How to Unlock Emotional Balance Through Genes Part 1 with Dr. J Dunn

Dr. Tamar: 0:00

Kinesiology is an incredible feedback tool. You can literally ask the body what's going on through the nervous system through a positive and negative response. You can also ask it all kinds of things like emotional stuff I'm angry or I'm sad. The cool thing was you can ask the body is this food good for me or bad for me? You can ask the body which is the best source.

Dr. J. Dunn: 0:24

Welcome to Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrigenomics. Part of the Pharmacy Podcast Network, A must-have resource for pharmacists, entrepreneurs seeking to enhance patient care while enjoying career and life. Join us as we pivot into Nutrigenomics, using pharmacy and nutrition for true patient-focused care. Explore how to improve chronic conditions rather than just manage them. Celebrate entrepreneurial triumphs and receive priceless advice. Align your values with a career that profoundly impacts patients. Together, we'll raise the script on health and pivot into a brighter future. Hello and welcome to Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrigenomics. I'm Dr Lawful, Dr Pharmacy and Certified Nutritional Genomics Specialist. Today, we're exploring a topic that's close to my heart and, I believe, vital for many of you out there how to unlock emotional balance through genes An hour-ever-evolving quest for well-being. Understanding the role our genetics plays in our emotional health is not just fascinating. It's essential. If you're feeling overwhelmed with mood swings or grappling with emotional health challenges, or ever pause to think that the answers to these battles could potentially lie within your very own DNA, this episode is definitely for you. Join us as a esteemed Dr J. Dunn. With over three decades of experience, Dr Dunn has dedicated her life to the study and practice of alternative healing methods. Driven by her own personal struggles with health, Her journey led her to the discovery and development of holistic kinesiology and holistic methylation techniques that integrate the body's anatomy, physiology, emotional landscape and nutritional needs into a cohesive healing strategy. As an author, lecturer and CEO of my Happy Genes, Dr Dunn's work is at the forefront of leveraging genetic insights to enhance our mood and overall well-being. Her renowned approach does not view individuals merely as a set of symptoms, but embraces the complexity of the human condition. Through my Happy Genes, Dr. J. Dunn empowers individuals and practitioners alike to unlock their genetic potential, aiming to usher in a new era of happiness and health based on our unique genetic blueprint. This episode is designed not only to enlighten you about the power of genetics in determining our emotional health, but also to empower you with actionable strategies. So let's listen in. J, thank you for joining me on Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrigenomics. It's a pleasure to have you here. I'm excited to hear about my Happy Genes and how you came about starting your company. But, J, can you take us back to the roots? What sparked your passion towards this work and nudged you into this fascinating world of genetics, Dr?

