What is Epigenetic Profiling and how can it be used in Holistic Health Coaching?
There are 7.5 billion people in the world, and not one single person is the same. We all look different, think differently, and feel differently. Why is this? It comes down to our own unique genetic profile and how our diet, lifestyle, and environment turns our genes on and off.
Epigenetic Profiling uses AI Technology - artificial intelligence - called Shae™ to create a personalized user manual for your unique body, based on your genes and how they’re currently expressed (turned on or off). Your profile is holistic, and provides actionable education on how to live in-tune with your biology - how to eat, move, live, love, play, think, and thrive to reach optimal health, and improve your quality of life and longevity. Living in-tune with your biology in this way can also help you prevent and manage chronic disease, and some Shae™ users have even been able to reverse their chronic pain/disease.
Shae™ was developed over 20 years from 15 different sciences, including epigenetics, and provides a non-invasive assessment of your genetic profile through body measurements and your ancestral and medical history.
The wisdom of epigenetics can be applied to any and every instance of someone not feeling healthy and happy and is the key to progress with any health goal, from weight loss, to fatigue, overwhelm, stress reduction, difficulty gaining muscle mass, strengthening your body, hormone balancing, gut health, disease prevention, mental health, and much more.
Epigenetic Profiling and Shae™ takes out the guesswork of where to start on your journey to better health. Through personalizing and prioritizing the areas of health that you’re genetically wired to need to function optimally, we’re seeing results happen in as quickly as four weeks.
Without this personalised approach to your health, reaching your health goals can be incredibly difficult and confusing. There are so many cookie cutter ‘diets’ and programs out there (keto, intermittent fasting, paleo) which continue to fail people, because there are elements that can work against your genes, having the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve. On average 15-40% of people don’t respond to diet and exercise programs [1].
Understanding your biology and the recommendations within Shae™ is the first step. However, a huge part of making changes to your health comes down to habit change, and going this journey alone can not only be a lonely one, but can be difficult to stay on track. That’s where Health Coaching comes in.
A Health Coach is a supportive guide who helps clients set and stay accountable to goals, breakthrough blocks that are preventing habit change, prepare for obstacles along the way and plan how to overcome those obstacles to stay on track with your goals. The power of the AI brings you the science and the understanding of what’s truly going on inside your body, with the blueprint of how to bring it back to health. Health coaching empowers and motivates you to enact the recommendations provided by the AI to build sustainable and positive behavioral lifestyle changes that last a lifetime.
What are some examples of AI-powered health coaching platforms and tools?
AI is being used in many different aspects of health, particularly in research and development, but currently the access and use for the individual is very limited.
Shae™ is the world's first personalised health platform based on epigenetics, which is presented in a way that is easy to understand and easily actionable, which drives the results and success of the user.
It’s the first platform to measure your gene expression, and give advice based on what your body needs right now. They looked at 20000 people over 15 years of research to understand how bodies differ, and how their needs differ. When it comes to gene expression, we are all different. This platform measures that difference and then provides exact advice on the best foods, exercises, and behaviours to support your body’s preferred phenotype. Then, when your body changes, the platform will adjust your advice based on your new current needs or gene expression.
How does AI enhance the effectiveness of holistic health coaching?
Often clients will come to me as a health coach because they’re at breaking point and need someone to help guide them on road to recovery, whatever that might look like. They haven’t reached breaking point because they’re in an optimal state of health, it’s because their body is out of homeostasis and a range of mild to severe symptoms are occuring.
As an integrative nutrition and holistic health coach, I believe in uncovering the root cause of a client’s symptoms. Unfortunately, most clients come to me after they’ve received no help from their previous health practitioner who hasn’t taken the time to get to the bottom of what’s going on for their patient.
The AI enables me to take a deep dive into their health, something which my human brain wouldn’t be capable of doing, regardless of my qualifications, training or experience. This deep dive helps me get to the root cause of what’s going on for a client, what’s contributing to their symptoms, disease, and discomfort, in an instant! Without the AI, it might take a client 4-5 different health professionals to be able to paint a picture of their health and gain the recommendations required to heal.
Essentially, we can dive straight in with accessible, affordable and non-invasive ways of healing the body to prevent the possible need for further expensive testing and treatments.
During the onboarding process, the symptoms you list can identify things like mineral deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, gut dysbiosis, the cause of things like bloating, stomach pains, and the need for blood sugar regulation. The recommendations then given are again accessible, beginning with the right nutrition, movement, environment and lifestyle for the clients unique genetic profile, which in theory is a simple way to bring yourself back to optimal health. Simple in theory, not always in practice, which is where a health coach can help you make the changes required and work through blocks preventing you from actioning habit change.
