355-SYNCPodcast_Dr.SamShay

Jenny Swisher: [00:00:00] Welcome friends [00:01:00] to this episode of The Sync Your Life podcast. Today I’m joined by my friend Dr. Sam. She, Dr. Sam. She is a DC I-F-I-F-M-C-P. He’s a functional medicine expert speaker and standup comic who helps middle aged women unlock their ideal diet, reduce inflammation, optimize body shape, and reclaim energy by decoding their DNA.

He’s the creator of the DNA Decoded program for the public to access, easy to understand and easy to implement genetics testing. He’s also the founder of Fit Genes, USA. I know I have that browser open on my screen since I last talked to him. I’m excited to dive deeper for myself. He trains practitioners and health coaches how to leverage genetics and their practice to help their clients identify food triggers, understand how their body handles stress, and create targeted plans that support clarity, resi resilience, and longevity.

Now here’s the thing, my friends, you guys know ’cause you’ve listened to almost 400 episodes of this show, most likely, or even if you’re landing here for the first time, you know that I’m all about a bio individual approach to our health. And you also know that I myself have been struggling with migraines, uh, vertigo here in the last couple of years and really having to dive deeper for myself.

And [00:02:00] I believe the future of health is genetics. And the reason behind that is because until we go deeper on ourselves and we identify that we are not the same as Susie or Sally, and we need specific. Supplementation specific plan, specific nutrition. Um, we’ll remain stuck. We’ll remain stuck in things like diet culture.

We’ll remain stuck trying to figure things out when really swimming upstream when we really don’t have to. So I love Dr. Sam. He’s, he’s here to kind of share with us all the ins and outs here, uh, of DNA. We’re gonna talk more specifically about this. We’ve not done anything deep on genetics yet here on the show, so I’m excited to have this conversation.

So, Dr. Sam, welcome to the podcast. I would love for you to share with my listeners more about just your background and how you got into, you know, this, this genetics, uh, life of yours.

Dr. Sam Shay: Sure. Uh, thank you. My, my, my story. The, the, the, the story arc may sound familiar, though the details differ. This is the wounded healing wounded healer archetype.

You started off very sick as a child, starting at age, Mari least memories at age six. [00:03:00] Uh, I was very unwell. But, uh, you know, from, from severe insomnia to depression, anxiety, uh, sugar addiction, screen addiction, and from. It wasn’t a very, it was kind of an unhealthy environment, both at school and at home.

And I also witnessed my mother, uh, was in a lot of chronic pain. Uh, and she numbed it out with a lot of painkillers. Um, and, uh, when you have stressed out, um, a stressed out single mom in a lot of pain, not the ideal decisions are made on behalf of her children by her own admission. And, uh, I like, like many people who grew up, uh, unwell and, and or seeing a family member being deeply unwell, um, I decided to not become the third generation medical doctor in my family, but instead to pivot to natural medicine.

’cause the, the what was being offered to me in, from my, from my parents were both psychiatrists, uh, was that my issues [00:04:00] were. Um, an SSRI deficiency as opposed to looking at what is going on with my diet, my environment, uh, the school environment, the home environment, sleep environment, everything else. And, uh, went through a very long service of, of education, multiple degrees.

Um, and I found genetics in 2016. And what, what I, at that time, I was still having a kind of crippling joint pain in my hands that like an 80-year-old man, and I was like 36, 35. And I didn’t understand why, even though I was doing a lot of testing for like. Functional, like for, for nutrition, like I was doing other functional tests that, that are very, that I have a lot of value to them.

I do them, I do them all the time. Whether it’s like stool testing or saliva testing, hormone testing, mitochondrial testing, gut testing, whatever it might be. I was still having these big ups and downs in my mood, my energy and my digestion throughout the day. And I was still in a lot of pain. [00:05:00] And when I ran my genetics, I realized that I was a hyper inflame genetically.

I was more, much more prone to inflammation of other people and di in my diet. I learned that I was uh, what I would call, not carbon tolerant, but. I couldn’t tolerate the amount of carbs I was eating at the time. I was having like a perfect Mediterranean diet. Uh, you know, local farmer’s market, knew the names of my farmers and their chickens, you know, just everything was, you know, quote perfect.

But when I ran my genetics, I actually had the genetics of someone who could only tolerate very low carbs, like someone’s, like a low carb paleo, bordering on keto. So within one week of changing my diet to my carb tolerance, my digestive mood and energy swings leveled out. And then within a couple months of changing, uh, my, the recommendations and, uh, from being hyper finding, I was hyper inflammatory, there were certain things within the genetics that couldn’t be revealed through other means [00:06:00] that all my joint pain went away.

So that was my personal experience. And then working with, um, hundreds and hundreds of people, uh, since, since that time. What I saw, uh, was that for people who are concerned about body weight and body shape that are getting that, that are stuck and like they can’t, like the more exercises are working and actually maybe counterproductive.

In fact, I gave a talk at a genetics conference called Exercise Induced Obesity, where these were the people that genetically were so hyper inflammatory that if they exercise too much, they started to retain water and no amount of exercise was gonna help. In fact, it was gonna make it worse because they need to recover, not exercise more.

So what I found working with people who were drilling with stubborn weight is that genetically I found three major causes of stubborn weight that were revealed in genetics testing. The first one was inflammatory water weight. The second one was hormonal toxic weight. And then the third one was caloric fat weight, which is the one most people think of when they think [00:07:00] of weight.

It’s just calories in, calories out, which is not really true. Uh, and uh, the most common one, that was the cause of the stubborn weight wa the puffy weight, the water weight was actually the, the, the inflammatory weight. And there’s multiple different sections of the genetics that actually reveal what type of inflammatory white people are struggling with.

And then there’s the other, uh, reality around genetics is that, you know, on both sides of my family, within two generations on my mother and father’s side, there is heart disease, cancer, stroke, and dementia. And that’s just with that, that’s on both sides, within both generations. And I mean, my, my father right now is, is in going through the mid to last stages of dementia and.

Uh, my, so I’m deeply concerned about these inherited risks, and what I learned from the genetics is that my health and wellbeing and longevity, I actually have massive amounts of control over I didn’t realize [00:08:00] I had, because I’m not chasing, this may sound strange to people, I’m not looking for the genes for heart disease, cancer, stroke, dementia, or heart disease.

I’m looking for the genes above them that if they get provoked, we’ll then poke downstream on those quote disease genes. So I’m looking at the genes that are the drivers of all chronic disease, the main drivers being inflammation, the second one being pre radical damage in the mitochondria. Third one being liver detox.

Fourth one being the vitamin D receptors, or how well you’re able to use vitamin D, not synthesize it, but actually get it into the cells. And then methylation, cardiovascular, circulation, and then fat, and fat and energy metabolism. So if I’m looking at. Those seven drivers of all chronic disease, I now have way more agency and empowerment to actually do something when I’m looking down the barrel on both sides of the family of really terrible chronic disease issues.

