This week on Barbell Shrugged, we geek out on science with Dr. Ron DePathrick, biomedical researcher, and nutritional expert.

Hey, this is Rich Froning, you're listening to Barbell Shrugged for the video version, go to BarbellShrugged.com.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bleto here with Doug Larson. We have traveled to Austin, Texas for the Paleo FX Conference.

And we have snagged Dr. Ron DePathrick, scientist.

We're going to be talking about vitamins and minerals and studies and science and poor journalism and all sorts of stuff.

I think it's going to be really entertaining. She's full of knowledge, if you want to understand. You've been studying for a while haven't you?

The more I know, the more I don't know, actually.

I think that's common. The people that are the most educated started to learn like, oh, we don't know shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm really excited to be here. This is sort of new to the Paleo community. And so I'm pretty pumped to be here giving a talk on how vitamins, certain things that you eat in your diet, how exercise, and how something called hyperthermic conditioning can change the expression of your genes.

So I must people think, well, your genes are set in stone, born with them. So I'm sort of doomed. I'm pretty exposed to type 2 diabetes or Alzheimer's disease. So what can I do? That's just not the case.

People forget about the expression of genes. You have genes, but the things, the environment, the activities, the things you eat, those help certain genes express and certain genes not express right?

Exactly. And so I'm basically not going to throw some knowledge bombs today and tell you exactly what helps you express the good ones and what helps you turn down the bad ones.

Express is kind of like turning on and off. Express is turning on and off. Yeah, you can, you know, you can turn on a gene when it's turned on. It's active. It's doing what it's supposed to do. And you can turn off a gene.

And even though the genes there, it's silent. So it's almost like it's not there.

Just think about a gene and turn it on. Actually, meditation does change the expression of genes. So if you really sit there and meditate on a gene, you might actually be able to do it by name.

Does the gene know its name?

Pretty sure the gene has no idea what the name is.

Yeah, so you know, it's pretty cool. So, you know, in a couple hours, I'm about to talk about how, you know, vitamin D can change the expression of genes that affect the way you behave.

So it actually, I just published a paper on this a couple of months ago where I found a mechanism by which vitamin D, which actually gets converted into a steroid hormone. It's really, it's really kind of important.

It regulates over 900 genes in your body, which is pretty much like a 124th of the human genome.

It turns on the synthesis of serotonin in your brain. And serotonin regulates the way you behave, first social behavior.

Makes you happy.

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