What are the benefits of personalized epigenetic profiling for wellness?
During my integrative nutrition and holistic health coach training I was told something that will always stick with me, “you can eat all the kale and broccoli you like, but if you’re in a toxic relationship or a career that doesn’t make you thrive, you’re never going to feel healthy”. After learning about epigenetics and personalised health, I’ve added to this quote,
“if you aren’t able to express yourself in the way you need to, aren’t receiving the right support in your social circles, are working on a schedule that is out of sync with your hormonal needs, are sacrificing your health for your love of your family, or live in a climate or environment not suited to your biology, disease can creep in and you’re never going to feel well”.
Wellness is all encompassing, it’s not just about how you eat and move your body that contributes to the feel good effect. Shae™’s epigenetic profiling is holistic, so it encompasses six key areas of integrative health; food, fitness, social, mind, genius (work), and place (environment, home, climate). All key areas that contribute to overall wellness, and genetic profiling helps you to break down your needs in each of these areas and understand which areas require priority over others, or where you might need to pull some focus to.
A huge part of this is driven by hormones. Hormones are a huge driver of how we feel at any moment, and each of us has a key hormone that drives us. We know this from how we developed in the womb, from the sciences morphology and embryology. These key hormones tell us which of the six areas within Shae™ we need to prioritise, pending our current state of health or gene expression. Without this knowledge, we end up flying blind as to where to begin to make changes for our health. For example, for some, Place will be the number one priority for their health. If they are always in cold environments like an airconditioned office but their body requires warmth, or there’s a lot of clutter in their home or on their desk, these things will prevent their body from functioning optimally, as conditions like these put their body in a state of stress. It’s wild to think that clutter on your desk can contribute to inflammation in the body, but through the years of research and machine learning, this is something we now know.
Understanding how each of the six key areas play into your overall health and wellbeing is an incredible step in your health journey and one I can’t highly recommend enough.
How does epigenetic profiling compare to other types of genetic testing?
The key difference of Epigenetic Profiling with Shae™ compared to DNA testing is that it uses both the phenotype (the current state of the body) and the genotype (the blueprint of how the body should be), so we can apply the right strategy with a greater degree of certainty of a result for the client.
DNA testing provides you with an overview of all the genes you have (genotype), but not necessarily how the expression of your genes is contributing to your current state of health (phenotype).
To explain further using a building analogy. Imagine that you find the ruins of a run down palace that you would like to renovate back to its original state and glory. The palace may be very run-down, missing walls, without any furniture and gaping holes where the ceiling should be. Looking at the palace before starting, you know what its phenotype is - its current state. But if you want to renovate it back to its original beauty and function, you need to know what it looked like before, the blueprint, or its genotype.
When you have a phenotype to start with - like the ruined palace - and you have the blueprint to how it looks when at its best - the genotype - then you have a clear and efficient path to follow to success.
When the team at Shae™ were building and refining the AI, one thing they trialed was adding DNA testing to the onboarding process in hope that this would enrich the data and recommendations provided, however this wasn’t the case.
What they already knew from the 15 sciences used to develop the AI (see below) was conclusive enough to provide a clear picture of the genotype as well as phenotype so DNA testing provided no additional value.
For example, they know from the current length of your femur and other parts of your skeleton how you developed in utero, and which genes were epigenetically dominant through your development, thus creating a picture of your genotype. When onboarding, it seems like we are measuring the body in a very simple way. However, there are more than 500 ratios and over 10,000 data points that create a single Shae™ profile. This includes the calculation of specific genes from the phenotype data. For example, height is related to over 1500 genes, and indeed you can predict height to within 2.5cm based on genes alone. Therefore, the measure of height can translate to the activation of certain genes.
This was great news for the team, as DNA testing is expensive for the client making the technology less accessible to those who really need it. More and more the team at Shae™ are working to make the cost to the client more affordable so they can provide personalised health to all and eliminate preventable disease by 2050.
The other wonderful thing about Shae™, with the power of machine learning the AI notices how your body is changing and your health is improving, so your recommendations will continue to change (for as long as you access the platform). The idea is to re-measure every 4-6 weeks and as Shae™ notices changes, there are many different parts of your profile that will change. At first you might not be recommended to consume red meat, but then when you next measure, you might find that eating red meat 3 times a week is now suited for your body. We are constantly changing, and Shae™ adapts with you.
