Can Your DNA Predict How Fast You'll Build Muscle and Lose Fat? (Joe Cohen) | Ep 364
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Why can two people follow the same diet and training plan but get completely different results? Could your DNA explain why fat loss feels harder, or why recovery takes longer? And is genetic testing the breakthrough it claims to be or just another fitness gimmick?
With me is Joe Cohen, founder and CEO of SelfDecode, to separate the science from the scams. Joe shares what your genes can actually tell you about building muscle, losing fat, and preventing disease, and where the industry is misleading you. We also dig into how combining genetic data with lab work creates actionable steps you can measure and adjust over time.
Tune in to discover whether your DNA could be the missing piece in your fitness journey.
Today, you’ll learn all about:
0:00 – Intro
2:17 – Why most DNA health tests fail
6:44 – Marketing hype vs real science
9:59 – Moving beyond the fitness basics
12:01 – Diseases genetics can predict well
16:38 – Universal habits vs targeted actions
18:15 – How SelfDecode prioritizes recommendations
22:43 – Genes and training insights
27:22 – Pathways and functional genetics
31:17 – Combining genetics with lab work
38:07 – Joe’s story of food intolerance
45:45 – Where to learn more about SelfDecode
Episode resources:
Website: SelfDecode.com
Instagram: @mrbiohacker
Facebook: @selfdecode
X: @SelfDecode
Can Your Genetics Really Predict Fat Loss and Muscle Gain?
If you’ve ever wondered why some people seem to build muscle easily or drop fat faster than others, the answer may partly be in their DNA. But while genetics influence everything from your recovery capacity to fat storage tendencies, the consumer DNA industry is filled with oversimplifications and outright misinformation. The reality is more nuanced than “you have this gene, so you need this diet.”
Understanding how your genes affect training and nutrition requires separating science from hype. Genetics can provide insights into risks and tendencies, but those insights need to be validated, contextualized, and combined with lifestyle data before they become actionable.
The Problem With Most DNA Fitness Tests
Many DNA companies sell the idea that one or two “magic” genes dictate how you respond to exercise or diet. They’ll claim you’re a “carb burner” or that you need to train a certain way based on a handful of SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms).
The problem is that most traits, including muscle gain and fat loss, are polygenic—influenced by thousands, sometimes millions, of genetic variants. Looking at a few SNPs in isolation cannot accurately predict outcomes. At best, these simplistic reports exaggerate small effects. At worst, they mislead people into unnecessary restrictions or wasted supplements.
What Genetics Can Actually Tell You
When done properly, genetic analysis can provide useful insights into:
Disease risk – Conditions like cardiovascular disease, prostate cancer, and type 2 diabetes are strongly influenced by genetics, and polygenic risk scoring can help identify higher probabilities.
Nutrient needs – Some variants affect vitamin metabolism (like MTHFR and folate), influencing whether supplementation could be helpful.
Pathway tendencies – Genes involved in methylation, detox, or inflammation may highlight where you are more sensitive and where lifestyle interventions could matter most.
Response tendencies – VO₂ max, recovery capacity, or susceptibility to injury may be partially influenced by genetics, though training adaptation still requires experimentation.
Lifestyle Still Reigns Supreme
Even with clear genetic risk, lifestyle often dictates when or if problems develop. For example:
Someone with high cardiovascular genetic risk may avoid disease for decades with exercise, good nutrition, and stress management.
A person predisposed to higher body fat storage can still maintain a lean physique with consistent training and dietary awareness.
Your genes might set the stage, but your daily habits determine how the play unfolds.
Where Genetics Fits Into Training and Nutrition
For physique goals, genetic data should be treated as one layer of personalization, not the foundation. The hierarchy still starts with proven fundamentals:
Strength training
Adequate protein
Sufficient sleep
Stress management
Balanced nutrition
Once those are in place, genetic insights can act as nudges. For instance, if your profile suggests you metabolize vitamin C poorly, supplementing might help. If your labs plus genetics show elevated inflammation risk, prioritizing anti-inflammatory foods and training recovery becomes even more important.
The Role of Data Beyond DNA
Because genes don’t change, the most powerful use of DNA testing is combining it with lab work and lifestyle tracking. You can see if your actual biomarkers (cholesterol, blood sugar, hormones) align with your genetic risks, then act accordingly. More importantly, you can re-test labs after making changes to see if your interventions worked.
This creates a feedback loop where genetics give you tendencies, labs show your current reality, and lifestyle changes move the needle.
The Takeaway
Genetics will not hand you a perfect workout plan or tell you exactly which foods to eat. But when interpreted properly, they can help prioritize risks, guide smarter supplementation, and provide extra motivation to double down on lifestyle basics. The real win comes from combining DNA data with blood work and consistent tracking to make informed, personalized choices—while ignoring the hype that one gene explains it all.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
If you've been following the same training and nutrition advice as everyone else, but getting wildly different results, your genetics might hold the answer. But here's what most people don't realize your DNA doesn't just influence whether you'll be good at sports or prone to certain diseases. It might reveal how your body responds to specific macros, how it recovers from training, and whether you're predisposed to store fat or build muscle more efficiently. My guest today has analyzed over two and a half million genetic variants for more than 200,000 people. He's going to reveal what your genetic blueprint might tell you about optimizing your physique. You'll discover the specific genes that may influence your body's response to training and nutrition, learn how to interpret genetic data without falling for overhyped marketing, and find out whether personalized health based on your DNA is the next revolution in health science.
