You’ve heard about genetic testing before. As the field of private genetic testing has expanded and become more affordable and accessible, companies like 23andMe or GeneDx have slowly become more common knowledge. These direct-to-consumer genetic services offer up the opportunity to understand genealogy, ancestry, and heritable diseases or potential health concerns. So what sets Genetic Direction apart from these already existing companies?
While it’s always important to understand where you’re coming from, it’s equally as important to understand where you’re going in the future. That’s the idea behind Genetic Direction. Rather than give you a summary of your history or ancestry, Genetic Direction tests localized areas of your DNA that relate directly to your fitness. While many of the genes tested can give you a small idea of what traits you inherited from your ancestors, the majority of them are tested to provide you with the tools to move forward with a personalized fitness and weight loss program based on your very own genetic profile. But what role does DNA really play in terms of your fitness?
There are two main aspects of fitness that pertain to your genetics: aerobic fitness and the ability to build strength and muscle mass. In recent studies, it was determined that aerobic fitness is 40-50% heritable. This means that your body’s efficiency and ability to pump oxygen through the blood to your muscles has about a 50% chance of being determined by the aerobic fitness of your parents (or other relatives). Essentially, you could have a lowered aerobic fitness from the get go simply because of your genetic makeup. This is a crucial piece of information when it comes to fitness and weight loss as aerobic fitness is one of the most important components involved in physical fitness and could help or hinder your ability to lose weight. Of course, your ability to build strength and muscle is a huge part of the weight loss process and has been discovered to be 50-60% heritable. Your mix of “slow” and “fast” twitch muscles is also 45% heritable. This means that some of us may be genetically predisposed to have more muscles geared towards sprinting, some of us may have more endurance muscles, or some of us may have a harder time building added muscle at all. With all of this being said, it makes sense to understand what your genes say about your ability to really get fit. While your genetic make-up is never an excuse to give up, your genes could be the reason you’re struggling to lose weight or see any type of results on your path to fitness. So what aspects of your genetic make-up does Genetic Direction analyze?
When you first turn in your GxSlim test kit, one of the first things we test is your protein, fat and carb utilization ability. This analyzes how well your body retains and uses these food components. If you have a lower than average fat utilization, it could be one of the reasons you find it harder to lose that excess weight. On the opposite end of the spectrum, people with above average fat utilization could increase their fat intake. The next part of testing involves nutrient utilization and deficiencies. We test for six different vitamins: B9, A, B6, B12, C and D. These specific vitamins have been proven to have a direct correlation with fitness and results allow you to determine what vitamins you need to supplement into your diet to become more efficient with your health.
Next, we move onto genes related to weight loss ability with diet and exercise. There are six different genes taken into consideration when it comes to weight loss and results can vary from high, above average, average, below average and low. For those of us unfortunate enough to have low weight loss in response to diet and exercise, it means working a little harder, something you may not have realized without genetic results and given up on long ago. Last but not least, we test your body’s response to exercise, specifically your fat loss response to cardio, fitness response to cardio, body composition response to weight training, HDL response to cardio, insulin sensitivity response to cardio, and your glucose response to cardio. Each one of these categories allows you to piece together exactly what type of exercises you should be doing in order to maximize your results and experience increased weight loss. Say you have a low response to cardio but a high response to weight training, then you should be lifting more weights when you hit the gym instead of just getting on the elliptical for half an hour. It’s information like this that gives Genetic Direction the ability to create a personalized fitness plan based on you as an individual. It’s what sets us apart from all of those other genetic testing companies. It can be fun and exciting to know who your ancestors were, but it’s almost more exciting to see results in your own body based on genes passed on to you by those ancestors. So instead of stepping into the past, take a step forward with the help of Genetic Direction and experience a more fit version of yourself.