Sciences used to develop Shae™ - epigenetics, embryology, anthropometry, chronobiology, morphology, phenotypology, endocrinology, neuropsychology, biotypology, ancestry & genetic lineage, molecular biology, geomedicine, advanced diagnostics and semeiotics, ayurveda, traditional chinese medicine.
How does epigenetic profiling help with chronic disease prevention and management?
Current treatments for diseases aren’t effective for everyone, and often they treat the symptoms, not the root cause of the dis-ease in the body, like a bandaid approach. On average, the percentages of people who don’t see effects from the drugs prescribed to treat their diseases are 38% for antidepressants, 40% for asthma, 43% for diabetes, 50% for arthritis, 70% for Alzheimer's and 75% for cancer [2].
To truly prevent, help or manage chronic disease, you need to treat the person, not the disease. Modern medicine absolutely has its place, but there’s so much more to it than that. Like Hippocrates said, “it’s more important to know what sort of person has a disease then what sort of disease a person has”.
It helps to first think about what disease is and how it comes about in the body.
Our bodies are always striving to maintain homeostasis - the body’s ability to maintain stability in your physiology, or optimal health. Our bodies are incredibly clever when it comes to dealing with stressors that throw us out of homeostasis, by way of what’s called homeostatic processes. When we’re cold, our body warms us back up by shivering. When we’re overheating like stepping into a sauna, we sweat to dissipate heat and bring us back to core temperature.
A simplified example of the body’s natural rhythm goes like this -
Changes in the environment (e.g. temperature change, food intolerance) create a stress response in the body.
The body responds to the stress with a homeostatic process (e.g. inflammation or reducing blood flow)
With the correct management (e.g. recovery, rest, optimal nutrition, exercise and environment) the body then returns to balance.
However, without adequate self-care and recovery (point 3 above), the body then goes into a state of chronic stress which leads to disease in the body.
Due to our unique genetic profile and gene expression, what is a stress to you might not be a stress to somebody else. A splinter in the foot of an elephant has much different influence then the same sized splinter in the foot of an ant. The same disease can mean very different things in different bodies.
From the data gathered from the 15 different sciences used within Shae™, we know not only why someone has developed the way they have, why they’re taller or shorter, have thicker necks or smaller wrists, but we also understand which diseases they are predisposed to, and how to keep the body in homeostasis to prevent the disease occurring.
The processes mentioned above are driven by your genes through gene expression (genes being turned on or off), and gene expression is controlled by diet, environment and lifestyle. Through the epigenetic profile, we uncover disease predispositions from the genotype, what disease is/isn’t happening currently in the body from the phenotype to which recommendations are then created to treat the root cause of the disease, or prevent disease in the future.
With the right nutrition, exercise, environment and lifestyle - think of it like personalised medicine - there is a greater effect of the treatment with less effort required by the person. We’re seeing people effectively manage digestive issues, diabetes symptoms, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and chronic pain.
If you’ve heard the expression “genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger”, Shae™ helps your breakdown environment in this sense to learn how to live in-tune with your biology and ensure your finger (or environment) is kept well away from the trigger.
How can AI be used to analyze large amounts of health data and provide insights for personalized coaching?
One of the key reasons that artificial intelligence is so effective in integrative health comes down to machine learning and data analysis. The data Shae™ is able to hold and process about the sciences and the correlation to someone's current state of health is far superior to that of the human brain. It takes out the trial and error previously required from health practitioners for not only faster results, but recommendations presented in a more refined way.
Once onboarded, Shae™ captures an incredible amount of data related to your health. Whilst each profile is unique and no two profiles will be the same, there will be some crossovers, which is attributed mostly to morphology and embryology, however each of the 15 sciences contributes. This crossover categorises someone into one of six Health Types, which makes the incredible amount of information provided by Shae™ more digestible for the user. From your Health Type we know the key drivers of your health; the key hormone driver, the key biological functions your body prioritises, what your natural body composition should be, how your mind works, how resilient you are to stress and how your body processes and uses energy.
We know if you’re built to move, Fitness is going to be a high priority for you. If you’re built to sense and think, all things Mind are going to be crucial for you, as you have a naturally sensitive nervous system. Or, we know that pleasure is a key driver for you, so Place is key, helping you avoid discomfort and anxiety, and avoiding unnecessary stress.
Through the science of chronobiology and chrontypes, the AI also tells us how the effect of time on the body can influence health. Upsets to our circadian rhythm (our internal clocks that keep our bodies functioning and metabolising) can cause and perpetuate disease. Research has shown that our internal clocks are heavily influenced by food input, exercise and stress. If these are delivered at the wrong time of day, it can send a cascade of messages that aren’t aligned with our clocks which disrupts the scheduling of the body. Like when you eat at 2am then your sleep is out of whack, that’s because our bodies aren’t designed to be digesting at that time of the day. Shae™ tells us when to eat, when to move, how best to schedule your work day to suit your biology and this timing will evolve and adapt as our health changes.
