podcast transcript - featuring dr. kendra becker · you can find more information about dr. becker...

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT - FEATURING DR. KENDRA BECKER

The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your condition. Featuring natural health experts from around the world, we share information, tools, products and strategies for living better lives in the areas of physical,

chemical/nutritional and emotional/spiritual well-being.

© 2016 The Centre for Epigenetic Expression. All rights reserved.

Dr. De Koyer: Hello and welcome back to Beyond Your Wildest Genes podcast, my name is Dr. Noah De Koyer and I am your co-host. Today I’m super excited to have Dr. Kendra Becker as our guest.

Dr. Becker and I met at the Functional Forum Annual Christmas party last month and I just knew I had to have her on. How are you today Dr. Becker?

Dr. Becker: Great, and I, very excited to be here Noah.

Dr. De Koyer: Good to hear your voice again. Today we’re going to talk about something that has been elusive to me in my understanding and that’s MTHFR, which I’m really excited about, but before we begin, let me just give your short bio and then we can get going. Sound good?

Dr. Becker: Sounds great.

Dr. De Koyer: Alright, so Dr. Becker is a Naturopath and a 4A specialist working with conditions like asthma, allergies, autism spectrum and atopy/eczema. She is the author of A Delicious Way to Heal the Gut and the co-host of the Holistic Health Hour. You can find more information about Dr. Becker at www.drkendrabecker.com and www.holistichealthhour.com.

So let’s dive right in Dr. Becker.

Dr. Becker: Sure.

Dr. De Koyer: And the question I like to ask first always is, how about a little bit of back story. Tell us, give us a feel about who you are to our audience.

Dr. Becker: Okay. Sure, so I went to college to become a registered nurse. I was going to be the next Florence Nightingale, and I graduated from a very

http://www.drkendrabecker.com

http://www.holistichealthhour.com

�competitive nursing school in Boston and went to work at some of the best hospitals in Boston. But I graduated in a huge nursing glut, so when you graduate in a huge nursing glut, you are a dime a dozen as far as nurses go. I was what was called a float nurse, so they were floating me around every single unit that happened to be short that day, but I never really got a comprehensive training and I wanted something a little bit more, because I was very interested in critical care, in the hyper acuity in the hospital.

So I applied to a program in San Diego and was accepted into a critical care unit as a new graduate nurse, where they trained me on the specific aspects of critical care. So I worked in cardiac surgery for both adults and children and when you spend five years in San Diego and the bulk of your time is outside running or kayaking or just being in nature, being in the hospital and being with sick people, it kind of, at least for me, offset my balance.

So I got very, very interested in holistic medicine and healing through diet, as I did with my own body, and really realized that the conventional aspect of medicine and thinking was just not for me.

So, California at the time was going through a real upheaval with, you know, there’s a huge dichotomy between this wellness lifestyle that California offers, and the convention of the government and the conventional medicine that was really being promoted and offered.

So, I left California and came back to the East Coast and went to a Naturopathic medical school in Connecticut, however, living in Connecticut you’re confined, as far as practice, you are allowed to draw blood, you’re allowed to do physical exams but they don’t treat you really as a conventional doctor does. So I couldn’t sign school physical forms, I couldn’t write a prescription for something like Lyme disease. So because of my nursing degree, I actually completed my APRN as well, so I’m dually certified in Connecticut, so I do actually have the prescriptive right as well.

So that’s my medical background. As far as how I ended up here with, you know, MTHFR and asthma and allergy and autism was, of course it’s always a personal story that gets you to where you’re going and what happened to me was, I had two late miscarriages and I had studied MTHFR in school and I understood the connection between MTHFR and autism and that’s kind of where my practice was 12 years ago. But then when I had my own struggles with my own fertility, I looked a little deeper into really what the mechanism was.

So for me, interestingly enough, I was taking, you know, I was a good girl, I read all the research for both conventional and holistic and you take all this folic acid, which is synthetic and also basically a pharmaceutical, because I was now high risk, I had two late miscarriages. So in doing more research it

The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your condition. Featuring natural health experts from around the world, we share information, tools, products and strategies for living better lives in the areas of physical, chemical/nutritional and emotional/spiritual well-

being.

