some, can you give us some ways to like sort of triage that for yourself? Say someone has run their genetics, they have that report. Can you kind of break down the difference between, I think you call it functional genomics versus genetics and how we can actually use these things to our advantage?

Kashif: So that’s exactly it. Genetics is the primary tool which won’t do what we just talked about. Just like medicine is, here’s what your disease is called, and here’s the pill you need to take, diagnose, and prescribe. Functional medicine is, why did it happen? What did you do? No fault of yours. You didn’t know any better. But what did you do? What did you eat? What did you breathe? Who did you talk to, right? And the same is true now in terms of genetic science. Genetics is you have an 80% chance of Alzheimer’s. You have a 60% chance of breast cancer. Good luck, right?

Functional genomics is 20% of people with that same Alzheimer’s genetics didn’t get sick. What were they doing right? What was their environment? What was their nutrition? What was their lifestyle? And some things are easy to understand. Some things are completely counterintuitive. I can use breast cancer as an example, since I mentioned it, you know. Genetics of breast cancer is, you have the BRCA gene, go cut your breasts off. You have the BRCA gene, go cut your fallopian tubes out. There was an article in CNN about two months ago that said that young women should cut their fallopian tubes out if they have a certain version of the BRCA gene. And my question to them is, what does the BRCA gene do? How does it cause cancer? They don’t know the answer. BRCA is actually a tumor suppressor. God forbid you get sick, it’s supposed to fix it. So it doesn’t cause anything. What it does is if you have the wrong or suboptimal version of the gene, you don’t do a good job of repairing and recovering. So it’s greater risk of not surviving. It doesn’t cause it. We still need to know what causes.

So that’s genetics. Genetics will give you all this propensity-based, you can, your risk of Alzheimer’s, risk of whatever. And each one of those, we can break down into functional. Why is it happening? So the why behind breast cancer, just like my niece who had low levels of estrogen, some women are the opposite, had their estrogen dominant. They make far too much. Step one of three, too much estrogen. And we can predict that genetically irrespective of the levels in your blood, we know what your body’s doing. Step two of three, when you make that estrogen, before you have your cycle, you’re converting it into a metabolite, either two, four, or 16-hydroxyestrogen, one of those three options. Two is good, clean stuff if you want. Four and 16 are toxic. They cause inflammation.

Step three of three, we know what detox pathways in your body eliminate that hydroxyestrogen if you happen to make it. So I’m estrogen dominant, make this toxin and the detox pathways may not be working so well. I now have this profile, which speaks to inflammation that I create, right? Then you get into menopause, no menstrual cycle, nowhere for this stuff to go. Your body’s trying to protect you. And it says, I don’t want my organs getting damaged. I don’t want my vascular term, my veins getting damaged. I’m going to go store this stuff in fat. And women have fat in their breasts. Women also have milk ducts and glands in their breasts that were never designed to cope with this level of inflammation. Then you add on top of that the birth control pill, cosmetics, fragrances, pesticides, all mimicking and disrupting hormones, taking us over the edge and overloading that funnel. That’s the cause. And this is not the only cause. This is one of many. And after all this, when the tumor was formed, BRAC was supposed to start doing something and fixing it. But if I knew this with my niece, she’s like, she’s 15 now, I could give her the information just to never have the problem. Forget about cutting your breasts off, right? So, that’s, you know, just to lay out genetics and functional genomics. Here’s your disease, but here’s why the disease is happening, which is much more empowering.

Katie: Yeah, I love that we’re getting to a point where this is now available and understandable. And I feel like I said, I feel like there’s so much conflicting research and there’s at least certain categories of genes that people have perhaps heard of, like MTHFR got a lot of time and people talked about that quite a bit. I had some concerns when we started hyper-focusing on single gene expressions that people were like over-supplementing in certain categories without realizing that that might affect other genes in a negative way. And it sounds like what you’re doing is helping take all of those into account in light of the person’s actual, not just genetics, but what’s going on in their life, their lifestyle, their supplements, and kind of putting a cohesive plan together. But I would love if we could talk about some of maybe the bigger categories of genes that you guys look at and how those can express in different people, whether it’s like, I think you mentioned the COMP gene. I know there’s MAOA, MTHFR, VDR mutations. Can you kind of speak to some of the big general categories that you maybe see patterns in with people?