Dr. Tamar: 3:27

Dunn. Thank you, it's a bit of a long story but I'll try to keep it kind of concise. As a healthcare practitioner, I've been practicing for about 35 years, but I think a lot of healthcare practitioners sort of go into healthcare to look for some of the answers to their own health issues, and I was no exception to that. I kind of struggled with energy and mood and headaches and nausea and fatigue early on in my 20s and I was raised in the medical model and so when I was struggling with my health, I'm one of those very stubborn people who doesn't go to the doctor unless I absolutely have to. But I ended up going to the doctor and they did all this blood work and said no, you're fine, there's nothing wrong with you. Here's a prescription for headaches. And I'm like wait, wait, what You're covering up the headaches, but you can't tell me where they're coming from. This. It just struck me as wrong and so I started to think well, maybe it's my diet, maybe McDonald's hamburgers and french fries are not the best diet, and so maybe I should start eating better, you know, more nuts and fruits and seeds and grains and vegetables. And I got worse, I started to feel worse. You know, and that's what everybody tells you to do, like eat, that's eating, right, you know. But oh my God, it was so much worse, so I was confused. I was working at a bookstore and I'm reading every book I can get my hands on with about diet, about nutrition, like I don't. Everybody's got a different opinion, you know. This person says eat all meat. You know, from all meat to all vegetable either is one extreme to the other. Yeah, keto or whatever. Everybody's got an opinion about how everyone should eat. And so I thought, well, this is just confusing. And then so I went to a health food store and I looked around and I'm like, oh my God, there's 20 brands of vitamin C. How do you pick? How do you start If you don't nothing? It's like no way confusing. So I talked to the owner of the store and I said what, what should I do? What do you recommend"? And she said, well, have you tried chiropractic? And I was like, no, no experience with it. She's like well, you'd be surprised what chiropractors can do. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try that. And went to a chiropractor, got adjusted, made no difference at all, and I was like, okay, check that one off. And then my roommate at the time said you should go to this guy that I'm going to. He's a little different. He does kinesiology. Are you familiar with kinesiology? Yes, yes, but we're going to talk more about that, yeah, so I went to this doctor and he's got my arm up in the air and I'm going oh God, this is the weirdest thing I've ever seen. But within 10 minutes he told me exactly why I was feeling the way I was feeling and what to do about it, how to change my diet for me, what supplements to take, adjusted me and then within a week, whole new human being. I was like, okay, that was weird, what was that? And so I dove in headlong into kinesiology. It's my passion, it's been. I've been doing it now for 35 years, but at the time it was just kind of weird. So I started using it on people and I was getting incredible results. But I didn't know anything about the body and I really want to know what makes the body work. I developed this passion for understanding it to the nth degree, what makes the body work, and so went off to chiropractic school after I learned the kinesiology and became a doctor and then studied functional medicine, had my practice for 30 some years, but again, you know, there were some people that didn't respond to anything I did. I had all these tools in my bag at this point. You know, emotional works and nutrition, body work, blah, blah, blah, and most people responded but there was a subset that did not. And then my chronic fatigue. I had Epstein-Barr virus as a teen and every time I got blood work done they'd say, yeah, epstein-barr is there, and I'd try antivirals and all kinds of things and nothing seemed to work for me, and so I thought we're missing something. And then I started thinking about my dad, who died at 55 of lung cancer, which wasn't a big mystery. He did everything he could to get it and it worked. But he was a big smoker, drinker, never ate anything balanced, you know. He's not health conscious at all, but the interesting thing was his best friend ended up marrying my dad and living another 30 years doing the same things smoking, drinking and we all know people who can get away with bad behavior, but it doesn't seem to affect them. And I went the only thing we can say is that's genetics, right? So I started to think maybe the missing piece is genetics. And so the word methylation kept coming into my consciousness and I was like, okay, I got to figure out what that is, because I keep hearing that word, and did a deep dive into methylation and started learning about genetics and found the answers. That was the missing piece. Found the answers for me when I got my genes tested through 23andMe and then put them through a. At the time it was like one of those algorithms that pulls out about 30 genes and I think, it was. That's it, yeah, genetic genie or something it was in the very beginning of understanding, and one of the genes that came up that I was homozygous for. And you know explaining that for a second when you inherit genes, you get one gene from mom, one gene from dad and that's comes together and that's your blueprint for how your body makes enzymes or makes receptors or makes proteins in the body. And if you have a variation from the normal code in your genes from one parent, that's a heterozygous variant, from both parents that's homozygous. So when you've inherited a homozygous variant, it can reduce the activity of a gene by 70% up to 70%. So one of the genes that caught my eye was the vitamin D receptor, and I have a homozygous variant there and so, in other words, I can't absorb vitamin D, and whenever I got my blood work done, my vitamin D was always very low and no matter how much vitamin D I took, I couldn't get it to budge. You too very common in African American folks. So I was like, okay, sucks to be me, or can we up, regulate that receptor with nutrients? That was kind of my hypothesis. Can we go in there, make that receptor work better so I can get vitamin D in there and get all the benefits, because we know, you know, how much benefit vitamin D is for so many things. And so I found a paper that showed that there are cofactors for that receptor that open it up. And so I started taking those nutrients very specific nutrients. Bam, it opened up. Vitamin D can get in all the other, like pathways that are affected by vitamin D, started to open up and my brain chemistry came online my lifelong depression gone like very quickly Within a couple days. I'm like I think this is happy. I've heard about it, you know, but my brain had no ability to make dopamine and serotonin and so because of that vitamin D receptor, one of the other things that BDR, when I looked up the research on it and PubMed on the vitamin D receptor, one of the first studies I found was that it's a high incidence of lung cancer when you smoke. If you have that homozygous variant, you know okay, there's my dad. And then it also up regulates your T cell function, which you know is your immune system. How well you fight infections very much depends on how much of a D you can absorb, and so my immune system started to turn on chronic fatigue syndrome of 40 years gone within a day. You know, within like a week. So amazing.