© 2016 Beyond Your Wildest Genes and The Centre for Epigenetic Expression. All rights reserved.

�was almost like I had, I was like the quintessential cartoon with the lightbulb moment and I thought, “Gee, this isn’t making any sense to me at all, that I have this imbalance, I don’t have the enzyme to break down the prescriptive pharmaceutical of folic acid and I need a much more natural form.”

So that got me, certainly headed down my radical and I switched my prenatal, I switched all of my supplements, at the time I was already gluten free, so I just kind of doubled down a little bit better in, what I call now fertility nutrition, and was able to have two healthy full-term babies, back to back, well three years apart, at home, and that really just opened my eyes to being that person for people, who have questions about MTHFR in particular, and how it implicates our health, both from conception all the way to death, because clearly it’s a facet of life at all aspects.

Dr. De Koyer: Alright, so let’s start right there.

Dr. Becker: Okay.

Dr. De Koyer: What the heck is MTHFR?

Dr. Becker: Alright, so MTHFR, in school we learned it as the Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. So I’m not sure if your podcast is under the umbrella of the FCC, but we can certainly use other words to describe, if you know what I mean?

Dr. De Koyer: Yes.

Dr. Becker: But anyway, so MTHFR is an enzyme, methytetrahydrofolate reductase. So about 60% of the US population is actually missing that enzyme. So this is a problem, and the reason that it is a problem is because what we have done in our big pharma, in our big food is, everything that is out there that is a product, you know, that isn’t food that nature has created, is basically enriched with folic acid. So when you are consuming folic acid and you have this particular enzyme deficiency, you don’t convert the folic acid into the useable form of folate which is called L-5 MTHF.

So basically, what you’ve created into your cells is a bottleneck. So you have a ton of folic acid in your blood and no folate in your cells, and the folate is basically the gasoline for the engine of your cells. So, when this happens in a body, so for example in my case with conception, I was able to conceive without a problem, but because I didn’t have the proper signaling, because I didn’t have the proper nutrition inside my cells, there wasn’t the proper signaling to continue to create or further along pregnancy. So that’s what my hiccup was.


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�I didn’t discover it until I went looking for it. However, in my practice, the bulk of what I see is children and where we see implications as far as MTHFR with children are in all the stuff I see, asthma, autism, allergy, eczema. Because if you think about this as a bottleneck, or as a basic cellular starvation in ever so slightly over-exaggerated terms, you are not getting the basic nutrients that your body needs into the cell, because you’re creating inflammation with something that the body can’t understand how to utilize.

Dr. De Koyer: Does it just solely revolve around folic acid and folate?

Dr. Becker: No, unfortunately it doesn’t. So this particular enzyme yes, it absolutely has to do with the conversion of folic acid to the useable form of folate, called methylfolate, absolutely correct. However, as you know, with the conversion of folate you also need B12, you also need B6, you need co-factors of a whole bunch of useable, elemental minerals like magnesium and calcium and vanadium and molybdenum.

So in the one particular subset enzyme, yes, it involves only the conversion of folic acid to folate. However, in the implication of the entire system, it does involve far more than that, and that’s what makes it challenging to treat.

Dr. De Koyer: Okay, and how do you treat somebody that has this particular deficiency?

Dr. Becker: I always say, as a Naturopath, you know, I always say I have no supplement and no advice for anybody that has a natural birth, a couple of years of breastfeeding, good wholesome food, great sleep, minimal stress and time outside, right? I mean that’s where we all like to be, which is how people don’t come upon these health challenges until later on in life, and of course chiropractic, I should always mention that, and we can talk about that in a minute, because there are some implications with MTHFR and chiropractic.

So basically it’s healthy living right? But depending on what the patients presents with, it depends on what the treatment is, and that’s one of the things that I think is most fascinating about holistic medicine is, 10 people can come in with the same diagnosis, and you would have 10 differentials and 10 different treatment plans. So a lot of times in my practice, with my pediatric patients, it’s a lot of education about staying away from foods with folic acid, right? So if you eliminate the thing that causing your body to be out of balance, a lot of times your body will self-correct and heal and be able to put itself back in balance.