Kashif: This was actually a big deal because when we started, so the human genome, there’s like 22,000 genes to look at. And that’s a lot of noise, right? So, and you’ll always hear, we sequence a thousand genes. We sequence 5,000. More is not more. How many lives have you changed? That’s the real question. And what we learned is that there’s really only 90 to 95 genes that you really need to understand to drive the majority of functional pathways, like hard biology that we understand. And they kind of sit in six buckets. So everything about executive function in your mind. How do you perceive the world and how does the world perceive you? If I have your DNA, I can describe your personality to a T. Are you meant to be an accountant? Are you reward-seeking? How do you enjoy things or not enjoy things? Like everything, DNA doesn’t lie. Neurochemicals don’t lie. So we know that.

Then sleep, number two. And much more specific than I don’t sleep or my sleep quality is poor, what exactly is going on? It’s like, is it circadian rhythm and clock, like I can’t fall asleep? Is it more quality, like I keep waking up? Is it that there’s no recovery, so I did sleep, but I wake up and I don’t feel rested? I don’t know what happened. Those are genetically three very different things. So we can be precise about what problem to actually solve.

Then there is everything around micronutrients, macronutrients, so metabolic health. We know that only 5% of the United States is actually metabolically healthy right now, which is sad, but it’s because we don’t know, well, it’s also because of what most of us have access to, but secondary, we don’t know what our bodies actually need. Should you actually be vegan? Make that choice. I want to be vegan. How is that going to work out? We can predict if it’s going to disrupt your hormones and make you sick or you’re going to thrive. Should you go carnivore? We can predict how you metabolize fats and what that may do to your insulin. And some people end up getting diabetes from becoming carnivore, right? For some people, it’s the ultimate tool. That’s the thing that saves them. So just the precision around no trial and error, getting it right the first time.

Then chronic disease. So cardiovascular, diabetes, cancers, dementia, all these big scary things, they’re all rooted in inflammation. Some are rooted in autoimmunity. If we can understand the hardware as an example, I can, through your genes, determine if here’s your artery. The inner lining is called the endothelium. I know if yours is resilient stainless steel or if it’s paper-thin. So all of a sudden, if you have the paper-thin, we need to prioritize and focus on this because that’s where you will express chronic disease first. So we need to do things, certain supplements, certain foods that give you the resilient version you didn’t have.

Number five of six is everything about cellular health. So we know that the top 15 killers in the United States, 14 are rooted in inflammation. So if you don’t have inflammation, you’re going to live a lot longer. So why does inflammation happen? That’s kind of where the conversation ends medically. We can go a lot further and understand, here’s how I detoxify. Here’s how my mitochondrial functions. Here’s how I deal with antioxidation. Here’s how I deal with inflammation. Here’s how I deal with mold and chemicals, et cetera. We can get very precise and know what the threat is, why your cells may be in amazing shape or suffering to some degree.

Lastly, the big one that’s been missing, especially for women, is hormones. And this was the biggest sort of aha moment for us. We spent 3 years studying 7,000 people. And this is why we have the insights I’m talking about. We didn’t open a textbook and read about genetics. We took that textbook, sat in front of 7,000 patients, asked them about their environment, their nutrition, their habits, their relationships, and understood what turned the dial based on the genetic profile. And I’d say about 60% of those participants were women. And I would say that of the men, there was some optimization. For the women, there was a massive shift, delta value between what they were getting and what was possible. And we realized the most broken part of our healthcare system is everything around female hormone health. It’s truly what needed the most support. And so it, this big gap between like you started the gaslighting of it’s supposed to be like that versus the precision of I know what your body’s doing on the inside and it does not need to be like that at all, it does not and reversing endometriosis, reversing fibromyalgia, getting infertile women pregnant, toning down the menopause symptoms, it over and over and over again, and this is now where we focus because that’s the area that needs the most help.