So the, the combination of looking [00:09:00] at very specific dietary genes and the health and longevity genes combined together has, has created a true personalized roadmap, not only for myself, but for all of my clients and then for my coaches, my health coaches, and my licensed practitioners that I’m training through Fit Genes, USA, that they can now run these genetics tests and I’m coaching and teaching them how to do that so that they can then offer the blueprints, uh, to their clients.

So to me, genetics is. First off, personally, deeply meaningful from not only what I have inherited the risk of, but also what it’s done for me personally. It’s been incredibly meaningful and helpful for the people that I work with. And it’s also the single most high value test out of the thousands of functional tests you can do.

Because when you run a genetics test, you run it once and you’re done. Not to say the other tests aren’t valuable, stool [00:10:00] testing, mitochondria, liver, whatever, they’re valuable, but you have to redo them after 3, 6, 9, 12 months, whatever, whatever the need is.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: But genetics is the single most important single test anyone can do without even a close second.

And if my mother and I had our genetic roadmaps, our blueprints, both of our lives would’ve been completely different. I firmly believe I could have figured out. What mom’s gen, like, she, she’s not interested in this stuff, but it’s like if she had that genetic, if look, she had genetic ba, she had a huge pain syndrome that was just really awful.

And I developed one and you know, I, half of me is her. So if I have a hyper her pretty, pretty solid bet that she’s also hyper inflamed and then we could have figured that out and then saved her a lot. And only physical pain, but also emotional pain. But also if you help mom, then you, the whole family is benefited automatically.[00:11:00]

I mean, my parents were busy pathologizing me, but never actually taking care of themselves.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: And my, I have, uh, you know, helping the kid may help, but helping the parents absolutely helps everyone.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: Yeah. So, so this, this is my, how I got here and also why I am so dedicated to this is, is just how quite literally painful.

Past was, and now this is an absolute roadmap and blueprint to, to not only like deal with the acute pain that people are in, but it, it’s also like inflammatory weight. It’s also the inflammatory consequences of what can come down the barrel years from now. Yeah. Uh, figuring your diet, all these things.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Yeah. So, so good. And I. It’s interesting. I, you know, since I’ve been struggling, um, in the last two to three years, I keep finding myself saying this out loud to my husband or my mom or friends. Like, I need to figure this out for myself, my own genetic path and what I need, my, what I uniquely need.

Because if I can get better, everything else gets better for the family, like mm-hmm. [00:12:00] I, I can then turn around and help my, help my daughters be as healthy as they can. You know what I mean? It’s like, it’s kinda like that. Put your own oxygen mask on first and then, um, and then, you know. And then it’s like you’re just better primed to be able to help everyone else.

There’s so many things. I took some notes on what you were saying. First of all, uh, we’re not gonna have enough time probably to go over everything I wanna talk about, but we

Dr. Sam Shay: can always do more, you know?

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. We can always do more. But the this, uh, I just told my husband this week, I said, this guy I’m interviewing this week, I was like, he, like, this is the most excited I’ve been about a podcast in a really long time as far as an interview, because I do just wholeheartedly believe that we have to take the deeper step.

Um, I agree with you about it being the best test. In fact, so many women have come to me in the last year saying, you know, I’m all over the place. Like, what’s the best thing to do? And if you would’ve asked me five years ago, you know, if a woman was over 40 and she was complaining of symptoms that she came to me and asked me that question, I would’ve said the Dutch test.

Like, let’s take a look at your hormones. Let’s see what’s going on. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I know there’s a lot of,

Dr. Sam Shay: I’ve been involved with that for years. Yeah.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. And I know that there’s a lot of functional practitioners that talk about, you know, stool testing and gut testing and all the things you were talking about.

But for [00:13:00] me, as someone who has been on this journey now for, like I said, three to four years, and I’ve done it all from stool testing to urine testing, to blood testing, to, um, the genetics test that I took while maybe not the best one, I’m excited to take yours. Um, but while not the best one, I, I have learned so much about myself, right?

Mm-hmm. And like you said, your genetics don’t change. So when I got that report back from myself and I was able to see like, oh, I’m like, I am prone to hormone imbalance and these are the reasons and I need to probably support my liver more in this way. And, and, you know, also I’m slow calm T I’m THFR, slow calm t which is like the double whammy, right?

So how can I really cater my lifestyle, my nutrition, my exercise, like everything? How can I start to model that around the right genetic profile for me? Um, I agree with you and I, I tell people all the time, I’m like, I would, I would. Spend the money and get genetics tested because it doesn’t change. And now, you know, and as I told you in our pre-conversation, this is something I plan to do with both of my girls at the age of five and nine.

Now I’m like, this, this to me just seems like a [00:14:00] no-brainer. Why is this not part of proactive wellness? Why do, why do we not all get a genetic profile when we’re born so that we know how to customize our health and nutrition? Right. So, um, that’s the first thing I wanna say. I wanna start though with, uh, a couple things regarding nutrition.

I think that’s a good way to start. Um, because what I’m interested in is, you know, you hear a lot of things about like the blood type diet and you know it’s best to eat more Mediterranean, do D dam.

Dr. Sam Shay: FYID. Damo has ditched his blood type diet for the genomic diet.

Jenny Swisher: Interesting. Interesting.

Dr. Sam Shay: Yeah.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: But he’s keeping, but he’s keeping that, that blood type diet up and running.

’cause he’s making bolo. Oh

Jenny Swisher: sure. Yeah. That’s

Dr. Sam Shay: so interesting. But he, but he’s actually shifted over to a genetic based diet.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess my question for you is, what does that look like? Like if you’re looking at, I mean I, obviously we can’t talk about all the different genetics, um, differences, but what we can try,

Dr. Sam Shay: but we’ll fail.

We can certainly try. It’s not,

Jenny Swisher: we, we can try poor talents.

Dr. Sam Shay: We

Jenny Swisher: could, we could talk a little bit about like, I mean, and if you wanna use me as an example, since I do have that double [00:15:00] whammy, you know, M-T-H-F-R, slow com t or whatever, like how does that look different for each person? And then what I really like to do is show people how maybe something from the outside, something in diet culture like keto for that person or intermittent fasting for that person may not align with their genetics.

Dr. Sam Shay: Sure. Okay. So ex excellent questions, we’ll start with diet and that with diet, there’s three components genetically to look at. One is, what is your carb tolerance? And if, and, and this is, this is a unique genetic test that you can’t get from 23 me ancestry. This is looking at the number of copies or duplicates of a specific gene called the Amy one, or the amylase producing gene in the sali.

Amylase is an enzyme. It’s that cuts up carbs when in your saliva. So it’s like carb cutting scissors, um, that, that you need to process your carbs through in order for you to proper digestion. This was one of the reasons why I was having such digestive problems is ’cause I didn’t have enough, [00:16:00] I didn’t have enough grunt, I didn’t have enough copies of this gene to spit out these scissors.

Another metaphor is imagine your intestines is a, is a fort, and the Vikings are charging the fort, the vikings are the carbs and you’ve got canons lining the fort. Well, if you have one canon that’s not as good as having 10 or 20. So you can have up to 20 canons, 20 copies of this gene that makes this enzyme to cut down and mow down the carbs of all the 20 you could possibly had.