Dr. J. Dunn: 11:02

Amazing and all from genetics. Has you brought up a good point where, with the comparison of your dad and his spouse, we're all different? We're all different and that's why we're going to respond to certain lifestyle habits and nutrition and environmental factors differently. It all boils down to our genetics and I think it's interesting that you became a chiropractor after your experience with a chiropractor that didn't help, and so that's interesting. Now you are a chiropractor actually being able to help help patients, help people get better. So I want to backtrack and get into the kinesiology. So how would you explain the principles of holistic kinesiology and holistic methylation?

Dr. Tamar: 11:48

Ooh, good questions. Those are my babies. You know the kinesiology is an incredible feedback tool. You can literally ask the body what's going on through the nervous system. Through a positive and negative response. You know you can say is this? The cool thing was like the beginning of it is you can ask the body is this food good for me or bad for me? You know you can get a like a strong or weak on foods, which is like mind blowing. You can actually ask the body is this good or bad for me? And then you can expand that into vitamins, minerals, you know supplementation Is this good for me or bad for me? You can ask the body which is like the best source, and you can also ask it all kinds of things like emotional stuff. You know I'm angry or I'm sad or whatever. You can get a kind of just ask the nervous system or your unconscious mind, essentially through the nervous system, all kinds of questions. And so I fell madly in love with the kinesiology and studied all types of techniques, applied kinesiology. You know, which was like the granddaddy, from George Goodheart to educational kinesiology, behavioral kinesiology, touch for health, everything I could get my hands on and kinesionics was the one that really kind of had the whole spectrum of healing modalities, from emotional work, nutrition, biochemistry or the body work, and you know like, looked at all possible healing modalities and put it under that sort of framework of kinesiology. So that made my practice very well rounded. You know, we can literally ask the body what's the best therapy for this person, and I created a much more simple technique called holistic kinesiology, which is I wrote a book, you know, that teaches people how to do that and I teach. I like to teach laypeople because it's so powerful to be able to just, you know, take care of your tummy troubles and your colds and flus and you know all the little aches and pains. You can test things and get a better idea of what's best for you.

Dr. J. Dunn: 13:45

So if I came to you, J, with, let's say, a headache, how exactly do you use holistic kinesiology to determine the source of that headache?

Dr. Tamar: 13:57

Yeah, that's a good, that's a good question. So there's like headache points so you can say, oh, you know, my headache's up here and you can actually therapy localized to it and test and if it goes weak, you know, that that's you know. Okay, you're getting feedback about that and then you can like put things next to you, next to your body, that might remedy it and you know, and find out what would balance it and that gives you an idea of what might be causing it. So a lot of times there's food allergies involved. So you can test for foods, you can test for supplementation that you might need. Toxins, hormones can cause headaches. So you can kind of tease out where the like kind of the source of it is through asking the body questions and challenging it. So it's kind of cool that way.

Dr. J. Dunn: 14:39

Okay, Thank you for explaining that. And you know, with the holistic kinesiology, to my understanding it's a unique combination, as you mentioned, with anatomy, physiology, emotional work, body work and nutrition. How does that work in achieving mental balance without medications?