Katie: Well, I love so many things about what you just said, especially the personalized aspect, because I have said this for years that, while I think there’s wisdom and we can learn something from every health expert and person out there, often these people have found what is working for them. And that’s awesome. And that might be carnivore, that might be vegan, whatever it is. But I caution people against trying to apply that as a direct blueprint because the same inputs are not going to have the same outputs necessarily in another person. And so that’s why I’m hesitant to even share when people ask, what exactly supplements am I taking every day. Or what exactly am I doing. Because I’m aware that that’s not going to translate necessarily in the same way for them. And I feel like this key that you’re talking about is sort of that missing piece that allows us to all do our own N of 1 and find out what are our actual factors, what’s going to work most optimally for me, and that you’re addressing the inflammation side. Because certainly that’s a recurring theme on this podcast and in the health world in general, we’re aware that this is a problem, but it seems that addressing it requires a little bit more of an individualized approach than the current system typically allows for.

But I would love to really go deeper into the hormone side, because certainly, most people listening are women. I think this issue we’re aware is a big issue for women, and that there are going to be multifaceted answers. But can you get a little more detailed into what you’re finding on the hormone side, ways that we can support our hormone, if there are any general recommendations that are overall helpful, and then maybe some examples in a personalized sense of ways that women can address hormones when they are aware of a specific gene or issue that they’re having.

Kashif: You know, my eyes got open because I didn’t realize how bad it was until we had to start healing people. And we had to start healing people at the root cause. Women are putting an average of 500 chemicals a day on their body. Between soap, shampoo, cosmetics, perfumes, et cetera, right? It takes 26 seconds for something on your skin to get through your skin, through the subcutaneous fat into your blood. So if you are not going to eat it, don’t put it on your body. And the amount of forever chemicals, parabens, phthalates, all these things that we’re finding, it’s almost like, are we intentionally being poisoned? Like, how could it be to this level? You know, and you’ll find lots of studies will argue this thing is safe, this thing is safe. It’s about the total load. You have to understand the total exposure during the day is far beyond what the body can handle.

And so the very first place we go is detox. You can’t, and you can’t detox without removing the tox. Like what is all this stuff that I’m exposing myself to? I’m going to go take some nice supplements to detox, but I’m still putting sunscreen on myself, right? So knowing what all the hormone disruptors are from your Teflon-coated frying pen to your plastics to your personal care products, and just purging and getting rid of them. That one thing will change everything. Now, the personalization over, the words we use like fibromyalgia, endometriosis, acne, hair loss, why, like what’s my why for those things as opposed to what is it? We can get very precise on the why. And for example, hair loss, you know, we know that there’s certain hormones like dihydrotestosterone. Some women make too much dihydrotestosterone. And you think that women are estrogen, men are testosterone. We do the exact same cycle. Progesterone, sorry, progesterone becomes testosterone, aromatizes into estrogen. Men just do it every day. Women do it over a period of a month. That’s the difference.

But in that, some women are more androgen dominant, do make too much testosterone, do make too much dihydrotestosterone, which causes cystic acne, which causes hair loss, which causes ovarian cysts. And it may just be toning that down a simple ingredient like fenugreek. Or, you know, there’s some extracts that come from certain foods like tomatoes, for example, that will just slow that one gene down and all of a sudden you don’t have this disease that you thought you had, right? It was just an overexpression of a hormone that was toxic.

The big concern is around estrogen toxicity. So women hear about estrogen dominance, right? And it’s easier to measure. Toxicity is not understood. And the dominance without the toxicity usually doesn’t cause the problem. So what are we saying is that there’s certain estrogen metabolites that cause inflammation. But our body still thinks we’re cave people. Our DNA still thinks it’s 2,000 years ago, or actually, in fact, 200,000 years ago. Our DNA hasn’t changed for a quarter million years. So it doesn’t expect that with that toxic estrogen you make, that it also has to deal with everything that you’re exposed to. We are not wired for that. And so women that are estrogen-dominant, estrogen-toxic, every hormone-destructive activity from your food to your, again, cosmetics, to what you breathe, for example, all create a load that the body was not designed for, which equals the problem that you’re talking about, whether it’s bad menopause or endometriosis, et cetera.

So we now with precision can tweak the right part of biology to not have to mask the symptom anymore. And this also expresses into things like hormone replacement therapy. How many women are thinking about this is amazing, I get to take hormones and stay young forever. I agree with hormone therapy. I also agree with the people that say it causes cancer. Both sides are right. This is why that debate hasn’t ended because we still see occurrences. We also see women that are thriving. Personalization is key.

