Why I Got Hooked on Genetics | EP001

If you were to ask a five-year-old in your neighborhood what they wanted to be when they grow up, chances are very slim they would say pharmacist. But that was my dream. I always wanted to be a pharmacist. I actually would visit drugstores, even as a child, because it was just something attractive about a drugstore. Then I got the opportunity to work in a drugstore, and the moment I started there, it felt like home. Drugs, to me, were just a magical thing, because when I was five years old, I had been very sick. I was in a different city. I was with my great-auntie, who I didn't really know. I got physically sick, and she took me down the street to this very friendly man who gave me something to drink. And within a few minutes, I felt so much better that I said to my auntie and the universe, someday I'm going to do that. I'm going to take people's pain away and make them feel better. Later on, I walked into a drugstore. I got that same feeling. This is where I want to be. This is where home is for me. This is something I want to do. I really want to investigate this and become the best pharmacist possible. I had the opportunity to go to university to get my degree. And when I got my degree, it was a degree in pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. As a matter of fact, my class was the last class to study both pharmacognosy, a very unfamiliar word these days, and pharmacy plus pharmacology. Pharmacognosy is the study of plants for medicine. So we actually learned how to extract things from plants and make medicine out of them, a long lost art. Now, of course, we have compounding pharmacy where they take already extracted things and mix them up for you. And everybody thinks it's a new thing and a wonderful science. But it was actually how pharmacy was practiced for many years. I was able to buy a drugstore later on in life. And in the basement was the most incredible display of roots and bark and things that they used to use to extract individual ingredients from and make these products. It was a very exciting time for me to be able to do that. As I moved through my career, I had this unfortunate incident where I became very, very ill. Actually, I was given about six days to live. The medical profession, they wouldn't put me in the hospital because they didn't know what I had. So I was just sick and at home with my family. I lost 33 pounds in about three and a half weeks. And it was the first time that something came up in me that questioned the medical system and the availability of answers to people who were really sick. But I recovered from that and quickly put it out of my mind and continued on my trail down being a great pharmacist and opening drugstores. And I ended up with three drugstores, lots of staff. And I really felt like I was helping people, was involved in the community. I was doing things that other pharmacists wouldn't do. I would make house visits. I would actually, for elderly people, take their dose set and fill up their dose set for them. And you know what? I loved it so much that I could work 100 hours a week and I wouldn't even think about it. And it's kind of funny because, you know, when we have a job that we really love and we do it to the best of our ability. And in the back of our mind, we tell ourself, we're doing this for our family. But the last people we're spending time with is our family. And that was kind of my situation. But they seemed to understand and they were very encouraging. Actually, our daughter came to work at my pharmacy when she was a very young lady. And it was just the most enjoyable time until I got sick. And I found out that they didn't have all the answers. So it started to raise these questions in my mind. So I'm honestly going to tell you that I was hooked on drugs. Like I just thought I had the answer. I thought I had the answer for, you know, a pill for every ill, something for everyone. And when I started pharmacy, people used to come into my store and they would ask me, Do you have something for that? And what they meant by that was, do you have a pill, a potion, a lotion, something that they could use that would very quickly help them recover from whatever it was they were suffering from. And they could just get back to life, whether that was work, whether that was family, whether it was school, whatever it was. And I was happy to do that. I learned all about everything that I possibly could. I even brought things into my store from my pharmacognosy experience that people had never heard of to supply people with things that they had no idea still existed and supply these really amazing experiences for people because they go, you know, I'm really, I'm really sick. And then I would give them something they'd never heard of. And a few days later, they would be like, well, that was really wonderful. Where did you get that? How did you know about that? Well, that's because I had the opportunity to take pharmacognosy. But when I was sick, there was this question that was raised in the back of my mind. Is this the answer to everything? Now, when I had gone to university, we studied genetics. You know, it was kind of the ancestry kind of genetics. You know, you get certain amount of genes from your mom and certain amount from your dad. Actually, you get 12,000 from mom, 12,000 from dad. And they come together in a new combination. And then, of course, their genes have had the same opportunity, 12,000 from mom, 12,000 from dad. So now you have not only these 12,000, but you've got an additional 24,000 genes. And all of them come together and they make a genetic panel for you. And I thought, well, this is really kind of interesting, I guess. But there's really no functional way to use this. And I don't know what I would do with it. And certainly in the pharmacy practice, it meant nothing at that time. And then people decided they needed to do the human genome and really take the genome apart and see if they could understand. Now, the purpose behind the genome originally, yes, was to understand human genetics, but to understand it from the point of view of illness. And just for your information, only about 4% of all the diseases that we deal with actually have their root cause in genetics. The others have their root cause in lifestyle and other things. So I put that aside. I put genetics aside. I thought, well, there's nothing there for me. I just have what I have and I'm going to be the best at what I do in