August 22, 2025 • 49 mins
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Why can two people follow the same diet and training plan but get completely different results? Could your DNA explain why fat loss feels harder, or why recovery takes longer? And is genetic testing the breakthrough it claims to be or just another fitness gimmick?
With me is Joe Cohen, founder and CEO of SelfDecode, to separate the science from the scams. Joe shares what your genes can actually tell you about building muscle, losing fat, and preventing disease, and where the industry is misleading you. We also dig into how combining genetic data with lab work creates actionable steps you can measure and adjust over time.
Tune in to discover whether your DNA could be the missing piece in your fitness journey.
Today, you’ll learn all about:
0:00 – Intro
2:17 – Why most DNA health tests fail
6:44 – Marketing hype vs real science
9:59 – Moving beyond the fitness basics
12:01 – Diseases genetics can predict well
16:38 – Universal habits vs targeted actions
18:15 – How SelfDecode prioritizes recommendations
22:43 – Genes and training insights
27:22 – Pathways and functional genetics
31:17 – Combining genetics with lab work
38:07 – Joe’s story of food intolerance
45:45 – Where to learn more about SelfDecode
Episode resources:
- Website: SelfDecode.com
- Instagram: @mrbiohacker
- Facebook: @selfdecode
- X: @SelfDecode
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👥 Join our Facebook community for Q&As & support
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Philip Pape (00:01):
If you've been following the same training and
nutrition advice as everyoneelse, but getting wildly
different results, your geneticsmight hold the answer.
But here's what most peopledon't realize your DNA doesn't
just influence whether you'll begood at sports or prone to
certain diseases.
It might reveal how your bodyresponds to specific macros, how
it recovers from training, andwhether you're predisposed to
(00:22):
store fat or build muscle moreefficiently.
My guest today has analyzedover two and a half million
genetic variants for more than200,000 people.
He's going to reveal what yourgenetic blueprint might tell you
about optimizing your physique.
You'll discover the specificgenes that may influence your
body's response to training andnutrition, learn how to
interpret genetic data withoutfalling for overhyped marketing,
(00:46):
and find out whetherpersonalized health based on
your DNA is the next revolutionin health science.
Welcome to Wits and Weights, theshow that helps you build a
strong, healthy physique usingevidence, engineering and
efficiency.
I'm your host, philip Pape, andtoday we are going to examine
(01:08):
whether your genetic code canunlock better results from your
training and nutrition.
My guest today is Joe Cohen,founder and CEO of SelfDecode, a
DNA and biomarker-based healthplatform that uses AI to deliver
personalized health insights.
Joe has spent years battlingbrain fog, inflammation and
fatigue throughself-experimentation, and he
(01:29):
claims to have optimized over400 lab markers.
His platform has analyzedgenetic data for over 200,000
people and he currently takes170 supplements daily based on
his genetic profile.
Today, you're gonna learn whichvariants might influence muscle
building and fat loss, how toidentify legitimate genetic
insights for marketing hype, andwhether personalized nutrition
(01:49):
based on your DNA can give youan edge in achieving your
physique goals.
Joe, thanks so much for comingon the show.
My man.
Joe Cohen (01:55):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Philip Pape (01:57):
So I want to start talking about the industry first
and then drill down to thespecifics here.
I think you've said that mostof the DNA health companies and
I know there are a lot out thereI get pitched all the time to
be on my show that they'reessentially scams, I think, is
the word you've used, and I wantto understand what makes that
the case and what differentiateswhat people should be looking
for from those companies.
Joe Cohen (02:17):
Yeah, so genetics is a very complex thing and
typically most things that wehave are what's called polygenic
, which means there's a varietyof genes that are related to it,
variety of pathways or varietyof genes, and there's different
ways of looking at genetics, butessentially what has been found
(02:37):
is that typically there'smillions of variants that
contribute to a condition or anytrait.
Typically, if it's intelligence, it's not just you don't have,
like an intelligence gene or avariant, it's typically there's
many, many variants that arerelated to it.
And you know some of thesethings are not fully decoded,
but you know that what we doknow is that there's a millions
(02:59):
of variants that, or thousandsor hundreds of thousands that
are typically related to thesepolygenic traits.
Some things are just veryspecific variants like, for
example, lactose intolerance.
It could be one, two, three, acouple variants related to that,
but most things are actuallyquite polygenic, which means
(03:21):
that there's a lot of genes thatare related to it.
Polygenic, which means thatthere's a lot of genes that are
related to it.
That means is if you're lookingat you know a hundred SNPs or
variants, then you're not goingto be able to tell or predict
something that is related tomillions of variants or hundreds
of thousands, it's just there'snot enough information, and so
what these companies typicallydo is they'll look at one
(03:42):
variant and they'll tell you youhave a high risk for this, or
you're like this, or you needthis or you need that.
They make broad conclusionsbased on specific variants and
what they're doing is they'retreating it like almost like a
lab test.
Like you get your LDLcholesterol tested, you have
this gene.
Now you got to treat this geneand do this, that and the other
(04:05):
thing, whatever, right, like.
The problem is that you have200 million SNPs, so you're not
going to like you've got these.
There could be 20,000 SNPs thatmake you more likely for
something and 10,000 that makeyou less, and you kind of have
to figure out what's the basedon all that information.
What is the total likelihood,like how likely are you to get
(04:29):
this condition?
And it's not yes or no.
It's, like you know, are you inthe 80th, 90th percentile?
Is your risk of getting thecondition?
Maybe in a population, it's 1%of people who are whatever have
a condition, and even if you'refive times the risk, then you're
5% right.
So it's not like, it's not justyes or no.
(04:51):
Do you have this right, and sothere's different kinds of
genetics.
When you want to predict stuff,the only way to do it is through
polygenic risk scoring, andthen you get okay, so we'll just
focus on this for a second,this polygenic risk scoring, and
then you get okay, so we'lljust focus on this for a second.
This polygenic risk scoringarea.
There are some companies veryfew that do polygenic risk
(05:11):
scoring for consumers, but thenthe problem is is that if you,
they don't actually do legitpolygenic risk scoring, meaning
they might just look at multiplevariants, but then they're not
doing it legitimately.
They might look at two, three,five, sometimes 30, whatever,
but they don't.
If it's not like legitimateapproach, then it's not.
You know it's not very good.
(05:33):
Now, even if they did look atmany, whatever they're looking
at, you want to validate thatyou're able to predict something
.
Genetics is about prediction,right that?
A lot of genetics is aboutprediction.
You get a test because you wantto try to predict something in
the future, or you want to tryto predict anything, maybe what
supplement you'll do well with,or whatever.
(05:53):
So if you're trying to predictsome kind of condition or some
kind of tendency and thesethings have many genes.
It's not just enough to saythat you came up with an
algorithm that can combine manythousands of variants or
whatever, and use AI and machinelearning and give you a result.
You actually have to validateit and that's why, even with
(06:15):
these LLMs like ChatGPT, theyhave this war with each other
where each of them.
But at the end of the day,there's some kind of standard
that they test against and thenthey kind of compare each to
each other how good are they atreasoning and different kinds of
things, different areas, and sothe same thing should happen in
genetics, but it's not.
It for consumer genetics, it'sjust the wild west where you
(06:38):
know.
You just say, like whoever hasthe best marketing is
essentially winning the race.
Yeah, because the you know a guylike who's not an expert, many,
basically anybody who has apodcast about this, about
anything, is not an expert ingenetics.
Typically right, and you couldget on a podcast whether it's
(06:59):
andrew uberman or even peterattia, and the guy they don't
really know, peter attia already, like, he did recommend
self-decode, but he he wasn'tfully understanding, he didn't
fully under understand geneticsand he just kind of knew that
you do need to look at morevariants.
He just didn't really dighimself deeply into it enough.
(07:19):
But he said, based on what Icould figure out, self-decode
seems like the best one.
Right, yeah, and he was prettyhonest about that.
But the idea is that he doesn'tknow, uberman doesn't know.
You take like any top healthinfluencer, they don't know.
And Uberman was once kind ofpromoting InsideTracker, which
(07:41):
has they don't have goodgenetics software, right, it's
just not valid, it's notaccurate, it's not valid, it's
not good.
I think InsideTracker has moveda little bit away from genetics
, but I'm just giving you anexample of somebody like Uberman
who's not going to understand.
He's a neuroscientist, it's acompletely different science and
(08:01):
it's not something like youcould just have a PhD, even in
nutrigenomics, and understandthis kind of polygenic risk
scoring it's.
You need to be abioinformatician, genetics,
statistical genetics.
It's kind of like a differentfield.
And so what we see is thatpeople who don't know what
they're doing in the healthspace trying to get into
genetics and the result isgarbage into genetics and the
(08:24):
result is garbage.
And but some of these peopleare skilled marketers, like the
10X people.
There's some other people,right, like they're good at
sales.
Grant Cardone doesn't know thefirst thing about anything
related to science, but he's agood salesman, so he doesn't
need to know.
It's, you know, same with GaryBrekker doesn't know anything
about genetics, but he's a greatsalesman and he can, like you
(08:52):
know, look at somebody talkingabout hydrogen water and be able
to formulate some sentencesthat sound good, but he doesn't
know anything about genetics.
Yet he's selling a genetic testas if this guy's the expert in
genetics.
Philip Pape (09:02):
Yeah, I'll tell you what you're preaching to a big
choir here, because the taglineof this podcast is skeptics of
the fitness industry.
You don't even have to get intoAI, informatics, genetics, to
see that kind of extrapolationfrom data, to make wild
conclusions and fearmongerthings right, because it goes
viral, it gets clicks, it getsattention Exactly and you see so
(09:23):
much misinformation.
That's why I wanted to have youon.
I've had a few other folks inthis space on and I understand
it's like a very emerging fieldand what you just said like
garbage in, garbage out.
If the data is not actionable,not only can you not do anything
with it, it's useless, but Ithink it could also lead to, you
know, unintentional actions andfears and, oh my God, I'm at
(09:46):
risk for this thing and, likeyou said, it's 500% higher risk,
but that's relative to a 0.1%risk in the population, so it's
all relative.
I think all of that's important, which is why I wanted to start
there, because then thequestion is okay.
If people are like I'veoptimized for my system in my
life, my fitness system, thebasics, I'm training, I'm eating
(10:06):
my protein, I'm moving aroundand I'm doing things like that
and I'm tracking right, we talkabout tracking all your
lifestyle metrics, the thingsthat you can easily do with a
smartphone, and they want to goto that next level.
That's where I think some ofthese interesting avenues like
genetics come in.
I've personally had tests doneand you're right.
Sometimes they will just take asingle snip and say, okay,
(10:28):
you're a carb burner and I'mlike what is this Like?
You know, how does that help meand is it even accurate and how
do we trust that information?
So, for the purposes of thisaudience who's concerned about
optimizing their biology andoptimizing their health and
lifestyle, Can you, as the ownerof Self2Code and your platform,
say with some reasonable levelof confidence that certain
(10:50):
variants influence specificthings that we can act upon,
like your recovery or how youtrain or what you eat?
Joe Cohen (10:58):
To be very honest, I could go through it, but fitness
is probably you could do.
Okay, so you can make actions.
For everything related togenetics there's always
something you could do, meaninglike it's giving you information
and if you have good geneticsoftware, then it'll give you
good information, but it's notgoing to tell you exactly which
(11:23):
exercise you need to do.
If you need to do more forearm,you need to do more forearm
training.
