The DNA-Based Diet That Uses Epigenetics to Personalize Your Health (Dr. Matt Dawson) | Ep 268
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Could your DNA determine how effectively you process carbs or fats? Are you overemphasizing the role of genetics in your health journey? How does epigenetics empower you to shape your health destiny?
Philip (@witsandweights) examines the fascinating intersection of genetics, epigenetics, and personalized medicine with Dr. Matt Dawson, physician, entrepreneur, and CEO of Wild Health. They uncover how genes influence health outcomes and the extent to which lifestyle decisions can rewrite the script of DNA. Dr. Dawson explains how Wild Health integrates cutting-edge AI, genomic insights, and precision medicine to optimize performance, longevity, and overall wellness.
Dr. Matt Dawson is the co-founder and CEO of Wild Health, a precision medicine company revolutionizing how we approach health by combining genetic insights, blood markers, and lifestyle factors. A trailblazer in genomics-based care, he has trained thousands of doctors worldwide and is dedicated to helping individuals maximize their health potential.
Today, you’ll learn all about:
2:15 Impact of lifestyle vs. genetics on health outcomes
4:06 The science behind actionable genetic insights
6:31 Personalizing diet and fitness through genetic testing
10:47 How genetic variations influence athletic performance.
15:35 The influence of genomics on health and lifestyle
18:29 Epigenetics: Unique health paths
21:19 Reversing diabetes with personalized medicine and health optimization
26:29 Leveraging AI for health insights and prevention
31:54 The future of precision medicine with large language models
37:50 Why strong relationships are the ultimate longevity hack
39:36 Outro
Episode resources:
Website: wildhealth.com
Instagram: @wildhealthmd
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/wildhealth
Unlocking the Power of DNA-Based Diets to Optimize Your Health
What if your DNA could hold the key to better health, a leaner physique, and more energy? Epigenetics—the way lifestyle influences your gene expression—offers a window into personalized nutrition and training strategies tailored to your body. In this article, we explore how understanding your genetics can help you make smarter decisions about your diet, training, and overall health, based on my recent conversation with Dr. Matt Dawson, co-founder of Wild Health.
Dr. Dawson and his team have pioneered a precision medicine approach that blends genomics, blood work, and lifestyle data to create actionable health plans. But before you assume this is just another health trend, let’s break down what this means for you and how it could transform your approach to fitness and nutrition.
DNA Isn’t Destiny, but It’s a Map
One of the biggest misconceptions about genetics is that your DNA locks you into a specific health trajectory. In reality, only about 20% of your health outcomes are determined by your genes—the other 80% is controlled by what you do. This includes what you eat, how you train, how much you sleep, and how you manage stress.
Your genes provide a roadmap, but lifestyle choices drive the vehicle. For example, certain genetic markers might indicate a predisposition for conditions like Alzheimer’s or insulin resistance, but strategic changes in your diet, exercise, and recovery can help mitigate those risks.
Personalized Nutrition: Superfoods and Kryptonite Foods
Not all foods are created equal, and your DNA might explain why you thrive on one type of diet but struggle with another. Wild Health’s genetic testing identifies:
Superfoods
These are foods that align with your genetic needs. For example, someone with specific SNPs (genetic variations) requiring more vitamin D, vitamin A, omega-3s, and collagen might benefit from eating sardines—a nutrient powerhouse for their genes.
Kryptonite Foods
On the flip side, some foods can cause inflammation or other adverse effects. Dairy and gluten, for instance, may be kryptonite for individuals with specific genetic markers.
This isn’t about trendy elimination diets—it’s about tailoring your food choices to what works best for your unique body.
Why Exercise and Recovery Should Be Personalized
Genetic insights can also inform how you train and recover. Are you better suited for endurance or strength training? Do you need more collagen for joint health or extra recovery time after workouts?
Dr. Dawson shared an example of an NBA player who performed worse on caffeine due to his genetic profile, even though caffeine improves performance for most athletes. Cutting out caffeine allowed him to recover better, sleep more deeply, and optimize his training.
The Science of Epigenetics
Epigenetics explores how lifestyle factors turn certain genes on or off. Your behaviors—like eating more omega-3s or getting consistent resistance training—can literally change how your genes express themselves.
For example, someone with genetic markers for an increased risk of Alzheimer’s can dramatically reduce that risk through targeted lifestyle changes, such as improving insulin sensitivity and maintaining a nutrient-dense diet.
How AI Is Revolutionizing Personalized Health
Wild Health integrates AI and large data sets to make sense of your genetic and biometric data. This allows for highly personalized recommendations. For instance, their platform might detect overtraining patterns through your HRV (heart rate variability) trends and recommend adjustments to prevent injury.
It’s like having a coach who understands not just your workout routine but how your body responds to every rep, meal, and night of sleep.
Is Genetic Testing Right for You?
Genetic testing can offer valuable insights, but it’s not a silver bullet. To get the most out of it:
Work with a provider who integrates genetic data with other key metrics like blood work, sleep patterns, and lifestyle habits.
Be prepared to use the insights as a starting point—not as gospel. Test what works for you and adjust based on results.