Philip Pape: 0:59
Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we are going to examine whether your genetic code can unlock better results from your training and nutrition. My guest today is Joe Cohen, founder and CEO of SelfDecode, a DNA and biomarker-based health platform that uses AI to deliver personalized health insights. Joe has spent years battling brain fog, inflammation and fatigue through self-experimentation, and he claims to have optimized over 400 lab markers. His platform has analyzed genetic data for over 200,000 people and he currently takes 170 supplements daily based on his genetic profile. Today, you're gonna learn which variants might influence muscle building and fat loss, how to identify legitimate genetic insights for marketing hype, and whether personalized nutrition based on your DNA can give you an edge in achieving your physique goals. Joe, thanks so much for coming on the show. My man.
Joe Cohen: 1:55
Hey, thanks for having me.
Philip Pape: 1:57
So I want to start talking about the industry first and then drill down to the specifics here. I think you've said that most of the DNA health companies and I know there are a lot out there I get pitched all the time to be on my show that they're essentially scams, I think, is the word you've used, and I want to understand what makes that the case and what differentiates what people should be looking for from those companies.
Joe Cohen: 2:17
Yeah, so genetics is a very complex thing and typically most things that we have are what's called polygenic, which means there's a variety of genes that are related to it, variety of pathways or variety of genes, and there's different ways of looking at genetics, but essentially what has been found is that typically there's millions of variants that contribute to a condition or any trait. Typically, if it's intelligence, it's not just you don't have, like an intelligence gene or a variant, it's typically there's many, many variants that are related to it. And you know some of these things are not fully decoded, but you know that what we do know is that there's a millions of variants that, or thousands or hundreds of thousands that are typically related to these polygenic traits. Some things are just very specific variants like, for example, lactose intolerance. It could be one, two, three, a couple variants related to that, but most things are actually quite polygenic, which means that there's a lot of genes that are related to it.
Joe Cohen: 3:25
Polygenic, which means that there's a lot of genes that are related to it. That means is if you're looking at you know a hundred SNPs or variants, then you're not going to be able to tell or predict something that is related to millions of variants or hundreds of thousands, it's just there's not enough information, and so what these companies typically do is they'll look at one variant and they'll tell you you have a high risk for this, or you're like this, or you need this or you need that. They make broad conclusions based on specific variants and what they're doing is they're treating it like almost like a lab test. Like you get your LDL cholesterol tested, you have this gene. Now you got to treat this gene and do this, that and the other thing, whatever, right, like. The problem is that you have 200 million SNPs, so you're not going to like you've got these. There could be 20,000 SNPs that make you more likely for something and 10,000 that make you less, and you kind of have to figure out what's the based on all that information. What is the total likelihood, like how likely are you to get this condition? And it's not yes or no. It's, like you know, are you in the 80th, 90th percentile? Is your risk of getting the condition? Maybe in a population, it's 1% of people who are whatever have a condition, and even if you're five times the risk, then you're 5% right. So it's not like, it's not just yes or no. Do you have this right, and so there's different kinds of genetics.
Joe Cohen: 4:56
When you want to predict stuff, the only way to do it is through polygenic risk scoring, and then you get okay, so we'll just focus on this for a second, this polygenic risk scoring, and then you get okay, so we'll just focus on this for a second. This polygenic risk scoring area. There are some companies very few that do polygenic risk scoring for consumers, but then the problem is is that if you, they don't actually do legit polygenic risk scoring, meaning they might just look at multiple variants, but then they're not doing it legitimately. They might look at two, three, five, sometimes 30, whatever, but they don't. If it's not like legitimate approach, then it's not. You know it's not very good. Now, even if they did look at many, whatever they're looking at, you want to validate that you're able to predict something.
Joe Cohen: 5:41
Genetics is about prediction, right that? A lot of genetics is about prediction. You get a test because you want to try to predict something in the future, or you want to try to predict anything, maybe what supplement you'll do well with, or whatever. So if you're trying to predict some kind of condition or some kind of tendency and these things have many genes. It's not just enough to say that you came up with an algorithm that can combine many thousands of variants or whatever, and use AI and machine learning and give you a result. You actually have to validate it and that's why, even with these LLMs like ChatGPT, they have this war with each other where each of them. But at the end of the day, there's some kind of standard that they test against and then they kind of compare each to each other how good are they at reasoning and different kinds of things, different areas, and so the same thing should happen in genetics, but it's not. It for consumer genetics, it's just the wild west where you know. You just say, like whoever has the best marketing is essentially winning the race.
Joe Cohen: 6:44
Yeah, because the you know a guy like who's not an expert, many, basically anybody who has a podcast about this, about anything, is not an expert in genetics. Typically right, and you could get on a podcast whether it's andrew uberman or even peter attia, and the guy they don't really know, peter attia already, like, he did recommend self-decode, but he he wasn't fully understanding, he didn't fully under understand genetics and he just kind of knew that you do need to look at more variants. He just didn't really dig himself deeply into it enough. But he said, based on what I could figure out, self-decode seems like the best one. Right, yeah, and he was pretty honest about that. But the idea is that he doesn't know, uberman doesn't know.
Joe Cohen: 7:29
You take like any top health influencer, they don't know. And Uberman was once kind of promoting InsideTracker, which has they don't have good genetics software, right, it's just not valid, it's not accurate, it's not valid, it's not good. I think InsideTracker has moved a little bit away from genetics, but I'm just giving you an example of somebody like Uberman who's not going to understand. He's a neuroscientist, it's a completely different science and it's not something like you could just have a PhD, even in nutrigenomics, and understand this kind of polygenic risk scoring it's.
