3X4 | More about the report
Understanding the root cause of chronic disease
It's not about just patching symptoms - It's about understanding the root cause
More and more research is showing that your genes interact with each other, and with your nutrition, environment and lifestyle choices.
How and what you eat, your exposures to environmental toxins, how you move and sleep, your stress levels, your mental, emotional and spiritual experiences, your traumas, all affect how our genes behave.
Your genes, which carry the instructions that tell your body how to build, regulate and maintain itself, also tell your body how to respond to the food, toxins, exercise, stress, sleep, and anything else that your body is exposed to.
It's a two-way relationship. Understanding more about your genes helps you personalise your health choices to keep yourself as healthy as possible.
We now know from research, that the body functions as a whole and that the body systems talk to each other. For example, your gut health can affect your brain health; and your brain health, your gut.
The cells in your gut lining produce neurotransmitters such as serotonin that make you feel happy; and stressful thoughts can make your gut tight or churn.
Because of this, 3X4 genetics believes it's very useful to look at the body at the level of cells, pathways and systems.
Cells, Pathways and Systems
Your body is made up of complex, interconnected cells, pathways and systems so the 3X4 Genetic test groups your genes into these headings.
Cells
We are the sum of our cells, and we're only as healthy as they are. Imagine your body as Pleasantville and every cell in your body as a house. All the houses in the town function independently.
Each household needs to takes care of its own day-to-day maintenance and business, but ultimately contributes to the overall success and functioning of the town.
Similarly, every cell in your body has its own mechanisms to function, clean and protect itself. Your cells know what to do because your genes tell them what to do. If your genes have a misspelling, its instructions will be slightly less effective.
Knowing your genetic variations and then compensating for and supporting them with personalised healthy choices, can help prevent, delay and/or reverse chronic disease, at a cellular level.
Pathways
Going 'upstream'
3X4 Genetics believes in going 'upstream', like a detective, to better understand the root cause of symptoms.
To explain this, imagine a river. Certain streams feed into this river. The health of the river depends on the health of the streams further up the hill. All the streams need to be healthy and functioning properly for the river to function properly.
If just one river is not functioning optimally, it will affect the quality of the river's water and the symptoms will be seen as sick plants, animals and households along the river.
Certain genes function in specific pathways like a cascade. If you don't find a variation in one gene in one pathway, keep looking further up the pathway, or in related pathways, for genetic variations that you need to help with more personlised health choices to function better. This will improve the functioning of the whole pathway.
Energy | Activity | Nutrients
Additional sections this test looks at are Energy, Activity and Nutrients. These categories provide useful information about how you gain and lose weight, your resting metabolism, your appetite, a possible predisposition to wanting to snack because you never feel full, whether exercise or dieting will be more useful for weight loss, how your circadian rhythms may affect your appetite, and more.
5 Biological categories
- Cellular
- Systems
- Energy
- Activity
- Nutrients
1. CELLULAR
- Detoxification
- DNA damage
- Inflammation
- Methylation
- Oxidative stress
2. SYSTEMS
- Blood clotting
- Bone/Collagen/Joints
- Brain health
- Glucose and Insulin
- Sex hormone balance
- Vascular health
3. ENERGY
- Adipogenesis
- Appetite/Satiety/Intake
- Energy expenditure
- Exercise Response
- Pro-inflammatory fat
- Weight gain & loss of resistance
4. ACTIVITY
- Endurance
- Injury
- Power
- Recovery
5. NUTRIENTS
- Caffeine
- Salt
- Vitamin D