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�In many cases it’s not that easy, right? So sometimes we have to consider diet changes, sometimes we have to consider supplement changes, in some cases a lifelong supplement kind of regime and a lot of times it has to do with, we’ll have to look at blood work and monitor blood levels and really make sure patients are staying in balance.

Dr. De Koyer: So, is the most important thing, what this person, this child, this individual is eating? Is it staying away from folic acid? I guess it’s a little bit of everything, right?

Dr. Becker: Right and you know, food, as we talked about even during the Functional Forum. Food is either your greatest form of healing or your greatest form of poison. So I think it all starts with food, right? And I think that a lot of people who live with this mutation, who don’t have this enzyme to convert folic acid into folate, and eat a healthy diet and have never, ever come into contact with folic acid and never have a problem. So, absolutely, I think it always starts with food.

Dr. De Koyer: Right, so hypothetically, if you had this missing enzyme, and you ate a strict Paleo diet, you would likely never run into any of these problems?

Dr. Becker: Exactly correct, which is really, honestly, my kids are now 7 and 10, what I’m trying to do with my kids, do you know what I mean?

Dr. De Koyer: Right.

Dr. Becker: So, in an ideal world.

Dr. De Koyer: That’s interesting and when you think about it, and you started off talking about this, I mean, when in history did we start dramatically supplementing all our food with folic acid, what was that, 50 years ago, 60 years ago?

Dr. Becker: 1989.

Dr. De Koyer: Okay, so it was sooner than I thought.

Dr. Becker: Yeah, 1989. So here’s the thing. So anthropologically, if you look at this enzyme, almost 100% of people of Italian decent, have two copies of this enzyme, meaning they have no ability to convert folic acid into folate. None whatsoever. Mexican population, the same thing, have almost 100% incidence of having this enzyme and they are unable to convert. But if you look, specifically from the anthropologic standpoint, at the difference between the Mexican diet and the Italian diet, what you’re seeing in a Mediterranean diet, which has a much better balance of vegetables and grains, versus a Mexican diet which is very, very heavily based in corn and The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your

condition. Featuring natural health experts from around the world, we share information, tools, products and strategies for living better lives in the areas of physical, chemical/nutritional and emotional/spiritual well-

being.


�beans, they have a much higher incidence of folate deficiency and a much higher incidence of cleft lip and palate, which is one of the main hallmarks that we see with individuals that have struggles or have an MTHFR defect.

Dr. De Koyer: Interesting, interesting.

Dr. Becker: Yeah, absolutely fascinating.

Dr. De Koyer: How do you diagnose yourself with this deficiency?

Dr. Becker: So obviously it’s something that I specialize in, so almost 100% of my patient population has MTHFR. So I test everybody, either by blood or by saliva. I mean, I think that some of my life work in truth, I would love to see the MTHFR be a standard newborn screening test, just like we screen for galactosemia or PKU with a standard heel prick, because I think having this information for your newborn baby could set you up for a whole lifetime of health, and you have very basic ideas and very basic simple things, that don’t cost you a thing, that you can do to absolutely prevent any kind of challenges in the future with your baby.

So, it’s a very easy test to do, any doctor can order it, either by blood or by saliva, it is a genetic test, so I do often caution patients that if they don’t want their genetic information out there, for whatever reason, they easily can do a saliva test, and put a different name on there, just so they have the information for themselves. It’s not hard to find.

Dr. De Koyer: 23andMe does it right? When you get that test, or no?

Dr. Becker: Yes absolutely. 23andMe looks at, I think about 16 hundred different genes. MTHFR is one of them. And of course, as you know, it’s not just one particular gene, so there is a whole family and subset that they do look at 23andMe. So you can actually have your entire… you’ll know the exact mechanism of your particular pathway, for sure, by looking at 23andMe.

Dr. De Koyer: So if you’re interested and you didn’t want to go to your regular doctor or even a naturopath to do this, you could just do it outside this entire realm and just do a 23andMe screening, correct?