Joe Cohen: 8:08
You need to be a bioinformatician, genetics, statistical genetics. It's kind of like a different field. And so what we see is that people who don't know what they're doing in the health space trying to get into genetics and the result is garbage into genetics and the result is garbage. And but some of these people are skilled marketers, like the 10X people. There's some other people, right, like they're good at sales. Grant Cardone doesn't know the first thing about anything related to science, but he's a good salesman, so he doesn't need to know. It's, you know, same with Gary Brekker doesn't know anything about genetics, but he's a great salesman and he can, like you know, look at somebody talking about hydrogen water and be able to formulate some sentences that sound good, but he doesn't know anything about genetics. Yet he's selling a genetic test as if this guy's the expert in genetics.
Philip Pape: 9:02
Yeah, I'll tell you what you're preaching to a big choir here, because the tagline of this podcast is skeptics of the fitness industry. You don't even have to get into AI, informatics, genetics, to see that kind of extrapolation from data, to make wild conclusions and fearmonger things right, because it goes viral, it gets clicks, it gets attention Exactly and you see so much misinformation. That's why I wanted to have you on. I've had a few other folks in this space on and I understand it's like a very emerging field and what you just said like garbage in, garbage out. If the data is not actionable, not only can you not do anything with it, it's useless, but I think it could also lead to, you know, unintentional actions and fears and, oh my God, I'm at risk for this thing and, like you said, it's 500% higher risk, but that's relative to a 0.1% risk in the population, so it's all relative. I think all of that's important, which is why I wanted to start there, because then the question is okay.
Philip Pape: 9:59
If people are like I've optimized for my system in my life, my fitness system, the basics, I'm training, I'm eating my protein, I'm moving around and I'm doing things like that and I'm tracking right, we talk about tracking all your lifestyle metrics, the things that you can easily do with a smartphone, and they want to go to that next level. That's where I think some of these interesting avenues like genetics come in. I've personally had tests done and you're right. Sometimes they will just take a single snip and say, okay, you're a carb burner and I'm like what is this Like? You know, how does that help me and is it even accurate and how do we trust that information? So, for the purposes of this audience who's concerned about optimizing their biology and optimizing their health and lifestyle, Can you, as the owner of Self2Code and your platform, say with some reasonable level of confidence that certain variants influence specific things that we can act upon, like your recovery or how you train or what you eat?
Joe Cohen: 10:58
To be very honest, I could go through it, but fitness is probably you could do. Okay, so you can make actions. For everything related to genetics there's always something you could do, meaning like it's giving you information and if you have good genetic software, then it'll give you good information, but it's not going to tell you exactly which exercise you need to do. If you need to do more forearm, you need to do more forearm training. It's not going to tell you.
Philip Pape: 11:31
That would be incredible. Just have a robot tell you everything you need to do. Yeah, Right.
Joe Cohen: 11:36
It's not going to tell you if you need to stretch five minutes instead of ten. It can't get that exact. So you've got to understand what it can or cannot tell you. In general, though, the predictions you got to understand. There's also a hierarchy. It's not necessarily something's wrong or right. There's a hierarchy of how accurate something is, depending on the topic.
Joe Cohen: 12:01
When governments spend billions of dollars to build up databases, disease databases, and they, you know to predict things, they make these databases available so that companies and academics can actually train their models on diseases, and so diseases in genetics you can actually predict reasonably well, because there's been a lot of money pumped into it. There hasn't been a lot of money pumped into it. There hasn't been a lot of money pumped into how much you know, like in the nutrition stuff as much. So it doesn't mean that it's wrong. It just means that it's not as accurate as the disease stuff. And even with disease stuff, there's things that are just going to be more genetic and things that are going to be less genetic. Prostate cancer and cardiovascular disease are pretty genetic, and it's also very predictable Whether you're going to get prostate cancer, cardiovascular these are type 2 diabetes, also very predictable. So there's like a lot of this there's about you know. I would say there's about 150 conditions that we can predict reasonably well that if you have high risk, you probably want to do something about it. There's some change you're going to want to make. That is one way to look at genetics, where you look at a total risk. So I think it's a good idea to go through the different kinds of genetics because it's not just one thing. There's the polygenic risk scoring genetics, which is useful in the sense of if you want to know what you're at high risk for, and typically there's ways to reduce the risk.
Joe Cohen: 13:34
Whether it's prostate cancer or anything Cardiovascular, there's always hundreds of things you could do to reduce your risk if you know exactly what you need to prevent. So you know, just for prostate cancer, for example, tomatoes and lycopene that helps prevent prostate cancer. It's one thing. There's many things Green tea, different things, there's some supplements, like there's a whole bunch of different things you could do potentially to prevent prostate cancer. I wouldn't say that these things are a treatment.
Joe Cohen: 14:01
If you have prostate cancer, you take lycopene, your prostate cancer is going to go away. It doesn't really work like that right, but for prevention it makes more sense, like I wouldn't say if I had prostate cancer I'm not going to be, like, well, I'm going to eat tomatoes and it's going to go away. But if you're eating tomatoes over many, many years and you're taking supplements, then it can push that off for like 20, 40 years, right, like enough so that it's not relevant, because you could live to 100, 120, whatever the technology we have at that point is, and it's not going to be as relevant. So you want to push it off as much as you can. You know, and none of the nutrition and supplement stuff are going to make you live past 120. I think 120 is something that maybe you can get to with all the latest and greatest supplements and drugs and lifestyle stuff, but then after that it's kind of just like we need to replace your limbs and shit Cyborg.
Philip Pape: 14:55
Exactly.
Joe Cohen: 14:57
So, but that's one thing that genetics can do. It can help predict diseases pretty well.
