Epigenetics - The Medicine Nobody Told You About

Before the diagnosis, before the research, before Dubai, there was a life that looked perfect from the outside. Two successful careers, two healthy daughters, a beautiful home in the Bavarian Alps. And underneath all of it, two people running on empty. This is the story of how chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and years on the treadmill created the conditions for a genetic disease to wake up. And how a wife who refused to accept the doctors' answers began searching for a different story.
 
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Music by DJKiyo

I spent three months reading medical research at two in the morning, looking for answers the entire medical system said didn't exist. This episode takes you inside the detective work, the specialists I saw, the geneticist who laughed at the doctor who ordered the test, and the moment I found a diagnosis that nobody else had thought of. And what it felt like to be right when you wish you were wrong.
 
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Free Guide - How to advocate yourself in difficult medical appointments: LINK
 
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Music by DJKiyo

My husband said something that broke me and then, a few hours later, lit a fire that hasn't gone out since. This is the moment I discovered epigenetics. The moment I understood that the diagnosis was not the whole story. And the moment our marriage became a project to prove that the doctors' prognosis was not fixed.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Free Guide - Start Listening to Your Body: [link when ready]
Ready to go deeper? I offer 1:1 epigenetic coaching. Learn more: www.dr-nicolaschmitz.com
Stay connected:
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Instagram: @alter._health
Email: support@dr-nicola-schmitz.com
Music by DJKiyo

I sat at my desk and cried in fury when I realized that the knowledge to help my husband had been in peer-reviewed journals the whole time. Nobody had taught it to me in medical school. This episode explains why genes turn on and off, what five factors created the conditions for his disease to activate, and why conventional medicine missed all of it.
 
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Music by DJKiyo

We sold our practices. We sold our house. We took our daughters and moved to Dubai. Not because we were running away. Because we understood that you cannot heal in the same environment that broke you. This episode tells the story of the biggest external change of our lives, and what happened to our bodies when we finally gave them space to recover.
 
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Website: www.dr-nicolaschmitz.com
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Music by DJKiyo

I spent years doing this work quietly, one person at a time. This episode is about why I finally started saying it out loud. About the resistance I had to overcome. About who this podcast is for. And about what I hope happens between you and me over the seasons to come.
 
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Website: www.dr-nicolaschmitz.com
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Music by DJKiyo

Two identical twin sisters, raised in the same house in northern Germany, ended up in their late fifties with two completely different bodies. Same DNA, two different lives, two different biologies. This is the door into Season 2, and into one of the most important scientific findings of the last twenty years: your genes are not the script of your life. There is a layer above the genes, called the epigenome, that decides what each gene actually does. And that layer is being shaped, every day, by what you eat, how you sleep, how you move, how you feel, and who you spend your days with.
In this opening episode, we look at the strange and humbling story of the Human Genome Project, how researchers expected to find a hundred thousand human genes and instead found about twenty thousand, roughly the same as a roundworm. We look at what was hiding in the ninety-eight percent of DNA once dismissed as junk. And we introduce the piano metaphor that will hold together the rest of the season.
If you have ever wondered why one person stays well and another falls apart on the same diet, in the same family, with the same medical care, this is the episode that answers the question.
 
Sources
National Human Genome Research Institute - Human Genome Project Fact Sheethttps://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/fact-sheets/human-genome-project
National Institutes of Health - National Human Genome Research Institute Almanachttps://www.nih.gov/about-nih/nih-almanac/national-human-genome-research-institute-nhgri
Feinberg, A. P. - The Key Role of Epigenetics in Human Disease Prevention and Mitigationhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3752894/
Alegría-Torres, J. A., Baccarelli, A., & Bollati, V. - Epigenetics and Lifestylehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3752894/
Bruce H. Lipton - The Biology of Beliefhttps://us.macmillan.com/books/9781683649076/thebiologyofbelief/
 
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If a doctor has ever told you that something runs in your family and there is nothing you can do about it, this episode is for you. Genetic risk is real. Genetic destiny is not. The gap between the two is where almost all of the useful work happens, and almost nobody is taught to see it.
We look at penetrance, which is the technical word for how often a gene actually produces the trait it codes for. We look at the Dutch Hunger Winter studies, which showed that what one generation lives through can shape the biology of the next. And we walk through a client story about a woman who was tested for the BRCA1 gene and, after receiving her result, said something that stays with me: I have wasted twenty years.
Free download with this episode: Family History Mapping, a structured guide to look at your own family history and see the patterns that actually matter. 
If you carry a family history that has been weighing on you, or you want to think about your own biology with better information, this is for you.
 
