Episode 412 – Special Guest Dr. Matt Dawson, Wild Health, Finding YOUR Perfect Diet, Blood, Genetic, & Epigenetic Testing, Optimizing Biological Age, Interpreting Lab Results, AI & The Future Of Healthcare, And More!
Welcome to Episode 412 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast, hosted by Melanie Avalon, biohacker, founder of AvalonX, and author of What When Wine Diet: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine, and Barry Conrad, actor, singer-songwriter, and creator and host of Banter with BC.
SHOW NOTES
SPECIAL GUEST
Dr. Matt Dawson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wild Health, a genomics based precision medicine company. He is also CEO of TruDiagnostic, a deep science epigenetics company focused on human longevity testing. Dr. Dawson has published dozens of research articles, authored two textbooks, and written over 100 book chapters. He has won national awards in education and innovation and given talks in over 20 countries. He has a passion for not only human performance and longevity, but also bringing cutting edge research and science to market so that individuals can actually benefit from them. As such, he has founded 6 companies in the last decade, all of which are still in operation. Three of these have been acquired. His passion for human performance started in high school when he paired it with suboptimal natural athletic abilities to earn college scholarship offers in two different sports. His passion for longevity comes from a desire to be around as long as possible for his 4 children, wife, and future great grandchildren. He lives with that current family and two dogs in the woods of Kentucky.
Dr. Matthew Dawson attended medical school at The University of Kentucky before completing his residency in emergency medicine at The University of Utah, where he served as both chief resident and fellow. He has practiced medicine and was an associate professor at the University of Kentucky for 7 years, with an acute interest in functional medicine and, later, genomics. Dr. Dawson’s obsession with performance optimization began well before medical school. In high school, he would implement any fitness or nutrition technique that’d give him ‘an edge’ in athletics, resulting in college scholarship offers in two sports. Dr. Dawson carried this obsession with him through medical school and into his profession as a physician, earning numerous national awards for education, innovation, and leadership on account of his research and approach to health care.
Dr. Dawson crystallized this approach to providing patients with true health care, rather than sick care, by building Wild Health – a Precision Medicine service providing personalized, genetics-based care to help patients achieve optimal wellbeing. In that, Dr. Dawson has also trained thousands of physicians in Precision Medicine through online education, and has lectured in over twenty countries around the world. Dr. Dawson also co-hosts the Wild Health Podcast, a tool for teaching thousands about personalized, genetics-based Precision Medicine. His passion to help patients maximize their health span and perform at their absolute best considers all aspects of health: mental, physical, and spiritual.
Wild Health Website | TruDiagnostic Website
Wild Health IG | Wild Health LinkedIn
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WILD HEALTH: Get 20% off with code melanieavalon at wildhealth.com/melanieavalon.
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Original theme composed by Leland Cox, and recomposed by Steve Saunders.
Our content does not constitute an attempt to practice medicine and does not establish a doctor-patient relationship. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider for medical advice and answers to personal health questions.
TRANSCRIPT
(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)
Melanie Avalon
Welcome to Episode 412 of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. If you want to burn fat, gain energy, and enhance your health by changing when you eat, not what you eat, with no calorie counting, then this show is for you. I'm Melanie Avalon, biohacker, founder of AvalonX, and author of What, When, Wine. Lose weight and feel great with paleo-style meals, intermittent fasting, and wine. And I'm joined by my co-hosts, Barry Conrad, actor, singer-songwriter, and creator and host of Banter with BC. For more on us, check out MelanieAvalon.com and BarryConradOfficial.com. You can submit questions for the show by emailing questions at iapodcast.com or by going to iapodcast.com. We would love to hear from you. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this show do not constitute medical advice or treatment. So pour yourself a mug of black coffee, a cup of tea, or even a glass of wine if it's that time, and get ready for the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Welcome back, friends, to the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. This is Episode 412. I'm Melanie Avalon, and I'm here today with a very, very special guest. So the backstory on today's conversation, a while ago now, I got reached out to by a company called Wild Health. And they're doing very cool things when it comes to monitoring everything in your body that you need to be monitoring to actually take charge of your health right now, to take charge of your aging and longevity, all the things. I was really intrigued by their service because I know it can be really confusing, I think, for a lot of people to really navigate what's going on in their body. And there's so many different markers to look at. There's blood, there's genetics, there's just so many things. And what I really loved about Wild Health is it's a platform that encompasses all of that and analyzes things for you and makes things very implementable and approachable. So it looks at your blood work, it looks at your DNA, your genetic tendencies, it even looks at your biological age. And we'll dive into what that actually means. What's really cool is it's really easy to do to take the test, all the things. And then you have the portal, you have your results, you get this really comprehensive, like 50-page report that I was reading last night, again, and was fascinated by. And you actually get to work with coaches and practitioners in the portal to help make sense of everything. So I think the service is going to be so helpful for so many people. And I have so many questions as well as my own personal experience to share. So I'm here with the CEO and co-founder, Dr. Matt Dawson. Dr. Dawson, thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Thanks for having me. You get such a great description of what we do. You nailed it.