Video Transcript
And the last few sections in the report, vitamin A and vitamin D metabolism. So vitamin A, this is a really good section. I’m really interested in learning more about all the things that vitamin A are doing in the body and it’s one of the most important fat soluble nutrients that plays an important role in the immune system, especially in the gut.
And some good studies have been done on the BCM01 variants or BCO1 as it’s sometimes called now. Beta-carotene monooxygenase one, and this is the gene that converts beta-carotene into vitamin A. Now, when you look at the back of your food labels, your bag of carrots or your spinach and it says vitamin A 70% or whatever, that’s actually false, that’s erroneous. There’s no such thing as vitamin A in plants and there’s no vitamin A in plants. That’s beta-carotene. The body has to convert that into vitamin A and the research studies that have been done on these variants, these snips, have shown clearly that there’s a reduced ability to convert beta-carotene into vitamin A, and that could be really important to know.
If you’re a vegan for example, and you don’t get any animal fat, which is the only source of vitamin A, and you carry these BCMO1 variants, you may be vitamin A deficient, because the literature has clearly found that some of these genotypes are associated with 51%, 59% reduced conversion of carotenoids into vitamin A. So there’s the research literature on that.
The other variant here is the CYP26B1, and that’s involved in the metabolism of vitamin A. What the genotype found, the AA risk allele is they break down vitamin A faster, meaning that they may become deficient in vitamin A quicker than somebody who doesn’t have that variation.
The last section in the report is the vitamin D metabolism, and that’s the VDR snips as we see, the FOK1 and then the two on the bottom. So this is the vitamin D receptor and it’s a nuclear receptor, meaning that it’s found in the nucleus of your cell that’s significantly affecting gene expression. We know that vitamin D is important, but unfortunately most clinicians today are not looking at the right form of vitamin D. They’re looking at the 25-OHD and they’re trying to base some kind of a supplement program on the 25-OHD and that’s just simply you can’t do it, because 25-OHD is not the hormone that binds to the VDR. That hormone is known as calcitriol, otherwise known as 125-dihydroxyvitamin D.
So she’s heterozygous for these variants. How that’s significant I don’t exactly know, but I do usually recommend testing the 25-OHD together with the 125 dihydroxy and they should always be close to one to one in a ratio with one another. When you start to see a deviation from one to one, like one to two or two to one, when one is twice as high as the other, that can signal a problem. And we know that vitamin D is really important for calcium metabolism, for immune function, for immune cell signaling, for immune intolerance, for hormone activity. So many things.
So the other genes that are related in the section are the VDBP, which is the vitamin D binding protein, which is known as a GC globulin. Basically this is a transport protein for the different forms of vitamin D, including the precursor 25-OHD, but it also transports the calcitriol which is produced in the kidney and it transports that throughout the bloodstream, and it’s known as a GcMAF, or a macrophage activating factor. So it’s activating, it’s turning on your white blood cell macrophages, which are fighting different kinds of infections, like viruses and things.
So a couple of these other ones here is CYP2R1, and this is involved in the conversion of vitamin D3, cholecalciferol. Let’s say that you get from food, if you eat egg yolk or liver, and it’s converting that into the 25-OHD form. People that have that genotype have lower levels of the 25-OHD which are the precursor to the hormone.
And then NADSYN1 is involved in the synthesis of NAD, and that’s obviously a really important compound. NAD is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, huge co-factor in so many different biochemical reactions in the body, and the research found a lower percentage of people… lower circulating levels of the 25-OHD activity.
So there you have it, the Metabolic Healing/True Report nutrigenomics report. Take you back to the table of contents there to have a look at what the report is and you can have this report ordered yourself if you’d like. I’ll show you the link for that. And here it is, the True Report website, www.true.report. There’s the URL up there, true.report and this is the homepage. If you are a consumer wanting to get the nutrigenomics report here, you can go ahead and click that 23andMe interpretation for consumers and you can purchase single reports for $29. It’ll show you everything you need to do to download your 23andMe raw data file. And you can also buy, if you have a family, you can also upload their data as well.
Remember, the software is totally HIPAA secure and you can log in with your information here once you create your user account and you can turn all that on and get going. So thank you very much for watching this presentation today. Again, my name is Michael McEvoy. I’m the founder of metabolichealing.com as well as the founder of the True Report software. Hope you found that this presentation was useful for you today and look forward to hearing from you in the future. Take care.