It's not going to tell you.
Philip Pape (11:31):
That would be incredible.
Just have a robot tell youeverything you need to do.
Yeah, Right.
Joe Cohen (11:36):
It's not going to tell you if you need to stretch
five minutes instead of ten.
It can't get that exact.
So you've got to understandwhat it can or cannot tell you.
In general, though, thepredictions you got to
understand.
There's also a hierarchy.
It's not necessarilysomething's wrong or right.
There's a hierarchy of howaccurate something is, depending
(11:59):
on the topic.
When governments spend billionsof dollars to build up databases
, disease databases, and they,you know to predict things, they
make these databases availableso that companies and academics
can actually train their modelson diseases, and so diseases in
genetics you can actuallypredict reasonably well, because
(12:23):
there's been a lot of moneypumped into it.
There hasn't been a lot ofmoney pumped into it.
There hasn't been a lot ofmoney pumped into how much you
know, like in the nutritionstuff as much.
So it doesn't mean that it'swrong.
It just means that it's not asaccurate as the disease stuff.
And even with disease stuff,there's things that are just
(12:44):
going to be more genetic andthings that are going to be less
genetic.
Prostate cancer andcardiovascular disease are
pretty genetic, and it's alsovery predictable Whether you're
going to get prostate cancer,cardiovascular these are type 2
diabetes, also very predictable.
So there's like a lot of thisthere's about you know.
I would say there's about 150conditions that we can predict
(13:06):
reasonably well that if you havehigh risk, you probably want to
do something about it.
There's some change you'regoing to want to make.
That is one way to look atgenetics, where you look at a
total risk.
So I think it's a good idea togo through the different kinds
of genetics because it's notjust one thing.
There's the polygenic riskscoring genetics, which is
(13:26):
useful in the sense of if youwant to know what you're at high
risk for, and typically there'sways to reduce the risk.
Whether it's prostate cancer oranything Cardiovascular, there's
always hundreds of things youcould do to reduce your risk if
you know exactly what you needto prevent.
So you know, just for prostatecancer, for example, tomatoes
(13:47):
and lycopene that helps preventprostate cancer.
It's one thing.
There's many things Green tea,different things, there's some
supplements, like there's awhole bunch of different things
you could do potentially toprevent prostate cancer.
I wouldn't say that thesethings are a treatment.
If you have prostate cancer, youtake lycopene, your prostate
cancer is going to go away.
It doesn't really work likethat right, but for prevention
(14:13):
it makes more sense, like Iwouldn't say if I had prostate
cancer I'm not going to be, like, well, I'm going to eat
tomatoes and it's going to goaway.
But if you're eating tomatoesover many, many years and you're
taking supplements, then it canpush that off for like 20, 40
years, right, like enough sothat it's not relevant, because
you could live to 100, 120,whatever the technology we have
at that point is, and it's notgoing to be as relevant.
(14:34):
So you want to push it off asmuch as you can.
You know, and none of thenutrition and supplement stuff
are going to make you live past120.
I think 120 is something thatmaybe you can get to with all
the latest and greatestsupplements and drugs and
lifestyle stuff, but then afterthat it's kind of just like we
need to replace your limbs andshit Cyborg.
Philip Pape (14:55):
Exactly.
Joe Cohen (14:57):
So, but that's one thing that genetics can do.
It can help predict diseasespretty well.
Philip Pape (15:02):
Yeah, yeah.
No, let's compartmentalize here, because early on your first
answer you were talking aboutthe polygenic nature of some of
these and how sometimes it'shundreds, if not thousands, of
genes that come together, maybemillions, whatever.
And I remember reading recentlythey discovered all the genes
that comprise stuttering,whether somebody stutters, and
it was like 40 something genesthat they identified.
Joe Cohen (15:23):
That makes sense.
Right, that makes sense.
I mean at least yeah.
Philip Pape (15:31):
Yeah, yeah, where.
But then I also have heard,like for Alzheimer's risk, there
are those that there's like onesnip or two snips that can give
you a big indicator.
No, it's not true, right.
Joe Cohen (15:37):
Millions yeah.
Philip Pape (15:38):
Exactly so that that's where the misinformation
is.
And then, when you mentionedlifestyle and you mentioned the
tomatoes for prostate cancer, mymind always goes to the
hierarchy of things you do inyour lifestyle.
In other words, you wouldn'twant somebody to say, well, the
answer is the tomatoes, morelike that is going to nudge
things in the right direction,but you still should be doing
other things.
I also think there's somethingevery human should be doing, no
(16:01):
matter what, for healthylifestyle that probably also
reduce the risk of all of thesethings.
That makes sense, like strengthtraining, you know, muscle
centric medicine is, I know, ahot topic term today mental
health, right.
I read about the link betweendepression and diseases of, or
dementia related.
You know, alzheimer's and agerelated dementia, right?
(16:21):
And so there's like a cascadeof connections between these
things as well.
Where am I going with all thisis, how do we get people to know
what they should do, no matterwhat, versus how they should
target in on the things that aremost important to them and then
make these changes, like eatingmore tomatoes.
Joe Cohen (16:38):
Well, I think the things that they, first of all,
I think people need likemotivation.
There's some things.
We will tell you that strengthtraining or some kind of aerobic
exercise associated with lowerrisk of prostate cancer or
whatever, it is right and thatdoes repeat itself a lot.
So there are certain thingsthat everybody knows and
(16:59):
sometimes people don't do, butyou might sometimes need some
more motivation to understandwhy exactly you need to do this
right.
When it comes to theserecommendations, like you said,
you're going to be at risk for,let's say, 20 different
conditions or whatever.
Right, you're not going to takea supplement for every
condition, necessarily, but whatwe can do is we look at all
these conditions, all yourumbrella tests, and we can tell
(17:23):
you like a best fit, this thingis going to help you with the
most things that you have,issues, with the most risks that
you have, including.
You're also able to put insymptoms, conditions and goals.
We could take all that intoaccount and then we give you the
whole list.
For whatever we recommend, wesay here's all the reasons why
you should take it.
So it gives you a very clearrationale about all the reasons
(17:43):
you should take it, with thereferences.
So I don't think all becauseyou have a high risk for one
condition that you need to takeevery supplement to prevent that
condition.
But it should nudge you in theright way.
And then the question is okay,well, you need to be nudged in
different ways based on allthese different information, and
(18:04):
so you need software to putthat all together for you and
tell you what you should betaking.
What's the most important thingfor you?
That's going to help with themost of the things and the most
important things.
So that's kind of how we makerecommendations.
It's by nudging things higherup on the priority list.
So if you have a specificvariant, it'll nudge it up a
little bit for a certaincondition.
(18:25):
And then, if you have aspecific variant, it'll nudge it
up a little bit for a certaincondition, and then if you have
a risk for that condition, it'llnudge it up in the list.
If it's a serious condition,it'll nudge it more.
It goes on like that.
And then if you have a symptom,condition or goal, it'll nudge
it up significantly more if ithelps with that.
And then, once you see, it'llsee the whole like whoa, okay,
(18:47):
this thing helps with all thesedifferent things my labs and
this and it gives you a muchbigger picture.
It lets you see, wow, okay, nowI see why I need to take this.
Not because some guru told me,necessarily you know to do this
and you could also see forcertain things that everybody
knows they should be doingExercise.
(19:08):
You could see all the differentreasons why you should and
typically we actually, ifsomeone says they exercise
already, we hide these kinds ofrecommendations because they get
pissed when they see exerciseas a recommendation.
They're like I already know Ineed to.
You know I already do it, yeah.
Philip Pape (19:23):
No, I like that.
That's the essence ofpersonalization.
I think the wordpersonalization gets overused in
the industry and people arelike, yeah, we personalize the
program to you.
Give us your age, your height,your demographics and we'll give
you a template and what you'redoing is you're, you're you're
personalizing the output basedon collecting all this data,
letting you know using power,assists and tools, of course, to
interpret it and then linkingit to what you've validated is
(19:46):
worth going after.
So my question, then is I thinkyou personally take a ton of
supplements have we validatedthat the supplements themselves
or these recommendations willactually do the thing?
Is the data just as strongbehind those behavior and
supplement type recommendationsas the genetic root cause is?
Does that make sense?
Is it validated as well?
Joe Cohen (20:08):
We validated the prediction, as it's a good
prediction in terms of it canpredict these kinds of
conditions in the future,meaning it's predicting that you
have a high risk, so noteverybody's going to get it.
It's still a probability.
Again, it's depending on howhealthy you live and all these
other factors.
But the genetic part we know istrue in the sense you have a
high genetic risk.
(20:29):
So we're clear about that.
That's been validated.
The other stuff, like does thisrecommendation work?
We can't.
It's very hard to validate thatbecause what we can show you is
all the rationale as to whyit's being recommended, which is
what we do, and then you canchoose if you want to take it or
not.
You can't validate somethingwe're recommending is going to
(20:53):
prevent.
It's already validated thatthere's studies showing that
something helps with preventprostate cancer.
So we're not doing thevalidation for that, or at least
there's studies related to that.
But what we're doing is we'rejust putting that information
together for you so that you canthen make a decision.
Does this thing make sense forme, given all this information,
(21:14):
and then you could either do itor not.
Right, so it's I wouldn't saythat.
That's you know.
Like, yeah, you can't reallyvalidate that per se.
But that's why we give you theall the rationale, so that you
can make an intelligent decisionand be like, okay, I think this
makes sense, or not.
Philip Pape (21:31):
No, it makes perfect sense, man, and I'm just
clarifying for the listenersthey understand.
There's like different systemsbeing put together here, right,
there's the genetic analysis andthen there's okay, we have
epidemiology, we have mayberandom controlled trials and
maybe we have a bunch of ratstudies or whatever.
Behind all the otherinformation we think we know
about the supplementation, thelifestyle changes and whatnot,
(21:52):
because that's another area rifefor misinformation, I'm sure
you agree it's like.
So.
Then if you do recommend all ofthese things let's say it's a
ton of different supplementationdoes it reconcile interactions
and dosing and all of that tomake sure that the totality
makes sense?
Joe Cohen (22:11):
Yeah, I mean it does give you dosing, standard dosing
.
It doesn't change the dosingbased on it just because there's
too many unknowns there, but itjust tells you what is the best
thing for, like it prioritizeswhat's the most important thing
for you, what are the mostimportant things?
And then you could keep goingdown the list and see like okay,
(22:34):
so here's my top 10, top 15,top 20.
You can just keep going downand see what makes sense for you
to do cool.
Philip Pape (22:43):
And going back to the genetic variations I know
you mentioned, it's very hard,it's very infrequent that you're
going to have like one genethat's going to affect a clear
outcome.
There's something called thespeed gene, I think ACTN3, I was
looking up just some genes toask you about and this is one
has to do with fast twitchmuscle fibers.
Um, I like, if you take thatexample right, how actionable is
(23:05):
something like that?
Like if you know for a fact,because there are certain things
I've seen with other services,they'll say, okay, you're a
morning person versus a nightperson, so you need to go to bed
earlier or later.
Or you know you burn carbsbetter than you burn fat, so and
I'm always skeptical of thoseconclusions so what are your
thoughts on that?
Joe Cohen (23:21):
I don't personally know what to do with the fast
Twitch fiber one like what areyou going to do with that
information?
Philip Pape (23:28):
I mean I don't know , yeah, I don't know, higher
reps versus lower reps.