Dr. Tamar: 14:58

Ah well, that really kind of came about with the holistic methylation. So this was the next generation where we were looking at biochemical pathways. You know how does like when I mentioned the vitamin D receptor. How does my brain make serotonin and dopamine, or are there genetic variants that kind of interfere with that? Or if you are making serotonin and dopamine, can you break them down efficiently? Are the, do you have genetic variants that keep you from breaking them down, or do you have a combination of those things? So if you can't make serotonin and dopamine correctly, then you're going to be depressed. If you can make them but can't break them down, you're going to be anxious and irritable and ADD If you can break down one of them and not the other. If you can't break down serotonin, it makes you very irritable, aggressive and anxious, and if you can't break down dopamine, it gives you a little bit of ADD kind of thing. So we look at you know what are the genes you've inherited that keep you from balancing out your brain chemistry? And this was like, again, you know, for me it was the thing that changed my life and so I really focused a lot on looking at those biochemical pathways. So when you upregulate the vitamin D receptor and your body increases the absorption of vitamin D. It upregulates another enzyme called tyrosine hydroxylase that turns tyrosine into dopamine and another enzyme called the tryptophan hydroxylase that turns tryptophan into serotonin. So those pathways start working. But if you have other genes, like the MAO gene, if you have a variant there and a slow-moving enzyme and you start upregulating serotonin production, you can send somebody right into aggression and irritability. Or if they can't break down the dopamine you just made or the adrenaline that you just made, then you're going to send them into anxiety and ADD. So you have to understand the. You know the pathways and that was what we did with holistic methylation, as we started to look at not just brain chemistry but you know the citric acid cycle and the. You know those electron transport gene. How is mitochondrial functioning? There are genetic variants that will keep you from being able to make energy out of your food and when we do that, that's fatigue and weight gain and high blood sugar and insulin resistance and high cholesterol and all those things that go with that. You know the things that really affect the Americans the most are those interruption in those pathways. So we looked at a bunch of different biochemical pathways and where are the genetic variants in there that can cause, you know, these inherited kind of risks, right?

Dr. J. Dunn: 17:34

Thank you for sharing that. And now going back to, you mentioned some of those genetic variants, like, specifically, with vitamin D. What is another? What's another common genetic variant that you've noticed has a lot of impacts on emotional health?

Dr. Tamar: 17:49

The COMT is a biggie and I think it's pretty well known too. That's the catechol-O-methyl transphase and it's job. It's an enzyme and its job is to break down adrenaline, dopamine and norepinephrine. And if you can't do that, if you have a slow-moving enzyme, then this person is going to be the. They're really cool people. They're usually very energetic and creative and, you know, always thinking and always moving. They got to keep moving, but there are a lot, there's a lot of anxiety there and they often don't sleep well and they just can't shut it off because their bodies can't get adrenaline out. It makes them also highly susceptible to PTSD or panic disorders etc. Because their adrenaline levels are higher than normal. They should be down here and they stay kind of here because their body can't really metabolize the adrenaline the same way some other people can, and it's not like a defect, it's more of a variant. So these people, the ancestors of these people, probably were able to spot danger before anybody else because they're aware of everything around them. They're always, like you know, worrying about everything and looking around the VDR. People like me are just like you know. We're slow moving, we're kind of depressed, but if I take my supplements I'm not. I'm more up in here in this higher energy level and happyville. The other one is the MAO gene, which is the warrior gene and I'm sure you're familiar with that one. Yes, the MAO, monoamine oxidase, and that's the enzyme that breaks down serotonin. And so if you can't break down serotonin, serotonin causes a lot of irritation. You know we all think, oh, more serotonin, more happy. This is not the case. High serotonin can be very irritating to the nervous system. It's inflammatory as well, so it causes a lot of aggression. And these are the warriors, you know, that are a little bit high temper, you know, and irritable. And their ancestors. I'm one of those too. I tend to. I have a. My great, great great grandfather was William the Conqueror, so he's not a nice person, so I have a little tendency to get irritated. And then when I do, I know that I need to take that specific nutrient that up regulates that MAO to get it to break down the serotonin that I'm making. So it's cool that you can just like change your personality through understanding these interplay of genes and what nutrients actually upregulate them and balance out your brain, and so I call it biochemical nirvana.

Dr. J. Dunn: 20:15

I love it. I love it and it makes sense as well with another field of pharmacogenomics, where we look at the genetics to determine the potential efficacy and safety of medications for an individual. So with the MOA, that reminds me of like why certain serotonin based medications are not going to be effective for some or more prone to have some adverse effects for certain people, based on what variant they have. Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Tamar: 20:44

I think that's where a lot of you know. You imagine somebody who's got an MAO gene and you give them an SSRI and you've just cranked their serotonin. They're going to go into a rage and I'm wondering. Sometimes I wonder and there are people that think that this is where a lot of school shootings come from you know, from misprescribed antidepressants and medications like that that are, like you say, wrongly prescribed for somebody with certain genetic variants.

Dr. J. Dunn: 21:10

Yeah, we've come so far. So far there's everyone that everyone should just be tested before being put on certain medications, especially medications that can affect our psyche, you know yeah.

