If you’ve heard anything about genetic testing over the past few years, it’s probably been about the tests offered by ancestry companies. There’s an obvious allure to finding out where you came from (or uncovering family secrets!), and the at-home kits provided by these companies have shown people how easy it is to test their DNA.
But most people aren’t aware of the other benefits genetic testing can provide. While ancestry testing simply tells you where your family came from, genetic testing for health and wellness can lead you to a whole array of actionable insights into optimising your eating habits, exercise, lifestyle choices, and more in order to achieve better health.
Here are a few ways I’ve been able to use genetic testing to inform and improve my patients’ health and wellness.
Personalising your healthcare
A lot of approaches to health and wellness these days focus on a one-size-fits-all approach, prescribing the same diet, exercise, and lifestyle choices to everyone. But everyone is unique — so shouldn’t healthcare be tailored to that unique individual? Genetic testing uncovers a person’s genetic variants, which give us insight into how that person’s cells and systems function, show the impact of the types of food you eat and the environment around you, and more.
Helping you lose weight
Weight loss is frustrating. Those who have struggled to lose weight can spend time, energy, and a lot of money seeking new ways to get healthy and lose weight when their genes are able to give them all the insight they need. Genes are able to inform you about what types of exercise are best for your body, whether it be more endurance exercises or power exercises. They can also show how your body stores fat, which nutrients it absorbs best to inform which foods to eat, and other insights that can form a more targeted recommendation plan.
Doing the right exercise
What if you’ve been hitting the gym and trying to get fit, but you’ve been doing the wrong exercises all this time? Getting insights into your genes can actually show you whether your body is more suited for endurance activities, like running or bicycling, or whether your body is more suited for power activities like sprinting or weight lifting. Knowing more about how your body works means being able to choose the right activities for you.
Finding the root cause of your health issues
In addition to the one-size-fits-all approach to health, many times practitioners are helping their patients simply combat symptoms of chronic illness. But constantly treating symptoms can be timely and costly, and never really addresses the root issues anyway. Since genetic testing reveals how your body works at the cellular level, it can point towards the root causes of illnesses that are generating those symptoms. That way, diseases can be treated at the source, rather than spending a lifetime of patching up your symptoms.
Improving your metabolism
Your genes can also tell you more about your metabolism. We know that metabolism has a connection with energy and vibrancy, yet many of us have a “sluggish” metabolism we’re not sure how to correct. Knowing your genes can give you insights into how your metabolism is affected by what you eat, how you burn energy, how you store fat, and more.
Helping you balance your hormones
Your genes influence how your reproductive hormones function. Genetic testing can help you gain insights and a new perspective into any hormonal imbalances or irregularities you’ve experienced, and inform you how to try to balance them.
Taking care of your heart health
Your genetic variants can help explain why your cholesterol is high despite an excellent diet and lifestyle, and help you safeguard against cardiovascular disease and reduce damage to your blood vessels.
Understanding how your body regulates blood sugar
Genetic testing can help you understand how your body regulates and balances your blood sugar and insulin levels, and help you reduce your risk of developing diabetes.
Optimising your caffeine intake
We’re all affected by caffeine in various ways — some people can drink coffee right up until bedtime, when others have to cut themselves off mid-morning! But do we know why? Our genes can tell us! Our genes are responsible for how quickly we metabolise caffeine, so we can know whether to have that extra cup or not.
Helping you make better daily choices
As you can see, knowing your genes and how they affect your body can give you insights into many different aspects of your health and wellness so that you can make better choices each day about actions that affect you. For example, did you know that your genes can determine how well your body eliminates toxins, which can help you make choices about what environments to be in? Your genes can also give you insight into your stress levels, and flag if you’re not getting enough sleep at night.
So much more than ancestry!
Knowing your genes can reveal a lot more to you than just what’s listed above. Additionally, as our knowledge continues to increase around how genes work and how they impact our bodies, the blueprint that genetic testing provides for your optimal health will only become more detailed, allowing you to build the perfect life of health and wellness suitable to you.
And perhaps the best news: you only need to test your genes once, because they don’t change.
If you are ready to start your personalised health journey, get in touch.