Philip Pape: 15:02
Yeah, yeah. No, let's compartmentalize here, because early on your first answer you were talking about the polygenic nature of some of these and how sometimes it's hundreds, if not thousands, of genes that come together, maybe millions, whatever. And I remember reading recently they discovered all the genes that comprise stuttering, whether somebody stutters, and it was like 40 something genes that they identified.
Joe Cohen: 15:23
That makes sense. Right, that makes sense. I mean at least yeah.
Philip Pape: 15:31
Yeah, yeah, where. But then I also have heard, like for Alzheimer's risk, there are those that there's like one snip or two snips that can give you a big indicator. No, it's not true, right.
Joe Cohen: 15:37
Millions yeah.
Philip Pape: 15:38
Exactly so that that's where the misinformation is. And then, when you mentioned lifestyle and you mentioned the tomatoes for prostate cancer, my mind always goes to the hierarchy of things you do in your lifestyle. In other words, you wouldn't want somebody to say, well, the answer is the tomatoes, more like that is going to nudge things in the right direction, but you still should be doing other things. I also think there's something every human should be doing, no matter what, for healthy lifestyle that probably also reduce the risk of all of these things. That makes sense, like strength training, you know, muscle centric medicine is, I know, a hot topic term today mental health, right.
Philip Pape: 16:14
I read about the link between depression and diseases of, or dementia related. You know, alzheimer's and age related dementia, right? And so there's like a cascade of connections between these things as well. Where am I going with all this is, how do we get people to know what they should do, no matter what, versus how they should target in on the things that are most important to them and then make these changes, like eating more tomatoes.
Joe Cohen: 16:38
Well, I think the things that they, first of all, I think people need like motivation. There's some things. We will tell you that strength training or some kind of aerobic exercise associated with lower risk of prostate cancer or whatever, it is right and that does repeat itself a lot. So there are certain things that everybody knows and sometimes people don't do, but you might sometimes need some more motivation to understand why exactly you need to do this right. When it comes to these recommendations, like you said, you're going to be at risk for, let's say, 20 different conditions or whatever. Right, you're not going to take a supplement for every condition, necessarily, but what we can do is we look at all these conditions, all your umbrella tests, and we can tell you like a best fit, this thing is going to help you with the most things that you have, issues, with the most risks that you have, including. You're also able to put in symptoms, conditions and goals. We could take all that into account and then we give you the whole list. For whatever we recommend, we say here's all the reasons why you should take it. So it gives you a very clear rationale about all the reasons you should take it, with the references. So I don't think all because you have a high risk for one condition that you need to take every supplement to prevent that condition. But it should nudge you in the right way. And then the question is okay, well, you need to be nudged in different ways based on all these different information, and so you need software to put that all together for you and tell you what you should be taking. What's the most important thing for you? That's going to help with the most of the things and the most important things.
Joe Cohen: 18:15
So that's kind of how we make recommendations. It's by nudging things higher up on the priority list. So if you have a specific variant, it'll nudge it up a little bit for a certain condition. And then, if you have a specific variant, it'll nudge it up a little bit for a certain condition, and then if you have a risk for that condition, it'll nudge it up in the list. If it's a serious condition, it'll nudge it more. It goes on like that. And then if you have a symptom, condition or goal, it'll nudge it up significantly more if it helps with that.
Joe Cohen: 18:44
And then, once you see, it'll see the whole like whoa, okay, this thing helps with all these different things my labs and this and it gives you a much bigger picture. It lets you see, wow, okay, now I see why I need to take this. Not because some guru told me, necessarily you know to do this and you could also see for certain things that everybody knows they should be doing Exercise. You could see all the different reasons why you should and typically we actually, if someone says they exercise already, we hide these kinds of recommendations because they get pissed when they see exercise as a recommendation. They're like I already know I need to. You know I already do it, yeah.
Philip Pape: 19:23
No, I like that. That's the essence of personalization. I think the word personalization gets overused in the industry and people are like, yeah, we personalize the program to you.
Philip Pape: 19:31
Give us your age, your height, your demographics and we'll give you a template and what you're doing is you're, you're you're personalizing the output based on collecting all this data, letting you know using power, assists and tools, of course, to interpret it and then linking it to what you've validated is worth going after. So my question, then is I think you personally take a ton of supplements have we validated that the supplements themselves or these recommendations will actually do the thing? Is the data just as strong behind those behavior and supplement type recommendations as the genetic root cause is? Does that make sense? Is it validated as well?
Joe Cohen: 20:08
We validated the prediction, as it's a good prediction in terms of it can predict these kinds of conditions in the future, meaning it's predicting that you have a high risk, so not everybody's going to get it. It's still a probability. Again, it's depending on how healthy you live and all these other factors. But the genetic part we know is true in the sense you have a high genetic risk. So we're clear about that. That's been validated.
Joe Cohen: 20:33
The other stuff, like does this recommendation work? We can't. It's very hard to validate that because what we can show you is all the rationale as to why it's being recommended, which is what we do, and then you can choose if you want to take it or not. You can't validate something we're recommending is going to prevent. It's already validated that there's studies showing that something helps with prevent prostate cancer. So we're not doing the validation for that, or at least there's studies related to that. But what we're doing is we're just putting that information together for you so that you can then make a decision. Does this thing make sense for me, given all this information, and then you could either do it or not. Right, so it's I wouldn't say that. That's you know. Like, yeah, you can't really validate that per se. But that's why we give you the all the rationale, so that you can make an intelligent decision and be like, okay, I think this makes sense, or not.
Philip Pape: 21:31
No, it makes perfect sense, man, and I'm just clarifying for the listeners they understand. There's like different systems being put together here, right, there's the genetic analysis and then there's okay, we have epidemiology, we have maybe random controlled trials and maybe we have a bunch of rat studies or whatever. Behind all the other information we think we know about the supplementation, the lifestyle changes and whatnot, because that's another area rife for misinformation, I'm sure you agree it's like. So. Then if you do recommend all of these things let's say it's a ton of different supplementation does it reconcile interactions and dosing and all of that to make sure that the totality makes sense?