Dr. Tamar: 21:22

And you know, like you and I kind of talked about momentarily, if you can do it with natural remedies, if you can upregulate that MAO or if you can get the VDR going so that you make serotonin and dopamine correctly, then there's not a need for for most people and I'm not I'm not dismissing the whole field, because I think it's a lot of lives but I think there are a lot of people who could benefit from like precision nutrients or nutrigenomics that up, regulate their genes so that their brain chemistry is balanced. And I've seen it happen over and over and patients are coming back in and they're going. Oh my God, I just feel the most used word I hear is content and you know, and it's, it's just fascinating and I've seen it with even drug addicts we I've worked with. The first one I did was an interesting case. She was a meth addict and she had two small children at home and she was frequently going off and leaving them. When you get hooked on meth, you know, you just, you just forget about the rest of the world, right? And the kids would call their there were like six and eight, I want to say and they would call their aunt and say, hey, mom's gone again, can you come and get us? And she would pick them up and it's like, okay, we got to wait for her to come back again. But she brought her into the office and said, can you do something with this? And I said I don't, I don't know, let's try it. It was a beginning of when I first started working with this this way and I said, let's, let's try it. Let's try a, you know, a genetic program. We'll look at all her variants, design this nutritional program for her. And she came in a week later and I said you know how's it going? She goes. I have absolutely no desire for meth. There's, there's, no, I just don't want it. I said, okay, that's good, we'll see what happens in a month. You know, because you know addicts, they'll go yeah, I'm better. And so a year went by. She got her kids back, she got her job, no meth use. She just completely stopped. And then she went off her supplements and then went right back to meth. So the family called me up and said, hey, you know, don't let her run out of her supplements, we will pay. You know, put her back on the program. And she went back on the program and I look at her now she's like 15 years down the line, she's fine, she's getting married and you know she has a full life, she has her life back and meth is a very bad, you know downward spiral. And so I saw that with cocaine use, I saw it with alcohol use and that's. That's not saying there aren't other extenuating things like environmental and emotional abuse and traumas that can drive people to use these things. But if you take away the biochemical reason for it, then the willpower is a lot more apt to take it the rest of the way there. So that's been pretty fascinating to see where we're flooding the brain with dopamine. And dopamine is usually the thing you know that people are looking for with a drug addiction or a sex addiction or alcohol or whatever they're looking for. That dopamine hit because they're born with low dopamine or low dopamine receptor activities.

Dr. J. Dunn: 24:24

Well, that's amazing. Who would have thought that just having those supplements could help someone get over their meth addiction? It's biochemistry.

Dr. Tamar: 24:32

It's so in love with it.

Dr. J. Dunn: 24:34

Yeah, so, J, your company is my Happy Jeans. Can you explain the concepts of my Happy Jeans and especially how individuals can optimize their genetic potential for better health and happiness?

