One size doesn’t fit all
When it comes to health, there’s lots of standard guidelines we’ve all heard before – 30 minutes of exercise a day, drink water, eat unprocessed foods, get 8 hours sleep. All very sensible things and there’s no question they improve our health and wellness. There’s also more specific advice out there – avoid gluten and/or diary, lift weights, eat plant based, do endurance cardio, do high intensity cardio. All these things work, it’s just that some work better for some than others.
How well you respond to your health regime doesn’t just depend on what you do but how well your genes respond as well as other environmental and lifestyle choices.
Studies where subjects undertake identical fitness training regimes typically have wide ranging results and highlight the biological diversity across people and the differences in the ability of individuals to adapt.
Since the human genome was mapped in 2003, with the promise of solving major health issues, it’s been discovered that only around 20-40% of our health is down to our genes. 60-80% is reliant on gene expression or our phenotype, that is, the multifaceted interplay of the environment and our choices on our genes.
While our DNA gives us the map of us, the epigenome, that sheath of proteins and chemical which sits on top of our DNA determines how it is expressed. It switches on and off genes like a light switch. Our phenotype is the result of our genes, the environment we’re in and our lifestyle choices, leading to the expression of those genes – that is, determining who we are.
Think of it like this. If your genes are the music of ‘you’ as its written, your epigenome are the sound engineers, determining which bits are loud and which bits are soft, which bits get the spotlight and which bits get ignored. Your phenotype is the symphony we hear.
When we know our epigenetic profile, when we can interpret our phenotype, that’s when we can make intelligent decisions about lifestyle and environmental choices that’s going to work best for our bodies and lead us to our best health.
Taking into account 15 layers of science, 2 decades of research and over 20,000 case studies, our epigenetic profiling platform assimilates all this knowledge and research to find the commonalities amongst 6 basic health types and developed algorithms to predict work works best given your specific body measurements.
Find out about your personal epigenetic profile here.