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, thank you. I really like because I feel like there are a lot of different companies trying to do what you're doing. And I like I said, I was very, very impressed with just the whole system and everything that I learned personally and and where the focuses are. But to introduce yourself a little bit to listeners. Can you tell listeners a little bit about your personal story? I know you attended medical school at the University of Kentucky and you did your residency in emergency medicine at the University of Utah. And you've published a lot when it comes to textbooks and articles and things like that. But what led you to what you're doing today with this wild health service?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Sure. Yeah. So you're right. So I went to kind of traditional medicine route at first, and it was around six years ago. I was working at an academic center. I was teaching med students and residents and writing and publishing and doing all that. I started noticing all of the science emerging around genomics and personalized medicine. And it looked to me like for the first time that we could really personalize almost everything down to the level of someone's DNA. Like we've known for a while that you can look and see what medications will or won't work, what someone's likely to have side effects from. But it looked like you could even personalize diet, exercise, sleep, supplements, all of these other things. I kind of started diving into that, went down a rabbit hole when it comes to that. My co-founder at Wild Health, Mike Malin, he's also a physician. We sequenced our DNA. We started looking into it. And around that time, he had a difficult medical issue. He found out that his lipids were through the roof, like a really dangerous level, like cause a heart attack level. So he saw his doctor. His doctor told him to do a specific diet that works for most people, but Mike's not most people. He's Mike, and he got worse on this diet. So his doctor then wanted to put him on a statin, which is fine. It helps most people. But Mike had a bunch of side effects for him. I had muscle breakdown, myopathy. And when we looked at his genetics, we saw that, oh, wow, it looks like his genetics needs to be on almost the exact opposite diet of what his doctor had put him on. And he had a very specific gene variation that made him almost guaranteed to get that muscle breakdown of myopathy. And we were kind of angry at first, but then we just realized, well, medicine is always 15 to 20 years behind. And while the science is out there, no one is doing this. And we couldn't really tolerate that. We left our universities. We started doing it for friends and family, and just started having really remarkable results when we started personalizing people's treatment and recommendations to their DNA.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, I love this so much. And like I said, I was reading my report last night and it was, I guess, validating. It was nice to read some of the different sections and just see how much it aligned with me personally. So for example, in the sleep analysis, it was telling me that I have a genetic tendency to be a night owl, which is so true. In the food sections, it was telling me that I might have increased gluten and wheat sensitivity. Oh, in the mental section, there was one about how I tend to be dopamine driven, which is literally what I say about myself all the time that I feel like I keep a lot of dopamine around in my brain. So, okay, I have so many questions here. So these genetic tendencies that we have, how do you approach, because you just mentioned that, you looked at his data and you realized that he wasn't on the appropriate diet and all of these things. It mentions on wild health that there are, is it over 70,000 different SNPs? And maybe you can define what a SNP is. How do you decide which ones to look at? How to interpret them? And also, how do we know it's accurate? Because I noticed, for example, in the section that talks about your APOE, or was it the APOB? One of them, it was saying that it's actually, I think it's probably the APOE, one, that it's hard with accuracy to actually test that. So how do we know that what we're testing is accurate? How do you know what to test? And how do you know how to interpret it? Lots of questions.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah, no great questions. And yeah, it's about 700,000 specific SNPs that we test, and a SNP is a single nucleotide polymorphism. So it just means that it's a slight variation, and it just puts you at increased or decreased risk for something. So APOE is a good example of one of those. So if you have an APOE4 gene, then you're about 200 to 300% more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. And if you have two of those, if you have an APOE4, you're about 11 times more likely. So someone is at more risk. Now, your DNA is not your destiny. We've heard this term DNA is destiny. It's not. It's only about 20% of your health outcome. And that APOE4 is a great example of that. So one of the first patients that we saw was my mother. My grandmother had passed away of dementia of this disease, and I was worried that my mother would have this gene, and sure enough, she did. But what I told her at the time is I said, mom, this is good news, because we know about this now, and we know what to do about it. And when we put her on the program, personalizing her diet, her sleep, her exercise, in three months, she lost 40 pounds, reversed her insulin resistance, told me she felt 20 years younger, and I think that we will prevent, or at least delay by 10 to 20 years, her getting that disease. So we find these differences in our genes, and we do something about them. You ask about diet. So another example of that is actually, I told about Mike and his diet. One of this was kind of an aha moment for both of us when we look at our genes. It looked like when we looked at our genes that he and I needed to be on pretty much the opposite diets. So he had all of these sensitivities to saturated fats, where I had none of those. And I had all these sensitivities to carbohydrates. And so it looked like I almost would do really well on a ketogenic animal-heavy diet, and he would do well on almost a vegan diet. And so we tested this. We would eat the exact same thing for two weeks, do the same workouts, draw our blood. And we were eating his diet. He destroyed me in the workouts. It was much better. His lab looked great. He felt great. When we switched to my diet, I would beat him in the same workouts. I felt great. He felt horrible. His labs were bad. Mine were good. And we're like, wow, this is why it's like religious wars when people talk about diet, like people they're keto or they're vegetarian or vegan or omnivore or carnivore or Mediterranean. It's because people find the perfect diet for themselves, and they assume it's perfect for everybody else. But we're not like that. We're very bio-individual, and personalizing all of these things makes a big difference in how we feel and perform and the diseases that we get.