Dr. Becker: Absolutely. What you would need to do, if you do decide to do that, because as you know, 23andMe got chased around by the FDA for a little while, until they sold out, but basically what they did is they are de-identifying your data through 23andMe and using it to make drugs through pharmaceutical companies. So generally, if I’m going to recommend that somebody use 23andMe, I always say use some sort of an alias. But yes, the information is on there, and then what patients should do is download their entire zip file onto their own home device. From there, then you can go and The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�pay $25, $30 to have a much more specific health screen interpretation that’s done that will give you all of these genes, the MTHFR genes, genes for liver function, genes for cartilage manufacturing, and a whole host of other things that are very interesting to those of us that study the stuff.

Dr. De Koyer: Okay, I did that. What is that additional analysis called, what is that called, I did that with my 23andMe?

Dr. Becker: Well now, these days, what is it, motherhood is the necessity of inventions? So now there’s multiple different software types to upload, so there’s one called StrataGene and that one’s out of the Northwest corner of the US. There’s another one that’s called Sterling’s App off of the MTHFR’s support.com website. There’s another one called Nutrihacker. That one, I think is put out by a nutraceutical company, because if you upload your data though Nutrihacker, they love to give you all kinds of supplement recommendations. So you come out of there with 47 hundred different supplements, but the information is still valid and still there.

So those are some of the ones that I use. There is a free one through a website called geneticgene.com.

Dr. De Koyer: That’s right, yeah.

Dr. Becker: Yeah, that gives you about 25 snips, where something like Nutrihacker or StataGene gives you closer to 400. So, it all depends on what level of information you’re looking for.

Dr. De Koyer: Even kids can do 23andMe or no?

Dr. Becker: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And for me, I mean, I just did my kids’ 23andMe. You know, I decided, after I looked at mind and my husband’s DNA years ago, after we had them, and realized they weren’t so lucky in the genetic department, I decided that I didn’t want to know and now, just over the last year, I decided, I think I do want to know. They’re getting older and there’s things that they should know, you know, about their health, and I want to give them the control over that. So that’s why I decided at this point to do it for them.

Dr. De Koyer: Yeah, well that’s great. I think a lot of our audience is going to do this and I’m going to do the same with my kids as well. Now, let’s get a little bit back into the condition.

Dr. Becker: Okay.

Dr. De Koyer: So, autism, asthma, allergies, eczema, ear infections, on and on…


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�Dr. Becker: Yeah, you’ve got it.

Dr. De Koyer: Anywhere you want to go with that, shoot, just successes, what you see, how you treat, your protocol. Anywhere you want to go with it, I’m fine with, so go.

Dr. Becker: Okay perfect. Well let me start with this, let me start with MTHFR and chiropractic.

Dr. De Koyer: Okay.

Dr. Becker: So my husband’s a chiropractor and we do practice together. We talked about this, he’s a basic atlas guy, so he comes in, he adjusts patients, he spends five minutes with them, he says, “Have a great day, I’ll see you next time, next week, whatever.” However, what happens with chiropractors, and you know, we’ve been in practice for like 12 years, and I’ve spent over a decade with chiropractors is, chiropractors are excellent at chiropractic medicine and they don’t, at least in my experience, delve into a whole lot else. But they have an innate sense, forgive the pun, of working with their hands and understanding, like bioflow of the body.

So, what he noticed, you know, a few years back, before he really kind of studies the science of MTHFR, is that there are certain patients that hold their adjustment for weeks and weeks, and other patients who come back 48 hours later that are a complete disaster.

So, we started talking about it and it turns out there’s quite a bit of research about chiropractic and MTHFR. What happens with these patients, that are positive for MTHFR, is… now you remember about the mechanism here, we’re trying to get folate into the cell, right? So folate always goes into the cell with B12 and in order to get B12 in the cell you need, B6 and you need magnesium. So, one of the best things to keep your alignment or to hold your adjustment is magnesium.

So basically, when you’re positive for MTHFR and you carry this mutation and you’re not converting properly, you’re also not using your B12 right, you’re not using your B6 right, and you’re burning through your magnesium.

Now here, we live in the Northeast and magnesium levels in individual s in the Northeast are very, very low compared to the rest of the country, so we already know we’re starting with a magnesium deficient population. You combine that with a problem with MTHFR, you have patients who are coming in for back pain, neck pain, headaches or whatever, and they can’t hold their adjustment for 48 hours.