Joe Cohen (23:32):
I have no idea I don't think I would train.
That's what I'm saying.
Like there's specific things.
Tony (23:37):
Like I don't think you're going to figure out higher reps
versus lower reps based on yourgenetics you just got to train
and figure it out right, becausethat's the advice I would give
is you're going to figure it outwhen you train yeah, yeah, what
you could do is like, let's say, it could tell you what your
natural vo2 max tendency is andthen it could give you ways to
(23:57):
improve your vo2 max and andsome of those improvements could
be genetic based.
Joe Cohen (24:03):
So then there is specific variants that if we
know that you already have anissue and we could say we can
make it.
Sometimes there are studiesthat show that if you have this
predisposition or if you do thiswhen you have high LDL
cholesterol, it'll bring downyour cholesterol more if you
(24:25):
take this drug or thissupplement or something like
that.
So there are studies done likethat and we put that in the
software.
Also, there's other things thatIf we see a supplement works in
a certain pathway, we will saythat this thing can help.
You have this pathway that ishigh risk and this thing could
help with that.
Or, for example, if we see youhave a predisposition for lower
(24:49):
vitamin C and vitamin C isrelated to some condition like
low vitamin C, we could say thatput it up higher on the list
and say, because you have thispredisposition, so that's all
explained.
So there's kind of like themacro picture which I think is
important for genetics.
You want to see what you're atrisk for.
And then there's like goinginto the details where sometimes
(25:18):
you might change up arecommendation for something,
like you might try somethingelse first.
You know like acne could befrom like 20 different causes.
So this is an example.
You know, my girlfriend hadsome acne and I I gave her some
general stuff and that helped,but not completely.
And then we were tryingdifferent things and we I was
(25:41):
actually waiting for a genetictest because I thought that
would help to see if it'sactually genetic or not.
Turns out it's not and she saidnobody in her family has it, so
it's, it's like somethingthat's not genetic with her.
And I also saw it wasn't.
Like I was already suspectingthat it was hormonal, but we
(26:01):
didn't have the data for it.
Now we see that it's notgenetic and it actually doesn't,
and the doctor told her hethought it was hormonal as well,
like she does have highertestosterone levels for a girl.
So, for example, you know thatthat could be a reason why a
girl has acne right, or it couldbe from many, many other
(26:22):
reasons, different kinds of acne.
But this is an example wherealso genetics can sometimes help
you figure out.
Like, hey, if it is genetic,then there's other things to do
about it, right?
If it's not genetic, if it'smore environmental, because you
just have some elevated hormone,then there's going to be other
things.
If it's genetic, it usuallymeans there's multiple
(26:45):
biochemical pathways at work andyou kind of need to do a bunch
of things, but then when you dothat it will help.
If it's an environmental thing,it's usually something very
specific that's causing it.
Just be a specific hormone.
It could be a specific thing.
Then if you do other things,it's just not going to help as
much because you just didn't dothe exact thing that you needed
to do.
So that also is a method whereyou could use genetics to help.
(27:09):
And then I would say that thereis a functional way to use
genetics as well, and I want toget into that.
The functional way is you'relooking at so we do have this
approach, for example.
Okay, so we look at pathways.
For example, we have amethylation, detox pathway,
histamine pathway and what we dothere.
(27:31):
I think it's reasonably goodactually.
So what we do there is we willlook at all the genes in a given
pathway.
So methylation, so we'realready narrowing down to
something specific.
You take one of the main geneswith methylation.
So there's about 30 differentgenes in methylation.
We see how does it relate.
We make a diagram.
We see all the different SNPswithin a gene and any time like
(27:55):
if overall you have risk in agene, it will light up red so
you could see the pathway as awhole.
And then we giverecommendations based on the
pathway as a whole and I thinkthat could be useful in.
You do need like a providersometimes or you need to be a
nerd to like really read, but Ido think the pathways when we're
(28:15):
designing it sometimes we don'tknow exactly like like I don't
know how my results are going tobe, but when I like plug it in,
I'm like pretty good in termsof the recommendations and
showing what are all the thingsin the path, like things I
wouldn't be able to figure outif not seeing a diagram.
So we have the pathway reports.
Unfortunately, the othercompanies do not do a
comprehensive job at thesepathway reports and so again it
(28:40):
falls short with what they'redoing.
Even within this approachthey're not doing a good job.
And then there's like the GaryBrekka DNA company kind of
approach where they're lookingat like five SNPs, the DNA
company, 83 SNPs and they'retrying to make very broad
conclusions based on you knowyou.
(29:01):
Basically the whole 10x healthreport is if you have mthfr or
not.
The other stuff is just notsignificant enough.
It's like do you have mthfr,yes or no, and we will test it.
Like you can get that from anydna test pretty much, but
they're just overcharging youfor it.
Like you can do our test for600 bucks, get you know
(29:24):
thousands of reports and allthis kind of advanced tech, or
you could do theirs for 600bucks and you just get MTHFR.
So it's like and in ours you'llget MTHFR as well.
That's what I mean by it's ascam in in the sense that
they're really like mthfr is animportant gene.
Everybody should know it ifthey have like these variants.
(29:47):
But it's just kind of like overemphasis on one gene.
Right, there's many otherimportant genes and and, like
you said, apo e is important.
You should know what braca isimportant.
These are things.
These are important genes, notsaying not.
But the problem is that, firstof all, if you don't have ApoE,
you could still have high riskfor Alzheimer's and if you do
(30:08):
have ApoE, you can have low risk.
You really have to look at manyof the genes, right.
So that's where the problemcomes in.
When you try to look atspecific genes, even the most
significant ones out there, it'sstill not going to give you an
accurate prediction.
And but now, when you get tothe functional ones, when you
exclude MTHFR, the functionalones are usually much less
(30:29):
predictive of anything.
Philip Pape (30:31):
And yet the functional ones, like you said.
That really got my, you knownerd brain going as an engineer
of like imagining a dashboard upon a, you know, in a control
room right when you see thechain of events and you see the
feedback loop and everythingconnected and you're trying to
identify that chain of eventsgenetically and where things are
hung up or at high risk.
Are you able to, like youmentioned, the methylation
(30:53):
pathway?
Are you able to combine thatwith then, say, blood work, lab
work, Because I've heard youtalk on other shows about you
know, it's not just genetics, wealso have a whole health side
of the marker analysis.
Combine those to also do abefore and after when you make a
change, because that's theother thing I'm wondering about
is, okay, you've done thesethings, how do you get an after?
Because your genes don't change?
So what does change and can youmeasure that?
(31:15):
So that's what comes to mindfor me right now.
Joe Cohen (31:17):
Yeah, you can do blood tests on everything.
So what we do is, any time wehave a report, let's say, if I
have high risk forcardiovascular disease, right,
we will tell you all thedifferent blood tests that are
related to cardiovasculardisease and then you can upload
it.
You buy the test, you upload it.
Whether it's from us or not, itdoesn't matter.
You get the test, you upload itand then we can tell you which
(31:41):
ones are increasing your risk,which ones are decreasing your
risk, and so then you couldfocus and we tell you each one
how to reduce the risk for themarker.
So once you know that you're athigh risk for cardiovascular
disease, first of all, somepeople maybe would want to start
taking statins.
We'll tell you.
We have a pharmacogenomicsreport to see.
Are you going to get muscle painfrom statins?
(32:03):
For me it says I do get musclepain and I just you know I'm an
experimenter, so I'm like, letme see, I'm going to see.
Most people I don't think wantto do that.
Right, they're not going to dowhat I'm doing, just to
experiment for the sciencepurpose.
But I took it and I got verysevere muscle pain.
Interesting and also, yeah, sothere's kind of like you know
(32:25):
there's like thepharmacogenomics part of it
which is pretty good.
So you could see that if you dohave specific variants,
pharmacogenomics is typically ofa specific variant.
You're going to do worse orbetter with a drug.
That does have an influence.
I'm not saying not.
The problem with some of thesupplements are sometimes
there's studies.
A lot of times there's not.
(32:46):
But even then it's not going tosay to take a drug or not.
If you just get yourpharmacogenomics report, you
still need to see are you atrisk for the condition?
Right, like?
You have to see a lot moreinformation.
So you really need a veryrobust, comprehensive platform.
But yeah, so let's say someonehas cardiovascular disease.
(33:07):
If you also have, you could havethe risk from genetics, but you
might have low cholesterol.
I mean, you're still high risk.
It's actually what they therecent study found in you know
top journal that we didn'tpublish this one.
But we have our own studiesthat we publish on our results,
which shows that we have thebest results when we benchmark
(33:28):
it.
But this study was just showingthat cardiovascular disease in
genetics, if you have a highpolygenic risk score for
cardiovascular, it's actuallymore important than pretty much
any other risk factor that youcan have Blood pressure
cholesterol.
It's actually more importantthan pretty much any other risk
factor that you can have Bloodpressure cholesterol.
It's like pretty much tied withlike blood pressure, which is
pretty huge, so, but it's moreimportant than cholesterol, than
(33:50):
high cholesterol or any ofthese other markers that you
might have, even likeinflammation.
Just when they look at all thedifferent things, you have a
high polygenic risk score.
It just comes to the top.
This is the most significantthing in terms of risk.
Now, what you can do under thatcircumstance is make sure all
the other markers are low riskand also do certain things that
(34:12):
prevent cardiovascular diseasein general.
There's a whole bunch of stuffyou could do, and so that's what
I did.
I just make sure I do have ahigh risk of coronary artery
disease in my genetics and Ijust make sure that I've got low
risk in all of the labs thatare related to cardiovascular
disease.
So I can see that it's changing, that the labs get better.
(34:33):
It's high risk.
Then it goes to low risk, right, and so you can change these
things.
Philip Pape (34:39):
Yeah, man, I get so many questions.
I could talk to you for hours,to be honest, because I'm like
what do I focus in on?
Tony (34:45):
My name is Tony.
I'm a strength lifter in my 40s.
Thank you to Phil and his Witsand Weights community for
helping me learn more aboutnutrition and how to implement
better ideas into my strengthtraining.
Phil has a very, very goodunderstanding of macros and
chemical compounds and hormonesand all that and he's
continuously learning.
That's what I like about Phil.
He's got a great sense of humor.
(35:06):
He's very relaxed, very easy totalk to.
One of the greatest thingsabout Phil, in my view, is that
he practices what he preaches.
He also works out with barbells.
He trains heavy not as heavy asme, but he trains heavy.
So if you talk with him aboutgetting in better shape, eating
better, he's probably going togive you some good advice and I
would strongly recommend youtalk with him and he'll help you
(35:26):
out.
Philip Pape (35:28):
Cardiovascular disease.
We talk about that a lot in theshow in the context of obesity,
lifestyle and also howage-related disease has evolved
over humanity's existence.
Right, Like at one point wedidn't see any of these diseases
, and even things like type twodiabetes we used to call it
adult onset and now it's inchildren, right, Because of
lifestyle.
And so that brings up thequestion of epigenetics.
(35:50):
Like if you went to Homosapiens 20,000 years ago and did
a genetic test, would they havea risk of cardiovascular
disease still?
Or has that been bred into usvia more recent modern man's
lifestyle?
You know what I mean.
Like those questions come tomind no, they always.
Joe Cohen (36:05):
They always had.
The risk was always there.
The genetic risks are alwaysthere and and not people could
die from a heart heart disease,even if they live a very natural
lifestyle true, yes it's, evenif they live a very healthy
lifestyle.