Melanie Avalon
It's so interesting and I think it is so relevant to so many listeners on this show because we get so many questions about people having that very debate that you just talked about. Do I do lower carb? Do I do lower fat? I think it can be really confusing and of course you can do trial and error and try it yourself but having this lens of looking at through your DNA can just be so, so helpful. And what I found really interesting is cause I really gravitate towards an animal based diet. A lot of my genetic SNPs really did seem to line up with that. So for example, I saw that I have difficulty converting a lot of the plant based sources of vitamins into their usable form in my body and so I would benefit from having an animal based diet there with those different nutrients. How do you handle potentially conflicting genetic information that may pop up? So for example, my general recommendations in my report were that I tolerate saturated fat well, that I tend to tolerate carbs like okay, like in the middle. In general I was getting like low carb recommendations but then also at the same time some of the SNPs indicated that I'd be better on a high carb low fat approach. So how do you handle that when people have SNPs that seem to be conflicting?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah. So you said something important earlier. I want to go back to you said, it seems like a lot of people are trying to do this. And I think it's important to use that word, because one of the things we realized very early is it's not easy. Like, this is very complex. So, I mean, we, we've spent over $50 million on the platform to do this. And so it we use, we built this on an AI platform that takes into account, not just all your genetics, but also the blood work and a lot of other information as well. So like, you'll get kind of the general recommendations that will pop up and populate in there based on all the different SNPs. But then we also, the last step is actually running this through a physician and a health coach filter as well. That's where we give the final recommendation to kind of edit things. And but what the AI engine does is it kind of pulls together all the different stuff to make specific recommendations. I mentioned earlier, I'll give you a good example from food. With food, we don't really actually usually talk in terms of the big macro diets, the big macro categories, like vegan, omnivore, keto, things like that. We talk in specific foods, like what are potentially super foods versus kryptonite foods. So like for my mother, a couple of the steps that you mentioned, so there's a fads too, that means she needs more of the active form of omega three from animals. She also has a collagen 5A1 snip, which means she needs more collagen protein and a VDR snip, meaning she probably needs more vitamin D, a BCMO, meaning she needs more vitamin A. So when you put those together, the algorithm said, okay, for you, the world's perfect food looks like it's probably a sardine. It has a really clean source of omega three. It has a collagen protein in the skin and the bones. It has vitamin A and vitamin D in the organs because it's a whole animal. And so it kind of put all of that together. And then for kryptonite foods, you mentioned you had some sensitivities to wheat and gluten. She had that as well. So that's an SH2B3 gene, but she also had an MCM6. So it meant dairy is inflammatory for her. So identifying kind of the super foods and kryptonite foods, we think is a better way to go about talking about food than kind of the bigger categories itself. But at the same time, if you're seeing the doctor and the health coach and you're talking through some of these things now for you, if it looks like, well, you have some genes that mean you need more, that you'll be fine with, with fats and animal, animal fats and some where you need more complex carbohydrates. Well, then we're going to look at your lab tests. So for example, if your ApoB, your kind of most atherogenic cholesterol particle is through the roof, that may give us a little bit of pause on the animal proteins. But if your hemoglobin A1c is really high and you have a lot of insulin sensitivity, that may give us some pause towards the carbohydrates. So we would tailor the recommendations based not just on the genetics, but the lab tests as well.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
And then what also are your goals around activity and exercise and things like that. So it's a complex picture that we use the AI engine to make most of the recommendations. And then we add on the kind of doctor and health coach, their kind of final look and talking to the patient as well.
Melanie Avalon
I love that so much. Yeah, because I think, well, first of all, I want to say you did a really good job with the report of having it be very comprehensive. Like there's so much information, but also it is very approachable. It's very readable. So I really appreciate that aspect. And I really liked that. So basically AI can, you know, analyze and generate all of these findings, but then having that conversation with a real human being who can walk you through it. And, and that's what I remember when I met with my health coach, she was very knowledgeable and helpful in saying like, this is what this actually means. Like she was saying, like, you know, I know there's like a lot of data here, but here's what we're actually looking at. And then like you just said, when we actually look at your blood work, what do we see and what changes should we make? And I actually made a very practical, implementable change immediately after having this conversation. And that was that, cause I'm looking right now at my, like the summary at the very end. And it looks at like your lipids, your methylation, your vitamins and micronutrients, your hormones, your inflammation and your insulin resistance slash, slash metabolism. The one category that's like all red is my methylation category, which I have known. I've, I've known, I, I struggled with that in the past, but it was nice because talking to her, she was like, okay, like what, you know, what you need to do is you really need to be on a methyl folate supplement here. It's also interesting because, you know, based on the whole context of that, which it talks about in the report, apparently there are different ways that you could go about addressing it based on the whole comprehensive picture. But what she was saying with me was to get on that and now, and I've been on that and I've seen a big difference. So, so thank you. That was like a very like practical change that I made.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
And I'll make one point about that, about the provider and things, too. This is called precision medicine. I like to remind people it's precision medicine, not perfect medicine. So our recommendations as a physician or a health coach or a provider is only as good as the amount of data we have. So the fact that we have an incredible amount of data about your genes, all the biomarkers, scientific data, all of this, means we're going to be able to give much better recommendations, but we still need to follow that over time and make sure that what we're recommending is actually working. So I think the relationship part of this is really important, too, having that relationship with a physician health coach that can interpret, like you were mentioning. And like things I mentioned earlier, like from my mother, they identified that sardines was the world's perfect food. Well, the perfect food and perfect diet for you is the one that you're going to be able to follow as well. If she had said, that's disgusting, I'm not going to eat sardines, well, then we would have just found other ways to kind of plug those holes and give her that extra support that she needs. So it is definitely, the AI platform is very powerful, but having that human with it and following someone over time, because humans are complex, is a very important part of the process.