At the end of the day, the power of personalized health lies in its ability to help you cut through the noise of one-size-fits-all diets and exercise plans. With the right data and guidance, you can focus on what works for your body.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
If you're wondering whether DNA testing could help optimize your diet and health, or if you're skeptical about personalized health recommendations, this episode is for you, because today we're examining what science really tells us about precision medicine with Dr Matt Dawson, an expert in this field. As well as genomics and optimizing performance, you'll learn how epigenetics the way our lifestyle influences gene expression shapes our health outcomes, discover which aspects of diet and lifestyle can actually be personalized through testing, and understand whether this kind of precision approach could benefit you. So, if you want to understand how your behaviors interact with your genes to influence your health, what we're about to share will help you make informed decisions about personalized medicine. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're discussing the science of epigenetics and personalized health with Dr Matt Dawson. Matt is a physician, entrepreneur and precision medicine expert who's trained thousands of doctors worldwide in genomics-based care. He's the co-founder and CEO of Wild Health, a precision medicine company that provides personalized genetics-based care and precision medicine to optimize health and healthspan. Today, you'll learn how epigenetic testing can inform health decisions, discover the interplay between your genes and lifestyle choices and understand both the opportunities and limitations of precision medicine for improving your results.
Philip Pape: 1:40
Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you, philip, I'm excited to be here. So I think I've heard you say that DNA accounts for something like 20% of health outcomes and what people always ask is well, how much of that am I beholden to, how much of that affects the outcome where I can't do anything about it? Versus lifestyle's, everything versus something in between? Right, and I'm just curious from your perspective, now that you've been in this area for so long, is there anything that surprises you about where genetics really matter a ton versus where lifestyle really matters, if that makes sense?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 2:15
Yeah, no, I'm glad you framed it that way, because when I get the questions like, is it genetics or lifestyle, it's a crazy question. It's always both for sure, and I'm glad you went into it as a percentage, because I think that's what matters and that's the way to talk about it. Dna is not destiny, as we've heard that saying before. It is only about 20% of your health outcome. The other 80% is what you do, All the things that we know what you eat, how you sleep, your stress levels, how much you exercise.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 2:44
That is what turns the good genes on and off and the bad genes on and off. Like, we all have specific genes that give us advantages and specific genes that give us disadvantages, and knowing what those are and being aware of those, we can then do something about it. So there are a few genes that are kind of deterministic around some very specific diseases, but that's pretty rare. It's pretty, pretty extremely rare For the most part. All the things that we test for wild health, for example, you can do something about, and we want to find those and then talk about what to do about them to accentuate the advantages or to kind of damp down the disadvantage they have.
Philip Pape: 3:18
All right, cool. So let's talk about that, the things you can do something about, because I wasn't sure if I was going to introduce this in here, but just full disclosure, I had. I did some testing with you guys a while back and had the results and I thought it was pretty cool because it gave me a different perspective on things that I might want to look into and be concerned about or not, without you know over necessarily overreacting and freaking out on the results. Definitely some, you know, risk it Alzheimer's and things like that, which jive with my family history. But I think where the skepticism comes in is what is the scientific support for taking a SNP or whatever the result is and saying, yeah, that really has strong support, that it means this potential outcome or this lifestyle change that I need, versus we're still kind of guessing Like, do you have a fair sense of where that falls For?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 4:06
sure. I mean we test for about 700,000 different specific SNPs. The ones that we really have evidence that we can do something about is more like in the hundreds, like a very small percentage of it, but they really matter. I mean you brought up a great example. I mean you just get specific about Alzheimer's disease and ApoE4.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 4:22
So we first started Wild Health my disease, an APOE4. So when we first started Wild Health, my grandmother she passed away from dementia and one of the first patients we saw was my mother. I was worried about her genetics just because of my grandmother, which is her mom, and sure enough, she had an APOE4 gene. So there's a ton of evidence around that you have two copies of the APOE4, you're about 11 to 13 times more increased risk of getting the disease If you have one version. You're two to three times so 200 to 300% more likely to get it than general population. My mother had one copy and what I told her when we found this is like, mom, this is good news that we know about this now, because we know we can do something about it. This isn't devastating news. It's not deterministic. It doesn't mean you're going to get it and we can do something about it.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 5:06
There's a great book called the End of Alzheimer's by Dale Bredesen, and he talks about kind of the, I think, the 36 holes in the roof, all the things you can do. So because we found this with my mother, we just really started focusing on the things that are going to optimize her brain health and going kind of above and beyond what we would have otherwise. And it just so happened in the process she lost 40 pounds in three months, reversed her insulin resistance and said that she felt 20 years younger, but in that process I really believe we probably add an extra 10 to 15 years to her life before she gets dementia. So that's just a very specific example. There's others as well that I could give, but that's the first one that popped out since you mentioned the dementia risk.