And then the question is howlong you're going to?
You're going to die from heartdisease at some age, no matter
what Right, maybe if you live toa hundred, maybe if it's 90,
(36:30):
some people 35, right Like ifthey're very young.
So you know, living like anunhealthy lifestyle could make
someone get heart disease at 70or 60 instead of 90 or 80.
But what I'm saying is that now, so if you don't have genetic
(36:50):
risk, you'll still get heartdisease.
But the question is when.
And if you have a high geneticrisk, it's going to be 20 years
earlier, let's say to be 20years earlier.
Let's say and so if you have ahigh genetic risk and you don't
eat healthy, you can get a heart.
Philip Pape (37:08):
Like people were dying from heart disease all the
time, like earlier ages andthen you know, throughout
history, yeah, yeah, no, itmakes sense.
What you're saying makes sensein terms of the risk versus when
you would get it and whetherit's inevitable.
And we see a correlation, rightwith lifestyle and obesity and
that going up because of thereason you said is you're
accelerating the process.
So another one related to thiscomes up is autoimmune
conditions.
(37:29):
Pat, a lot of clients have haddifferent autoimmune conditions,
from lupus to rheumatoidarthritis to you know
undifferentiated things thatthey show up in their lab work,
right, they have the antibodiesfor it.
They may or may not have thediagnosis and there are
obviously different medicationsand there's what do you call it
biologics today, like Dupixanand things like that, that can
deal with those.
But one of the recommendationsfor certain autoimmune
(37:52):
conditions is elimination dietsbecause there's something that
is triggering, right, theinflammation in your food.
How does that fit into all ofthis in terms of you know, the
recommendations?
Does that make sense?
Joe Cohen (38:07):
I might be.
Yeah, so I might be the onlyperson in the world, definitely
the only person I know I'veheard of.
I used to be on a carnivorediet.
I could only eat meat.
If I ate anything else, I getlike brain fog, pains, like
fibromyalgia, just everything.
Every random issue would justmy body would just start going,
(38:27):
you know hey, if you had anapple, like it would be a
problem.
Yeah, if you just yeah, if I atean apple, I get like, start
getting like tired, like, oh, Ican't think, I don't know what's
going on.
My brain slows down.
You know, like I get a foodcoma from an apple, literally,
and I get bloated and like it'slike, wow, you ate an apple and
(38:48):
now I'm bloated.
I can't think Unmotivated.
I'm like, you know, it's as ifI, it's as if maybe someone else
ate like a heavy pasta, hugeheavy pasta.
Philip Pape (39:02):
And then you, you know, and they're like, oh, like
you get a little, you know howyou get a little brain like oh
yeah, or drink wine, like when Idrink wine, or something like
that.
Yeah, same thing yeah.
Joe Cohen (39:10):
So it was like I would eat an apple and that
would happen, right, I'd be likewhat the fuck's going now?
If I eat something else, like abread, I'd be out for days.
So I basically just at acertain point, I figured out in
(39:33):
2013 already that I need to goon this diet that doesn't have
any.
It's just meat and chicken,beef, chicken and really clean
salmon, and that's it.
That's all I ate.
Wild Alaskan frozen salmoncrazy.
I should warm it up and like nospices, nothing like, just very
plain, just beef, and I wouldjust, yeah, I would melt down
from everything.
(39:53):
Uh, now I can eat anything bread, gluten, everything, literally
everything and the way I didthat was reverse all my food
sensitivities.
It was actually somewhatgradual, but it was also pretty
like there was things that Ifigured out.
Oh, I got to do this and thenit just made a huge difference
and now I could just eatanything.
So we were talking about likeso number one is in my results
(40:19):
come up that have a high risk offood sensitivities and also
food allergies, but what we seeis that I also reversed it.
So I had it from a young agealready.
I remember as long as I canremember I would get tired from
eating, like bread or any kindof you know any carbohydrates.
And then now I don't.
Now I could eat anything cheese, dairy milk, whatever you name
(40:44):
it.
It doesn't matter if it's A2,a1, a, this gluten, whatever.
It doesn't make a difference.
Philip Pape (40:52):
That's a big business.
Joe Cohen (40:52):
right there there's a lot of people who have issues
with food and I noticed thateverybody has some issues with
food and it's more of a problemthat as you get older you lose
tolerance to foods and it's alsohow much.
There's also a degree of like.
If you have a reaction 10percent or 20 percent or 100
(41:16):
percent you just get, like youknow, out of commission.
20% or 100%, you just get outof commission.
Two people could have a foodcoma.
One gets maybe 5% tired butthey're still able to work and
do whatever.
The other person gets slammedthe whole day.
They can't function.
And you see that even peoplewho are like beasts they eat a
pasta in the morning A lot ofthem are just like fucked, so
(41:41):
they don't do that.
They'll just kind of like.
A lot of people will dointermittent fasting because
they kind of know they'll eatsomething, but it slows them
down.
Food is not supposed to slowyou down.
Philip Pape (41:49):
Yeah, so they work around it by either starting to
restrict or to strict a timing.
Joe Cohen (41:53):
Yeah, and so.
But if you're, if you know howto do it and again, like the
only way I figured it out waswith precision health then you
could fix all these things, andsame with any kind of issue.
There's a way to fix all thesethings.
It's just a question of do youknow the right way to do it?
And unfortunately, you knowcharlatans are taking it over by
(42:17):
saying we're going to test fivesnips and tell you everything
you need to know.
Like you know, if you gotanxiety, you got heart to MTHFR.
Let me explain to you.
It's like this is your wholeworld.
You're like whoa, I can do thistest.
Philip Pape (42:33):
It sounds so simple , doesn't it?
Joe Cohen (42:35):
Right.
So simple it's.
Just let me tell you something.
It's MTHFR.
It's so simple it's just.
Let me tell you something.
It's MTHFR.
It's the secret.
We do have all these functionalreports.
By the way, One of the thingswe did was we just replicated
every one of these othercompanies, so that if you're
like curious, oh, I want this10X report, we're like, let's
(42:58):
make this better so that it'snot complete shit, and then call
it something else 100X,whatever.
I get it, man.
Philip Pape (43:05):
So wait before we get off the food thing because I
know we're almost out of timeis just give me one example of
how one of the foods you wereintolerant to, how you overcame
that.
Now I'm really curious aboutthat.
Joe Cohen (43:19):
So for me, with food, intolerance is not one reason
why you're intolerant to food,and it's very kind of.
I would say that I figuredthings out over time over, but
there was a very bigacceleration.
So I figured things out from 15years ago already, but there
was a very big acceleration inthe past couple of years because
(43:42):
of how intelligent the softwareand just precision health has
become like more accessible toblood tests, better software.
So in the past three and a halfyears think about it like this
I reduced the food sensitivities.
But it was at a point where mydiet was like I could eat
vegetables and fruits and so itwas like, okay, I'm not just
(44:07):
eating meat and beef, right,like I'll eat.
And then I was kind of eatingsome fruit, nuts and seeds
sometimes.
But then I just figured out onething at a time boom, boom,
boom, boom, boom, just.
And like each thing I figuredout I was like whoa, the
sensitivities went down more,80%, 90%.
Now I can eat this, I eatavocados.
I remember just reacting toevery single food I eat avocados
(44:29):
, boom.
And then two years ago I wouldnot react to 60% of foods, then
70%, 80%, and as I did more andmore things.
Now I'm just like I can eatwhatever I want.
Now I've got the leastrestrictions.
People are like, oh, I can'teat this, or else If I eat pizza
now, I'm fine.
(44:49):
I don't have a food coma, whichwould be anathema.
Forget about pizza.
I couldn't eat an apple, yeahyeah, yeah, no that apple.
Philip Pape (44:59):
Man, I couldn't eat an apple, you know?
Joe Cohen (45:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no that apple man, I couldn't eat a
fucking tomato, forget about anapple, you know.
Philip Pape (45:09):
And the reason this is important right is because,
at the end of the day, we wantpeople to live their lives and
enjoy food.
Food is good, right, andthere's too much fear-mongering
around it, and some of it maycome from a legitimate place,
but it's generalized and it'smarketed as if, like, this is
the diet, this is the perfectdiet, and we talk about
restriction versus like flexible, personalized restraint.
You know, like you want to haveflexibility, you want to have
some level of restraint in yourdiet depending on your goal, but
(45:31):
then also, hopefully, you caneat whatever the heck you want
If that's a food you enjoy andthere's a way to get there.
So this is awesome, man.
I mean, I know we justscratched the surface.
Folks can find a lot of yourcontent, but where do we want to
send them to to learn moreabout your work right away?
Joe Cohen (45:45):
I would say Self Decode or Mr Biohacker on
Instagram.
There's some content there andI think it's important to
understand.
Really, like, genetics has huge, huge power and precision.
Health in general is is verysignificant.
The problem nowadays is it'sjust going to the person who
(46:05):
markets it the best, which is anissue, right.
And what are these people goingto say?
They're going to say that I'vespoken to some of these people.
I'm almost I'm, like you guysrealize like what's going.
They usually will bury theirhead in the sand, but also
they're going to be like oh,we're, you know, we're just
(46:26):
looking at the functional genesand so number one is we, we do
that, we can do that, we do thatRight, so that if somebody
wants that, it's like, here yougo.
But the problem is it's it justdoesn't like the if, like, you
can't just make predictionsbased on specific variants, even
though they're going to tellyou, oh, it's all validated.
(46:46):
By the way, that wordvalidation can mean two very
different things, right?
What they're saying is thatthere's some kind of study that
shows an association between agene, a SNP, and a condition,
between a gene, a SNP and acondition.
The problem is that thatassociation might exist, but it
wouldn't exist across alldifferent ancestries.
It might not be replicatable.
(47:07):
Now, let's say it isreplicatable.
The effect size is so smallthat you would need to add up
hundreds of genes in order toget something significant.
So the problem is the effectsize.
But we do still allow people touse genetics in that way
because I think sometimes, ifyou want to play detective, you
(47:28):
can learn, you could pick upinteresting insights here and
there by looking at these genes,and so we just do everything.
We've become like theeverything platform, and part of
the reason we also doeverything is because we also
license out the technology toother businesses okay so it's
basically whatever we get arequest for, or if another
(47:49):
company's doing something, it'slike we can do that too.
Not a problem here here it isright.
Like so we just have like kindof a smorgasbord of everything
you could do with genetics and Iwould you know, and whatever
someone wants you could do withgenetics and I would you know,
and whatever someone wants youcan do, right.
Like it's like you want thisgene, you got it.
What do you want?
Tell us the genes.
We make like custom reports,whatever you want.
(48:10):
If you wanted to make a witsand weights genetic report, we
can make one for you.
You just tell us the topics.
Whatever you want in there, weput it in there.
Philip Pape (48:21):
Love it man.
Love it man.
Yeah, I'm all about data.
Like you said, you can't reallyhave too much.
It's just can you make sense ofit?
And, with the power of what wehave now with tools and AI and
what you guys are doing and thevalidation, I think that's
awesome People this.
So we'll send them toselfdecodecom and check out Joe
on IG at Mr Biohacker and Joeman.
(48:46):
Thanks for your time, thanksfor coming on and sharing this.
I'm glad we had you to discussthe future, the future of health
and medicine and all of thistoday.
Joe Cohen (48:50):
Appreciate it.
And one last tip is you couldalso upload your lab tests.
For me it's like a game I play.