Melanie Avalon
with the evolution of AI, is it continuously updated? And do you ever have to retest your genes ever, or is that technology pretty much done like you've done the testing, and now AI can just adapt to interpreting it?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah. So you would not have to retest your genetics. The AI itself, though, is getting better and is making the recommendations better and better over time. So when I say AI, though, I specifically think about two different things. So to be able to build all these recommendations, we need machine learning. A human's brain isn't, it's not the right tool to look at a million different variables and make recommendations. So you need machine learning for that. So that's what the platform is built on initially. However, the other thing that I mean when I say AI is large language models. So this has been a real game changer. So we took all of our, all of our IP, all the recommendation engine and all of that and put it on a large language model so that we could interact with it better. So for example, I have this app that we built on my phone, and I can actually interact with it. I can ask like I was giving a talk at an event in DC a few months ago, and I said to it, I said, Hey, I'm giving a talk. I'm in DC. I'm saying it's the Omni in DC. What should I have for lunch? And it gave me a specific meal at a restaurant point one miles away. That was based on it knows my genetics and I was on my lab work and who I slept that night, it knew that I lifted weights and went for a run that day, gave me the perfect meal at the perfect time there. So really cool stuff. And it can also it just pushes information like a few months ago, I got a notification from the LLM has all the status said, Hey, you are about you're overtraining, you're gonna get injured or sick. So I chatted back with it and said, Well, how do you know that? And it showed me all my HRV data, my resting heart rate trends, and I thought, Oh, yeah, I've been traveling and working out just as hard not sleeping. Well, historically, I would have just pushed through that and gotten sick or injured. But I saw this and then I said, Well, give me a program to recover over the next two weeks. And it knows my goals. At the time I was training to climb this mountain in Ecuador, and trying to improve my pickleball game. Those are my only only two goals. So it gave me recommendations personalized to me for those goals and to recover and follow that. So the LLMs are a real game changer and being able to interact with your with your data. Now that app itself, unfortunately, is not on the market. It actually was so good, we ended up taking it down because we were worried from a regulatory standpoint, it'd be seen as a practicing medicine. But we built it into our product where now, if you ask a question of your doctor and health coach, the LLM intercepts it, it gives them a suggested response because it knows everything about you. And the doctor hasn't memorized your 700,000 genes probably. And then the provider can kind of modify it or just use it or reject it and give a new answer. But we found when we first implemented that, the providers only use it about 20% of the time. But now it's over 90% of the time because the answers are phenomenal. Like they're just really good, much better than a than a regular person would give an answer.
Melanie Avalon
Do you think AI will ever completely take the place of humans?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah, great question. So there's a couple different ways to think about that. Like if you asked me the question, is AI better at making medical diagnosis than doctors? There's no question. It's just much better. Like there's lots of data on that. There's also data comparing like Chad GPT to physicians and blinded. Well, because people said, well, okay, it's better making diagnosis, but the people are more empathetic. So then they tested that and when people were blinded chatting with a doctor, Chad GPT, they actually rated Chad GPT more empathetic too.
Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness. I believe that.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
So if you were to tell me your options are a doctor or AI, I take the AI every day, like I just do, and I am a physician. I don't actually think that's the decision though, just like when, let's think about chess. It took a long time before Big Blue, which is an AI machine from IBM, beat the world's best chess player. But the best chess player in the world now isn't a machine or a human, it's this combination. It's kind of a centaur. So what you want is a physician you really trust who stays super up to date and who is using the AI. Like you want the combination of the two is what I think the best medical care is now and in the future.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm really interested by it. I did an episode recently on AI. The whole book was actually about the future of health care in regards to like technology and AI and stuff. And he was saying that the reason the synergy of humans and AI can surpass just AI is that AI doesn't have the ability to, I guess at least right now, to think outside of its own rule system. And sometimes you need to think outside of... You need to not break the rules, but you need to be able to think outside the box in that regard.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah, I go really deep on this, especially the last couple weeks has been a crazy time in AI. And I would say, I don't know if I, I think you actually could train the AI to be much better at humans and we have that thinking out of the box and being creative. So I'm not I'm not sure if that's the separator. Maybe it is. I can give you another example, though, where them working together is really important. We had a patient who was young, like in the early 40s, executive came to us very healthy, no medical problems, just wanted to optimize probably like the 95th percentile already wanted to go to the 99th percentile. So great. We ran all of the stuff. And we got an alert from the AI from the large language model that said, Hey, notice some things like in his genetics and labs and things like this guy needs a deeper dive on cardiovascular health. So I as a physician or clinician, like no one would have said that this guy's perfectly healthy, young, we would have not got a clearly scan, which is an AI guy to CT angiogram for him, we would not have done that for him. It just didn't make sense. And from a textbook, but the AI picked it up. However, then actually having him do that, I don't know if he would have actually gone through the trouble of doing it, because he felt fine if just the AI was telling him, but he trusted us as a clinician. So it was kind of that combination of the AI finding it and then and then him trusting the human. And in fact, he got the scan, we got an emergency call from the radiologist who said he needs to go to the cath lab immediately he had like a 90% lesion and his LED, which is called the widow maker artery. And if he hadn't had this done, he probably would have died of a massive heart attack in the next year or two. And this was an example of the AI and the human either one of them alone, like would have been probably been a little deficient wouldn't have gotten this outcome. And now, I mean, this guy who he had two teenage daughters, and he's going to be with them hopefully for 40 more years instead of one to two years. So that's, that's just the example that pops to my mind when I think about humans and AI kind of working together to really deliver the next level of of medical care.
Melanie Avalon
Wow, yeah, I love that. Do you think there will be any, since AI has this super power to be able to analyze all this data, do you think it will come up with any really surprising findings or change our opinions on what we've historically thought about different medical conditions, treating them, like things like that? Paradigm shifts, basically.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
100%. And that's kind of why other guys, that's kind of why I push back on his thinking outside the box. Because when I look at this, like, AI, and people could argue about this word, I see AI is much more creative than humans already. And I wouldn't even say that a year ago, it's just progressing so quickly. Like, when you watch the emerging things that come out, or its ability to put things together, like creativity is really about pulling together kind of disparate things from different places to come up with new and novel ideas. They're really it's, it's fusing different different areas. And AI is amazing at that. So I yeah, I think AI, it's already in drug discovery, so many other areas, it's making a tremendous difference and really changing the care, we see it all the time and the recommendations that it makes, and the things that it comes up with, it's, it's very creative, and is definitely going to be showing us new ways to deal with things.
Melanie Avalon
Actually to that point, because so last night, so like I said, I did this a while ago, I read my report then last night, I went in and downloaded my report again, when it's generating the report, is it updating it when you go in?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
So, I don't think it is if you don't have new data, and I say I don't think it is because if it was like a year or two ago, then I think you would get a new report because there's been updates. But when you would get a new report is one, if there are updates pushed in the system or two, when you're feeding it more data. So if you had just had a new lab test, for example, then there would be a new report. But if there's no new data, then it would be the same report and recommendations.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, gotcha. One other question there. Oh, so when people are reading their results, when it's talking about these different SNPs, these, you know, genetics that people have, it'll say that you might have an increased or reduced risk of XYZ, you know, whatever condition or thing it's talking about in that section. How should we interpret that word risk? Especially if we don't know what the normal risk is for something. Yeah, how do we know the severity of what this means with this word risk? And is it like absolute or relative? Like, what's going on?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
there? That's a great question, and we could actually try to build that into the report and say it increases your risk by X amount, which means this, so therefore this. That would turn it into hundreds of pages, so that's part of where the human comes in, and that's why it's important to have a doctor and health coach, because if you have a PEMT SNP or some other SNP that says, oh, based on this, you have this increased risk of blood cancers or something like that, that can sound scary, but if you have the physician or the provider who has a context around that, it's like, okay, yeah, that means your risk of blood cancer goes from 0.5% to 0.6%, then that's like a one in a thousand increased risk that you got, so it's not a really big number, or even if it's a 1% for a 2%, that can sound scary, because you think, oh, my risk has doubled. Well, it's doubled from a relative risk standpoint, but still, from going from 1% to 2%, that's a 1% absolute, so it's a 1 in a hundred risk, so it's not really much to be worried about, like the stress from you thinking about that and constantly trying to do something about it is probably worse than having it, so it is important to have someone who can give you that context with these, quote, unquote, risks as well.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, awesome. Yeah, I did notice in the report that it was with one of the cancer related things that it actually gave me a little bit more data more in the language that you're using. And I had a feeling it was because for what the reason you just said, because you want it to be clear, like what it actually means practically. Okay, on the blood side testing side of things, so for listeners, so when you do this program, you get the genetic information, which that was a saliva test, right? The genetics. That's right. And then you also do a blood test and get a lot of biomarkers. How did you decide which biomarkers to include on the blood test and how did you decide the ranges?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