Philip Pape: 5:45
Yeah, no, that's a good one. It's a powerful one on a lot of people's minds and some other ones are, I'll say more maybe surprising. Or I didn't even realize you guys would test for them, like what kind of sleeper you are, kind of your chronotype almost and whether you'd react better to certain macronutrients. And again, I have a lot of skepticism in general and that's kind of my framing on this whole podcast episode. So some of it where I'm like well, I'm a lifter, I eat a lot of carbs and I thrive on that, and they're telling me, maybe I'm not a carb processor. What is that? How do I do with that? And I'm not going to do something with every single bit of information. It's more of, hey, this could be a tendency or some correlation. Maybe that's. The nutrition side of it is where there's a lot of questions. How do you guys come to that determination on some of that?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 6:30
Yeah, no, it's a great question. So I'll start off by saying I'm glad you're skeptical. That's necessary. If someone's not skeptical, don't trust them. They're not a good scientist, because science is just getting closer and closer to an approximation of the truth. You never know the ultimate truth. To get very specific about nutrition, though, I also like to tell people that we're doing precision medicine, not perfect medicine. Everything that I would tell someone to do it's a hypothesis based on the information I have, and doing the genetics just gives us much better information. So you get very specific about that. I'll tell you.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 7:01
It was one of the aha moments for Mike and I when we started Wild Health. We looked at our genetics. You mentioned kind of carb processing and saturated fat processing. When we looked at it, mike had all of these sensitivities around saturated fat. He was very sensitive to saturated fats, whereas I didn't have any of those. I had a lot of sensitivities around carbohydrates that looked like I process fat really well. He processes carbs much better.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 7:21
So we had this hypothesis like it looks almost like he should be on closer to a vegan diet and me a ketogenic, very animal, heavy diet. So we tested this. So for a couple weeks we would do just his diet, eating like closer to a vegan diet, both of us doing the same workouts, eating the exact same things, blood tests before and after, and we did his diet. He would destroy me. In the workouts His blood work looked great, my blood work looked crap. It looked like crap. I felt horrible when we switched to my diet more of a ketogenic diet. I beat him in the same workouts. My blood work got better and his got worse. So we tested the hypothesis before we actually said we're going to do this because we want these objective markers. It's the same thing as we make any recommendations to someone we could talk about instead of big kind of macro things like you're talking about very specific molecules.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 8:04
So for myself, one of my aha moments for me too, was I was doing Ironman racing when I first sequenced my genetics and I found that I needed more collagen. At a collagen SNP I needed more collagen protein. I also had a SNP that met. I actually have a bigger inflammatory response to exercise, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. We want a little bit of a hormetic stress, but it looked like I needed more recovery than most people. So when I started, when I dialed that volume down, which would have been not the right thing, according to Ironman right. So it's volume, volume, volume. I dialed that back and started eating more collagen protein, start performing better. And with the collagen protein, all of these old tendon and ligament injuries that I had got better and that they went away. So we'll identify these things, but then we want to test them.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 8:48
The other thing is I think people sometimes put too much emphasis on the little variations. So, for example, it came back that I did better with endurance than strength training. What that did not mean is that I needed to quit lifting weights. Oh man, that would be a nightmare. Yeah, what it meant is look at it is when I am lifting weights. Everyone needs resistance training. Everyone needs these things. I may respond a little better to higher reps, lower weights. So maybe instead of five by five sets, I'm doing three by 10 sets, and when I did adjust for that, I did start making gains a little better. So it's knowing how to interpret it and then also objectively testing it. But like if you go to a doctor or a coach or anybody, now they're going to give you recommendations the recommendation that someone gives you when they know your DNA is still not going to be perfect, but it's going to be better and it's going to be a shortcut to getting to that final perfect answer for you.
Philip Pape: 9:44
I like the fact that it gives you these like a decision tree basically, where, like you said, with a test, with the types of diet you you isolated, right, you used one as a control, one as experiment or for yourself, right, you did a cross comparison, whatever you want to call it, and I highly encourage people to do that anyway, even if it didn't have the gene data and you want to know. Right, that's the only way you're going to know. Your response to training or response to a diet is to try it out. So don't assume that there's one size fits all, which is another key message here, in that people push certain diets right, that this diet is the best for everyone and what you're saying is, no, we're all different anyway and we kind of know that.
Philip Pape: 10:19
My question, then, is how advanced is the world of evidence and testing when it comes to those gene environment interactions? So some of the ones you just mentioned I feel like we're still in the infancy of that when it comes to like big RCTs, randomized control trials and meta-analysis on that stuff. At least, I haven't seen too much of it in the evidence-based fitness side of the thing, but maybe it's more in the genomics and the hard sciences that I don't pay as much attention to. What's the state of evidence today in that?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 10:47
Yeah, so as a scientist, you always want more and bigger RCTs and all of that, so I'm excited for where it's going to go. However, six years ago when we started doing this, when I started looking, I was surprised at how much evidence there was. There was a lot of evidence. Nobody was just doing it yet and that's common, like in medicine, we're always like 15 years behind the evidence. So there is a fair amount. I mean and you mentioned athletics, so there's even.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 11:10
There are studies in athletics where they randomize. There's a soccer team in Great Britain there, also with some other sports teams. I've seen a few different of these studies where they randomized the athletes to getting the standard workout or having it adjusted somewhat for their genetic profiling, like I just mentioned. And in those studies the ones who were randomized to get the genetic-based program did better. They made quicker gains when it came to cross-lateral jumping and a few other specific things that they were measuring. So there is evidence. There's not these massive RCTs, but I think it's unfair to even think there would be, because there's no pharmaceutical company putting a billion dollars behind the studies. So the studies are expensive and, while I'd love to have more to me, there's enough evidence to actually start doing something, but being cognizant of the fact that I'm going to try this, this is probably going to work, but I'm going to actually measure it and have an objective marker to make sure that it's working, because there's plenty of what we don't know.