Joe Cohen: 22:11
Yeah, I mean it does give you dosing, standard dosing. It doesn't change the dosing based on it just because there's too many unknowns there, but it just tells you what is the best thing for, like it prioritizes what's the most important thing for you, what are the most important things? And then you could keep going down the list and see like okay, so here's my top 10, top 15, top 20. You can just keep going down and see what makes sense for you to do cool.
Philip Pape: 22:43
And going back to the genetic variations I know you mentioned, it's very hard, it's very infrequent that you're going to have like one gene that's going to affect a clear outcome. There's something called the speed gene, I think ACTN3, I was looking up just some genes to ask you about and this is one has to do with fast twitch muscle fibers. Um, I like, if you take that example right, how actionable is something like that? Like if you know for a fact, because there are certain things I've seen with other services, they'll say, okay, you're a morning person versus a night person, so you need to go to bed earlier or later. Or you know you burn carbs better than you burn fat, so and I'm always skeptical of those conclusions so what are your thoughts on that?
Joe Cohen: 23:21
I don't personally know what to do with the fast Twitch fiber one like what are you going to do with that information?
Philip Pape: 23:28
I mean I don't know, yeah, I don't know, higher reps versus lower reps.
Joe Cohen: 23:32
I have no idea I don't think I would train. That's what I'm saying. Like there's specific things.
Tony: 23:37
Like I don't think you're going to figure out higher reps versus lower reps based on your genetics you just got to train and figure it out right, because that's the advice I would give is you're going to figure it out when you train yeah, yeah, what you could do is like, let's say, it could tell you what your natural vo2 max tendency is and then it could give you ways to improve your vo2 max and and some of those improvements could be genetic based.
Joe Cohen: 24:03
So then there is specific variants that if we know that you already have an issue and we could say we can make it. Sometimes there are studies that show that if you have this predisposition or if you do this when you have high LDL cholesterol, it'll bring down your cholesterol more if you take this drug or this supplement or something like that. So there are studies done like that and we put that in the software. Also, there's other things that If we see a supplement works in a certain pathway, we will say that this thing can help. You have this pathway that is high risk and this thing could help with that. Or, for example, if we see you have a predisposition for lower vitamin C and vitamin C is related to some condition like low vitamin C, we could say that put it up higher on the list and say, because you have this predisposition, so that's all explained. So there's kind of like the macro picture which I think is important for genetics. You want to see what you're at risk for. And then there's like going into the details where sometimes you might change up a recommendation for something, like you might try something else first. You know like acne could be from like 20 different causes. So this is an example. You know, my girlfriend had some acne and I I gave her some general stuff and that helped, but not completely. And then we were trying different things and we I was actually waiting for a genetic test because I thought that would help to see if it's actually genetic or not. Turns out it's not and she said nobody in her family has it, so it's, it's like something that's not genetic with her. And I also saw it wasn't. Like I was already suspecting that it was hormonal, but we didn't have the data for it. Now we see that it's not genetic and it actually doesn't, and the doctor told her he thought it was hormonal as well, like she does have higher testosterone levels for a girl. So, for example, you know that that could be a reason why a girl has acne right, or it could be from many, many other reasons, different kinds of acne. But this is an example where also genetics can sometimes help you figure out. Like, hey, if it is genetic, then there's other things to do about it, right? If it's not genetic, if it's more environmental, because you just have some elevated hormone, then there's going to be other things. If it's genetic, it usually means there's multiple biochemical pathways at work and you kind of need to do a bunch of things, but then when you do that it will help. If it's an environmental thing, it's usually something very specific that's causing it. Just be a specific hormone. It could be a specific thing. Then if you do other things, it's just not going to help as much because you just didn't do the exact thing that you needed to do. So that also is a method where you could use genetics to help. And then I would say that there is a functional way to use genetics as well, and I want to get into that. The functional way is you're looking at so we do have this approach, for example.
Joe Cohen: 27:22
Okay, so we look at pathways. For example, we have a methylation, detox pathway, histamine pathway and what we do there. I think it's reasonably good actually. So what we do there is we will look at all the genes in a given pathway. So methylation, so we're already narrowing down to something specific. You take one of the main genes with methylation. So there's about 30 different genes in methylation. We see how does it relate. We make a diagram. We see all the different SNPs within a gene and any time like if overall you have risk in a gene, it will light up red so you could see the pathway as a whole. And then we give recommendations based on the pathway as a whole and I think that could be useful in. You do need like a provider sometimes or you need to be a nerd to like really read, but I do think the pathways when we're designing it sometimes we don't know exactly like like I don't know how my results are going to be, but when I like plug it in, I'm like pretty good in terms of the recommendations and showing what are all the things in the path, like things I wouldn't be able to figure out if not seeing a diagram. So we have the pathway reports.
Joe Cohen: 28:33
Unfortunately, the other companies do not do a comprehensive job at these pathway reports and so again it falls short with what they're doing. Even within this approach they're not doing a good job. And then there's like the Gary Brekka DNA company kind of approach where they're looking at like five SNPs, the DNA company, 83 SNPs and they're trying to make very broad conclusions based on you know you. Basically the whole 10x health report is if you have mthfr or not. The other stuff is just not significant enough. It's like do you have mthfr, yes or no, and we will test it. Like you can get that from any dna test pretty much, but they're just overcharging you for it. Like you can do our test for 600 bucks, get you know thousands of reports and all this kind of advanced tech, or you could do theirs for 600 bucks and you just get MTHFR. So it's like and in ours you'll get MTHFR as well.