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�So what we’ve discovered is, by treating these patients for MTHFR, you know because a lot of times a patient will come for chiropractic because they’re invested in chiropractic, they’re not invested in functional medicine, they’re not invested in a Paleo diet or anything else, they just want drugless pain management, you know, for lack of a better word.

So, what we found with our patient population, even the patients that don’t change their diet, that aren’t exercising, that aren’t quitting any of their vices, if we treat and manage their MTHFR with specific B vitamins, and give them a little bit of magnesium, they hold their adjustments much longer and they stay out of pain for a much longer period of time, which I think is absolutely fascinating, because as you know, as a chiropractor, you see patients younger and younger with migraines and headaches and back pain and insomnia. These are six year olds, you know what I mean? This isn’t your grandma sitting around the bridge table.


Dr. Becker: So you know, it’s to get these kids in and to be able to treat these genetic mutations much earlier on, I think really sets kids up for a much healthier life moving forward.

So, I mean, I think that’s important to say, because I get a lot of referrals from local chiropractors to do this for them, because as a chiropractor, you want to see your patients get better and you want to see them out of pain, and you want them to be on a wellness plan where you can kind of check in with them every couple of weeks, as opposed to always constantly putting out a fire.


Dr. Becker: So this has been huge, particularly for me, because I’ve been able to help patients, but even for my husband, because then the quality of his car and the satisfaction of both his job and his patients, goes way up, because patients feel better.

So, I think that’s always important to say too and I do think chiropractors, at least the ones I’m working with, are very invested in this because they know how important it is. So I think that makes a big difference.

But as far as what I see, as you know, I treat mostly little kids, asthma, autism, allergy and eczema, and all of those happen to be an issue or an expression, I guess we could say, of having an MTHFR mutation.

So, particularly with eczema right, we know that eczema is basically a rebellion in the gut, we know that there’s inflammation in the gut, we know that there’s imbalance in the gut and we know that the body is trying to get The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�the imbalance or the inflammation out of the gut and it pushes it to a part of the body that is ’non-essential’ like the skin, and that’s basically why we see eczema.

Standard conventional care would be steroids on the skin. There isn’t a single word uttered in the dermatologist’s office or even your pediatrician’s office that says, “Hey, what are you eating?” You know, what does this kid have for breakfast, you know, what are their eating cycles like? Are you using chemicals on your clothing, you know, are you washing your clothes in detergent that has fragrance and scent?

So none of these conversations are had, so that’s a lot of what I do when in my office, is a lot of education. You know, if you have a child that has an MTHFR mutation, that has eczema and they are uncomfortable, you have to go down to basics, they have to wear pure cotton clothes, you have to put things on their skin like coconut oil, that doesn’t react or cause further inflammation onto the skin, and of course, when you’re doing that, in the meantime, because the child’s so itchy and uncomfortable, and then you have to fix what’s going on inside.

So you fix the diet, you certainly fix any genetic problems that you can get a handle on, and you know, with the combination of those two, the success rates in my practice are absolutely incredible and I think that’s one of the reasons why I always tuck with kids, is because they’re so amazingly resilient and it is such a great return on your investment as a physician, I find anyway.

Dr. De Koyer: I agree.

Dr. Becker: And as far as asthma, I mean asthma is basically the same pathology that you see with eczema, it just happens in the lungs, right?> So the same discussion goes on, where we’ve got to look at food and we have to look at chemical exposure and we also have to look at MTHFR. Now you look at MTHFR particularly with kids with asthma, because you know they have a conversion problem. So if they’re having a conversion problem and they have high levels of folic acid in their blood, that’s creating the inflammation. If they have some genetic predisposition to have a weak spot in their lungs, or the other thing that is widely noted with kids with asthma is they have the bronchi, the two little tubes that come off your windpipe that go to your lungs, their angles are different than what the standard is, and that’s seen very frequently in kids with asthma.

So again, we have an anatomical problem. Now, in most cases kids will grow out of that, right? As your body grows, your bronchi grows, the angle changes, and kids will grow out of it. But because we’ve intervened so much with conventional medicine and steroids and long term steroids and


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�leukotriene blockers, we’ve not changed the microbiome and the cellular expression inside the body that is now setting these children up to literally require medication for their whole life.