Can I move my lab results?
And what's amazing is that youcan move every single lab result
.
It's unbelievable.
Philip Pape (49:04):
Nice and then so you can interpret the before and
after per the question I hadearlier right and see what
you've done.
Joe Cohen (49:09):
So yeah, that's what it's all about.
Philip Pape (49:11):
Yeah, you got to, you got to change your.
You have to have data that'sactionable, that you could make
a change from and then be ableto measure every lab test, every
single blood test you take.
Joe Cohen (49:19):
You can alter.
Philip Pape (49:21):
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, it's in your control,folks, all right.
Well, thanks for coming on, joe.
Joe Cohen (49:25):
Thanks for having me.
If you've been following the same training and
nutrition advice as everyoneelse, but getting wildly
different results, your geneticsmight hold the answer.
But here's what most peopledon't realize your DNA doesn't
just influence whether you'll begood at sports or prone to
certain diseases.
It might reveal how your bodyresponds to specific macros, how
it recovers from training, andwhether you're predisposed to
(00:22):
store fat or build muscle moreefficiently.
My guest today has analyzedover two and a half million
genetic variants for more than200,000 people.
He's going to reveal what yourgenetic blueprint might tell you
about optimizing your physique.
You'll discover the specificgenes that may influence your
body's response to training andnutrition, learn how to
interpret genetic data withoutfalling for overhyped marketing,
(00:46):
and find out whetherpersonalized health based on
your DNA is the next revolutionin health science.
Welcome to Wits and Weights, theshow that helps you build a
strong, healthy physique usingevidence, engineering and
efficiency.
I'm your host, philip Pape, andtoday we are going to examine
(01:08):
whether your genetic code canunlock better results from your
training and nutrition.
My guest today is Joe Cohen,founder and CEO of SelfDecode, a
DNA and biomarker-based healthplatform that uses AI to deliver
personalized health insights.
Joe has spent years battlingbrain fog, inflammation and
fatigue throughself-experimentation, and he
(01:29):
claims to have optimized over400 lab markers.
His platform has analyzedgenetic data for over 200,000
people and he currently takes170 supplements daily based on
his genetic profile.
Today, you're gonna learn whichvariants might influence muscle
building and fat loss, how toidentify legitimate genetic
insights for marketing hype, andwhether personalized nutrition
(01:49):
based on your DNA can give youan edge in achieving your
physique goals.
Joe, thanks so much for comingon the show.
My man.
Joe Cohen (01:55):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Philip Pape (01:57):
So I want to start talking about the industry first
and then drill down to thespecifics here.
I think you've said that mostof the DNA health companies and
I know there are a lot out thereI get pitched all the time to
be on my show that they'reessentially scams, I think, is
the word you've used, and I wantto understand what makes that
the case and what differentiateswhat people should be looking
for from those companies.
Joe Cohen (02:17):
Yeah, so genetics is a very complex thing and
typically most things that wehave are what's called polygenic
, which means there's a varietyof genes that are related to it,
variety of pathways or varietyof genes, and there's different
ways of looking at genetics, butessentially what has been found
(02:37):
is that typically there'smillions of variants that
contribute to a condition or anytrait.
Typically, if it's intelligence, it's not just you don't have,
like an intelligence gene or avariant, it's typically there's
many, many variants that arerelated to it.
And you know some of thesethings are not fully decoded,
but you know that what we doknow is that there's a millions
(02:59):
of variants that, or thousandsor hundreds of thousands that
are typically related to thesepolygenic traits.
Some things are just veryspecific variants like, for
example, lactose intolerance.
It could be one, two, three, acouple variants related to that,
but most things are actuallyquite polygenic, which means
(03:21):
that there's a lot of genes thatare related to it.
Polygenic, which means thatthere's a lot of genes that are
related to it.
That means is if you're lookingat you know a hundred SNPs or
variants, then you're not goingto be able to tell or predict
something that is related tomillions of variants or hundreds
of thousands, it's just there'snot enough information, and so
what these companies typicallydo is they'll look at one
(03:42):
variant and they'll tell you youhave a high risk for this, or
you're like this, or you needthis or you need that.
They make broad conclusionsbased on specific variants and
what they're doing is they'retreating it like almost like a
lab test.
Like you get your LDLcholesterol tested, you have
this gene.
Now you got to treat this geneand do this, that and the other
(04:05):
thing, whatever, right, like.
The problem is that you have200 million SNPs, so you're not
going to like you've got these.
There could be 20,000 SNPs thatmake you more likely for
something and 10,000 that makeyou less, and you kind of have
to figure out what's the basedon all that information.
What is the total likelihood,like how likely are you to get
(04:29):
this condition?
And it's not yes or no.
It's, like you know, are you inthe 80th, 90th percentile?
Is your risk of getting thecondition?
Maybe in a population, it's 1%of people who are whatever have
a condition, and even if you'refive times the risk, then you're
5% right.
So it's not like, it's not justyes or no.
(04:51):
Do you have this right, and sothere's different kinds of
genetics.
When you want to predict stuff,the only way to do it is through
polygenic risk scoring, andthen you get okay, so we'll just
focus on this for a second,this polygenic risk scoring, and
then you get okay, so we'lljust focus on this for a second.
This polygenic risk scoringarea.
There are some companies veryfew that do polygenic risk
(05:11):
scoring for consumers, but thenthe problem is is that if you,
they don't actually do legitpolygenic risk scoring, meaning
they might just look at multiplevariants, but then they're not
doing it legitimately.
They might look at two, three,five, sometimes 30, whatever,
but they don't.
If it's not like legitimateapproach, then it's not.
You know it's not very good.
(05:33):
Now, even if they did look atmany, whatever they're looking
at, you want to validate thatyou're able to predict something
.
Genetics is about prediction,right that?
A lot of genetics is aboutprediction.
You get a test because you wantto try to predict something in
the future, or you want to tryto predict anything, maybe what
supplement you'll do well with,or whatever.
(05:53):
So if you're trying to predictsome kind of condition or some
kind of tendency and thesethings have many genes.
It's not just enough to saythat you came up with an
algorithm that can combine manythousands of variants or
whatever, and use AI and machinelearning and give you a result.
You actually have to validateit and that's why, even with
(06:15):
these LLMs like ChatGPT, theyhave this war with each other
where each of them.
But at the end of the day,there's some kind of standard
that they test against and thenthey kind of compare each to
each other how good are they atreasoning and different kinds of
things, different areas, and sothe same thing should happen in
genetics, but it's not.
It for consumer genetics, it'sjust the wild west where you
(06:38):
know.
You just say, like whoever hasthe best marketing is
essentially winning the race.
Yeah, because the you know a guylike who's not an expert, many,
basically anybody who has apodcast about this, about
anything, is not an expert ingenetics.
Typically right, and you couldget on a podcast whether it's
(06:59):
andrew uberman or even peterattia, and the guy they don't
really know, peter attia already, like, he did recommend
self-decode, but he he wasn'tfully understanding, he didn't
fully under understand geneticsand he just kind of knew that
you do need to look at morevariants.
He just didn't really dighimself deeply into it enough.
(07:19):
But he said, based on what Icould figure out, self-decode
seems like the best one.
Right, yeah, and he was prettyhonest about that.
But the idea is that he doesn'tknow, uberman doesn't know.
You take like any top healthinfluencer, they don't know.
And Uberman was once kind ofpromoting InsideTracker, which
(07:41):
has they don't have goodgenetics software, right, it's
just not valid, it's notaccurate, it's not valid, it's
not good.
I think InsideTracker has moveda little bit away from genetics
, but I'm just giving you anexample of somebody like Uberman
who's not going to understand.
He's a neuroscientist, it's acompletely different science and
(08:01):
it's not something like youcould just have a PhD, even in
nutrigenomics, and understandthis kind of polygenic risk
scoring it's.
You need to be abioinformatician, genetics,
statistical genetics.
It's kind of like a differentfield.
And so what we see is thatpeople who don't know what
they're doing in the healthspace trying to get into
genetics and the result isgarbage into genetics and the
(08:24):
result is garbage.
And but some of these peopleare skilled marketers, like the
10X people.
There's some other people,right, like they're good at
sales.
Grant Cardone doesn't know thefirst thing about anything
related to science, but he's agood salesman, so he doesn't
need to know.
It's, you know, same with GaryBrekker doesn't know anything
about genetics, but he's a greatsalesman and he can, like you
(08:52):
know, look at somebody talkingabout hydrogen water and be able
to formulate some sentencesthat sound good, but he doesn't
know anything about genetics.
Yet he's selling a genetic testas if this guy's the expert in
genetics.
Philip Pape (09:02):
Yeah, I'll tell you what you're preaching to a big
choir here, because the taglineof this podcast is skeptics of
the fitness industry.
You don't even have to get intoAI, informatics, genetics, to
see that kind of extrapolationfrom data, to make wild
conclusions and fearmongerthings right, because it goes
viral, it gets clicks, it getsattention Exactly and you see so
(09:23):
much misinformation.
That's why I wanted to have youon.
I've had a few other folks inthis space on and I understand
it's like a very emerging fieldand what you just said like
garbage in, garbage out.
If the data is not actionable,not only can you not do anything
with it, it's useless, but Ithink it could also lead to, you
know, unintentional actions andfears and, oh my God, I'm at
(09:46):
risk for this thing and, likeyou said, it's 500% higher risk,
but that's relative to a 0.1%risk in the population, so it's
all relative.
I think all of that's important, which is why I wanted to start
there, because then thequestion is okay.
If people are like I'veoptimized for my system in my
life, my fitness system, thebasics, I'm training, I'm eating
(10:06):
my protein, I'm moving aroundand I'm doing things like that
and I'm tracking right, we talkabout tracking all your
lifestyle metrics, the thingsthat you can easily do with a
smartphone, and they want to goto that next level.
That's where I think some ofthese interesting avenues like
genetics come in.
I've personally had tests doneand you're right.
Sometimes they will just take asingle snip and say, okay,
(10:28):
you're a carb burner and I'mlike what is this Like?
You know, how does that help meand is it even accurate and how
do we trust that information?
So, for the purposes of thisaudience who's concerned about
optimizing their biology andoptimizing their health and
lifestyle, Can you, as the ownerof Self2Code and your platform,
say with some reasonable levelof confidence that certain
(10:50):
variants influence specificthings that we can act upon,
like your recovery or how youtrain or what you eat?
Joe Cohen (10:58):
To be very honest, I could go through it, but fitness
is probably you could do.
Okay, so you can make actions.
For everything related togenetics there's always
something you could do, meaninglike it's giving you information
and if you have good geneticsoftware, then it'll give you
good information, but it's notgoing to tell you exactly which
(11:23):
exercise you need to do.
If you need to do more forearm,you need to do more forearm
training.
It's not going to tell you.
Philip Pape (11:31):
That would be incredible.
Just have a robot tell youeverything you need to do.
Yeah, Right.
Joe Cohen (11:36):
It's not going to tell you if you need to stretch
five minutes instead of ten.
It can't get that exact.
So you've got to understandwhat it can or cannot tell you.
In general, though, thepredictions you got to
understand.
There's also a hierarchy.
It's not necessarilysomething's wrong or right.
There's a hierarchy of howaccurate something is, depending
(11:59):
on the topic.
When governments spend billionsof dollars to build up databases
, disease databases, and they,you know to predict things, they
make these databases availableso that companies and academics
can actually train their modelson diseases, and so diseases in
genetics you can actuallypredict reasonably well, because
(12:23):
there's been a lot of moneypumped into it.