doing that. And that was my total life. And I loved it. I loved every minute of it. I loved getting to know my patients. I loved getting to know their situation. And I loved helping them. We even ran a study with an obstetrician-gynecologist where we decided that we would see if we can affect the outcome of children through food, nutrition. We did all sorts of things. We actually did 100 patients in that study. And we would put the people, the ladies, on a special diet as soon as they found out they were pregnant. And we would give them things that I knew about from my pharmacognosy practice, things that had some history that were ancient now and not used. And the amazing result of that was in that time of period, those 100 ladies that had children, we never had one child that had a childhood illness. We followed those children for four years after they were born. And nothing occurred. There was no ADHD. There was no autism. So it was just an experience that we did and we ran. And it gave me some insight into the fact that there's maybe a little bit more to pharmacy. So you can see what's happening here. I was totally dedicated to being a pharmacist. Like I say, I was really hooked on drugs when I started this. But there was some cracks starting to come in my overall perspective about how medicine could be delivered. Now, many of you that would be listening to this, if you're my age, remember that you could go to the drugstore, you could buy your cigarettes at the front and your Ventolin inhaler at the back. I thought that was really quite counterproductive to what we were trying to do with people, selling them things that we knew were damaging their health and then actually selling them the solution at the back of the store. So myself and some other pharmacists got together. We put a lobby together to lobby the federal government to actually remove cigarettes from drugstores. Obviously, we're successful. If you go into a drugstore today anywhere in Canada, you can no longer buy tobacco products at a drugstore. And that was one of my greatest accomplishments. I also thought, well, if I'm going to be this good pharmacist and this really sort of excellent person, I'd like to get my face out there and talk about it. So I became the media director for the Alberta Pharmaceutical Association. So if there was an incident in the province of Alberta, I was the person who would be interviewed by the television or radio stations to talk about that incident, how it would affect the public, and the pharmacy association and pharmacists in general. I'm happy to report that even as of 2024, which is the latest statistics we have, that pharmacists are still the most trusted profession out of all professions. And I think it's well-deserved. They work hard, they know their stuff, and they're available. They're the most available healthcare practitioner that you can find. Many drugstores are even open 24 hours a day now, and you can find a pharmacist to talk to. And generally, they can provide some information or some insight that will help you feel better about yourself. In my own practice, this crack of, do we have all the answers, kind of started to grow. So when I got really sick and there was no answers to that, I recovered, obviously, and went back to my job. But I had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that something was missing. I just didn't know what that was. Later on in my life, and just a few years ago, my two eldest brothers both passed away within a few months of each other with the complications of diabetes. Now, diabetes is something that we think we know a lot about. We know the treatment modalities. We have many drugs for it. Of course, insulin was created here in Canada. It's one of our greatest accomplishments. A Nobel Prize was given out for the discovery of insulin. And we feel like we have a real handle on that. So to have two of my brothers actually suffer the complications and ultimately die from the complications of diabetes was very disturbing to me. And I wanted answers for myself. I didn't know where to go. But I stepped outside of the regular allopathic medical system. And one of the very first things that my naturopath, who I went to, suggested is that I would have my DNA done. I had a DNA test done. It's a very simple test. It's not complicated. And ultimately, it's really not expensive. Although it looks like it, it's maybe $500 up front. And that looks like a big expense. But what I got out of it was worth way more than that. I had my genetics done. And fortunately, I discovered that if I worked at it, I could be diabetic. But I wasn't destined to go down the same path as my brothers. When I realized I wasn't going down the same path as my brothers, it opened a whole new world to me. If this was true for me, how many other people is this true for? We look at the rise of diabetes. We look at the rise of cardiovascular disease. We look at the rise of cancer. We look at all the money that's gone into researching cardiovascular disease. All of the drugs that have been developed for cardiovascular disease, for cancer, for diabetes, and these things that plague our population. And it seems like there's this idea, at least in our general society, that age and illness have now become synonymous. As a matter of fact, just recently, someone said to me, it's not a matter of the fact that you're going to pass away from something. It's just what are you going to get and when it's going to happen. It's sort of like we're destined to get something that's going to take us out. And I found that very disturbing that that was the attitude. But it is a general attitude. Think about it. If you were 50 years old or 55 years old and you have an ache or a pain and you go to a doctor, he'll say, well, you know, you're 50. And that's over middle age. In our country, we talk about middle ages. When somebody is 50 or 60, we're like, oh, they're in their middle ages because apparently we're really poor at math. If you double 50 or 60, that would give us a tremendous lifespan. It's actually 40 to 45 is more like middle age. And people don't like to think about that at that age. My children are that age right now. They're 46 and 45. And I tease them about, hey, you're middle age. Welcome to the middle ages for your life. What occurred to me was if that's true for me, what could be true for others? And if we could just get people to do their DNA, what could that been? How would that benefit them? So the benefits