I had a grand total. Two, the second lowest possible. So when I’m looking at individuality around diets, there’s, there’s, um, I, I literally just recorded a one hour, uh, teaching, uh, teaching module for my practitioners and coaches yesterday on this. Uh, if you’ve got one copy than you are more likely to be a keto style.

Because there’s so few carbs that you can actually break down. Twos to fours [00:17:00] are more paleo style, but a four can have double. The amount of carbs compared to a two five to eights are more Mediterranean. But there’s a big gray space from the five to the eight, nine and aboves are higher carb. So you have this bell curve, so you can actually figure out genetically, are you keto, paleo, Mediterranean, or high carbs or whatever, shade of gray in between.

And then there’s strategies within, based on your number of how to actually titrate the exact amount of your, your up, what’s your upper limit of, of heavy carbs you can have per meal. So you can now genetically test for that, your individual carb problems, which has massive implications for health, wellbeing, performance, anything.

And, and the thing is, is like I had. I had clients that were, uh, one guy who was an amateur tennis player. Now, if you have worked with any tennis player, not even the pros, the amateurs, they are so fit. It’s kind of terrifying. Like, like tennis players and swimmers are probably two of the fittest, uh, you know, [00:18:00] sport sports personnel on the planet.

Um, and this, this, this guy was fit. He was, he was like six plus, you know, he, he was absolutely an athlete. He, his tennis buddies, um, what I call keto, shamed him into doing keto. And, and by the way, I don’t bag on keto. I’m just using as an example that there are people do exist on other extreme. He start, no, he didn’t.

He we, we were, I just got his carb results in. He was telling me about how, oh, he just started keto. ’cause his friends like keto shamed him. And, and I hadn’t told him his results yet. And he’s like, oh yeah, we were doing keto. And I felt, and I interrupted him and I said, under no circumstances you’d be to ke you to do keto ever genetically.

And he was dead silent. And he’s like, I knew it. Oh my God. I was like, fainting on court. I felt awful, you know? And he’s, and, and I said, you have a 13 bro. You, you are, you’re above the, like you are, you are a very high carb, like you are not built for keto. Other people are, I’m built for keto. [00:19:00] Like I do terrible on a high carb diet.

I know. ’cause I was on, I was raised on a high carb diet. You, however would do great. So it, it’s, it’s, you can add there is actual genetic individuality. Now if there, we can go into the entire, you know, uh, evolutionary biology and the genetic bottlenecks and on all the rest of it of why people have different, and the short answer is the people whose Ries, um, developed in an area with no agriculture, they have present day the lowest number of, uh, copies of this AMY one gene.

And guess who has the highest risk of diabetes? The same group of people that have the lowest copy numbers. Inuit, native American, Aborigines, Pacific Islander, Maori. The, the first major clinic that ran this was in Australia, where there’s a lot of Aborigines, Pacific Islanders in Maori, the highest rates of diabetes.

They didn’t and [00:20:00] didn’t grow up with agriculture. Whereas China, the average number is eight. Europe, the average number is six. I’m a two. Why? Because my ancestry’s from Northern Russia, not a lot grows up there. So it, it’s, it’s, it, it all does make anthropological, evolutionary, biological sense. Now, can you predict exactly uh, you can, you predict exactly what it’s going to be based on your background to a degree, but you’re better off just getting tested.

So that’s one third of the dietary, uh, triangle. The second one. Is looking at your food trigger the genes of your food triggers and your eating behaviors. So food triggers include, are you genetically vulnerable to caffeine and get caffeine induced anxiety and depression? So there are some major genes that are related to caffeine metabolism, and if you don’t metabolize caffeine that well, you don’t get energy.

It doesn’t matter how bulletproof you make a coffee, you get [00:21:00] anxiety and the risk of depression. That was my story I had, I was just chucking coconut oil in it. I was just an anxious, depressed mess within two to four hours after having coffee. So now once I got my genetics results back and I saw that I was reactive to coffee, I just had to accept the reality and not conflate energy with anxiety.

Anxiety with energy rather, because that’s what I was doing. I was, I was diluting myself when I was having coffee. Another example, are you histamine intolerant? That’s huge. A lot of quote, health foods are high in histamine, including, and I say this at very personal risk, avocados and, uh, the, there’s a lot of health foods, chocolate, tea, uh, even, even sauerkraut, avocados, uh, citrus fruits that are high in histamine and certain people are genetically vulnerable to them.

And, and if people don’t know that, they keep on pounding these quote [00:22:00] health foods and they still get like headaches, puffy water away. ’cause histamine is part of the, is is an adjacent branch to the inflammatory pathway. I mean that’s, that’s little B stings. You histamine’s the flood switch to just drown out that venom in a massive amount of water so the venom doesn’t corrode in erode tissue.

Nerve mu um, um. Muscle or whatever.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: So, uh, if people, if people are having struggle with water, weight, headaches, indigestion, foggy brain, um, hives, especially that, that’s a pretty obvious sign, um, fatigue, then they may be histamine intolerant and then you to change your diet to an antihistamine diet.

Yeah. Other people are genetically vulnerable to, um, gluten. They may be at risk of celiac disease. They may, and, and it’s like if people have that genetic risk, like they just have to stop gluten full stop. Mm-hmm. They just have to like that, that’s non-negotiable. People should know that. Then there’s the eating behaviors.

Some people are genetically wired to overeat. They, they don’t have good satiety or [00:23:00] satiation genes. Other people are programmed to over crave sugar and over consume sugar. There’s actually two separate genes and, and some people may be thinking, that doesn’t make any sense. How, how can we have evolved. To have a sugar craving gene, or not a satiety gene or whatever.

It makes perfect sense because I was recording a video, a training video for my, um, for, for my practitioners and coaches. I have a whole library of like 200 videos where I go over all the major genes and gene clusters and describe what’s a red dot, what’s a yellow dot, what’s, what’s the overview?

Everything. It’s a whole training program. On the day I was recording sugar cravings, the genes of sugar cravings and, and over consuming sugar Natural Grocers, which is a, a grocery chain around the, in parts of the United States. It was Mother’s Day and they were advertising, get a free chocolate bar if you buy literally anything in the store.

Now I have the jeans for lack of satiety, craving sugar, and overeating sugar. [00:24:00] What do you think? Just mobilized every single foraging instinct in my brain when I saw free chocolate bar for the entire. So anthropologically evolutionary, biologically evolutionary psychologically. Mother nature does not give a hoot about who I am.

It only cares about getting my genes as far down the lineage as possible into the future. Mm-hmm. So if I have a gene that makes me overeat, it’s not, not that I’m gonna have, I’m gonna, if I sneak even just one little extra scoop of bison away from my family, I’m gonna have a net caloric advantage. Even if I am full and I don’t feel full, I’m gonna get some extra calories if I crave sugar.

What was happening when I was thinking about that chocolate bar, I always went into full foraging mode. All I can, and I actually recorded this on, you can see it on the video. It’s like, hi, I’m having a real meta experience right now talking about these because I’m literally thinking about foraging for sugar right now.