There hasn't been a lot ofmoney pumped into it.
There hasn't been a lot ofmoney pumped into how much you
know, like in the nutritionstuff as much.
So it doesn't mean that it'swrong.
It just means that it's not asaccurate as the disease stuff.
And even with disease stuff,there's things that are just
(12:44):
going to be more genetic andthings that are going to be less
genetic.
Prostate cancer andcardiovascular disease are
pretty genetic, and it's alsovery predictable Whether you're
going to get prostate cancer,cardiovascular these are type 2
diabetes, also very predictable.
So there's like a lot of thisthere's about you know.
I would say there's about 150conditions that we can predict
(13:06):
reasonably well that if you havehigh risk, you probably want to
do something about it.
There's some change you'regoing to want to make.
That is one way to look atgenetics, where you look at a
total risk.
So I think it's a good idea togo through the different kinds
of genetics because it's notjust one thing.
There's the polygenic riskscoring genetics, which is
(13:26):
useful in the sense of if youwant to know what you're at high
risk for, and typically there'sways to reduce the risk.
Whether it's prostate cancer oranything Cardiovascular, there's
always hundreds of things youcould do to reduce your risk if
you know exactly what you needto prevent.
So you know, just for prostatecancer, for example, tomatoes
(13:47):
and lycopene that helps preventprostate cancer.
It's one thing.
There's many things Green tea,different things, there's some
supplements, like there's awhole bunch of different things
you could do potentially toprevent prostate cancer.
I wouldn't say that thesethings are a treatment.
If you have prostate cancer, youtake lycopene, your prostate
cancer is going to go away.
It doesn't really work likethat right, but for prevention
(14:13):
it makes more sense, like Iwouldn't say if I had prostate
cancer I'm not going to be, like, well, I'm going to eat
tomatoes and it's going to goaway.
But if you're eating tomatoesover many, many years and you're
taking supplements, then it canpush that off for like 20, 40
years, right, like enough sothat it's not relevant, because
you could live to 100, 120,whatever the technology we have
at that point is, and it's notgoing to be as relevant.
(14:34):
So you want to push it off asmuch as you can.
You know, and none of thenutrition and supplement stuff
are going to make you live past120.
I think 120 is something thatmaybe you can get to with all
the latest and greatestsupplements and drugs and
lifestyle stuff, but then afterthat it's kind of just like we
need to replace your limbs andshit Cyborg.
Philip Pape (14:55):
Exactly.
Joe Cohen (14:57):
So, but that's one thing that genetics can do.
It can help predict diseasespretty well.
Philip Pape (15:02):
Yeah, yeah.
No, let's compartmentalize here, because early on your first
answer you were talking aboutthe polygenic nature of some of
these and how sometimes it'shundreds, if not thousands, of
genes that come together, maybemillions, whatever.
And I remember reading recentlythey discovered all the genes
that comprise stuttering,whether somebody stutters, and
it was like 40 something genesthat they identified.
Joe Cohen (15:23):
That makes sense.
Right, that makes sense.
I mean at least yeah.
Philip Pape (15:31):
Yeah, yeah, where.
But then I also have heard,like for Alzheimer's risk, there
are those that there's like onesnip or two snips that can give
you a big indicator.
No, it's not true, right.
Joe Cohen (15:37):
Millions yeah.
Philip Pape (15:38):
Exactly so that that's where the misinformation
is.
And then, when you mentionedlifestyle and you mentioned the
tomatoes for prostate cancer, mymind always goes to the
hierarchy of things you do inyour lifestyle.
In other words, you wouldn'twant somebody to say, well, the
answer is the tomatoes, morelike that is going to nudge
things in the right direction,but you still should be doing
other things.
I also think there's somethingevery human should be doing, no
(16:01):
matter what, for healthylifestyle that probably also
reduce the risk of all of thesethings.
That makes sense, like strengthtraining, you know, muscle
centric medicine is, I know, ahot topic term today mental
health, right.
I read about the link betweendepression and diseases of, or
dementia related.
You know, alzheimer's and agerelated dementia, right?
(16:21):
And so there's like a cascadeof connections between these
things as well.
Where am I going with all thisis, how do we get people to know
what they should do, no matterwhat, versus how they should
target in on the things that aremost important to them and then
make these changes, like eatingmore tomatoes.
Joe Cohen (16:38):
Well, I think the things that they, first of all,
I think people need likemotivation.
There's some things.
We will tell you that strengthtraining or some kind of aerobic
exercise associated with lowerrisk of prostate cancer or
whatever, it is right and thatdoes repeat itself a lot.
So there are certain thingsthat everybody knows and
(16:59):
sometimes people don't do, butyou might sometimes need some
more motivation to understandwhy exactly you need to do this
right.
When it comes to theserecommendations, like you said,
you're going to be at risk for,let's say, 20 different
conditions or whatever.
Right, you're not going to takea supplement for every
condition, necessarily, but whatwe can do is we look at all
these conditions, all yourumbrella tests, and we can tell
(17:23):
you like a best fit, this thingis going to help you with the
most things that you have,issues, with the most risks that
you have, including.
You're also able to put insymptoms, conditions and goals.
We could take all that intoaccount and then we give you the
whole list.
For whatever we recommend, wesay here's all the reasons why
you should take it.
So it gives you a very clearrationale about all the reasons
(17:43):
you should take it, with thereferences.
So I don't think all becauseyou have a high risk for one
condition that you need to takeevery supplement to prevent that
condition.
But it should nudge you in theright way.
And then the question is okay,well, you need to be nudged in
different ways based on allthese different information, and
(18:04):
so you need software to putthat all together for you and
tell you what you should betaking.
What's the most important thingfor you?
That's going to help with themost of the things and the most
important things.
So that's kind of how we makerecommendations.
It's by nudging things higherup on the priority list.
So if you have a specificvariant, it'll nudge it up a
little bit for a certaincondition.
(18:25):
And then, if you have aspecific variant, it'll nudge it
up a little bit for a certaincondition, and then if you have
a risk for that condition, it'llnudge it up in the list.
If it's a serious condition,it'll nudge it more.
It goes on like that.
And then if you have a symptom,condition or goal, it'll nudge
it up significantly more if ithelps with that.
And then, once you see, it'llsee the whole like whoa, okay,
(18:47):
this thing helps with all thesedifferent things my labs and
this and it gives you a muchbigger picture.
It lets you see, wow, okay, nowI see why I need to take this.
Not because some guru told me,necessarily you know to do this
and you could also see forcertain things that everybody
knows they should be doingExercise.
(19:08):
You could see all the differentreasons why you should and
typically we actually, ifsomeone says they exercise
already, we hide these kinds ofrecommendations because they get
pissed when they see exerciseas a recommendation.
They're like I already know Ineed to.
You know I already do it, yeah.
Philip Pape (19:23):
No, I like that.
That's the essence ofpersonalization.
I think the wordpersonalization gets overused in
the industry and people arelike, yeah, we personalize the
program to you.
Give us your age, your height,your demographics and we'll give
you a template and what you'redoing is you're, you're you're
personalizing the output basedon collecting all this data,
letting you know using power,assists and tools, of course, to
interpret it and then linkingit to what you've validated is
(19:46):
worth going after.
So my question, then is I thinkyou personally take a ton of
supplements have we validatedthat the supplements themselves
or these recommendations willactually do the thing?
Is the data just as strongbehind those behavior and
supplement type recommendationsas the genetic root cause is?
Does that make sense?
Is it validated as well?
Joe Cohen (20:08):
We validated the prediction, as it's a good
prediction in terms of it canpredict these kinds of
conditions in the future,meaning it's predicting that you
have a high risk, so noteverybody's going to get it.
It's still a probability.
Again, it's depending on howhealthy you live and all these
other factors.
But the genetic part we know istrue in the sense you have a
high genetic risk.
(20:29):
So we're clear about that.
That's been validated.
The other stuff, like does thisrecommendation work?
We can't.
It's very hard to validate thatbecause what we can show you is
all the rationale as to whyit's being recommended, which is
what we do, and then you canchoose if you want to take it or
not.
You can't validate somethingwe're recommending is going to
(20:53):
prevent.
It's already validated thatthere's studies showing that
something helps with preventprostate cancer.
So we're not doing thevalidation for that, or at least
there's studies related to that.
But what we're doing is we'rejust putting that information
together for you so that you canthen make a decision.
Does this thing make sense forme, given all this information,
(21:14):
and then you could either do itor not.
Right, so it's I wouldn't saythat.
That's you know.
Like, yeah, you can't reallyvalidate that per se.
But that's why we give you theall the rationale, so that you
can make an intelligent decisionand be like, okay, I think this
makes sense, or not.
Philip Pape (21:31):
No, it makes perfect sense, man, and I'm just
clarifying for the listenersthey understand.
There's like different systemsbeing put together here, right,
there's the genetic analysis andthen there's okay, we have
epidemiology, we have mayberandom controlled trials and
maybe we have a bunch of ratstudies or whatever.
Behind all the otherinformation we think we know
about the supplementation, thelifestyle changes and whatnot,
(21:52):
because that's another area rifefor misinformation, I'm sure
you agree it's like.
So.
Then if you do recommend all ofthese things let's say it's a
ton of different supplementationdoes it reconcile interactions
and dosing and all of that tomake sure that the totality
makes sense?
Joe Cohen (22:11):
Yeah, I mean it does give you dosing, standard dosing
.
It doesn't change the dosingbased on it just because there's
too many unknowns there, but itjust tells you what is the best
thing for, like it prioritizeswhat's the most important thing
for you, what are the mostimportant things?
And then you could keep goingdown the list and see like okay,
(22:34):
so here's my top 10, top 15,top 20.
You can just keep going downand see what makes sense for you
to do cool.
Philip Pape (22:43):
And going back to the genetic variations I know
you mentioned, it's very hard,it's very infrequent that you're
going to have like one genethat's going to affect a clear
outcome.
There's something called thespeed gene, I think ACTN3, I was
looking up just some genes toask you about and this is one
has to do with fast twitchmuscle fibers.
Um, I like, if you take thatexample right, how actionable is
(23:05):
something like that?
Like if you know for a fact,because there are certain things
I've seen with other services,they'll say, okay, you're a
morning person versus a nightperson, so you need to go to bed
earlier or later.
Or you know you burn carbsbetter than you burn fat, so and
I'm always skeptical of thoseconclusions so what are your
thoughts on that?
Joe Cohen (23:21):
I don't personally know what to do with the fast
Twitch fiber one like what areyou going to do with that
information?
Philip Pape (23:28):
I mean I don't know , yeah, I don't know, higher
reps versus lower reps.
Joe Cohen (23:32):
I have no idea I don't think I would train.
That's what I'm saying.
Like there's specific things.
Tony (23:37):
Like I don't think you're going to figure out higher reps
versus lower reps based on yourgenetics you just got to train
and figure it out right, becausethat's the advice I would give
is you're going to figure it outwhen you train yeah, yeah, what
you could do is like, let's say, it could tell you what your
natural vo2 max tendency is andthen it could give you ways to
(23:57):
improve your vo2 max and andsome of those improvements could
be genetic based.
Joe Cohen (24:03):
So then there is specific variants that if we
know that you already have anissue and we could say we can
make it.