Philip Pape: 12:03
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree, that's the case in a lot of these fields. So I was just curious about it and I also think just being just taking the step to do this type of testing I think puts somebody in a position of the awareness and taking an action towards something Like I could imagine. Whatever the result is, you're going to improve something in your life, cause I know I had some, you know, second thoughts about certain things. Can you give us another, maybe, case where the insights from this lead to quite different recommendations for like two different people? Yeah, cause I mean your. Your results is like a 50 page or a hundred page document. Right, there's a lot in there, but maybe one that people would be really fascinated by. Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 12:40
So you're talking about athletics. That's kind of your focus. It's very specific. This is a max contract NBA player that we saw who. He came to us and his specific issue actually came as his mood issues. He's having kind of depression, anxiety, kind of low levels throughout the season, and so what we didn't do is what traditional medicine would do, like put him on SSRI or something like that, the Band-Aid. That's not getting to the root cause. So we looked at his genetics. Then we compared that to his lifestyle. What is he doing?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 13:12
And one of the things that he was doing was the same thing that all of his teammates were doing, which was, before a game, drink a bunch of caffeine, maybe some Red Bulls coffee, something like that, because caffeine has been shown to be an ergogenic aid. It improves performance like period, like we've known that for decades, so it's not a bad strategy. However, when you actually look at those studies, what you find is that for people who are fast metabolizers genetically, they get an improved performance. That happens to be up about 80% of people. When you do a study, if 80% of people in there are going to have a benefit, well then you're going to think that this benefits people. But then when you look at the other people who weren't fast metabolizers, if you're a moderate metabolizer you get no gain. If you're a slow metabolizer, it actually hurts your performance. So for him it turns out he was a slow metabolizer.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 13:55
He also had a specific gene called an Adora 2A. That meant that caffeine disrupted his sleep more than other people. So caffeine is going to disrupt everybody's sleep some, but it disrupted his more. So what was happening is he was doing what his teammates were doing, which, for 80% of them, was probably working a bunch of caffeine. It was hurting his performance and it meant that he couldn't get to sleep at night. It was destroying his sleep architecture. So he was waking up exhausted the next morning drinking more of the caffeine and things to get to shoot around, hurting his performance more. He's in this vicious cycle. So something that would work perfectly for me. Like I'm a fast metabolizer and when I was doing Ironman racing, caffeine was like my best friend because it did help performance. For him, it hurt his performance. That's a perfect example of one genetic snip meaning a very different thing for two different people when it comes to athletic performance.
Philip Pape: 14:43
Yeah, Especially since you said what 20% of people would fall in that category, which is fairly. I mean, it's big but it's also small, in that it's kind of like with creatine, when I say most people benefit but there's actually like 25% that don't you know, and everybody pushes it and everybody says you should take it, but then somebody says, well, I don't, it's not doing anything for me, Well, you must not be taking it, right? Right, it's like we do this gaslighting kind of game which then leads to another thing I wasn't even going to ask about and I think of women's health, hormones, peri-postmenopause like that's a big part of our audience. Where does this come in? And interacting with that world and I bring that up because there's a lot of triggering there there's a lot of emotions with the traditional healthcare industry maybe not being as responsive to some of that as we'd like, and so people go to things like hormone specialists and whatnot. Where does the genetic testing come in regarding women's health and hormones?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 15:34
Well, I think I mean it's loaded. I'm trying to decide where to start, just because we've done hormone replacement therapy for women so poorly for so long that that's like a can of worms, that like we just hurt so many women over the last couple of decades since the Women's Health Initiative study. So I think, in general, medicine has had a very bad view and it's been bad for women, and when it comes to to that, most women would definitely benefit from hormone replacement therapy. Going through menopause and the risks are incredibly overblown. How do genetics fit into that? There's not a lot of great snips that would help specifically guide hormone replacement therapy. That's just something that a good physician should be able to do. There's really nice guidelines around that.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 16:17
Where precision medicine and genomics come in a little more is kind of an ancillary way. What we find is that when you're optimizing, people think I'm going through menopause, perimenopause. This is really difficult, tough it is, and let's probably optimize these hormones and replace them. But other things matter too. Optimizing diet, exercise, sleep all these other things play a key role in how you feel, whether you're replacing your hormones or not. So anything that you do for someone, the same thing with cancer patients.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 16:47
We have cancer patients. A lot of times they come to us. We're not going to say not to do like, see the oncologist and do all of those things, but the basic lifestyle things that we can really guide with precision medicine are going to make a difference in how well those oncology drugs work with, how well you feel and perform, whether you're doing hormone replacement therapy or not. So for that specific example, I would say it plays more of a kind of an ancillary role, except for medications. So if you're talking about oncology drugs or medications, we do specifically like lipids, for example. If someone's lipids are incredibly high and we need to treat them, we don't just put them on the first medication that a physician normally starts. We do pharmacogenomic testing to see which medication they're going to respond best to with the least side effects.