We basically said, okay, in the first assessment of someone, we want a lot. We kind of want as much information as we can reasonably get that doesn't kind of break the bank for them. So it's a large amount of tests initially. On follow-up testing, we try to get more targeted and specific, like what did we find? What are the risks? What are the things that we need to follow? So it's normally smaller tests. So we really picked, I think there's around 50-something biomarkers we start with, and we just think those are the ones that are most impactful. Now, there are others we could add. So if we do the testing and we're talking and we find that someone has elevated inflammatory markers and we just can't figure out exactly why, then we may add a lot more things. We may add some food sensitivity testing or some other toxin testing. If we're talking to someone and it sounds like hormones are an issue, we may do more advanced hormone testing. So the initial set is designed to give us the most bang for our buck, the most information without breaking the bank, and then we get very targeted from there when picking the lab test. And oh, you mentioned reference ranges. Yeah, so there are certainly classic reference ranges, and we'll use those for a lot of the tests, but others we try to use ranges that we consider more optimal for. There's an example, you mentioned methylation status. So homocysteine, I think a standard lab panels, they'll say it's normal if it's under 14. Well, we want you to be kind of under 10. Vitamin D, you may on some lab reports not get a quote unquote deficient number unless you're under 20. We want you definitely to be above 30 and optimally to be around 50 or more. So we do modify some to be more optimal range than just non-diseased.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, one of the personal findings I had, this was really interesting to me because this has been my theory for like a decade. And then getting my information back, I was like, okay, maybe, maybe this is correct, which is that, and this is again, this is showing how you look at the blood and the genetics. I always have high B12, like always, I test high for it. And so I tested high on this one for the blood work as well. But it said in my genetic analysis that I have a SNP which makes it hard for B12 to get into my cells. And so when I was talking with the practitioner to reviewing everything, I was like, oh, could this maybe be why it's always high for me because it's not getting into my cells, it's just like staying in my bloodstream. She agreed with me on that. So I thought that was really, really interesting. Another question, so the biological age test that people take. So what is the role of that? What is the difference between biological age and chronological age?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Sure. Yeah. So, chronologically, it's just pretty easy. That's how many years you've been alive. Most people know that. If you don't, you can look at your driver's license and there it is. The biology age is different. So, first off, age is the number one risk factor for almost every chronic disease. But we all know people who may be 40, but they look and feel and perform like a 30-year-old or a 50-year-old. So, that's more of a biologic age. What is your risk of getting diseases? Morbidity. And what is your risk of dying? Mortality. And traditionally, for years, there's been multiple of these biologic age tests that are out there. Most of them are not good. They're kind of junk. They're not validated. They may just be based on some random algorithm. But are they really telling you what you want to know, which is, am I increasing or decreasing risk of dying? And am I increasing or decreasing risk of getting disease? That's what we really want to know. That's kind of a true biologic age. At Wild Health, we use a company called True Diagnostic for that. Now, True Diagnostic is just to call out a conflict here. I am CEO of True Diagnostic as well. So, we were using True Diagnostic for years before I came in and started working with True Diagnostic. The reason why I like True Diagnostic is because of one specific test they have that I have used for years I really like, which is called the PACE test. So, I don't actually care that much if we get your biologic age back. And let's say you're chronologically 40, but your biologic age tells me you're 36 versus 44. I'm just going to try to optimize you either way. And if it tells me you're 44, biologically, and let's say that we believe that result, well, are you doing everything perfect now and you just had a really rough go of it in your 20s and 30s? Or is it reflecting something that's going on right now? That's unclear to me as well. What I like about the PACE test, this is a test about by Duke, it tells you what is your rate of aging right now. So, it's information right now. And what's great about it is it is very sensitive to change. Meaning, for example, if you get pregnant, that's a physiologic stress and your rate of aging goes up about 20 percent, but then it comes back down to normal when you deliver the baby. Same thing happens if you get COVID, have hip surgery, get a car accident, your rate of aging goes up, but it comes back down when you recover. What this allows me to do as a clinician is to do end-of-one experiments to figure out what is going to reduce your rate of aging. So, Stanford did a great study. Actually, it's not a great study. There are a lot of problems with the study, but the interesting thing about the study was there's this twin study where they move people back and forth between a vegan and an omnivore diet. And then they measured lots of things, but one of the things they measured was this PACE of aging. And they found that in eight weeks, changing your diet, you can have an effect on your rate of aging.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
So, we could change someone's diet and see how it affects the rate of aging. Or if someone says, I want to go to Panama and get IV stem cells. Well, that's expensive. If you're going to invest $40,000, it would be good to have an objective measure of something like rate of aging that we could look at and see if it affects that. Or if you're going to try a wrap of ice in or some other supplement stacks or other things. It's nice to have an integrator of all your health, like rate of aging to follow over time and try to push down as low as possible.