Thank you. Natural grocers. So I, I had a really [00:25:00] meta experience of why is it make, because if I’m craving sugar genetically, I’m gonna forage extra hard. If you just do an extra 20 minutes of forging every day for your entire lifetime, you’re gonna hit some caloric payload. So it does make sense, like it’s a cost benefit analysis.

It’s everything’s about trade-offs, even inflammation. Even inflammation has a role if you’re an over inflam. One of the things, when I got my genetic results back, this is true, I cried for an hour when I got my results back, ’cause I had two questions were answered for me. One, why I was so sick. Two, I had to wait out.

And then there was a third one, I realized I forgave my body. Because I realized that my genes were not bad or wrong, they were just mismatched for the environment. Mm-hmm. I’m a hyper inflame. I had, for seven years, I had the worst genetics of anyone I ever tested. I was a gold medalist in the crappy Gene Olympics.

I was dethroned about three years ago to silver dethroned again to bronze. I’m not bitter. I’m not [00:26:00] bitter. You’re bitter. I’m not bitter. I’m not being just a bronze medal.

Jenny Swisher: Oh. I haven’t been tested yet, so I bet I I might be you. We’ll see.

Dr. Sam Shay: Oh, oh sure. Now it’s a contest. Okay, got it. So I, I had the worst genes for seven years.

I was, I had, of the 16 most important pro-inflammatory genes, I had 14 out of 16 be pro-inflammatory, really bad. Now, why could I forgive my body? Or at least not try to blame my parents? Like literally, literally genetics is the only test where you actually could truly blame your parents on. Mm-hmm. So that, I guess, one bonus, I guess true,

Jenny Swisher: true story,

Dr. Sam Shay: but.

I, but I realized like, no, if I’m a hunter-gatherer 20,000 years ago Yeah. And I’m trying to take an animal 10 times my body weight with using only a tiny stick, there’s a huge chance I’m gonna get bitten, mauled, gored, trampled or otherwise.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: So if I’m bit on the arm, what is that? That’s tissue damage plus the injection of pathogens from what’s in saliva or dirt or whatever.

What does inflammation do? It rushes in red [00:27:00] blood cells to heal and white blood cells to kill off potential infections. So if me and a and another hunting party member, we have identical bite wounds, but I’m hyper inflammatory and they’re not, I’m more likely to survive in the short term at the trade-off of my long-term health and wellbeing in the long term.

And this person’s lower inflammatory prone nature. It, the, the, the, it’s flipped less likely to survive in the short term, but more likely to thrive in the long term. It’s all about trade-offs in nature. So I finally got it. Oh, I don’t have bad genes. I’m just in the wrong environment. I’m actually custom built to be a tip of the spear hunter.

So, but so I’m just hypersensitive to any input that could be even mildly interpreted as inflammatory. So I have to be extra careful to not live a pro-inflammatory lifestyle, do extra things, use nutrition in different ways. Nutri genomically, which is a term I didn’t learn until I studied [00:28:00] genetics, which is taking fewer specific nutrients at higher levels to trigger the genes to change expression as opposed to merely just throwing anti-inflammatory nutrients into the soup.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: You know, there’s, there’s widgets you throw into the machinery, but then there’s changing the machinery. Yep. And that’s what nuclear genomics is about. So I learned that, you know what, I’m, I’m actually perfectly built for a wrong, for the, for the wrong environment, uh, that I’m in.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: And, and that then that, that like forgiving my body was massive.

Just Absolutely ma It was one of the best gifts I ever got from, from doing my genetics.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Yeah,

Dr. Sam Shay: so that’s, that’s the second phase is learning what your, what your trigger foods and your environment, your emotional behaviors are. Then the third one is your relationship to, uh, actually, I, I talked a bit about it without naming it, your relationship to the drivers of diseases, inflammation free, radical damage, vitamin D receptors, uh, liver detox, like, and there’s, there’s, there’s different nutritional and dietary [00:29:00] realities that you have to include based on if you’re an over flamer or not.

Right. If you’re a poor detoxer or not. If, if you, if you, if you’ve got like me, like 10 out of the 12, maybe it’s 11 outta the 12 to go back and check, um, you know, a major methylation genes or red yellow tots, uh, uh, there, there’s, there’s a, there’s additional dietary considerations there, but fortunately, once you have the data, you have the data and then it’s just a matter of, of time and coaching and consistency to just make the genetic changes and when you just make them for life.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think you said, you said this earlier when you were talking about your story, that the thing that this gives you is the power to take control over your health. It gives you the, the ability to say like, oh, well this makes sense. Like this is, this makes sense as to, you know, for me, hearing you talk about caffeine, this is something I’ve learned the hard way, right?

Like, I tried to bulletproof my way to, I tried to bulletproof my way to being able to consume caffeine, and it’s just not gonna happen. Like, my genetics are just not gonna happen. It’s not gonna happen. So why [00:30:00] continue to force myself into that position of caffeinated coffee, right? It’s gonna make me anxious and all the things.

But it that, it’s, it’s funny because I think so much about, I didn’t even think about genetics. Like, I mean, genetics was never even, I mean, I mean, I’ve been into fitness and nutrition and I’ve had a, a story with, um, struggling migraines and stuff like that for a long time. But genetics was never anything I even like when my f when my functional practitioner brought up doing a genetics test, I was like, why?

Like, why, why would we do that? And, um, but what, what drew me to it was. My, my own kids’ experience, and I’ve shared this before on the podcast, and I don’t wanna go super deep into this, but, um, my oldest was born, both of my girls are adopted, so I did not birth either of them. I was also adopted at birth.

And so, just generically speaking, let me just say how frustrating it can be to be a 1980s baby in the 1980s through a lot of adoption processes, depending on the state you were born in. There wasn’t a requirement for medical history, so I have no medical history of my birth [00:31:00] parents, and so I’ve lived my whole life, like not only not having my genetics tested, like mostly everyone else, but I also haven’t had any, even awareness of what my predispositions are or what my, my birth parents might.

Dr. Sam Shay: So you were. You were a latchkey plus kid in the eighties.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So what’s funny is like, you know, I didn’t think, I mean, it’s always been frustrating. I fill out my medical history to every doctor, and I always have to put the big na, like, not applicable. I don’t know, I don’t know my history.

Um, but when my oldest daughter was born, I remember thinking, you know, we’re gonna request the medical history. Like, we’re gonna request as much information as we can. And so we did, but we had these weird things pop up, right? And it’s, it’s, it, it becomes so much more, um, easy to see, I guess, when it’s not a biological child that you’re raising because.

For my oldest daughter, we would, we, she had these weird things, like she would get really high fevers, right? And it’s like, maybe if I was her biological mother, I would say, oh, this is what happens in our family. We get really high fevers around viruses or, you know what I mean? But like, I didn’t have any of that information.