Philip Pape: 17:34
Oh, I can see it sounds incredibly, incredibly useful, especially since, in that case, I imagine you have a good size data set with those correlations and those medications. So you mentioned lifestyle, which we talk about all the time, and I like that you went there, even with regards to hormones, because I also agree most people are going to need some form of hormone replacement therapy, probably and the you know the risks have been overblown and at the same time, we want to address lifestyle. What kind of lifestyle improvements beyond the basics, beyond the stuff that everybody would do regardless of a genetic test? Right, like everybody should resistance train, in my opinion, everybody should be active and so on. Eat enough protein. Are there things you found that are very unique that have come out of your research and how you apply this to people? That are lifestyle habits. People who are listening would say, oh, that's very interesting, like I never thought to change that or to do that differently, but genetic testing might indicate it yeah, I mean, I mean diet is the biggest one.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 18:31
So I gave this specific example with mike and I. Ours was different, but there's a lot of other specific examples. We try to identify kind of superfoods and kryptonite foods for folks and those are going to be different for different people. Like I already mentioned my mother, so I'll mention her. She had, when you're thinking about her, snps to kind of design superfoods for her. She had SNPs around a VDR, meaning she needs more vitamin D, bcmo means she needs more vitamin A, fads2, she needs more omega-3. And a collagen SNP means she needs more collagen. So putting those together then the AI recommended like perfect food for her is a sardine because it has all of those in it. And then, when it comes to kryptonite food, she had an MCM-6, which meant dairy is inflammatory for for her, and SH2B3, meaning wheat and gluten are inflammatory for her, and that's going to be different for everybody.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 19:24
So very specific things around food we find that frequently make a difference. Supplements as well. I already mentioned kind of the caffeine example, but there are other examples with supplements as well. People talk about all times like do supplements work or do they not, which I think is the craziest question ever. They work if you need them and they don't if you don't, and so identifying who needs certain supplements based on their genetics and blood work is important, and that's going to be different for everybody too, things like vitamin D, because I always recommend my nutrition clients.
Philip Pape: 19:56
You know. Get tested for that right, because we know you could have too much vitamin D in terms of supplementation and then many people are deficient. I'm a white guy in new England and I have that personal experience with needing more vitamin D, but what you're suggesting is that the genetics itself have give you a natural tendency to need more of something. Is that that kind of what you're saying, Independent of? I mean, it sounds like you should also get tested for deficiency, wouldn't you agree? They go hand in hand. Yeah, a hundred percent.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 20:22
Genetics is a small piece of the puzzle, it's not the entire thing. So if I go vitamin D, sure you can have the VDR snip. You may need more, but then what is your vitamin D, though? And then, are you living in Florida in the summer or Alaska in the winter? All those or Alaska and the winter, all those things kind of come into it. So genetics, I think, are a key thing. I wouldn't treat someone without having them, but they're just a piece of the puzzle. Even though we're a genomics-based company, I tell people all the time, genomics by itself is almost worthless. I need all the other information, I need the entire picture to really be able to make good recommendations.
Philip Pape: 20:54
Yeah, that's cool. Okay, and so you mentioned Alzheimer's and I don't know if you mentioned diabetes, but I have in my notes that there was a white paper and I should have. I wish I had more of the details. There's a white paper on diabetes reversal. Does this strike a chord with you? Yeah, and I was curious how much of that you could say is from the personalization, from the genetics, and maybe you can walk us through what we're talking about too, versus like fundamental changes that anybody would make that would reverse diabetes.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 21:19
Yeah, great question. So I mentioned my mother and she in three months lost 40 pounds versus her insulin resistance, mike's mother. We put her on the program. She lost 80 pounds, got off all of her chronic medications. Now those are anecdotes, those aren't science. So we looked at our first several thousand patients and we put a white paper out on the results. So I think that's what you're talking about. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome no-transcript. You've got diabetes. We're going to start treating it.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 21:49
They don't want to talk about reversing diabetes. Well, about 3% of people in traditional medicine who have elevated A1c will reverse and normalize their A1c, meaning effectively they don't have type 2 diabetes anymore. In our patient population, those who came to us with elevated A1c, 48% completely reversed it. So about half of our patients are quote unquote reversing type 2 diabetes. Is it 40 or 48? 48, yeah, so about half. So we do get incredible results. And when you look at all the other results we looked at, like LDL-P inflammation very similar, remarkable results we're not seeing in medicine otherwise.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 22:21
You ask a good question how much of that is related to the kind of personalization versus just stuff that people should be doing? I have no idea. I'll tell you what I think. There's not a study that we can do to really tease those out. We'll just never be able to do that. Here's what I believe. I believe that the personalization makes a big difference, but I also believe that there's a component to people actually finally getting to know what's good for them and they're probably more compliant. Also, I mean my mother. I hear people say well, she's just like doing what she needs to do. She always wanted to be healthy. She was always trying. She just didn't know what to do for her. So how much of it was that she's finally doing the right thing for her versus how much of it was she excited to finally have a plan for her and so she did it more? I don't know. Either way it works, and I think it's a mixture of both of those.