Sources
GeneReviews / NCBI Bookshelf - BRCA1- and BRCA2-Associated Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancerhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK1247/
National Cancer Institute - BRCA Gene Changes: Cancer Risk and Genetic Testinghttps://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/genetics/brca-fact-sheet
Kuchenbaecker, K. B. et al. - Risks of Breast, Ovarian, and Contralateral Breast Cancer for BRCA1 and BRCA2 Mutation Carriershttps://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2632503
Chen, S. & Parmigiani, G. - Meta-Analysis of BRCA1 and BRCA2 Penetrancehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267287/
Heijmans, B. T. et al. - Persistent Epigenetic Differences Associated with Prenatal Exposure to Famine in Humanshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2579375/
Kaati, G., Bygren, L. O., & Edvinsson, S. - Cardiovascular and Diabetes Mortality Determined by Nutrition During Parents’ and Grandparents’ Slow Growth Periodhttps://www.nature.com/articles/5200859
Vågerö, D. et al. - Paternal Grandfather’s Access to Food Predicts All-Cause and Cancer Mortality in Grandsonshttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07617-9
Ben Lynch - Dirty Geneshttps://www.harpercollins.com/products/dirty-genes-ben-lynch
 
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Everything you do enters your body through four doors. The bloodstream, the nervous system, the hormonal cascade, and the microbiome. Every meal, every night of sleep, every stressful call, every walk, every drink of water passes through one of these four channels and becomes, on the other side, information for your cells.
In this episode, we walk through each of the four doors and see how they actually work. We look at estrogen recycling and why the gut has more to do with hormones than most people realize. We meet a businessman whose morning routine looked perfect from the outside, and whose afternoons quietly undid everything he had built in the mornings. And we set up the bridge into the next episode, where we go deep into methylation, the switch behind everything else we have discussed.
If you have ever wondered what actually happens to a meal or a stressful conversation once it enters your body, this is the episode where the machinery gets visible.
If you are interested in becoming an Epigenetics Coach yourself, have a look here: Certified Epigenetics Coach Training
 
Sources
Hartley, T. R. et al. - Caffeine and Stress: Implications for Risk, Assessment, and Management of Hypertensionhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8101832/
Reis, C. E. G. et al. - Effects of Coffee Consumption on Glucose Metabolismhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6544578/
National Cancer Institute - Benzene and Cancer Riskhttps://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/benzene
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention / NIOSH - Benzene: NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazardshttps://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/npgd0049.html
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - Volatile Organic Compounds’ Impact on Indoor Air Qualityhttps://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/volatile-organic-compounds-impact-indoor-air-quality
Joye, Y. - Some Reflections on the Relevance of Fractals for Art Therapyhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4147024/
 
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Today we do something different. We follow a single molecule on its actual journey, from a leaf of spinach growing in a field, through your gut wall, through your liver, through an enzyme called MTHFR that you may have heard about from genetic testing, into a single cell, all the way to a specific spot on a specific gene where it silences the gene it was made to silence.
The journey is real. It is happening, in some version, in your body right now, trillions of times a second, with the molecules from the food you ate yesterday and this morning. And in most modern adults, the journey is failing at at least one point. Often at several. This episode shows you where those failure points are and what the pathway actually needs to run at full speed.
If your blood work is normal but your energy is not, if your mood swings without obvious cause, if you carry unexplained fatigue that no doctor has been able to name, this is the episode that may explain it.
Free download with this episode: Nutrients Almost Every Westerner Is Low In. A practical reference with the nutrients that support methylation, the best food sources, and notes on supplementation.  For a personal conversation about your own methylation and where to start.
 
Sources
Choi, S. W. et al. - Modulation of DNA Methylation by One-Carbon Metabolismhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10375321/
Raghubeer, S. et al. - Methylenetetrahydrofolate Reductase, the One-Carbon Cycle, and Diseasehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8703276/
Crider, K. S. et al. - Folate and DNA Methylation: A Review of Molecular Mechanisms and the Evidence for Folate’s Rolehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3262611/
Stover, P. J. - One-Carbon Metabolism–Genome Interactions in Folate-Associated Pathologieshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2777484/
Ben Lynch - Dirty Geneshttps://www.harpercollins.com/products/dirty-genes-ben-lynch
 
Stay connected:
Website: www.dr-nicolaschmitz.com
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