Dr. Tamar: 24:47

Yeah. So you know, the holistic methylation is a pretty time intensive muscle testing system that kind of identifies these biochemical pathways, interruptions, and it's clunky. Not everybody is really open to kinesiology or muscle testing and some people want that like objective test or they just don't have the time or the bandwidth to go and get tested, or doctors that want to do this work they don't do muscle testing. So I created this, my Happy Jeans software algorithm. I'm like, okay, what if we did this with software, the things that I were doing in the clinic with muscle testing, let's try it with a software algorithm. And so I tried to replicate what we could do in the office in the clinic with this software. And so we test for 675,000 SNPs, the single nucleotide polymorphism, those little changes in the DNA that can lead to these enzyme imbalances that cause potentially our risk for diseases, and we report on 585 currently genes. You know I told you about starting with the 30, that you know that I got tested and then we've expanded to 585 at this point and still expanding. I keep adding new genes in there. But the algorithm, you know, we have fiber once you get your DNA tested and it's all very private. I'm very concerned about people getting their genes tested and having an exposure, possibly to diseases, to whatever hackers or whatever getting their info. So we're very adamant that your sample, your. It's a swab and so your swab sample will never have your information on it. It's got a barcode that you hook up to an email and so we don't know anything about you. They don't know anything about you. That sample goes to the lab With only a barcode and then it's destroyed after three months. But then we get that data back. The data comes back and wait. We use alumina, which is like top of the top of the line as far as DNA analysis with this private lab, and then we pull out the information out of that from your genes and we look at where, what homozygous variants do you have, what heterozygous variants do you have, what are your normal gene codes, and then we give you reports. So like the first report is mood and personality looks at do you have the M a o? Do you have the calm? Do you have you know the combo Do you have? And it looks at do you have a higher risk of being anxious or depressed or OCD or PTSD, add, you know, we look at those risks. Addictions of all kinds. You know the alcohol, opioids is in there, even Entrepreneurial tendencies. We can tell through your genetic report which is right. It's kind of cool. You learn a lot about yourself, like oh, that's why I'm always starting a new business, right, that's interesting, yeah, and I'll read it to people and I'm like this is the way you are, and before I even know them. And they're like, oh, my god, how'd you know that? You know it's like it's so accurate at Determining your personality. And then we give you the actual gene table like these are all the genes you inherited. This is whether you're hydrozygous and was, I guess, blah, blah, blah. And you can click on any of those and open them up and it takes you right to the studies. You know that I've shown this is how this gene works and this is what the risks are of having a variant there and you so? It's a ton of research that you can do, all PubMed studies. You know as much as I could get, though the best of the best studies on PubMed or National Institute of Health Studies. And then the second report is diet and lifestyle. What foods you should avoid, like is it nightshades, gluten, lactose? What are your best combination of nutrients, carbs, fats, proteins. Which ones are better for your genetic physiology? So there's a whole list of those different things. And then we look at your disease risks. Are you at high risk of autoimmune, cardiovascular Alzheimer's, brain dysfunction, cognitive decline, covid risk? You know on and on. There's a big list of different Health risks and this is only available through practitioners. So the consumer can get the first two, the mood and diet. But we really wanted people to be under the supervision of a physician when they read their health risks. So we don't want to freaking out saying, oh my god, I'm gonna get Alzheimer's. Okay, it's a risk. And so we wanted them to be under the care of somebody who understands what they're looking at. And the fourth one is a biochemical pathway. So we look at how well you're methylating, how well you're Making neurotransmitters, how well you're detoxing, how well you're breaking histamine down, how well are you, how well is your mitochondria functioning, at least genetically? Where are your stumbling blocks you know to your health? And then the fifth one is a supplement recommendation and it's based on the answers to your questions what symptoms are you having? And then we can correlate those with okay, you have the gene that keeps you from breaking food down into energy and you're tired. Ah, okay, this is probably what's happening there. And then these are the nutrients that up regulate that particular pathway. So it's a an algorithm that's patented that looks at that. You know that combination of biochemical pathways, your genes and your symptoms that you're having to get very precise with your supplementation.

Dr. J. Dunn: 30:05

Yeah, that is. It's like looking into a crystal ball for some people, right, and be able to tell what they could potentially be at risk at. But we know that that's although it's in their genetic code, it doesn't mean it has to happen, right, and I similar to. I use something similar as well, where the just as you described and my clients will will say how do you, how do you know that, how do you know that? Or this describes this is exactly what's going on, and the beauty of these genomic tests is that when the clients get the results, they finally have answers.

Dr. Tamar: 30:45

Yes this light bulb goes off and everything makes sense to them now right and it's very Compassion-giving because, you know, a lot of people beat us. We beat ourselves up, we go why can't I just be happy? Why not I just be positive? Why can't I just have energy? Why can't I just go for a walk and quit eating sugar? You know, and, and the answers are in there, and so when people find it, it's like oh wow, like you say, it's like that explains it you know, but it's also Affirming that you can do something about it. You know, and that's what that's the beauty of neutrogenomics, right, exactly, you can do something about it. Yeah, so it's our diet, our lifestyle, supplementations that we take all of those affect the expression of these genes and that's what we call epigenetics, right, so it's. It's not like, oh, I can't do anything about it, I'm just gonna have to live with it. People are scared to get their genes tested because they think I don't want to know, you know. But if you know and do something about it or prevent what's coming down the line, then it's very empowering, yeah it is.

Dr. J. Dunn: 31:43

We'll continue our conversation with our guests in our next episode. Until then, always remember, in your journey as a healthcare professional Professional, always raise the script on health, because together we can bring healthcare to higher levels.