Philip Pape: 23:11
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, the more I talk with you here, the more I realize that, yeah, the power in this is the personalization. You know many of us who are in this industry who don't have access to what you do or obviously I could have a client go get a test. We have to take a little more of a trial and error approach or use their history or something like that, but still, like you said, the compliance or adherence with the personalization which gives you this greater clarity, less ambiguity, more confidence that what you're going to do is going to work is super powerful and you're just like adding an extra level of probability on top of that to make it even more potentially successful is what I'm hearing from this. So that's awesome. Whatever gets people to be healthier, matt, is I'm all for. So all right.
Philip Pape: 23:54
So when I think you said you analyze hundreds of thousands of genetic markers or and there are so many snips 70 something, thousand, I don't know what numbers you threw Either it was just massive numbers and just a few of them. Do we know with a decent amount of confidence what the correlation is? Right? You said a few hundred. With a decent amount of confidence, with the correlations? Right? You said a few hundred. How do you avoid going too far and making an assumption that of like a spurious correlation that may actually not be real, like, what's your quality level on that? What is the process? I'm just curious about that.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 24:23
Sure, yeah, yeah, um. So, as we're giving recommendations to people like, do specific things, um, again Again, dna is not everything by itself. It's not helpful. So we're not going to make a recommendation to do X just based on DNA. There's also a conversation with the person. There's their blood work and their biomarkers and all the other data we have. So when we're making a recommendation, we're doing it the same way that a regular doctor would. We make the recommendation based on all the data we have. So, like when we're making a recommendation, we're doing it the same way that a regular doctor would. We make the recommendation based on all the data we have. The difference is we have a lot more data.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 24:58
So, in the recommendations in general too, they're just never going to be way out there, and I'm trying to actually think of a specific time where the recommendation would be harmful, and it's hard to come up with one. I mean we could, let's say, for example, the nba player that I mentioned, maybe for some weird, unknown, unknown reason, like he has a gene that caffeine would make him perform better and it overrides this one that we know about. That's possible, but it's unlikely, and so we would just follow him when we say, stop drinking caffeine for the games. We're then going to follow up and say how do you feel? How did you perform? So anything that we say to do, we usually try to identify an objective marker of is this working? Is something that's going to improve your sleep? Well, we want you to wear a sleep tracker, an Oura ring, an Apple watch, a whoop, something like that, and then when we do it, and then we're going to measure and see how you're doing, so we still want to follow with objective markers when we make recommendations.
Philip Pape: 25:57
That makes sense? Yeah, and it's not. It's not like this binary, like you should get more sleep and you should get less sleep. It isn't like you're going to suggest somebody get less sleep. You know what I mean. It's more of we're going to recommend more sleep for you and then for another person we're not going to recommend more sleep necessarily. It's more of that situation. So you mentioned data, having more data. I'm curious about how you use AI today, especially as hot as that has become as a topic, and again even a year ago, when I did this. I don't know how much has changed since then, but how do you incorporate AI?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 26:29
Yeah, a couple of ways. One it's just impossible for the human brain to take millions of data points and make perfect sense out of that. That's much better for a machine. So we've spent probably $50 million in the last six years developing the AI platform to be able to make the recommendations, to take everything into account and make those recommendations, and we get really interesting things happen from it sometimes.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 26:51
A good example of this is we had a 40-something-year-old guy who was an executive, very healthy former college athlete who just came to us because he just wanted to optimize, kind of get that last 1% and no medical diagnoses, nothing else.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 27:06
But with the AI we found like they had some specific genetic snips. His blood work was not bad, but there's some signals in there and his wearables, his HRV and rest and heart rate all of it together gave a signal that said, hey, you need to do a bigger cardiovascular workup in the sky, which I never as a physician we never would have. Normally he's a completely healthy guy. But it prompted us to go further and do this clearly scan and AI-guided CT angiogram of his heart. And when we did this, we got an emergency call from the radiologist reading and said, hey, he needs to go to the cath lab now and he had a greater than 90% lesion on his LAD, which would have meant in the next year he probably would have had a massive heart attack, potentially died from that, and by finding this, like the AI putting all this together, like we probably added 40 years to this guy's life. He has two young kids, and so that's just an example of the AI being able to see patterns that a human wouldn't see with that much data.