And so, um, [00:32:00] long story short, she ended up having vaccine reactions. Um, and I’ve shared this on the podcast before, but she had vaccine reactions two different times. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We were putting our faith and trust into the pediatric world. And that’s a whole other podcast in itself, and I’m happy to share that episode.

But we started to learn the hard way that like, oh, like her body isn’t like handling these very well. And also like there are certain foods that she seems to not be handling very well. Right? And then when my youngest came along is when I was first introduced to this idea of like M-T-H-F-R, right? Like, what is this?

And that’s, I feel like the one that people talk about the most. Um, but there’s lots of different genetic profiles. But M-T-H-F-R is something that has kind of popped up recently, I feel like in the last few years that people are talking about. And we found out that. Both of our girls are M-T-H-F-R. Um, we, we made different choices with, with Sutton, my youngest one.

Um, we started seeing chiropractic care. We started seeing, you know, just kind of changing the way that we were handling our health in general. But when we started to learn these little things, like, oh yeah, you know, most people with M-T-H-F-R, like, oftentimes they’ll have like a stork bite on the back of their neck, [00:33:00] or they’ll have this or that, or they have these different indications and also that means that they don’t possibly detoxify well.

And that’s when this whole genetic conversation started to really grab my attention and really started to make me think about my own self. And at the time, I was the person drinking the caffeine, wondering why I was an anxious mess until 2:00 PM every day. Right? And so when I could finally step back and say, and like I said, we have not genetic tested them yet.

Aside from the THFR test, um, blood test, we have not done anything in depth yet. That’s on our agenda to do very soon. But when I, when I see the different nuances from the, from each of them to myself, I’m like, I, again, I don’t understand how this isn’t part of just overall health and wellness. I don’t understand why this is not a conversation we’re having.

Um, so I love, I wrote, I took some notes on what you were saying. You were talking about, you know, what’s your carb tolerance? You were talking about food and trigger behaviors, inflammation, like these are all such important things. I have a nuanced question for you though, because I wanna ask you something about, um,

Dr. Sam Shay: I before.

Oh. So I wanna, there’s one topic at some point I do you wanna talk [00:34:00] about, uh, yeah. Today, which is the genes of exercise. ’cause I know your audience is willing into fitness.

Jenny Swisher: Yes.

Dr. Sam Shay: That is, that is a generic topic I feel, be very important to cover whenever you want to cover it.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah, no, I do wanna get to that.

So what I was gonna say though, is. Where my brain is going now is when I think about, you know, diet culture no longer serving us. That’s a message I’ve been preaching for a long time. When I think about like, okay, how can I help my kids understand that their bodies are unique? How can I help them find their perfect nutrition profile or their, you know, what, what’s working best for them?

I also think about the things that are coming up now in society. So yeah, we’re still stuck in the diet fads, but there are also conversations happening around like microdosing, GLP ones and peptides and reducing inflammation with those things. And so I would be crazy not to ask the question, right? ’cause I know for me, in my own journey.

I have, um, a doctor telling me like, you know, in order to reduce this inflammation, microdosing, a GLP one might be advantageous to you to be able to do that. And so I’m in interested in your [00:35:00] take on that. Like, how do, and I, we, we will talk exercise, but how do these peptides play a role in, in everything that you’re doing with genetics?

Have we looked into that? Have we looked into seeing how maybe different things might affect different genetic profiles? What would you have to say about that?

Dr. Sam Shay: Um, so you, there this is a multi-variant issue around peptides, for example. And it actually is, is a, a, a micro, it’s actually a microcosm of a larger macrocosm conversation.

GLP ones are a tool and every, it used to be every 10 years there was a new tool. Now it’s every year or six months. And tool to me as a clinician, I’m a pragmatist, not an absolutist. Nora purist. I’m interested in what works and we can backfill the physiology and the science behind it. But the things we need to consider when looking at any tool is number one, is it safe?

Number two, is it effective? Number three, is it effective long? Is it safe and effective long term? [00:36:00] So tools are, tools have different uses. If the, the difference between western medicine and functional medicine is the following. Western medicine is philosophically aligned to get people out of crisis into stability.

Functional medicine is philosophically getting people from chronic to normal than normal to optimal. They’re different tools. So I would be, uh, it would be deeply, uh, ignorant of me to say, scalpels are dangerous and should never be used ever. But if I’m coming from a functional, there is no place for a scalpel in a functional medicine standpoint.

But there is in the emergency room. So GLP ones, like with anything is a tool. So my question to anyone using this tool or frankly any tool is like, how do you know that you need it? What is, what are you tracking? Is it subjective experience? Is it objective metrics? If show how, how reliable are they repeatable?

Can you easily access repeatable things? How do you know when you don’t need them anymore? Um, [00:37:00] how safe is it? Short term and long term? Is there something that from first principles makes more sense to look at first? So if someone is dealing with, you know, life altering, life crippling, uh, uh, meaningful formative inflammation, that, that it’s so painful they can’t function or they can’t sleep or they do whatever, is there a place for some emergency use tool to do what?

By time. To then figure out what’s going on at the root level and resolve the reason why the inflammation is the first place. The folly is using emergency tools all the time as the only thing you’re using and not using it. What they’re designed to do or supposed to do is to buy time. And I, I’m all look and, and I, I fully understand my, my very first clinic was called Pain Doctors.

Like, I get it. Some people just need to get out of pain. I, I personally know this, I’ve seen this with my family members. I get it. I don’t, I do not bag on, on, [00:38:00] on medications as such. It’s, it’s, it’s if they’re used incorrectly Yeah. Overused or all, like all the reasons why they can be abused and misused.

It’s a tool. That’s all it is. It’s a tool. Just like fish oil is a tool. And I have a video, this is true. I have a video on my YouTube channel on the five, the five situations to not be on fish oil. Now that may sound like total blasphemy to a lot of people, but like, you know what? The more you learn about physiology and, and the my mitochondria analysis and also and, and fatty acid analysis and all the rest of it.

Sometimes facial oil isn’t the answer.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: So there’s just other things. Um, yeah. And it’s, it’s like we can’t, we, we can’t just globalize a single tool is universal for everybody, but what we can do is uni the strategy of analysis first, tool second. Yeah. That’s what we could use. Whether your tool’s a GLP one or fish oil or genetics or combination of whatever.

It’s like, oh, actually genetic’s not a [00:39:00] tool. Genetics is more the strategy, um, um, right. To pick out what tools to use. Like I, I’m, I’m from like, what data first tool second. And, and I think, um, does that, does that answer your question?

Jenny Swisher: Yes. Well, I think you’re saying exactly what I was hoping for, which is if genetics is that the foundation of everything, uh, which it is then.

You kind of just alluded to it a second ago when you said that, let’s figure out like, okay, well if you have inflammation, like for example, in my, the example, there’s other

Dr. Sam Shay: reasons. Yeah.

Jenny Swisher: There’s other reasons. There’s other reasons

Dr. Sam Shay: for inflammation, right? Yeah.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. So like when my doctor’s telling me like, Hey, you know, if you try this, if you try to microdose tirzepatide, um, you’re gonna probably see the inflammation fall off within a few weeks.