So, if these patients show up in my office before they’ve gone on pharmaceuticals, and we can make diet changes and we can make supplement recommendations, and with all my kids with asthma I of course always send them to the chiropractor, just because that neurologic reset that you can get from an adjustment, makes a huge, huge difference in breathing and the other things too is, educating asthma kids, particularly on taking deep breaths. You know, it’s one thing, when you’re struggling to breathe and you’re air hungry from an asthma attack, you shut off the ability to use your diaphragm.


Dr. Becker: Well you know, and one of the things that a chiropractic adjustment does is it actually re-stimulates and balances that phrenic nerve to allow for a full deep breath for these kids and air exchange alone, is healing. You know, I mean what do we say to people that are in pain, “Take a deep breath,” you know, if you’ve had a diagnosis of asthma for 15 years, and you haven’t used the bottom two lobes of your lungs, how are you going to be able to do that? You can’t.

So I think that makes a huge difference and I think we’ve gone, society’s become so medicalized, that we forget these fundamental aspects that are incredibly useful and incredibly beneficial to our health.

Dr. De Koyer: I have a question. We live in a shortcut, quick-fix society, if we have a headache, take an Aspirin, if our vitamin levels are low, get some sunn or take some vitamin D. There’s no real shortcut here right? There’s no supplement that you can take to change your genes or to… you have to avoid folic acid, I mean that’s first and foremost, correct?

Dr. Becker: You’re absolutely right. There is no shortcut and I honestly think this is society’s lesson. You know, I mean, you can’t, we live in a quick-fix society and we’ve been indoctrinated into this whole pill, kind of philosophy and I think that’s one of the reasons why chiropractic is so effective, because it is drugless medicine and it is a quick-fix, but it is not a resolution in some cases. It does get you out of pain, but as far as MTHFR, absolutely. You absolutely have to fix the diet, you absolutely have to heal from within, and you have to remember too that your genes don’t define you, you know what I mean? Like we say in genetic medicine, the genes load the gun but the environment pulls the trigger.



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�Dr. Becker: So you could live a full happy life and never come into contact with folic acid, do you know what I mean? And not have any issues. The problem is, is we’re in the over-processed, over-medicalized society where you’re bombarded by it, you know, on all levels and that tends to be the issue, particularly with little kids, you know, who want to go to school and eat the junk that the other kids are eating, or they want to go to a birthday party and have the cake that’s been enriched with folic acid and full of GMOs and they want to have the pizza and the soda and that’s really where the struggle comes in the society, because it’s not the norm to go to a party and have walnuts and carrots as your birthday snack, kind of things, unfortunately.

Dr. De Koyer: I have another question. Now you said they started mass supplementation in 1989.

Dr. Becker: Correct.

Dr. De Koyer: We’re seeing dramatic increases, I guess from that point of autism and ADD and all these other… I mean, we’re just getting sicker and sicker as a society.

Dr. Becker: Right.

Dr. De Koyer: Is it obviously that his is one of the biggest reasons why this is happening?

Dr. Becker: Absolutely, I mean, as you know, I’m sure you follow a lot of the environmental, you know, Working Group and the Environmental Medicine stuff…

Dr. De Koyer: Yeah.

Dr. Becker: But it seems to me that 1989 was really the tipping point and that’s where we’ve seen, you know, we ramped up the toxicity, literally by something like 75% and because those kids… so we’re looking really at, what we’re calling the millennial generation, those kids have now, those are now parents, they now have children, and those children are part of that sick generation because the genes that were passed on now have another generation of literal weakness. So it’s a lot of undoing. You know, to really understand genetic medicine, my generation for example, we need to look at our grandparents. Our parents’ health has very little implication on where we’re at, so we have to look at our grandparents’ health and that makes a huge difference.

So if you look at your grandmother and she’s 99 and she’s driving a car and she’s still going to the hairdresser and has her own teeth, you win. You know, if you look at your grandparents and you have a lot of Alzheimer’s in The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�your family or cancers or things like that, those are the people that really need to take a good hard look at their life and make some huge changes, because in my opinion, I think it’s all preventable and I think it’s all something that we have complete control over, but you have to take control over it, and it’s work. Do you know what I mean?