Philip Pape: 28:02
That's cool. So now do you take those patterns and make them kind of codify the pattern itself as a thing that is looked for, that combination of that data, just in that way?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 28:13
Yeah, so we're constantly making recommendations. Then we're constantly feeding things back into the app like, hey, did this work, did this not work? So, just like people out here have been talking about fine-tuning large language models a similar thing with ours and speaking of large language models, so that's the next thing. So we have recently taken all of this IP and put it on top of a large language model so that people can actually interact with it. So, for example, like with our program now, if someone sends a question, a message, to their physician health coach, the LLM will intercept it and looks at all of their millions of data points and gives a recommendation to the doctor and health coach about the potential answer or what to do. The doctor and health coach can then use that or modify it or whatever, but it's just much better at remembering. Like the doctor and health coach, they just aren't going to remember your 700,000 genes and like your entire medical history. And we've actually put this into an app so it's on my phone, I use it every day, but you can actually interact with all this and it pushes notifications to you.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 29:16
So, like recently, I got a notification that said hey, you're overtraining, you're going to get injured or sick if you continue. And so I interacted with it just like you would chat GPT. I said, well, how do you know that? And it showed me my HRV trends and my resting heart rate trends. And then I realized, oh yeah, I've been traveling, I've been working out just as much, not sleeping as well. Historically, because I'm so hardheaded, I would have pushed through that and gotten injured or sick. But because it gave me a subjective feedback, I then interacted with it and said, well, give me a seven-day plan to recover a little better. And it gave me that, but based on my DNA, my blood work, knowing my goals. I knew my goals where I was climbing a mountain called Cotopaxi, coming up, and I wanted to get better pickleball. Those were my two goals, and so it gave me a workout plan to recover and still push towards those goals. So having all that IP built on a large language model that you can interact with, I think is the real future. Yeah, man.
Max: 30:05
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Philip Pape: 30:49
I'm excited about it. I mean, that's I's fat. I'm just imagining all the possibilities just in the world nutrition and training with taking that complexity of data, taking your health data, the biomarkers, genetics, smushing it all together and getting some amazing patterns, cause we all know that information. You know, the problem isn't the information necessarily right. It's people doing things and being compliant and whatnot but also there's so much information we're not looking at. Even you mentioned HRV and recovery data.
Philip Pape: 31:18
Not everyone has an Oura Ring, but I encourage people to play with that stuff and kind of reverse engineer. If you have poor sleep and then you look at the data and it says it's poor sleep, does that make sense for what you did last night, all that stuff. So I think it's awesome. So now, okay, we get down this rabbit hole. People are listening and saying, okay, well, what do I do with all this? What would you tell somebody who's considering genetic testing and they just want to optimize their health? Our audience is generally they're already have some baseline level of they care about lifting and they walk, and I mean most of them. Some people may be listening, saying like I want to do that. Where would you send them first to start?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 31:53
yeah, um, well, obviously, like we created a program that we think we we built to be what we think is optimal, so at wild health, we do that. What I would say just in general, though, is you're going to do genetic testing, uh, one probably have someone. You're doing it with, a provider or someone who understands it, is going to help you translate it, and because you may get things back like that hey, you have this gene, so you're at slightly higher risk of cancer. If X, well, what does that mean? It may mean that your risk of that specific cancer goes from 0.1% to 0.2%. What does that matter? It's a doubling your risk, but not really. It means you got an extra one in 500 risk there, so it's not something to keep you up at night and think about.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 32:34
So having someone that knows how to interpret this and what to do with it is good. Also, not taking it by itself. I already mentioned this thing. Dna by itself is almost worthless. So making sure you, or someone you know, can integrate this with your blood work, your lifestyle, your phenotype, all the other stuff about you that isn't measured in that is critically important as well, and that's how we designed Wild Health to be able to take all of that into account and then have someone to help guide you through it as well when you're trying to implement it.
Philip Pape: 33:03
And what does that look like? So once somebody has taken all the tests which includes, as you mentioned before, not just genetic testing but also some blood work and things that go along with that what does happen next? You know, after the person, kind of review I assume they review with a doctor kind of understand what's happening and then what?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 33:21
Yeah, so if someone was just so decided for wild health. They get a DNA test in the mouth, just a saliva test. You spit it out, you send it back. We ordered blood tests. You just go to a local lab for a request where you have them come to your house. Either one get all your blood and then we collect a ton of information, questionnaires and things to learn things about you that those two things can't measure your blood tests and your genetics.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 33:42
There's a conversation with you as well, the lost art of talking to your patient, which you seem to have forgotten. It's important, yeah, and then all of that together we put into the AI. We get the report and the recommendations, but then how you implement that matters. The perfect diet for someone isn't just the perfect diet based on their blood work and genetics. It's a perfect diet based on that that they will actually do. So we want to like. If I mentioned, the world's perfect food for my mother was a sardine. If she's not going to eat those, then we'll find other ways to fill those gaps. So having the health coach and the doctor to implement and ask questions of that relationship we think is actually really important too to get the biggest benefit from all the testing.