But you’re saying with genetics, we ask the question, why is the inflammation there to begin with? Right? Correct. And so it doesn’t mean that the tirzepatide, for example, is bad or that it, it’s a tool that can’t be used. Mm-hmm. It’s just saying, but it also isn’t that inflammation going to just recur? Is that gonna be an ongoing need?

Right. So I see what you’re saying is like, well, why aren’t we peel back the in? This is a phrase we use often here on the podcast [00:40:00] and in my community, is continue to peel back the onion. And the bottom line is, is that you can continue to, for me, I, for, if you would’ve asked me a year ago, I would’ve said, yeah, you know, just keep peeling the back, the onion on your health.

Like, you know, have you done a gut test? Have you done this? Have you done a Dutch test? But the reality is that, that the center core of that onion is genetics. And so if you wanna just kind of skip ahead to the answers of the test, like that’s the answers of the test, right? So, right. Um, yeah. Which actually leads beautifully into this conversation about fitness because.

I’ve been so frustrated lately. I’m so grateful to the amazing people out there that are doing, actually it’s a lot of women, a lot of, uh, female researchers and scientists that are doing research on women finally in the space of fitness. And we’ve identified, established, yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: It only took, only took 70 years,

right?

Jenny Swisher: It took 70 years. Right. But we’ve finally established that women are not men and that we need to look at women in a different way, right? We need to look at women, um, as far as their fitness and how they should train. They should be different. We have menstrual cycles. We have, um, just different, uh, body types, [00:41:00] physiology.

And so I totally agree with that. And this is the message I’ve been preaching now for five years. I’ve totally on board with all of that. Where I get frustrated though, is that we are, once again though, classifying all women as the same as compared to all men who are the same. And what I’m seeing is a lot of this research coming out, like I think I just saw yesterday that there’s a new, there’s a couple of new, um.

Um, uh, fitness centers, I guess you’d say, or, um, dedicated research facilities that are now being instituted at different universities, um, that just have a different outlook on nutrition and training for women versus men. Love that we’re doing that. Love it. Like no one loves that more than me, but if you put me in a room, if I was an athlete and you put me in a room with 60 other female athletes, there is still such difference in such bi bioindividuality amongst all 60 of us that you have to look at those nuances.

And so I was just listening to, I love Abby Smith, Ryan. Um, she’s been doing a lot of research at UN UNC Chapel Hill on this like, you know, [00:42:00] females and fitness piece. And one of the things that I’m frustrated with at the moment is, um. You know, I’ve really put a lot of energy because it’s worked for me into this concept of cycle sinking, really falling in alignment with my menstrual cycle, knowing how to train.

That’s what works for me. Also, we know from this conversation that I have a double whammy genetic issue, right? And so of course, maybe I might feel different symptoms around my cycle. I might be more aware of those because of my predispositions to hormone imbalance genetically, right? And so I was just having this conversation with another person that we interviewed for the podcast.

She deals with adenomyosis, endometriosis. She’s very, you know, painful periods. I deal with migraines, painful periods. So we’re very in tune with how our bodies handle hormones, right? What’s, what’s frustrating is that, that now there’s people coming out on popular channels saying, well, there’s no science to this.

Because now we finally have a study on cycle sinking one. Study, I should say. We have one study on cycle thinking and it shows that it’s not actually a just to women at all. And [00:43:00] um, they might as well just train Monday through Friday, just like a man would. They might as well just have leg day, lower body day, upper body day, all the things because there’s no difference whether they cater to their menstrual cycle or not.

And my argument to that, and I’m just using this as an example, but there’s a lot of examples here, is when we look at the pool of people who are selected for that study, they select people that have regular 28 day menstrual cycles with regular ovulation, with absolutely no, uh, health predispositions, healthy women that are not dealing with, like, for myself, right?

Like I’m not, they’re not bleeding a week of the month or two weeks of the month, they’re not having any issues. So I could see where, yeah, like a study is gonna come back saying there was no a advantage here. Like these women were just as good to follow a 30 day program as they are to, to cater to mental cycle.

And I

Dr. Sam Shay: share back that up. Yeah. So the dirty secret of almost all research. And from institutions is that they’re all done on college and graduate level students, which means they’re all basically 18 to 27.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: And, and I was in, when I, when I had took some psychology classes, a part of my [00:44:00] pre-med, you had to agree to sign up for one of their psychology experiments, which I find ethically quite dubious.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: So what happens is you have a captured audience of unwilling yet forced test subjects in a university setting. So you are getting a truly narrow sliver of, uh, yeah. Of, of the age bracket where people are most usually optimal in terms of their health, just riding on the fumes of their, of their youth.

So this, the, the so many studies are then they, if they extrapolate out to the larger populations, are at best, not fully accurate.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: At best.

Jenny Swisher: Absolutely. And, and I think it’s so frustrating because I think that, you know, if, if we were to go to PubMed right now, and we were to be, if we had the ability to filter on PubMed what, what data we have that actually looks at genetic differentials, we wouldn’t have much.

Right. And that’s, and that’s [00:45:00] what we’re, that’s what we’re starting to say. Like, no, this is the area that this needs to focus. You look at the conversation around vaccines, right? That’s a big conversation right now. Why? ’cause we’ve never before looked at the differences in genetics and how that, how people with different bodies might process different things.

Right? And so the same thing here, like people are, people like to say, well, I’m following this, this research on this. Well is the research even valid though? Is it even valid for the reasons you mentioned? But also until we’re able to look at somebody like me that has a double whammy genetic snip. Next to somebody who doesn’t have that.

And you were talking about the canons, like are your, how are your, your canons firing, right? It’s two different things. It’s two totally different things. So I’d love for you to touch on, um, especially for my women listening who are into fitness, which I know is almost everyone. Um, I’d love for you to touch on genetics and, and the fitness approach as well.

’cause obviously if we, if we’re able to say, these are the three components we need to look at for nutrition, I’m assuming you also have something like that for, for fitness. Like, what do we need to look at in that regard?

Dr. Sam Shay: So the, the major, the major legs of the exercise stool, the following one. What is your [00:46:00] fiber type?

So there, there’s one specific gene, the actin three gene that determines are you slow twitch, intermediate twitch, or fast twitch fibers. Now the the mistake people make is like, oh, I’m fast. Twitch means I should only do sprinting and not do anything long distance. Like that’s not true. It’s just that it’s, it’s about what are you gonna be optimally perform performing at?

And I mean, they do this testing for, uh, genetics, testing for children who are gonna be trained in the Olympics. Like, like this, this is, this is some countries where they do genetic tests and even see if you even allow it into the Olympics. Uh, because if you have two, two people with the exact same times at a certain age, like a race, but one has a fast twitch muscle type, the other has a slow twitch muscle type, which one is a coach you’re gonna take on to actually train for a Olympic level performance?

Well, if you’re training for a long distance, you’re gonna take the slow twitch. If you’re training for sprint, you can take the fast twitch because their capacity for performance is hard. Uh, there, [00:47:00] there’s the, the floors and ceilings are pre-programmed genetically based on how fast you can twitch your muscles or not.