Awareness and understanding of these elements then allows us to prioritise the six key areas of health and within each, have a clear plan to action. This includes what foods to eat, how to cook them and when to eat them, what type of exercise, duration and intensity to do and at what time of the day and how to structure your days to make the most of how your body and brain function. All to nourish your body in the right way and eliminate unnecessary stress, prevent disease and keep your body in homeostasis.
What are some ethical considerations when using AI in holistic health coaching?
The world of tech can be a daunting one, as large companies can freely give third parties access to the data we provide them, of which they use in ways we might not have imagined.
With Shae™, you can remain confident and feel secure at all times, as you and only you own your data. No one else can access your data unless you give them permission. No data is shared with external third parties that will be used in any functional matter, including being used for insurances.
When working with a coach, the coach will request access to your profile, of which you can grant or deny permission, however for the coach/client relationship to be beneficial, it’s important that your coach has access to your profile. Once access is granted, the coach doesn’t own your data, you are still the sole owner of the data imputed into the AI.
Should you request extra support from the science team at Shae™, they will need access to your data, which you can grant but again, you remain the owner of the data. However, without access, unfortunately they’ll be unable to support you with your request.
The only data shared would be your name and email address to the CRM used by Shae™ for the purpose of sending you email communication related to your profile and progress. This communication is a great support and recommended, however you can opt out of this at any time.
Should you feel the need to, you can request for your data to be deleted and taken off the network at any time.
How can individuals benefit from AI-powered holistic health coaching?
The benefits of living intune with your biology using Shae™’s AI-powdered recommendations are endless. As the recommendations are about bringing your body back to a state of homeostasis and healing the body from inadequate recovery from stress, you can see improvements in all areas of health.
People who have been on a weight management journey their whole life but find they just continue to put on weight are seeing results fast and easily.
People suffering auto-immune conditions are able to reduce the inflammation and flares they experience by reducing stress, and develop an understanding of how stress impacts their body in different ways.
Stress related diseases and illnesses like non-alcoholic fatty liver, IBS, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, depression, insomnia, arthritis, hormonal imbalances and menstrual cycle irregularities can all be improved by living in-tune with your biology.
Things your doctor might pick up on a routine blood test like high cholesterol, mineral deficiencies, and hormone fluctuations can all be improved by the recommendations provided by the AI, as it’s not just about what you eat that has cause and effect on these things.
If you’re someone that struggles to gain muscle mass and have become aware that this is important as you age, Shae™ can help you identify why you’re struggling to build mass and how to eat, move and live to change that.
If you’re an athlete trying to improve your performance, or train for a fun run like the City To Surf, Shae™ can help you do just that. The key things here would be understanding that key hormone that drives you, your chronotype and how stress impacts your system at all levels. Training at the right time of the day to make use of your natural energy levels, and fueling your body with the right macronutrients for your morphology go hand in hand to improve your performance.
Even your relationships can be improved by greater self-awareness and understanding of the social settings that make you thrive or those that leave you feeling depleted.
Everything from mood, sleep, joy, self-care and vitality can be improved when living in-tune with your biology. Shae™ is changing the lives of people who have been ill for a long time but also those who are lucky enough to be healthy, leveling up their vitality and energy even further.
How can individuals find qualified practitioners who use AI-powered holistic health coaching?
There are more and more health practitioners becoming endorsed to use AI in healthcare, specifically working with Shae™. Choosing a practitioner who has the qualified endorsement is important to ensure they can help you utilise the AI in the right way and are supported by the team at Shae™.
There are all sorts of health experts utilizing AI in healthcare now, from GPs, to naturopaths, personal trainers, biologists, dieticians, yoga teachers, exercise scientists, alternative medicine practitioners and psychologists. This Is exciting progress of the application of epigenetics and personalised medicine across many areas of the healthcare system. It also means that there can be an expert lens used with the integration of AI-powered health recommendations to give you access to a practitioner that specialises in the area you require assistance.
For a list of endorsed practitioners you can visit https://precisionhealthalliance.org/ambassadors/ or feel free to reach out to me to discuss how AI and genetic profiling can help you with your health journey.
About the Author
Kate Squires
Kate is an Integrative Nutrition and Holistic Health Coach, and Shae Certified Health Professional.
