Watch this brief VIDEO to help you understand why we feel genetic testing is the most important first step a person can take to better understand their body and attain better health.

At One Eleven Wellness, we complete a genetic test to map out 36 metabolic pathways to get the most precise details about YOU in order to optimize your health.

View a sample report HERE.

If you've heard about genetic testing in the past decade, it's probably been through the marketing of ancestry companies. There's the allure of finding out where you came from (or uncovering family secrets!), and at-home kits provided by these companies have shown everyday people how easy it is to test their DNA.

But unfortunately, due to the popularity and widespread marketing of ancestry tests, most people aren't aware of the other benefits genetic testing can provide. While ancestry testing simply tells you where your family came from, genetic testing for health and wellness can lead you to a whole array of actionable insights into optimizing your eating, exercise, lifestyle choices, and more in order to achieve better health.

Personalized Care

A lot of approaches to health and wellness these days focus on a one-size-fits-all approach, prescribing the same diet, exercise, and lifestyle choices to everyone. But everyone is unique — so shouldn't healthcare be tailored to that unique individual? Genetic testing uncovers a person's genetic variants, which give us insight into how that person’s cells and systems function, show the impact of the types of food you eat and the environment around you, and more.

Disease at the Root

Many times practitioners are only addressing the symptoms of chronic illness. Constantly chasing and treating symptoms can be timely and costly, and never really addresses the root issues anyway. Since genetic testing reveals how your body works at the cellular level, it can point towards the root causes of illnesses that are generating those symptoms. That way, diseases can be treated at the source.

Inflammation

The right amount of inflammation in the body is healthy, and helps speed up the healing process. Chronic disease appears when there's too much inflammation — and you can learn through genetic testing how well your genes keep inflammation at bay.

Detoxification

A person's genes can inform how their body can dispose of toxins that build up. You can learn how well your cells work to detoxify your body, and what you need to change in order to support proper elimination of toxins to prevent disease.

Oxidative Stress

Unchecked oxidative stress can lead to fatigue, memory loss, and other disease, and you can learn how well your genes handle this kind of stress and understand how to implement strategies to protect your body from too much oxidative stress. 

Methylation

This is the process of repairing cells, making new DNA, and ensuring that your cells are working well overall. A genetic test can give you insight into how well this process is working. 

Mood and Behavior

It’s normal for our mood to change depending on the situation, but when our emotional state leads to changes in behavior that affect our ability to deal with daily routines, support should be sought. Genetics affects our ability to manufacture and balance chemicals in the brain that are necessary to manage mood, anxiety, depression, addiction and related behaviors. In addition, diet and lifestyle choices impact brain chemicals and may require adjustment.

Manage Weight

Those who have struggled to lose weight may spend time, energy, and money seeking new ways to get healthy and lose weight when their genes are able to give them all the insight they need. Genes are able to give insight into what types of exercise are best for your body, whether it be more endurance exercises or power exercises. They can also show how your body stores fat, which nutrients it absorbs best to inform which foods to eat, and other insights that can form a more targeted recommendation plan.

Metabolism

Your genes can also tell you more about your metabolism. We know that metabolism has a connection with energy and vibrancy, yet many of us have a "sluggish" metabolism we're not sure how to correct. Knowing your genes can give you insights into how your metabolism is affected by what you eat, how you burn energy, how you store fat, and more.

The Right Exercise

What if you've been hitting the gym and trying to get fit, but you've been doing the wrong exercises all this time? Getting insights into your genes can actually show you whether your body is more suited for endurance activities, like running or bicycling, or whether your body is more suited for power activities like sprinting or weight lifting. Knowing more about how your body works means being able to choose the right activities for you.

Caffeine Intake

We're all affected by caffeine in various ways — some people can drink coffee right up until bedtime, while others have to cut themselves off mid-morning! But do we know why? Our genes can tell us! Our genes are responsible for how quickly we metabolize caffeine, so we can know whether to have that extra cup or not.

Better Daily Choices

As you can see, knowing your genes and how they affect your body can give you insights into many different aspects of your health and wellness so that you can make better choices each day about actions that affect you. For example, did you know that your genes can determine how well your body eliminates toxins, which can help you make choices about what environments to be in? Your genes can also give you insight into your stress levels, and flag if you're not getting enough sleep at night.

More Than Ancestry

Knowing your genes can reveal a lot more to you than just what's stated above. Additionally, as our knowledge continues to increase around how genes work and how they impact our bodies, the blueprint that genetic testing provides for your optimal health will only become more detailed, allowing you to build the perfect life of health and wellness suitable to you.

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It's often assumed that we can't change our genes — so why even try? The truth is that while we can't change our DNA code, our gene expression is a bit of a different story. Our genes express themselves in different ways, and not only affect how we interact with the world around us, the world around us affects how our genes express themselves. That means that lifestyle and food choices we make can actually influence how our genes work. Our genes aren't set in stone, and there's a lot we can do to help them impact our health.

Genetic testing has gained a lot of popularity in the past decade through ancestry companies who can test your DNA and track your family's history. But genetic testing can be used for a lot more than seeing where you came from, and can be used a lot more proactively as well. Genetic testing can tell you how your body functions, right down to the cellular level, and can help you understand how your body processes nutrients, how it metabolizes caffeine, how well it handles inflammation, and much more. It can help you look forward to a healthy future as well as backwards to your ancestors.

It's a common concern to worry about whose hands your genetic test will fall into, and if it'll be used for malicious purposes. But HIPAA laws prevent practitioners from sharing information about a patient's genetic test, and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA, protects individuals from being discriminated against for what's in that test. That means that your employer can't make hiring or firing decisions, nor can your health insurance company restrict coverage, based on a genetic test.

Our knowledge of all areas of science is always evolving. The study of genetics has certainly come a long way since DNA was first studied in the 1950s. Like any other science, our knowledge around genes, their expression, and how they impact health and functionality increases each day. And like with any other science, we practice with what we have, and expand our practice as our knowledge expands. We would never hold back the ability to help a patient just because someone thinks the science "isn't there yet"!

While there may be some genes that are more popular or given more attention than others, genes can't be looked at in isolation. What matters is how genes work together to create an overall picture of a person's health and wellness. We like to say that knowing a person’s genes is like having a blueprint to how their system works. Just as you would never try to build a house with the plans for just one wall or floor, you wouldn't just look at one or two genes in isolation.