Sometimes there are studiesthat show that if you have this
predisposition or if you do thiswhen you have high LDL
cholesterol, it'll bring downyour cholesterol more if you
(24:25):
take this drug or thissupplement or something like
that.
So there are studies done likethat and we put that in the
software.
Also, there's other things thatIf we see a supplement works in
a certain pathway, we will saythat this thing can help.
You have this pathway that ishigh risk and this thing could
help with that.
Or, for example, if we see youhave a predisposition for lower
(24:49):
vitamin C and vitamin C isrelated to some condition like
low vitamin C, we could say thatput it up higher on the list
and say, because you have thispredisposition, so that's all
explained.
So there's kind of like themacro picture which I think is
important for genetics.
You want to see what you're atrisk for.
And then there's like goinginto the details where sometimes
(25:18):
you might change up arecommendation for something,
like you might try somethingelse first.
You know like acne could befrom like 20 different causes.
So this is an example.
You know, my girlfriend hadsome acne and I I gave her some
general stuff and that helped,but not completely.
And then we were tryingdifferent things and we I was
(25:41):
actually waiting for a genetictest because I thought that
would help to see if it'sactually genetic or not.
Turns out it's not and she saidnobody in her family has it, so
it's, it's like somethingthat's not genetic with her.
And I also saw it wasn't.
Like I was already suspectingthat it was hormonal, but we
(26:01):
didn't have the data for it.
Now we see that it's notgenetic and it actually doesn't,
and the doctor told her hethought it was hormonal as well,
like she does have highertestosterone levels for a girl.
So, for example, you know thatthat could be a reason why a
girl has acne right, or it couldbe from many, many other
(26:22):
reasons, different kinds of acne.
But this is an example wherealso genetics can sometimes help
you figure out.
Like, hey, if it is genetic,then there's other things to do
about it, right?
If it's not genetic, if it'smore environmental, because you
just have some elevated hormone,then there's going to be other
things.
If it's genetic, it usuallymeans there's multiple
(26:45):
biochemical pathways at work andyou kind of need to do a bunch
of things, but then when you dothat it will help.
If it's an environmental thing,it's usually something very
specific that's causing it.
Just be a specific hormone.
It could be a specific thing.
Then if you do other things,it's just not going to help as
much because you just didn't dothe exact thing that you needed
to do.
So that also is a method whereyou could use genetics to help.
(27:09):
And then I would say that thereis a functional way to use
genetics as well, and I want toget into that.
The functional way is you'relooking at so we do have this
approach, for example.
Okay, so we look at pathways.
For example, we have amethylation, detox pathway,
histamine pathway and what we dothere.
(27:31):
I think it's reasonably goodactually.
So what we do there is we willlook at all the genes in a given
pathway.
So methylation, so we'realready narrowing down to
something specific.
You take one of the main geneswith methylation.
So there's about 30 differentgenes in methylation.
We see how does it relate.
We make a diagram.
We see all the different SNPswithin a gene and any time like
(27:55):
if overall you have risk in agene, it will light up red so
you could see the pathway as awhole.
And then we giverecommendations based on the
pathway as a whole and I thinkthat could be useful in.
You do need like a providersometimes or you need to be a
nerd to like really read, but Ido think the pathways when we're
(28:15):
designing it sometimes we don'tknow exactly like like I don't
know how my results are going tobe, but when I like plug it in,
I'm like pretty good in termsof the recommendations and
showing what are all the thingsin the path, like things I
wouldn't be able to figure outif not seeing a diagram.
So we have the pathway reports.
Unfortunately, the othercompanies do not do a
comprehensive job at thesepathway reports and so again it
(28:40):
falls short with what they'redoing.
Even within this approachthey're not doing a good job.
And then there's like the GaryBrekka DNA company kind of
approach where they're lookingat like five SNPs, the DNA
company, 83 SNPs and they'retrying to make very broad
conclusions based on you knowyou.
(29:01):
Basically the whole 10x healthreport is if you have mthfr or
not.
The other stuff is just notsignificant enough.
It's like do you have mthfr,yes or no, and we will test it.
Like you can get that from anydna test pretty much, but
they're just overcharging youfor it.
Like you can do our test for600 bucks, get you know
(29:24):
thousands of reports and allthis kind of advanced tech, or
you could do theirs for 600bucks and you just get MTHFR.
So it's like and in ours you'llget MTHFR as well.
That's what I mean by it's ascam in in the sense that
they're really like mthfr is animportant gene.
Everybody should know it ifthey have like these variants.
(29:47):
But it's just kind of like overemphasis on one gene.
Right, there's many otherimportant genes and and, like
you said, apo e is important.
You should know what braca isimportant.
These are things.
These are important genes, notsaying not.
But the problem is that, firstof all, if you don't have ApoE,
you could still have high riskfor Alzheimer's and if you do
(30:08):
have ApoE, you can have low risk.
You really have to look at manyof the genes, right.
So that's where the problemcomes in.
When you try to look atspecific genes, even the most
significant ones out there, it'sstill not going to give you an
accurate prediction.
And but now, when you get tothe functional ones, when you
exclude MTHFR, the functionalones are usually much less
(30:29):
predictive of anything.
Philip Pape (30:31):
And yet the functional ones, like you said.
That really got my, you knownerd brain going as an engineer
of like imagining a dashboard upon a, you know, in a control
room right when you see thechain of events and you see the
feedback loop and everythingconnected and you're trying to
identify that chain of eventsgenetically and where things are
hung up or at high risk.
Are you able to, like youmentioned, the methylation
(30:53):
pathway?
Are you able to combine thatwith then, say, blood work, lab
work, Because I've heard youtalk on other shows about you
know, it's not just genetics, wealso have a whole health side
of the marker analysis.
Combine those to also do abefore and after when you make a
change, because that's theother thing I'm wondering about
is, okay, you've done thesethings, how do you get an after?
Because your genes don't change?
So what does change and can youmeasure that?
(31:15):
So that's what comes to mindfor me right now.
Joe Cohen (31:17):
Yeah, you can do blood tests on everything.
So what we do is, any time wehave a report, let's say, if I
have high risk forcardiovascular disease, right,
we will tell you all thedifferent blood tests that are
related to cardiovasculardisease and then you can upload
it.
You buy the test, you upload it.
Whether it's from us or not, itdoesn't matter.
You get the test, you upload itand then we can tell you which
(31:41):
ones are increasing your risk,which ones are decreasing your
risk, and so then you couldfocus and we tell you each one
how to reduce the risk for themarker.
So once you know that you're athigh risk for cardiovascular
disease, first of all, somepeople maybe would want to start
taking statins.
We'll tell you.
We have a pharmacogenomicsreport to see.
Are you going to get muscle painfrom statins?
(32:03):
For me it says I do get musclepain and I just you know I'm an
experimenter, so I'm like, letme see, I'm going to see.
Most people I don't think wantto do that.
Right, they're not going to dowhat I'm doing, just to
experiment for the sciencepurpose.
But I took it and I got verysevere muscle pain.
Interesting and also, yeah, sothere's kind of like you know
(32:25):
there's like thepharmacogenomics part of it
which is pretty good.
So you could see that if you dohave specific variants,
pharmacogenomics is typically ofa specific variant.
You're going to do worse orbetter with a drug.
That does have an influence.
I'm not saying not.
The problem with some of thesupplements are sometimes
there's studies.
A lot of times there's not.
(32:46):
But even then it's not going tosay to take a drug or not.
If you just get yourpharmacogenomics report, you
still need to see are you atrisk for the condition?
Right, like?
You have to see a lot moreinformation.
So you really need a veryrobust, comprehensive platform.
But yeah, so let's say someonehas cardiovascular disease.
(33:07):
If you also have, you could havethe risk from genetics, but you
might have low cholesterol.
I mean, you're still high risk.
It's actually what they therecent study found in you know
top journal that we didn'tpublish this one.
But we have our own studiesthat we publish on our results,
which shows that we have thebest results when we benchmark
(33:28):
it.
But this study was just showingthat cardiovascular disease in
genetics, if you have a highpolygenic risk score for
cardiovascular, it's actuallymore important than pretty much
any other risk factor that youcan have Blood pressure
cholesterol.
It's actually more importantthan pretty much any other risk
factor that you can have Bloodpressure cholesterol.
It's like pretty much tied withlike blood pressure, which is
pretty huge, so, but it's moreimportant than cholesterol, than
(33:50):
high cholesterol or any ofthese other markers that you
might have, even likeinflammation.
Just when they look at all thedifferent things, you have a
high polygenic risk score.
It just comes to the top.
This is the most significantthing in terms of risk.
Now, what you can do under thatcircumstance is make sure all
the other markers are low riskand also do certain things that
(34:12):
prevent cardiovascular diseasein general.
There's a whole bunch of stuffyou could do, and so that's what
I did.
I just make sure I do have ahigh risk of coronary artery
disease in my genetics and Ijust make sure that I've got low
risk in all of the labs thatare related to cardiovascular
disease.
So I can see that it's changing, that the labs get better.
(34:33):
It's high risk.
Then it goes to low risk, right, and so you can change these
things.
Philip Pape (34:39):
Yeah, man, I get so many questions.
I could talk to you for hours,to be honest, because I'm like
what do I focus in on?
Tony (34:45):
My name is Tony.
I'm a strength lifter in my 40s.
Thank you to Phil and his Witsand Weights community for
helping me learn more aboutnutrition and how to implement
better ideas into my strengthtraining.
Phil has a very, very goodunderstanding of macros and
chemical compounds and hormonesand all that and he's
continuously learning.
That's what I like about Phil.
He's got a great sense of humor.
(35:06):
He's very relaxed, very easy totalk to.
One of the greatest thingsabout Phil, in my view, is that
he practices what he preaches.
He also works out with barbells.
He trains heavy not as heavy asme, but he trains heavy.
So if you talk with him aboutgetting in better shape, eating
better, he's probably going togive you some good advice and I
would strongly recommend youtalk with him and he'll help you
(35:26):
out.
Philip Pape (35:28):
Cardiovascular disease.
We talk about that a lot in theshow in the context of obesity,
lifestyle and also howage-related disease has evolved
over humanity's existence.
Right, Like at one point wedidn't see any of these diseases
, and even things like type twodiabetes we used to call it
adult onset and now it's inchildren, right, Because of
lifestyle.
And so that brings up thequestion of epigenetics.
(35:50):
Like if you went to Homosapiens 20,000 years ago and did
a genetic test, would they havea risk of cardiovascular
disease still?
Or has that been bred into usvia more recent modern man's
lifestyle?
You know what I mean.
Like those questions come tomind no, they always.
Joe Cohen (36:05):
They always had.
The risk was always there.
The genetic risks are alwaysthere and and not people could
die from a heart heart disease,even if they live a very natural
lifestyle true, yes it's, evenif they live a very healthy
lifestyle.
And then the question is howlong you're going to?
You're going to die from heartdisease at some age, no matter
what Right, maybe if you live toa hundred, maybe if it's 90,
(36:30):
some people 35, right Like ifthey're very young.
So you know, living like anunhealthy lifestyle could make
someone get heart disease at 70or 60 instead of 90 or 80.
But what I'm saying is that now, so if you don't have genetic
(36:50):
risk, you'll still get heartdisease.
But the question is when.
And if you have a high geneticrisk, it's going to be 20 years
earlier, let's say to be 20years earlier.
Let's say and so if you have ahigh genetic risk and you don't
eat healthy, you can get a heart.