Joe Cohen: 29:36
That's what I mean by it's a scam in in the sense that they're really like mthfr is an important gene. Everybody should know it if they have like these variants. But it's just kind of like over emphasis on one gene. Right, there's many other important genes and and, like you said, apo e is important. You should know what braca is important. These are things. These are important genes, not saying not. But the problem is that, first of all, if you don't have ApoE, you could still have high risk for Alzheimer's and if you do have ApoE, you can have low risk. You really have to look at many of the genes, right. So that's where the problem comes in. When you try to look at specific genes, even the most significant ones out there, it's still not going to give you an accurate prediction. And but now, when you get to the functional ones, when you exclude MTHFR, the functional ones are usually much less predictive of anything.
Philip Pape: 30:31
And yet the functional ones, like you said. That really got my, you know nerd brain going as an engineer of like imagining a dashboard up on a, you know, in a control room right when you see the chain of events and you see the feedback loop and everything connected and you're trying to identify that chain of events genetically and where things are hung up or at high risk. Are you able to, like you mentioned, the methylation pathway? Are you able to combine that with then, say, blood work, lab work, Because I've heard you talk on other shows about you know, it's not just genetics, we also have a whole health side of the marker analysis. Combine those to also do a before and after when you make a change, because that's the other thing I'm wondering about is, okay, you've done these things, how do you get an after? Because your genes don't change? So what does change and can you measure that? So that's what comes to mind for me right now.
Joe Cohen: 31:17
Yeah, you can do blood tests on everything. So what we do is, any time we have a report, let's say, if I have high risk for cardiovascular disease, right, we will tell you all the different blood tests that are related to cardiovascular disease and then you can upload it. You buy the test, you upload it. Whether it's from us or not, it doesn't matter. You get the test, you upload it and then we can tell you which ones are increasing your risk, which ones are decreasing your risk, and so then you could focus and we tell you each one how to reduce the risk for the marker. So once you know that you're at high risk for cardiovascular disease, first of all, some people maybe would want to start taking statins. We'll tell you. We have a pharmacogenomics report to see.
Joe Cohen: 32:01
Are you going to get muscle pain from statins? For me it says I do get muscle pain and I just you know I'm an experimenter, so I'm like, let me see, I'm going to see. Most people I don't think want to do that. Right, they're not going to do what I'm doing, just to experiment for the science purpose. But I took it and I got very severe muscle pain. Interesting and also, yeah, so there's kind of like you know there's like the pharmacogenomics part of it which is pretty good. So you could see that if you do have specific variants, pharmacogenomics is typically of a specific variant. You're going to do worse or better with a drug. That does have an influence. I'm not saying not. The problem with some of the supplements are sometimes there's studies. A lot of times there's not. But even then it's not going to say to take a drug or not. If you just get your pharmacogenomics report, you still need to see are you at risk for the condition? Right, like? You have to see a lot more information. So you really need a very robust, comprehensive platform. But yeah, so let's say someone has cardiovascular disease.
Joe Cohen: 33:07
If you also have, you could have the risk from genetics, but you might have low cholesterol. I mean, you're still high risk. It's actually what they the recent study found in you know top journal that we didn't publish this one. But we have our own studies that we publish on our results, which shows that we have the best results when we benchmark it. But this study was just showing that cardiovascular disease in genetics, if you have a high polygenic risk score for cardiovascular, it's actually more important than pretty much any other risk factor that you can have Blood pressure cholesterol. It's actually more important than pretty much any other risk factor that you can have Blood pressure cholesterol. It's like pretty much tied with like blood pressure, which is pretty huge, so, but it's more important than cholesterol, than high cholesterol or any of these other markers that you might have, even like inflammation.
Joe Cohen: 33:55
Just when they look at all the different things, you have a high polygenic risk score. It just comes to the top. This is the most significant thing in terms of risk. Now, what you can do under that circumstance is make sure all the other markers are low risk and also do certain things that prevent cardiovascular disease in general. There's a whole bunch of stuff you could do, and so that's what I did. I just make sure I do have a high risk of coronary artery disease in my genetics and I just make sure that I've got low risk in all of the labs that are related to cardiovascular disease. So I can see that it's changing, that the labs get better. It's high risk. Then it goes to low risk, right, and so you can change these things.
Philip Pape: 34:39
Yeah, man, I get so many questions. I could talk to you for hours, to be honest, because I'm like what do I focus in on?
Tony: 34:45
My name is Tony. I'm a strength lifter in my 40s. Thank you to Phil and his Wits and Weights community for helping me learn more about nutrition and how to implement better ideas into my strength training. Phil has a very, very good understanding of macros and chemical compounds and hormones and all that and he's continuously learning. That's what I like about Phil. He's got a great sense of humor. He's very relaxed, very easy to talk to. One of the greatest things about Phil, in my view, is that he practices what he preaches. He also works out with barbells. He trains heavy not as heavy as me, but he trains heavy. So if you talk with him about getting in better shape, eating better, he's probably going to give you some good advice and I would strongly recommend you talk with him and he'll help you out.
Philip Pape: 35:28
Cardiovascular disease. We talk about that a lot in the show in the context of obesity, lifestyle and also how age-related disease has evolved over humanity's existence. Right, Like at one point we didn't see any of these diseases, and even things like type two diabetes we used to call it adult onset and now it's in children, right, Because of lifestyle. And so that brings up the question of epigenetics. Like if you went to Homo sapiens 20,000 years ago and did a genetic test, would they have a risk of cardiovascular disease still? Or has that been bred into us via more recent modern man's lifestyle? You know what I mean. Like those questions come to mind no, they always.