Dr. De Koyer: Alright, so let’s talk about some diet action steps for the audience.

Dr. Becker: Okay, sure.

Dr. De Koyer: What are the main things we want to include in our diet and what are the main things we want to avoid to try to eliminate our exposure to folic acid as much as we can?

Dr. Becker: Okay, so to eliminate our exposure to folic acid, you avoid anything that’s in a box, basically, anything that’s processed. And the other thing is gluten, gluten is a huge problem for a number of reasons, but we’ll talk specifically about the folic acid problem. Number one, 100% of gluten is enriched with folic acid in this country. Almost 100% of all wheat and gluten products are GMO. Now, when you have and MTHFR problem, now remember we talked about the folate and the B12 and the B6 and the magnesium, well because the body’s working so hard for that conversion, it has very little time to be able to make decisions, I guess for lack of a better word, to eliminate toxicity. So we know these people actually have a higher toxic burden.

So, stay away from things like GMOs and artificial sweeteners and chemicals and artificial colors and things like that, absolutely positively can enhance your health.

You know, I’m a huge Paleo diet proponent, I like the Western Price Nourishing Traditions diet, but basically, in the take home messages, you don’t have to buy any books, you don’t have to do a cooking class, you don’t have to get certification, you have to eat food that nature made, do you know what I mean? So if it rots or if it spoils, eat it. If it has an exploration date on it, keep going.

So that’s generally how I like to operate and I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that, you know? And I think we need to just eat real food, and we need to eat when we’re hungry and we need to stop when we’re full and I think that’s something else that we’ve fallen really short on in this country, is because we’ve become institutionalized into this three meals a day, or you have to sit down for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You have to have all these things on your plate. You don’t, you need to eat when you’re hungry, you know, that’s what our forefathers did, that’s what our ancestors


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�did and that’s what the cavemen did, and I think their metabolism was better for it and they certainly didn’t have a lot of lifestyle diseases that many Americans are struggling with today.

Dr. De Koyer: I agree. Now, what supplements or what multivitamin supplement companies, if you don’t mind sharing, don’t have folic acid and use folate as their source of B vitamin?

Dr. Becker: Well there are actually a lot. So I live in Connecticut and I generally try to use companies that are local. So we have our own supplement line, which actually is manufactured in Danbury. There’s another company that’s called Designs for Health that is in Suffield, Connecticut and a company called Vital Nutrients, they’re in Middletown, Connecticut. There’s another company that is not in Connecticut but they’re called Thorne Research and Thorne was actually the first company to put together their own methylated multivitamin.

So those are the companies I tend to recommend. In truth though, I will say, I don’t do a lot of supplement recommendations, because I really prefer that people get their nutrition from their good. The only things I generally supplement is if somebody is suffering with an MTHFR defect and they need a little bit of extra help with their conversion, I will use methylated B vitamins to be able to assist with the conversion. But for the most part, I really think it’s only through food and lifestyle, you know?

Dr. De Koyer: Excellent point. Now, I guess this is my last question, and then I’ll ask for any last words. What about political action, I mean, this is obviously a huge problem, I was actually in my dentist office and in the next stall a young girl was talking about how she has thee MTHFR defect, what can we do to bring more prominence to this issue and get this folic acid out of the foods so we can start moving forward and moving past this?

Dr. Becker: Right, so as consumers, you vote with your dollars, you know what I mean? So I think the first thing that you have to do is you have to buy real food, obviously from your local farmers and things like that, and that’s where the shift is going to come. The shift is going to come from the consumerism, because they’re not interested in listening to the obviously, they’re not interested in legislation, because to get folic acid out of all the processed food, the government and the pharmaceutical companies are going to lose money, so they’re not interested in that. So you have to vote and use your dollars as your voice, and I think that’s the greatest message.

As far as implications in the dentist’s office, heck year, I’m heading there today with my kid in fact. So MTHFR in the dentist and I use a dentist who actually happens to be a biological dentist who’s educated in MTHFR, because people who have an MTHFR issue, can struggle in the dentist’s


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�office with using the nitrous oxide. If you have low levels of B12 because your conversion is off because of this particular mutation, and the dentist gives you nitrous oxide, you could have a serious, serious problem, like death.