for me was I got to look inside myself for the very first time. I got to look at the multiple risk factors that I have that could lead to some chronic disease. But not only did I get a look at what was there, I got to look at what I could do about it. And I think that for me was the missing link. So remember, I had set on my course in pharmacy to take people's pain away. And of course, to be the best pharmacist that I could be. And all of a sudden, I had this new extra element, which was very exciting and very satisfying to me personally. Not only could we use allopathic medicine if required, but we could look inside and say to these people, we now know your fitness genes. We now know your mental health genes. We know your macronutrient needs like protein, carbohydrates, fats. We know how well your body handles life just in general. Not only do you know how it handles that, we can now look at ways that we can improve how your body is going to function for the rest of your life. We could look at the exercise programs that would be most beneficial to you. We can look at food choices that are most beneficial to you. We could even look at things like is weightlifting the best exercise for you or is running the best thing for you. And some people, we look at their genetics and we have to tell them that you're really good at what you do and I know you really love what you do, but here is how your genetics are going to respond to that long term. And if you just would make a small change in that, the outcome could be very different. So for me, it was just this, I'm going to say grand opening. It was like this, I always picture it like this because I was standing on the Grand Canyon one day and I looked at the Grand Canyon and if you've ever been there, you know it's like wow, this is just something so incredible. You see a picture of it, but you can't imagine the depth and the overtaking, overwhelming really. And that's how I felt about DNA. When I first looked at DNA, it was like this whole chasm had opened up. We can see deep inside, we can see the good, we can see where we're not as efficient and now we can have the answers. So yes, I tell people, I used to say to people when they would ask me what I do, I would say, oh I sell drugs, which had more ting a few years ago than it does today. I mean it's a little more common today for that to be true and it was a little funnier years ago. But now I can say to people, I help you uncover the very root of your existence, how you were put together, what you inherited from your parents and how those things are affecting you right now, how your lifestyle choices are affecting you. And even if you are on medication, we can do pharmacogenetics and make sure that the medicine you're taking is appropriate for your genetic profile. So it was just this whole new world that opened up to me, that I became very passionate and excited about and I decided to do this podcast based on the fact it was so valuable to me. So what the essence of this podcast will be in the future is me taking apart some of these features of DNA, talking to you about the most common things I find in DNA testing, talking to you about the most common recommendations we make in DNA testing. We can even get deep into the mental illness. There's been a lot of questions about mental illness recently and what does DNA play a role in that. So there's many things we can explore together. So I'm going to invite you on a journey with me. I've been on the journey myself. I was an allopathic practitioner through and through. And now I'm still an allopathic practitioner in the sense that there are times when medicine is very important to us but I have changed my mind about how we would approach the whole scenario of illness. And certainly one of my goals would be to help you to understand that illness and age are not connected. You do not have to get something. You do not have to suffer like someone else in your family did. Even if your genetics would indicate that that is your course in life, we can change that course in life. Recently I watched a wonderful documentary called Your Second Fifty. In that documentary there was a Dr. Dale Bredesen. Dr. Dale Bredesen is someone who I followed. I've never seen him spoken to before or interviewed. For those of you who don't know, Dr. Dale Bredesen has written a book called The End of Alzheimer's. And what he was talking about was the fact that even that disease, which right now, with the current treatments we have, is going to lead to 45 million people getting Alzheimer's, not being able to recover from Alzheimer's. But Dr. Dale has found a way through genetics, through nutrition, through lifestyle changes, and he has pulled people back from the depths of Alzheimer's. That's how powerful knowing your DNA can be. It can be the most powerful and give you the most control through your own choices of your destiny. There's a new term that people are talking about called healthspan. We used to talk about lifespan, which meant how long am I going to be on this planet. Now we're talking about healthspan. How many days am I going to enjoy the life that I'm on this planet? And how fully can I enjoy those days? And certainly at the root of that is understanding literally what you are made of, what you are made up of, the DNA you are given, and the availability to make changes, which is a study of epigenetics, to that to give you the best life possible. So this is Alan. I'm very excited about taking you on this journey. I hope you'll follow along with me. If you could just like and subscribe these videos, even if you don't listen to every one, it really helps me. I would appreciate that. And I'm going to give you everything that I possibly can of what I've learned over the last five decades of both allopathic medicine, natural medicine, and genetics. For now, we'll see you again. Thank you for watching this podcast. I'd like to mention that it is sponsored by DNA Power, a British Columbia company located in North Vancouver, B.C. DNA is an innovator and currently one of the most popular DNA tests available across the world. DNA's total power is the test that I had done, which gave me the blueprint to help me live a better life. I'm strongly going to encourage you to have your DNA test, and I've included a link below, dnapower.com slash alan53. If you click on that link, you will get a 10% discount on the total power test if you put alan53 in the coupon code at the checkout of the DNA Power test.