Melanie Avalon
okay, I am loving this part of the conversation so much. I mean, I've been loving the whole thing, but I'm really loving this. And I just pulled up my report as well. So mine was 10.64 years younger was my biological age, which it says puts me in the top 16% of the population. For that pace that you were talking about, mine was 0.67.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
That's that's incredible. Yeah. So the way the pace works is if you get a score of this one point zero, that means you're aging at the normal rate for someone your age and sex. If it's one point two, you're aging 20 percent faster. If it's point eight, you're you're aging 20 percent slower. So point six seven is remarkable. That means you're aging at two thirds normal rates. That means for for over 30 years, you're only going to age 20. You'll be 10 years younger than you should be in 30 years from now. So that is that is definitely one of the lowest ones I've seen. That's really incredible. It just means that you're you're doing a lot of things right. Like you're killing it. That's a really impressive pace score.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. Okay. I'm really excited. And you said this was based on.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah, this is developed by Duke. They have a really large cohort called the Dunedin cohort is a large group of people out of New Zealand that were followed for decades. And they followed them and watched how they aged, what diseases they got and things. And then they drew longitudinal blood samples over time. And then from that, they could derive and figure out what is your pace of aging based on different epigenetic markers. So this is epigenetics. So we sequence someone's DNA once, that's your genetics, that never changes. But I mentioned earlier, genetics is 20% of your health outcome. The other 80% are epigenetics, what you do, what you eat, your stress levels, how you sleep. And so you're doing all of that right, it seems like. And so the way we measure this pace is we look at gene expression, epigenetics. So it looks at about a million gene sites and tells how much each one is turned up or turned down, how much you're expressing those good or bad genes. And you turn them up and down by changing different lifestyle factors. And so from that, then they can derive what is your pace of aging. So that's how it is from that Duke study specifically, but that's a remarkable pace, that's great.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome. And for listeners, when you get your report, it breaks it down into all these different organ systems, so 11 different systems, and it shows you are you aging, you know, slower or the same or faster in each one. So it's like heart, inflammation, metabolic brain, musculoskeletal, kidneys, liver, lungs, blood, immune hormones.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah, and to be specific not only about that, so technically on the report, the trade report, you're going to get three different clocks. So Harvard developed a clock on the Olmec M.H. And that is probably the one where you said you're 10 years younger. That's the best predictor of kind of mortality, like your risk of dying. So you have a much lower risk of dying than someone your age. The other one you mentioned with the Oregon systems, that's from Yale. So Yale developed that one. It's called the symphony age. That's right. And because we age in a heterogeneous manner, like if someone drinks odd alcohol, their liver is going to age more quickly. If they're smoking, their lungs are going to age more quickly. So that's a nice one to figure out kind of maybe what is your weakest link. And then the pace one is from Duke. So three very different epigenetic clocks there.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, and so they should in theory align or do they often not?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Well, they're giving you different information. So, yours are pretty aligned. Like, you're only getting ages 10 years younger and your pace is 0.67. Both of those are remarkable. I don't see your symphony age, but most of your organ systems are probably going to be lower as well. Maybe not all of them. So, they do line up in general, but they're measuring three different things. So, they're really telling you different information. And I will say for any of your listeners that do this, like, don't be disappointed when your results aren't like Melanie's. That's a phenomenal result you've got.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, wow. Yeah, for the symphony, they're all aging slowly except for immune and hormones. Very interesting.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
And things change over time too, so it could be that when you repeat the test, there could just be a certain reason at that time that those may be a little off as well.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, this is so interesting to me. Two quick questions. One, because you're mentioning this, well, first of all, I love this idea about how one of them, like the pace is looking at like your pace of aging. That is so, so cool. Practically, it seems like a person could be aging slower. And then like you were saying, that means when you live chronologically this amount of time, but you're only going to quote age this other amount of time. And at the same time, it seems like there's a limit to how long we can live. Basically, my question is, do people age at different rates, but then is there still like this final timeline that once you hit it, you hit it?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
What I'll say to you is, so far, no one has ever not died necessarily that we have on record. That we're aware of. Yeah, so where is that limit? People argue over that all the time, like, is there an intrinsic limit? Is it 120? Like, where is it? I don't know. And as science progresses, like, we're going to get better and better. People are living longer and longer. But yes, it's really about slowing the rate of aging. And the other thing about the slowing rate of aging, it's not just about living longer. You're just going to feel better and perform better. So it's not even like how much time we're adding to your life by slowing the rate of aging. But I mean, when you're 60, it'd be great if you feel and perform like you're 50 or 40. And when you're 80, like, you feel like you're 60. So it's really about optimizing your health now and how you feel later, too, is that the rate of aging, that's the big thing. Because most of us don't actually die of old age. We die of cardiovascular disease, dementia, cancer. These are the big killers. So while health, we're trying to slow down your rate of aging and optimize and make you feel as good as we can now. But we're also really aggressively screening for and trying to prevent those big things as well at the same time, because that's really what's going to lead to a shorter life for most of us.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, I have sort of a nuanced question. I hope I can articulate it. Let's say a person gets a test, like does this test, does the true diagnostics and gets all this aging information. So they have the potential to make lifestyle changes that will change the epigenetics. And if they are to retest, you know, in the future, hopefully they would see a beneficial change in that they're now aging slower based on these lifestyle changes that change their epigenetics. Is aging itself still a factor going against us? And what I mean by that is, even if they make these beneficial changes, if they test a year from now, does that year of aging, is that always going to be kind of a negative in affecting their rate of aging?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