Philip Pape (37:08):
Like people were dying from heart disease all the
time, like earlier ages andthen you know, throughout
history, yeah, yeah, no, itmakes sense.
What you're saying makes sensein terms of the risk versus when
you would get it and whetherit's inevitable.
And we see a correlation, rightwith lifestyle and obesity and
that going up because of thereason you said is you're
accelerating the process.
So another one related to thiscomes up is autoimmune
conditions.
(37:29):
Pat, a lot of clients have haddifferent autoimmune conditions,
from lupus to rheumatoidarthritis to you know
undifferentiated things thatthey show up in their lab work,
right, they have the antibodiesfor it.
They may or may not have thediagnosis and there are
obviously different medicationsand there's what do you call it
biologics today, like Dupixanand things like that, that can
deal with those.
But one of the recommendationsfor certain autoimmune
(37:52):
conditions is elimination dietsbecause there's something that
is triggering, right, theinflammation in your food.
How does that fit into all ofthis in terms of you know, the
recommendations?
Does that make sense?
Joe Cohen (38:07):
I might be.
Yeah, so I might be the onlyperson in the world, definitely
the only person I know I'veheard of.
I used to be on a carnivorediet.
I could only eat meat.
If I ate anything else, I getlike brain fog, pains, like
fibromyalgia, just everything.
Every random issue would justmy body would just start going,
(38:27):
you know hey, if you had anapple, like it would be a
problem.
Yeah, if you just yeah, if I atean apple, I get like, start
getting like tired, like, oh, Ican't think, I don't know what's
going on.
My brain slows down.
You know, like I get a foodcoma from an apple, literally,
and I get bloated and like it'slike, wow, you ate an apple and
(38:48):
now I'm bloated.
I can't think Unmotivated.
I'm like, you know, it's as ifI, it's as if maybe someone else
ate like a heavy pasta, hugeheavy pasta.
Philip Pape (39:02):
And then you, you know, and they're like, oh, like
you get a little, you know howyou get a little brain like oh
yeah, or drink wine, like when Idrink wine, or something like
that.
Yeah, same thing yeah.
Joe Cohen (39:10):
So it was like I would eat an apple and that
would happen, right, I'd be likewhat the fuck's going now?
If I eat something else, like abread, I'd be out for days.
So I basically just at acertain point, I figured out in
(39:33):
2013 already that I need to goon this diet that doesn't have
any.
It's just meat and chicken,beef, chicken and really clean
salmon, and that's it.
That's all I ate.
Wild Alaskan frozen salmoncrazy.
I should warm it up and like nospices, nothing like, just very
plain, just beef, and I wouldjust, yeah, I would melt down
from everything.
(39:53):
Uh, now I can eat anything bread, gluten, everything, literally
everything and the way I didthat was reverse all my food
sensitivities.
It was actually somewhatgradual, but it was also pretty
like there was things that Ifigured out.
Oh, I got to do this and thenit just made a huge difference
and now I could just eatanything.
So we were talking about likeso number one is in my results
(40:19):
come up that have a high risk offood sensitivities and also
food allergies, but what we seeis that I also reversed it.
So I had it from a young agealready.
I remember as long as I canremember I would get tired from
eating, like bread or any kindof you know any carbohydrates.
And then now I don't.
Now I could eat anything cheese, dairy milk, whatever you name
(40:44):
it.
It doesn't matter if it's A2,a1, a, this gluten, whatever.
It doesn't make a difference.
Philip Pape (40:52):
That's a big business.
Joe Cohen (40:52):
right there there's a lot of people who have issues
with food and I noticed thateverybody has some issues with
food and it's more of a problemthat as you get older you lose
tolerance to foods and it's alsohow much.
There's also a degree of like.
If you have a reaction 10percent or 20 percent or 100
(41:16):
percent you just get, like youknow, out of commission.
20% or 100%, you just get outof commission.
Two people could have a foodcoma.
One gets maybe 5% tired butthey're still able to work and
do whatever.
The other person gets slammedthe whole day.
They can't function.
And you see that even peoplewho are like beasts they eat a
pasta in the morning A lot ofthem are just like fucked, so
(41:41):
they don't do that.
They'll just kind of like.
A lot of people will dointermittent fasting because
they kind of know they'll eatsomething, but it slows them
down.
Food is not supposed to slowyou down.
Philip Pape (41:49):
Yeah, so they work around it by either starting to
restrict or to strict a timing.
Joe Cohen (41:53):
Yeah, and so.
But if you're, if you know howto do it and again, like the
only way I figured it out waswith precision health then you
could fix all these things, andsame with any kind of issue.
There's a way to fix all thesethings.
It's just a question of do youknow the right way to do it?
And unfortunately, you knowcharlatans are taking it over by
(42:17):
saying we're going to test fivesnips and tell you everything
you need to know.
Like you know, if you gotanxiety, you got heart to MTHFR.
Let me explain to you.
It's like this is your wholeworld.
You're like whoa, I can do thistest.
Philip Pape (42:33):
It sounds so simple , doesn't it?
Joe Cohen (42:35):
Right.
So simple it's.
Just let me tell you something.
It's MTHFR.
It's so simple it's just.
Let me tell you something.
It's MTHFR.
It's the secret.
We do have all these functionalreports.
By the way, One of the thingswe did was we just replicated
every one of these othercompanies, so that if you're
like curious, oh, I want this10X report, we're like, let's
(42:58):
make this better so that it'snot complete shit, and then call
it something else 100X,whatever.
I get it, man.
Philip Pape (43:05):
So wait before we get off the food thing because I
know we're almost out of timeis just give me one example of
how one of the foods you wereintolerant to, how you overcame
that.
Now I'm really curious aboutthat.
Joe Cohen (43:19):
So for me, with food, intolerance is not one reason
why you're intolerant to food,and it's very kind of.
I would say that I figuredthings out over time over, but
there was a very bigacceleration.
So I figured things out from 15years ago already, but there
was a very big acceleration inthe past couple of years because
(43:42):
of how intelligent the softwareand just precision health has
become like more accessible toblood tests, better software.
So in the past three and a halfyears think about it like this
I reduced the food sensitivities.
But it was at a point where mydiet was like I could eat
vegetables and fruits and so itwas like, okay, I'm not just
(44:07):
eating meat and beef, right,like I'll eat.
And then I was kind of eatingsome fruit, nuts and seeds
sometimes.
But then I just figured out onething at a time boom, boom,
boom, boom, boom, just.
And like each thing I figuredout I was like whoa, the
sensitivities went down more,80%, 90%.
Now I can eat this, I eatavocados.
I remember just reacting toevery single food I eat avocados
(44:29):
, boom.
And then two years ago I wouldnot react to 60% of foods, then
70%, 80%, and as I did more andmore things.
Now I'm just like I can eatwhatever I want.
Now I've got the leastrestrictions.
People are like, oh, I can'teat this, or else If I eat pizza
now, I'm fine.
(44:49):
I don't have a food coma, whichwould be anathema.
Forget about pizza.
I couldn't eat an apple, yeahyeah, yeah, no that apple.
Philip Pape (44:59):
Man, I couldn't eat an apple, you know?
Joe Cohen (45:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no that apple man, I couldn't eat a
fucking tomato, forget about anapple, you know.
Philip Pape (45:09):
And the reason this is important right is because,
at the end of the day, we wantpeople to live their lives and
enjoy food.
Food is good, right, andthere's too much fear-mongering
around it, and some of it maycome from a legitimate place,
but it's generalized and it'smarketed as if, like, this is
the diet, this is the perfectdiet, and we talk about
restriction versus like flexible, personalized restraint.
You know, like you want to haveflexibility, you want to have
some level of restraint in yourdiet depending on your goal, but
(45:31):
then also, hopefully, you caneat whatever the heck you want
If that's a food you enjoy andthere's a way to get there.
So this is awesome, man.
I mean, I know we justscratched the surface.
Folks can find a lot of yourcontent, but where do we want to
send them to to learn moreabout your work right away?
Joe Cohen (45:45):
I would say Self Decode or Mr Biohacker on
Instagram.
There's some content there andI think it's important to
understand.
Really, like, genetics has huge, huge power and precision.
Health in general is is verysignificant.
The problem nowadays is it'sjust going to the person who
(46:05):
markets it the best, which is anissue, right.
And what are these people goingto say?
They're going to say that I'vespoken to some of these people.
I'm almost I'm, like you guysrealize like what's going.
They usually will bury theirhead in the sand, but also
they're going to be like oh,we're, you know, we're just
(46:26):
looking at the functional genesand so number one is we, we do
that, we can do that, we do thatRight, so that if somebody
wants that, it's like, here yougo.
But the problem is it's it justdoesn't like the if, like, you
can't just make predictionsbased on specific variants, even
though they're going to tellyou, oh, it's all validated.
(46:46):
By the way, that wordvalidation can mean two very
different things, right?
What they're saying is thatthere's some kind of study that
shows an association between agene, a SNP, and a condition,
between a gene, a SNP and acondition.
The problem is that thatassociation might exist, but it
wouldn't exist across alldifferent ancestries.
It might not be replicatable.
(47:07):
Now, let's say it isreplicatable.
The effect size is so smallthat you would need to add up
hundreds of genes in order toget something significant.
So the problem is the effectsize.
But we do still allow people touse genetics in that way
because I think sometimes, ifyou want to play detective, you
(47:28):
can learn, you could pick upinteresting insights here and
there by looking at these genes,and so we just do everything.
We've become like theeverything platform, and part of
the reason we also doeverything is because we also
license out the technology toother businesses okay so it's
basically whatever we get arequest for, or if another
(47:49):
company's doing something, it'slike we can do that too.
Not a problem here here it isright.
Like so we just have like kindof a smorgasbord of everything
you could do with genetics and Iwould you know, and whatever
someone wants you could do withgenetics and I would you know,
and whatever someone wants youcan do, right.
Like it's like you want thisgene, you got it.
What do you want?
Tell us the genes.
We make like custom reports,whatever you want.
(48:10):
If you wanted to make a witsand weights genetic report, we
can make one for you.
You just tell us the topics.
Whatever you want in there, weput it in there.
Philip Pape (48:21):
Love it man.
Love it man.
Yeah, I'm all about data.
Like you said, you can't reallyhave too much.
It's just can you make sense ofit?
And, with the power of what wehave now with tools and AI and
what you guys are doing and thevalidation, I think that's
awesome People this.
So we'll send them toselfdecodecom and check out Joe
on IG at Mr Biohacker and Joeman.
(48:46):
Thanks for your time, thanksfor coming on and sharing this.
I'm glad we had you to discussthe future, the future of health
and medicine and all of thistoday.
Joe Cohen (48:50):
Appreciate it.
And one last tip is you couldalso upload your lab tests.
For me it's like a game I play.
Can I move my lab results?
And what's amazing is that youcan move every single lab result
.
It's unbelievable.
Philip Pape (49:04):
Nice and then so you can interpret the before and
after per the question I hadearlier right and see what
you've done.
Joe Cohen (49:09):
So yeah, that's what it's all about.
Philip Pape (49:11):
Yeah, you got to, you got to change your.
You have to have data that'sactionable, that you could make
a change from and then be ableto measure every lab test, every
single blood test you take.
Joe Cohen (49:19):
You can alter.
Philip Pape (49:21):
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, it's in your control,folks, all right.
Well, thanks for coming on, joe.
Joe Cohen (49:25):
Thanks for having me.
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