Joe Cohen: 36:05
They always had. The risk was always there. The genetic risks are always there and and not people could die from a heart heart disease, even if they live a very natural lifestyle true, yes it's, even if they live a very healthy lifestyle.
Joe Cohen: 36:20
And then the question is how long you're going to? You're going to die from heart disease at some age, no matter what Right, maybe if you live to a hundred, maybe if it's 90, some people 35, right Like if they're very young. So you know, living like an unhealthy lifestyle could make someone get heart disease at 70 or 60 instead of 90 or 80. But what I'm saying is that now, so if you don't have genetic risk, you'll still get heart disease. But the question is when. And if you have a high genetic risk, it's going to be 20 years earlier, let's say to be 20 years earlier. Let's say and so if you have a high genetic risk and you don't eat healthy, you can get a heart.
Philip Pape: 37:08
Like people were dying from heart disease all the time, like earlier ages and then you know, throughout history, yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. What you're saying makes sense in terms of the risk versus when you would get it and whether it's inevitable. And we see a correlation, right with lifestyle and obesity and that going up because of the reason you said is you're accelerating the process. So another one related to this comes up is autoimmune conditions. Pat, a lot of clients have had different autoimmune conditions, from lupus to rheumatoid arthritis to you know undifferentiated things that they show up in their lab work, right, they have the antibodies for it. They may or may not have the diagnosis and there are obviously different medications and there's what do you call it biologics today, like Dupixan and things like that, that can deal with those. But one of the recommendations for certain autoimmune conditions is elimination diets because there's something that is triggering, right, the inflammation in your food. How does that fit into all of this in terms of you know, the recommendations? Does that make sense?
Joe Cohen: 38:07
I might be. Yeah, so I might be the only person in the world, definitely the only person I know I've heard of. I used to be on a carnivore diet. I could only eat meat. If I ate anything else, I get like brain fog, pains, like fibromyalgia, just everything. Every random issue would just my body would just start going, you know hey, if you had an apple, like it would be a problem.
Joe Cohen: 38:30
Yeah, if you just yeah, if I ate an apple, I get like, start getting like tired, like, oh, I can't think, I don't know what's going on. My brain slows down. You know, like I get a food coma from an apple, literally, and I get bloated and like it's like, wow, you ate an apple and now I'm bloated. I can't think Unmotivated. I'm like, you know, it's as if I, it's as if maybe someone else ate like a heavy pasta, huge heavy pasta.
Philip Pape: 39:02
And then you, you know, and they're like, oh, like you get a little, you know how you get a little brain like oh yeah, or drink wine, like when I drink wine, or something like that. Yeah, same thing yeah.
Joe Cohen: 39:10
So it was like I would eat an apple and that would happen, right, I'd be like what the fuck's going now? If I eat something else, like a bread, I'd be out for days. So I basically just at a certain point, I figured out in 2013 already that I need to go on this diet that doesn't have any. It's just meat and chicken, beef, chicken and really clean salmon, and that's it. That's all I ate. Wild Alaskan frozen salmon crazy. I should warm it up and like no spices, nothing like, just very plain, just beef, and I would just, yeah, I would melt down from everything.
Joe Cohen: 39:53
Uh, now I can eat anything bread, gluten, everything, literally everything and the way I did that was reverse all my food sensitivities. It was actually somewhat gradual, but it was also pretty like there was things that I figured out. Oh, I got to do this and then it just made a huge difference and now I could just eat anything. So we were talking about like so number one is in my results come up that have a high risk of food sensitivities and also food allergies, but what we see is that I also reversed it. So I had it from a young age already. I remember as long as I can remember I would get tired from eating, like bread or any kind of you know any carbohydrates. And then now I don't. Now I could eat anything cheese, dairy milk, whatever you name it. It doesn't matter if it's A2, a1, a, this gluten, whatever. It doesn't make a difference.
Philip Pape: 40:52
That's a big business.
Joe Cohen: 40:52
right there there's a lot of people who have issues with food and I noticed that everybody has some issues with food and it's more of a problem that as you get older you lose tolerance to foods and it's also how much. There's also a degree of like. If you have a reaction 10 percent or 20 percent or 100 percent you just get, like you know, out of commission. 20% or 100%, you just get out of commission. Two people could have a food coma. One gets maybe 5% tired but they're still able to work and do whatever. The other person gets slammed the whole day. They can't function. And you see that even people who are like beasts they eat a pasta in the morning A lot of them are just like fucked, so they don't do that. They'll just kind of like. A lot of people will do intermittent fasting because they kind of know they'll eat something, but it slows them down. Food is not supposed to slow you down.
Philip Pape: 41:49
Yeah, so they work around it by either starting to restrict or to strict a timing.
Joe Cohen: 41:53
Yeah, and so. But if you're, if you know how to do it and again, like the only way I figured it out was with precision health then you could fix all these things, and same with any kind of issue. There's a way to fix all these things. It's just a question of do you know the right way to do it? And unfortunately, you know charlatans are taking it over by saying we're going to test five snips and tell you everything you need to know. Like you know, if you got anxiety, you got heart to MTHFR. Let me explain to you. It's like this is your whole world. You're like whoa, I can do this test.
Philip Pape: 42:33
It sounds so simple, doesn't it?
Joe Cohen: 42:35
Right. So simple it's. Just let me tell you something. It's MTHFR. It's so simple it's just. Let me tell you something. It's MTHFR. It's the secret. We do have all these functional reports. By the way, One of the things we did was we just replicated every one of these other companies, so that if you're like curious, oh, I want this 10X report, we're like, let's make this better so that it's not complete shit, and then call it something else 100X, whatever. I get it, man.