That’s one leg of the stool. The other leg of the stool is what are people’s collagen genes? There’s, there’s two major collagen genes that determine is your collagen actually healthy and compliant or is it inflexible and easily damaged? And so for people like me who’ve got, uh, not great collagen genes, I’m much higher prone for injuries.

And the, the number one way to help someone exercise is to make sure they don’t get injured in the first place. So if you’ve got collagen issues genetically, that means that you have to put as much focus on your recovery practice as you do on your exercise practice. And that’s not just nutrition, like taking collagen or creatinine or nool or vitamin C or other things that help with collagen formation and integrity.

But you’re looking at the recovery strategies saunas. Uh, massages, um, cold plunges, [00:48:00] walking lymphatic drainage, uh, warmup, only stretching after you exercise, not before. I’m, I’m sure you’ve, you’ve talked about this at some point that stretching before an exercise is actually dangerous. Uh, ’cause you’re, you’re micro tearing cold muscles.

Um, the, in fact, the other people who figured that out statistically proved it were the baseball teams. ’cause that is the most statistically top heavy sport in the world is baseball. And they did statistics shocking on injury rates of baseball players who stretched before they started playing versus those that stretched after.

And the pe, the ones that stretched before, got significantly more injured. So, uh, and then you can backfill the physiology. When you’re stretching a cold muscle, you’re creating micro tears. So, uh, you, you focus on your recovery. So that’s the col. So you have your fi, your twitch fiber type, you have your collagen type, then you have your inflammatory type, which we’ve already covered in, in a meaningful degree if you are hyper inflammatory.

[00:49:00] There’s four specific, the four major genes for inflammation that are looked at for this interleukin six, TF alpha, VDR one and VDR two, VDR sensor vitamin D receptor. The if you are, uh, as a weighted average. And this is part of the things that I do with, I made a customized report for, for these genetics.

Basically taking in 10 years of experience in teaching and study and making it into a single, practical, easy to understand report that’s not laced with all the hieroglyphics and hexa decimals of the RS numbers and all the other crazy jargon. It’s like, what do you do in what order of priority and how do you do it?

And just make it super clear, super clear, super straightforward. Vdr interleukin six and TA alpha are the four of the most, uh, most important inflammatory genes out there if you have as a weighted average and as opposed to like trying to go through with your clients, every single individual gene, it’s like, what’s the cluster of inflammation say?

And we’re gonna say, is it a green, yellow, or red dot the cluster? [00:50:00] So as a weighted average, if you’ve got those four genes as a yellow or a red dot, that means you are hyper inflammatory and you’re at risk of being, uh, you’re, you’re, you’re a much higher risk of being, getting exercise induced inflammatory injury.

And then you have to, like you did with the collagen, focus as much on your recovery compared to just exercise itself. You see this all the time in the CrossFit community all the time. I can walk into the CrossFit community, I can walk into any gym, and I can look around and I can know who’s a hyper inflame.

Because I’m on the presumption that they’re all exercising like an hour a day trying to, you know mm-hmm. Get through their next pr in the next two minutes or whatever. And the people who are hyper inflames, they have this, they’re, they may be strong, but they, you can’t see their definition. Like they’ve got this layer of water weight, this kind of like puffy layer of water that’s hiding their definition.

Their skin may even look a bit ruddy or red. Yeah. And these, like, you, they’re just like, they, [00:51:00] they’re, they’re like, it, it’s kind of like, um, uh, in, in the Spider-Man comics, you have kingpin. Kingpin is the strongest hu human in the Marvel universe. When you look at him, he’s like this giant man, but you don’t see his muscles.

It’s all inflammatory weight. Mm-hmm. He’s carrying, he’s got muscles underneath. Uh, so he, he over exercises is what I’m saying. Yeah. Yeah. The, what what happens is like people who over exercise relative to their inflammatory genetics, there’s this invisible threshold where you cross the line from.

Exercise as a net anti-inflammatory to now exercise as a net pro-inflammatory.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: That’s the invisible line that’s crossed. And so when you have people who are hyper inflams, you have to dial back the amount of exercise and dial up the amount of recovery. Recovery. Mm-hmm. Now this, and, and you know, you know this when, when you have someone who’s been, who’s a total exercise nut, and then for whatever reason they can’t exercise for a week, whether they [00:52:00] get injured or they have to travel, the gym is closed, whatever it is, they come back the next week.

Not only do they look better, they feel better, but they pump iron stronger. They’re actually, they’re their, their, their, their, their numbers are better. It’s because they have time to deam. Mm-hmm. So if you, if you’re someone that is, I, I gave a whole lecture at a genetics conference called Exercise Induced Obesity going through, it’s not just TNF alpha VDR and VDR.

Two, I mean, there’s, there’s other genes involved mostly in the inflammatory pathway as well that kind of accentuate this. But it’s like just going through the entire profile of these hyper inflams that the more they exercise, the more water weight they retain. So they’re actually putting on weight for the more they exercise.

So if you, if, if, if anyone here is struggling with this kind of bizarre water weight that’s just not going away and you exercise more, it seemingly gets worse. You may be, it’s maybe a genetic issue that can be a, that can be looked at

Jenny Swisher: mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: Through the lens of genetics. Yeah. One [00:53:00] other small test to figure out if you’re a hyper inflame, I made this test up.

It’s called the muffin test, not muffin, top muffin test if you, so this is the muffin test is if you eat half a muffin and in the same day you put on one to four pounds. Now. Unless

Jenny Swisher: women joke about this, women joke and say, I feel like if I eat this, I’m gonna gain five pounds. But you’re saying it’s a real thing.

Dr. Sam Shay: It’s a real thing. So unless, unless that muffin was last year’s re-gifted Christmas fruitcake, it didn’t weigh one to four pounds, right?

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: So why a half muffin can trigger that much weight gain? It’s like this because the muffin is massively pro-inflammatory.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: The gluten, the whatever plastic from the little rappi do around it, the sugar, the preservatives, the dough conditioners, the colorings what, whatever nonsense is in that quote unquote food, it triggers a full body systemic inflammation response because most of your inflammation is coming out from your gut.

And what happens when you have tons of [00:54:00] inflammatory chemicals circulating swelling in your body? Your body retains water.

Jenny Swisher: Yep.

Dr. Sam Shay: To do what? Dilute the toxic inflammatory chemicals like it dilutes b venom.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: From a bee sting, you swell up in order to minimize the amount of damage these inflammatory chemicals can cause.

Therefore, buying your liver and kidneys time to flush them out. That’s why the time is, is needed to help get rid of, like, you can go up and down like when you wake up in the morning and it’s like you’ve had, uh, assuming you haven’t eaten in 12 hours and then all of your anti-inflammatory mechanisms come in.

You can have dropped a lot of weight, not just from exhaling water, but more than just whatever the normal amount you lose from expiration. So I watched my father, who, who, uh, years ago, finally convinced him to stop eating just fried cheese and, and bread all the time for one day. One day. And I said, you can have as much chicken, coconut oil, and broccoli as you want.