If someone, if two people, let's say two people are doing the exact same things, they have the same genetics and everything else, if one of them is chronologically a year older, they're just going to have higher risk factors. So, it just is a risk factor in and of itself. Now, I think you were kind of asking the question like could maybe, and you tell me if this is a question, what was the question maybe like can you like reverse your biologic age and kind of be younger over time as well? Was that the kind of
Melanie Avalon
Okay, I think this is the reason I thought about it, because I was like, okay, I feel good about my results right now, so if I retest in a year and I haven't changed anything, but I've aged a year, is that going to slightly make my results not as good?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Right, so if you're not changing anything, you test in a year, you're in the same position, your rate of aging should, so what would most likely happen is your rate of aging.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, does aging affect the rate of aging?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah no it doesn't so okay now i got you yeah so your rate of aging if you're not doing anything anymore in poorly or any better should stay the same so the rate of should change so what you see for example you have that call your rate aging is say point six seven. And then in the three years you retest your rating still point six seven but your biologic age the one where you got a number that probably is only gonna go by two years instead of the three years. So that's that's the what you can see from that.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, gotcha. I've had David Sinclair on the show a few times and he has, you know, he came out with a book and his whole hypothesis was aging is a disease. Do you think aging is a disease?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
So, I think it's semantics, and what I mean by that is if we want to get, like, funding from NIH and places like that, it makes sense to call aging a disease. At the same time, aging is unnatural. Everyone ages, so is that does everyone have a disease here? So it really kind of depends on what you're trying to do with the word, like does it lose its meaning if you say aging? Now I've heard some people, like the argument, which is an interesting one, that disease, to kind of flip this around, disease is just aging of certain organs. So it's another way to look at it. When we have dementia, that's just aging of the brain in an accelerated fashion, or cardiovascular disease, aging of the heart. So is aging a disease? I think, honestly, the answer to that is it's a semantic question, and it's around words. If it's helpful for us to think of it as a disease so that we actually get more funding to treat it, then that's great. Because if we were to able to spend money on reducing the rate of aging of people, that would be way more effective than all the research that's going into individual diseases because aging is the number one risk factor for pretty much every chronic disease.
Melanie Avalon
That's pretty much the argument or the thoughts I subscribe to as well. Okay. I could ask you a million more questions, but I will stop myself. So listeners, I think you can see just how incredible this wild health platform is. So to recap, when you do this, you get all of this. So you get that genetic test where you're getting your risks for health based on your genetic DNA, you're getting that blood work, so a picture of what's happening right now and looking at it through these idealized ranges. And then also this biological age test where you're looking at epigenetics and looking at your rate of aging and things like that. And you get to work with a practitioner to help make sense of everything. But it's really an incredible platform. I'm so, so excited about it. Yeah, when listeners sign up and do this, how often do you recommend they do retesting? What will it look like practically for listeners to do this service?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah, so what happens if someone signs up, they get DNA tests comes to their house, the blood work is just we just put an order in and you get that done. A lot of the testing is done at your house where we arrange it. You have the meeting with a physician health coach and then kind of the cadence from there, the retesting depends on what's going on and what we find. Sometimes we may repeat testing pretty quickly based on what we see or sometimes maybe it's not until another three or six months. It kind of depends on what we identify are the main issues and what we want to work on. Some things take a while to change, other things change pretty quickly. So after the initial all the testing and the meetings with the providers, it's a pretty individualized and personalized program from there just based on what you need.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome. Awesome. So friends, listeners, I really cannot recommend this enough and we have an awesome offer for you guys. So thank you so much for that. You can get 20% off a wild health membership when you use the code Melanie Avalon and that will be at wildhealth.com slash Melanie Avalon. So definitely check that out. This is, this has been so amazing. What are you most excited about with the future of all of this?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Yeah, it's very clear to me. It's epigenetics. So, the pace of aging and all that, that comes from epigenetics, but there's so much more we can do. There's a true diagnostic. We just did this big study with Harvard where we found that we could actually predict and report on hundreds, if not thousands, of biomarkers just with an epigenetic test. So, you get so much data at much lower cost. So, there's a new product called TrueHealth that True Diagnostic has reported on about 130 biomarkers with the same just few drops of blood that the TrueAge test uses as well. So, in the future, in the next few years, we'll be able to give tens of thousands of dollars worth of data and biomarkers for hundreds of dollars. So, just the amount of data that we have to optimize our self-worth and to prevent disease and predict diseases is going up exponentially.
Melanie Avalon
Amazing. How often do you take your blood work?
Dr. Matthew Dawson
I go overboard with it. I'm probably once a month testing, but I'm always doing different experiments and I want the data. So I'm testing a lot. I don't really recommend that often to anybody else. It's a lot.
Melanie Avalon
That's amazing. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Dawson. This has been incredible. Again, listeners go to wildhealth.com slash Melanie Avalon, use the coupon code Melanie Avalon to get 20% off. Yeah, this has been so incredible and exciting. Thank you so much for all you're doing. It's changing so many lives. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Matthew Dawson
Thank you, Millie. It was a lot of fun. You asked great questions, so thanks so much for having me on.
Melanie Avalon
Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember everything we discussed on this show does not constitute medical advice and no patient doctor relationship is formed. If you enjoyed the show, please consider writing a review on iTunes. We couldn't do this without our amazing team editing by podcast doctors, show notes and artwork by Brianna Joyner and original theme composed by Leland Cox and recomposed by Steve Saunders. See you next week.