Philip Pape: 43:05
So wait before we get off the food thing because I know we're almost out of time is just give me one example of how one of the foods you were intolerant to, how you overcame that. Now I'm really curious about that.
Joe Cohen: 43:19
So for me, with food, intolerance is not one reason why you're intolerant to food, and it's very kind of. I would say that I figured things out over time over, but there was a very big acceleration. So I figured things out from 15 years ago already, but there was a very big acceleration in the past couple of years because of how intelligent the software and just precision health has become like more accessible to blood tests, better software. So in the past three and a half years think about it like this I reduced the food sensitivities. But it was at a point where my diet was like I could eat vegetables and fruits and so it was like, okay, I'm not just eating meat and beef, right, like I'll eat. And then I was kind of eating some fruit, nuts and seeds sometimes. But then I just figured out one thing at a time boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, just.
Joe Cohen: 44:18
And like each thing I figured out I was like whoa, the sensitivities went down more, 80%, 90%. Now I can eat this, I eat avocados. I remember just reacting to every single food I eat avocados, boom. And then two years ago I would not react to 60% of foods, then 70%, 80%, and as I did more and more things. Now I'm just like I can eat whatever I want. Now I've got the least restrictions. People are like, oh, I can't eat this, or else If I eat pizza now, I'm fine. I don't have a food coma, which would be anathema. Forget about pizza. I couldn't eat an apple, yeah yeah, yeah, no that apple.
Philip Pape: 44:59
Man, I couldn't eat an apple, you know?
Joe Cohen: 45:00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no that apple man, I couldn't eat a fucking tomato, forget about an apple, you know.
Philip Pape: 45:09
And the reason this is important right is because, at the end of the day, we want people to live their lives and enjoy food. Food is good, right, and there's too much fear-mongering around it, and some of it may come from a legitimate place, but it's generalized and it's marketed as if, like, this is the diet, this is the perfect diet, and we talk about restriction versus like flexible, personalized restraint. You know, like you want to have flexibility, you want to have some level of restraint in your diet depending on your goal, but then also, hopefully, you can eat whatever the heck you want If that's a food you enjoy and there's a way to get there. So this is awesome, man. I mean, I know we just scratched the surface. Folks can find a lot of your content, but where do we want to send them to to learn more about your work right away?
Joe Cohen: 45:45
I would say Self Decode or Mr Biohacker on Instagram. There's some content there and I think it's important to understand. Really, like, genetics has huge, huge power and precision. Health in general is is very significant. The problem nowadays is it's just going to the person who markets it the best, which is an issue, right.
Joe Cohen: 46:09
And what are these people going to say? They're going to say that I've spoken to some of these people. I'm almost I'm, like you guys realize like what's going. They usually will bury their head in the sand, but also they're going to be like oh, we're, you know, we're just looking at the functional genes and so number one is we, we do that, we can do that, we do that Right, so that if somebody wants that, it's like, here you go.
Joe Cohen: 46:34
But the problem is it's it just doesn't like the if, like, you can't just make predictions based on specific variants, even though they're going to tell you, oh, it's all validated. By the way, that word validation can mean two very different things, right? What they're saying is that there's some kind of study that shows an association between a gene, a SNP, and a condition, between a gene, a SNP and a condition. The problem is that that association might exist, but it wouldn't exist across all different ancestries. It might not be replicatable.
Joe Cohen: 47:07
Now, let's say it is replicatable. The effect size is so small that you would need to add up hundreds of genes in order to get something significant. So the problem is the effect size. But we do still allow people to use genetics in that way because I think sometimes, if you want to play detective, you can learn, you could pick up interesting insights here and there by looking at these genes, and so we just do everything. We've become like the everything platform, and part of the reason we also do everything is because we also license out the technology to other businesses okay so it's basically whatever we get a request for, or if another company's doing something, it's like we can do that too.
Joe Cohen: 47:51
Not a problem here here it is right. Like so we just have like kind of a smorgasbord of everything you could do with genetics and I would you know, and whatever someone wants you could do with genetics and I would you know, and whatever someone wants you can do, right. Like it's like you want this gene, you got it. What do you want? Tell us the genes. We make like custom reports, whatever you want. If you wanted to make a wits and weights genetic report, we can make one for you. You just tell us the topics. Whatever you want in there, we put it in there.
Philip Pape: 48:21
Love it man. Love it man. Yeah, I'm all about data. Like you said, you can't really have too much. It's just can you make sense of it? And, with the power of what we have now with tools and AI and what you guys are doing and the validation, I think that's awesome People this. So we'll send them to selfdecodecom and check out Joe on IG at Mr Biohacker and Joe man. Thanks for your time, thanks for coming on and sharing this. I'm glad we had you to discuss the future, the future of health and medicine and all of this today.
Joe Cohen: 48:50
Appreciate it. And one last tip is you could also upload your lab tests. For me it's like a game I play. Can I move my lab results? And what's amazing is that you can move every single lab result. It's unbelievable.
Philip Pape: 49:04
Nice and then so you can interpret the before and after per the question I had earlier right and see what you've done.
Joe Cohen: 49:09
So yeah, that's what it's all about.
Philip Pape: 49:11
Yeah, you got to, you got to change your. You have to have data that's actionable, that you could make a change from and then be able to measure every lab test, every single blood test you take.
Joe Cohen: 49:19
You can alter.
Philip Pape: 49:21
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it's in your control, folks, all right. Well, thanks for coming on, joe.
Joe Cohen: 49:25
Thanks for having me.