He doesn’t exercise. So the exercise wasn’t a factor. Anyway. I saw him eat, I [00:55:00] monitored him the whole day. He had plenty of calories. Plenty. Just not the gluten, not the dairy, not the other inflammatory stuff. And he weighed himself in the beginning of the day and he weighed himself the very next morning.

He lost four pounds in one day. Nothing to do with calories, nothing to do with exercise.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: Everything to do with inflammation.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: Absolutely everything.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Yeah. This is so good. I mean, I don’t, I, so I wanna say this, um, I love that you’re calling attention to the recovery side of fitness, which mm-hmm.

We most people don’t talk about. Right. And it’s funny because our trainer that created, that co-created the sync fitness program with me when I’ve had her on the podcast and in the community, and I ask her questions. She’s a former, like NC bodybuilder, she’s done, she kind of challenges herself. She’s done like a hundred mile races.

She’s, she’s kind of all over the place, just a gifted athlete and I would say gifted genetics, um, as far as body type and all that kind of stuff. And, and when I, I remember every time I’ve asked her about like, tell us how you eat. Tell us how you train. She answers me. Let me tell you how you recover.

Dr. Sam Shay: Fair.

Jenny Swisher: And. [00:56:00] That’s the winning statement, right? And it’s like when, when you, and I’m thinking about this even for myself, like when I would get into these seasons of Overtraining, I was the unhealthiest I could be. I felt swollen, I felt puffy, I felt bloated. I didn’t have the energy right. Sleep was affected, all the things.

As soon as I scale it back and I allow myself those three days, two to three days of hard, followed by a complete rest day, or I implement yoga, or I downregulate and I focus on my nervous system, I start to see the weight. Fade away, the inflammation fade away. So sometimes it really is a matter of like, women being stuck and it’s like, they’re like, I’m exercising six days a week, and I’m like, aha, that could be the problem.

Um, so I love that you mentioned that.

Dr. Sam Shay: Exactly.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. So we, we’ve already gone over our time here, so I wanna be mindful. I, I just, I thank you so much for this, this is a great start to this conversation. I’m gonna ha, I, I am gonna have to have you back on because I wanna talk more about just chronic disease.

I wanna talk more about, you know, how to, how people can be interested and, and, and get more information just on maybe even becoming a practitioner with, with Fit jeans. I’d love for you to just share with us though, how can people find you. I know it’s dr [00:57:00] sam shea.com. Fit jeans usa.com. I’ll also link up on the show notes for you guys.

Lemme make a distinction, a discount.

Dr. Sam Shay: Yeah, go. Lemme make between two. So

yeah,

Dr. Sam Shay: Dr. Stamp, she.com is, uh, will link people to, uh, the DNA Decoded. It’s up on the topic click. That’s for just individuals who want their genetics run and want to see what’s, what’s available. I have there a, a coupon code called Gold 100, which is a hundred dollars off the gold program, which is, uh, includes if, if, if, uh, the cost of the test that we’re talking about, the states here, if it’s international, it’s a different, slightly different story.

But in the states includes the shipping, it includes the cost of the test, the analysis, it includes the reports, it includes my learning library, a six month implementation program. And on the gold it’s also group coaching with me. So I do group coaching, uh, to support people who are going through, uh, their journey to understand their personal genetic blueprint.

And that includes also the carb tolerance test. Not just the, [00:58:00] not just the food variations test exercise and the inflammation and drivers of disease tests. Uh. So that’s for just the general individuals who want their own tests done for practitioners. That’s Fit Gene’s, USA.

Jenny Swisher: Okay.

Dr. Sam Shay: That’s for the practitioners and the health coaches that are wanting to actually implement genetics into their practice.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Dr. Sam Shay: Uh,

Jenny Swisher: and I, I’d love to have you back on to talk more specifically about that too. ’cause I think there’s a lot of members of my community who are, who are health coaches or, um, they’re into this and, and they, they see the, the future of genetics and wanna get more involved. And I think this would be a great way to do that.

So we’ll have to have you back for part two. Great.

Dr. Sam Shay: Thank you. And, um, uh, last, last bit that, uh. That, that I’ll mention is that, uh, despite the academic veneer, I’m also a standup comic.

Jenny Swisher: I know, I love that. I love that about you. I know you sent me your standup comedy routine and I wanted to show it to my girls, but I’ve had two sick, really sick kiddos the last week, so we haven’t gotten to it yet.

Uh, but

Dr. Sam Shay: yeah, so I used, so you standup comedy is my advocacy work. My education work. So I [00:59:00] released a full one hour show called Neuros, spicy Love Life and Comedy on the Spectrum. And it’s about what it’s like to have Asperger’s Syndrome and it’s the one hour show. Like I wish I had genetics back, you know, 40 years ago.

This is the show that I wish everyone’s hadn’t saw 40 years ago as well. My parents, teachers, community, siblings, you name it. And so I make, I, I, I try to be the change I wanna see in the world. And so comedy’s my way of doing that. And I’m working on my second show right now. The reason I mentioned the Latchkey Kid, uh, comment is that I’m literally writing a show describing how messed up the eighties were through the lens of my morning breakfast.

And I’m talking about like the, the high gluten cereals. Yeah. The, I can’t believe it’s not butter. Hydrogenated oil. Yeah. The, the, the dairy. And I have, I’m not How did you make

Jenny Swisher: it? How did it, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: I, I don’t know. I don’t know. And so it’s like, you know, and that, you know, my parent, the parenting skill, my, like most parents of the eighties, my parents, uh, [01:00:00] primarily relied on SSRI’s television and emotional neglect.

Like that was, that’s what made us latchkey strong, you know? So

Jenny Swisher: true.

Dr. Sam Shay: And, and so I’m, I’m actually writing about the eighties. Through the lens of, yeah, through the lens of food, using food as, as a, as a, as a, uh, a prop.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: To explain just how messed up the eighties. I, I say like the eighties is equal parts, nostalgic and sinister.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sam Shay: And, um, and then I’m wor so I’m working on the show and I’m bringing up genetics and the genetics of, of coffee. The genetics are on gluten, the genetics are on dairy, the genetics on inflammation, the genetics are run histamine, like it’s all there and re relevant and meaningful. So, uh,

Jenny Swisher: I love that.

Dr. Sam Shay: Yeah. It’s, it’s like, um, if people want to be entertained as well as educated, you can just put my name, Dr. Samsha neuro spicy into YouTube and you’ll find the show and my other show will be released at some point.

Jenny Swisher: Excellent. [01:01:00] So good. This is so good. Well, I’ve loved meeting you. I think this is such a, I mean, what you’re doing and the work that you’re doing in the world is, is gonna be really revolutionary and a, a, a true, um, pioneer in this space.

So I’m so grateful that you took the time to be here today. We’ll link all of this up for our listeners in the show notes. Don’t worry, he’ll be back as long as he agrees he’ll be back on the show. Um, but my friends, thank you so much for listening and until next time, we’ll talk soon.

Dr. Sam Shay: Thanks, Jenny.