Philip Pape: 34:23
And how about the training exercise side of it? What kind of recommendations would you give to someone? Is there like hands-on support? Do you guys have trainers, or is it more of? Here's what we recommend? Now you're going to have to find a qualified person to do that with.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 34:35
Yeah, our health coaches are all really great at that. Our health coaches are we had a big deal several years ago with CrossFit, so a lot of our trainers are. They're personal trainers also, they're not just health coaches. And so and we do have a couple people on the team who will help even develop training programs.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 34:51
If someone doesn't have someone to do that with, the general report doesn't give a lot of specifics around training, because that is just very specific to the person, that they're what their goals are like specificity, like that's just. It didn't make sense to give training recommendations based on genetics and blood work because, yeah, as you know, and I know that doesn't make sense, like what kind of injury, your injuries, your past, your past, sports, everything, no, that shows up in your genetics. So we don't get specific on those things unless someone wants it and then the health coach can get specific or we actually have some people on the team that can actually write some programming for folks. If they don't have someone, we also frequently will. Just the health coach or doctor will talk to someone's trainer and just help them integrate that information.
Philip Pape: 35:37
They're someone that they really trust and work with already. Yeah, yeah, no, that's good. This is definitely about partnerships and having a team. I mean, I experienced the same thing where somebody might come to me who already has a trainer. I'm like, great, let's work with them, you know, as a team. So you're saying you all have genetics that say, if your deadlift or squat is going to be bigger, right, and you should go after that one, maybe one day.
Philip Pape: 35:55
You know one of the other topics that came up recently on. I had Dr Spencer Nadalski on and we were talking about the healthcare industry and having doctors who lift, and I've only interacted with a few of the guys on your team, but the one gentleman I interacted with for my plan I could, you know, I could tell, based on his knowledge and what, how he spoke, that he practiced what he preached and he's, you know, a fit individual who was into this. I don't know if all your doctors are like that, but I definitely think that's something to look for. You know, when you're a patient looking at a doctor, do they practice a healthy lifestyle? What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 36:29
Yeah, I thought you were going to say I could tell, cause he was Jack and I was like, oh, he seemed like an athletic guy too.
Philip Pape: 36:34
Yeah, he had a coat on, though.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 36:36
Yeah, yeah, um, no, all of our doctors, I mean we just I mentioned code of fact, this is 20,000 foot uh mountain and Ecuador, uh, myself and four of other doctors recently like climbed that and so, like all of our, the people on our team, like they deadlift and squat and uh do endurance stuff and uh and exercise, like yeah, I certainly wouldn't trust a doctor who's obese and smoking and like in doing things that they shouldn't. I mean no judgment against being overweight, but if it's clear that their lifestyle is they're not practicing what they preach, yeah I would just and maybe they've got great advice, I don't know that. But in general, I want to see someone who's practicing what they preach and doing this stuff too, and not just telling you what they've read from a book, but they have some experience with it as well.
Philip Pape: 37:24
Cool, yeah, no, I get that from you guys because there's a lot of confusion in the healthcare industry about what we mean by that Cause there's definitely criticisms of, well, it's sick care, not healthcare, and all this, but your practice is definitely a more proactive. Let's get ahead of it and take control of our health and then take positive action to improve our lifestyle. So this has been awesome. I do like to ask one question of all guests Is there anything you wish I had asked that we didn't cover, and what's your answer?
Dr. Matt Dawson: 37:49
Good question, I think so. One of the things that I so a lot of times I'm asked about all these specific things biohacking type things and like maximizing longevity and genomics and all that, and I think it's all fun and exciting and great, but sometimes I think we lose sight of there's really good science on the number one thing for health, span and longevity. It came out of the Harvard study on healthy aging a massive number of people over decades and what they found was the number one predictor for how long you live and how happy you are is the strength of your social relationships. And so any of the things that we talk about biohacking and genomics and AI and all that if you're not focusing on your relationships, then you're wasting your time. Stop, go hang out with your kids or your loved ones or your significant other or your friends. That's going to be. If you're focused on health and happiness, that's going to be the number one thing. So I always like to remind people of that, as we're talking about all the cutting edge stuff as well.
Philip Pape: 38:46
That's a really great, great reminder. And it's apropos because I'm going to be talking to a couple later this week who is a relationship couple and it's the first time I ever spoke to anybody like that on the show because I'm like we don't just want to talk about protein and lifting here, we want to get into all the things that affect, like you said, your longevity, your happiness, your health, your lifestyle, and they all play together. So I'm glad you kind of ended with that here, dr Matt. Where can folks learn about you guys, either you personally or Wild Health wherever you want to send them.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 39:16
Yeah, wildhealthcom, I think, is where everything is. We have a podcast as well and social media feeds, which I'm so old I always forget what the handles for those are. But yeah, wildhealthcom, I have them all. Don't worry, I'm glad to give a plug for the relationship podcast. Hopefully you can put this one just before that one. This would be commercial for that Like tune in next time to the relationship podcast on Woodson and White.
Philip Pape: 39:36
Yeah, exactly, this one does come out before it. Yeah, yeah, so it'll, it'll be good. It'll be good. No, I appreciate it. All right, we'll send. We'll include that in the show notes. It's been a lot of fun. I know there's so many. It's okay to be skeptical we should be. You should also question the provider of this kind of thing, and my personal experience with wild health has been great. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts today.
Dr. Matt Dawson: 40:02
Thank you, it was a lot of fun.