I’ll give you an example. I’m literally just dealing with a breast cancer patient where we identified the reason she got sick is because of our BHRT, our bioidentical hormones. I believe women should take hormones to thrive if they get it personalized and right. So what was she doing? She was taking estradiol, which is typically the first place a doctor will go because it’s a more potent version of estrogen. So you’ll get a better outcome. There’s a gene called CYP1B1 that is responsible for taking estradiol and directly converting it into 4-hydroxyestrogen, which is DNA damaging, oxidizing, and inflammatory. She had the ultra-fast version of that gene. So what’s not understood is when you add something to somebody’s body, the body has instructions genetically to turn it into something else. So the assumption is I gave you estradiol, now you have estradiol? No, you gave me fuel to make 4-hydroxyestrone. Temporarily I had estradiol, but my body quickly turned it into something else.

And so this inflammatory insult was happening week after week in her hormones, and it caused this damage and eventually cancer. And no surprise that earlier in her life she had ovarian cancer, and she was on the birth control pill, again, adding estrogen to that same funnel that causes hormone disruption, right? So I would say these are the big areas, which is it’s around what are you surrounded by? What are your habits? It’s the hormone replacement therapy. And it’s not a yes or no answer. It’s just about personalization and getting it right. Like, let’s do what your body can actually handle that won’t hurt you. And then we can get it right for everybody. And then the other one is, how do hormones equal the word you’re using, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, infertility? Let’s park that problem for a second and dive into which specific part of the hormone cascade is over- or under-expressing and what specific nutrient can tone that down to more of a homeostatic middle ground then this word goes away. Because this is an outcome of this being imbalanced. So let’s focus on the balance and you won’t have the problems.

Katie: That makes so much sense. And it certainly illustrates why that personalization is so important because like you just explained, it could have an entirely different effect on different women. And this seems like very important information that we want to know. In fact, I very much want to go through this program with you, but can you briefly speak to how you walk people through this process and help them go from knowing their genes to understanding how to use this information optimally?

Kashif: So I think this is a big gap in the genetic industry, is the genetic industry thinks that they are in the testing business. And so they sell tests and then good luck with the information. That is not what people need. People need interpretation. People need coaching. There’s a lot of data. 22,000 genes. Each one is thousands of letters long. That’s a lot of data. Your environment, nutrition, et cetera, it’s all unique and individual. So, after having done this literally thousands of times, I realized that everybody needs to go through some level of education to learn how to interpret. The outcome should be not, I got a test and a report, because you’re not going to get, it’s impossible for a report to speak to this degree without interacting with you personally. There’s people working on it with AI, it’s still not doing the job.

What’s needed is, let’s sit and spend time on this, because the data is dumb until I know what questions to ask. Insights are useful, data is useless. Data is information, insights give me instruction. Insights are action. Now I know what to do. And it should be that. Tell me what’s wrong and how to fix it. That’s what people need to know. They don’t need to know what version of what gene they have. What’s wrong? What do I do? How do I become the best version of myself? We are genetically designed to live to 120. If you actually look at the physical structure of DNA, it has these caps on the end called telomeres, which are protective bumpers. And if you look at the physical structure of those telomeres, they are designed to last 120 years, which tells me that that’s how long we’re supposed to live. So it’s not a question of how do I do better? It’s how do I not make the wrong choices to take years away?

And so all of that, I believe people need to, and this is why we do this, spend time deep in a program, get deep insight, not only to identify everything and know what to do, but also to learn how to use the tool because your DNA doesn’t change. So five years from now, you have different questions. Ten years from now, you have different questions. You keep going back to the same information that you’re now taught and know how to use to solve different problems.

Katie: That makes so much sense. And I’ll put links in the show notes so people can find out more about that process and actually where to do it as well. But this has been so enlightening. I really appreciate you being here and sharing and you guys stay tuned. We’re going to get to do another episode that goes even deeper on some other topics. But for this episode, thank you so much for your time. This was such a joy.

Kashif: Pleasure. It’s an honor.

Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.

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