So it’s definitely something that needs to be vocalized. They were using nitrous oxide in the America as analgesia for women in labor, in pregnancy, and the rates of maternal death and fetal death were really high, so they stopped using it. And my opinion is, nobody went back retroactively, after they did all of this in the 60s and 70s to look at these women and see if they were positive for MTHFR. So you know, and that’s why I say, it is a consumer savvy person who is really educated on this unfortunately.

But as far as raising awareness, I mean, honestly I think this is some of my life’s work. I mean, I’m working now with genetic specialists in the Boston area, to try to add MTHFR to a prenatal screening, because if we know that, in the child, I mean, that could save a whole lifetime of genetic concerns that you would have going forward. How come this child is always having problems with their Achilles tendon? How come this child gets a fever after they exercise? These are all things that can be implicated with an MTHFR mutation. So I think it’s absolutely something that we’re bringing to light.

The other thing that really is helping the MTHFR visibility is the vaccine movement, and educating around vaccines, because there’s huge implications with little kids and vaccines. We can certainly discuss that another time, but clearly if you have problems with detox and you have problems converting folate and B12, you’re going to have problems with what is considered the normal or typical American Academy of Pediatrics’ vaccine schedule. So that’s something that parents really need to be educated about and understand, so they can advocate for their children, or child, who doesn’t have a voice of their own yet.

Dr. De Koyer: Just thinking about children and young children, what about formula? Is formula supplemented with folic acid?

Dr. Becker: It sure is. It sure is. There is one organic formula on the market that is not. Right now the name escapes me but it does exist. I have had clients who have ordered formula from Germany and from Italy, they don’t supplement any of their formula. But a lot of clients that I have that are using formula, make their own with goat’s milk.

So for me, again, I think it’s just part of the, out of gate, my recommendation is the same as the World Health Organization, which is breastfeed for two years and know that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. Then you can avoid the whole formula thing altogether. I mean, even if you breastfeed for one year, you know, you can avoid formula altogether,


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�because a year, your standard pediatrician would say, “Switch your baby to milk,” which at that point you could give them food and things that are nutritious and go from that angle. But that, I think, is a huge education piece that absolutely sets babies up for a proper balance in their immune system. I’m a huge advocate for breastfeeding for sure.

Dr. De Koyer: You really clarified things for me, you really opened my eyes, helped my understanding and I know that you helped our audience as well. Dr. Becker, do you have any last words?

Dr. Becker: You know, I only can say Noah, thank you so much for having me on here, thanks for letting me talk about MTHFR, because I know it can be elusive, you know, for patients and even physicians who just, it seems like a huge undertaking, but the truth of the matter is, is I think our message is all the same, which is, eat clean, train mean, and be nice, right? I mean, that’s all we need.

Dr. De Koyer: And you have a TV show, correct?

Dr. Becker: I do, my TV show is called The Holistic Health Hour and we’ve been around for just around eight months now and when we had started, we were going to be the voice for the holistic community, but myself and my co-host are really very invested in the autism community, I’m speaking at AutismOne in May, and it seems like whenever we end up, as far as our guests or as far as our topics, we always seem to end up circling back to autism. So, now we’ve just become like the autism community experts, which is certainly a title that I would embrace for sure. But it’s nice, we’ve had a lot of exposure and it’s been really nice to kind of communicate our message that way.

Dr. De Koyer: Great, well thanks again for being on. My name is Dr. Noah De Koyer, your co-host and you are listening to Beyond Your Wildest Genes podcast. If you like what you’ve heard today, please share this with your friends and encourage them to subscribe on iTunes. In fact today, which is January 5th, and this podcast will come out in a few weeks from now, we’ve just eclipsed 250 thousand subscribers.

Thank you and a review on iTunes would be the icing on the cake. You can s u b s c r i b e t o o u r i n c r e d i b l e w e e k l y e m a i l a t www.beyondyourwildestgenes.com. Thank you and as my oldest son Hayden says, “Be awesome and never unawesome.”


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http://www.beyondyourwildestgenes.com

Hosted by:

Dr. Michael Acanfora Dr. Noah De Koyer Dr. Wanda Lee MacPhee

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