DNA test kits for £100
Are they a valuable fitness boost or a costly con?
If you’re one of the 26 million people who have taken an at-home DNA test, a growing number of which promise to shed never-before-seen light on your health and fitness proclivities, the saliva you sent off in the post might have been for naught. An article in the British Medical Journal last month denounced the reliability of direct-to-consumer (DTC) tests, declaring that they “may produce false positive and false negative results”.
Following the popularity of screening for ancestry and health risks – set to be an industry worth more than £2 billion by 2024 – come kits that assess your insides, and produce tailored plans on how best to nurture what nature has given you with achievable nutrition and exercise goals. But are they worth it?
Tests cost from £79-£145 and take two to three weeks to process at a laboratory, where DNA is extracted from the saliva to run quality checks on various genes such as AKT1, associated with aerobic exercise response, AGT, which regulates blood pressure, and APOA2, which manages the body’s regulation of saturated fat. They look at IL6, responsible for susceptibility to inflammation, the alcohol metabolising abilities of ALDH2 and CLOCK, our circadian rhythm.
More than 1,000 are scoured by Muhdo Health, which purports to be the market’s most conclusive, while Fitness Genes tracks the mutations of 700,000 DNA strands in the search for physical optimisation. DNAFIT, meanwhile, comes with celebrity backing, endorsed by Rio Ferdinand and Greg Rutherford.
All of which sounds comprehensive enough. But do they actually work? Fireman Neal
Goulding, 41, signed himself, his wife and two sons up to Muhdo Health. Since the results came in a few months ago, its assessment of his ability to process caffeine has changed things dramatically. Previously, an afternoon cup would leave him “a bit anxious and twitchy”; now, he has gone from a few a day to just one in the morning, which has stopped him “feeling the benefits and then crashing afterwards. It gave me a false sense of energy, but when it wore off I’d really notice.”
His low levels of magnesium, too, have been addressed – he now takes a supplement for that and omega 3, and has “definitely noticed the effects in my skin and joints”. His wife Amy, 35, who also received analysis suggesting her magnesium levels needed a boost, has found the vitamins give her “more in the tank”.
There have been no dramatic changes, then, but the family had “nothing to lose” by sending off their swabs and, given the current “focus on health and well-being – obesity and longevity and people working harder for longer hours”, it is no wonder the market is growing ever more crowded.
So I decided to try it for myself – three of them, in fact. According to Fitness Genes, my body, like Neal’s, struggles to process caffeine, which CEO Dr Dan Reardon says means I am “unlikely [to] get any effect of caffeine in the short-term”. Downing a double espresso prior to exercise for an added boost is futile, then, “because you won’t break it down fast enough to exert any of the stimulating effects”.
Fitness Genes’ programme works via an online dashboard, where you can see your results and follow the various suggestions to ameliorate those natural deficiencies: I’m advised to avoid caffeine before bed and eat particular vegetables that heighten its rate of clearance from the blood. So far, so straightforward. Ish.
Because, curiously, a test from DNAFIT finds the reverse: that I process caffeine quickly. The same company also suggests I adopt a Mediterranean diet, up my Omega 3 and calcium intake and reduce my consumption of salt, saturated fats and grilled meat; I am built for endurance, apparently, as opposed to high-intensity activities. Is any of this information – assuming it’s even accurate – specific enough to make a difference?
“In the realm of fitness and other wellness and lifestyle tests, there’s really very little evidence that connects the variants that they’re testing for with the outcomes that they say they might have,” says Lawrence Brody PHD, senior investigator of medical genomics at the National Institutes of Health, part of the US department of health. He notes that recent attempts to prove the fruitlessness of such kits – in which canine samples were sent for testing, and reports produced about their sporting prowess – show how lacking in rigour the tests are. “Most of the conclusions are, you should eat well, you should exercise more and get more sleep,” Dr Brody says. Which are good suggestions, of course, also made by my third kit, MYDNA. But possibly not worth £100.
The bigger concern, Dr Brody adds, is “when a test says you should use a certain substance because of your genetics”. Spending on supplements for a placebo effect is bad enough; worse is cutting out food groups based on the advice of unspecific tests, which “could lead to a really unbalanced diet.” Or, if particular nutrients are singled out as being deficient in your body, overdoing consumption in order to redress the perceived imbalance.
It is the potential for people to act on flawed advice that the BMJ report’s authors are concerned by – they suggest that if you do take a DTC test, anything of note should be talked through with a GP first.
Prof Helen Stokes Lampard, chairman of the Royal College of GPS, says she has heard reports of patients “coming to see [doctors] with the results of commercial genetic tests, asking for them to be interpreted – and some commercial companies actually advise this instead of providing the necessary advice and feedback themselves. This is not a good use of our time or NHS resources”.
There is the added issue, too, of what happens to your DNA once you’ve flung it off into the post box: in 2016, 23andme, the market leader in health testing, began selling users’ results to drug companies including Glaxosmithkline, who reportedly paid $300 million for access to the anonymous information. Firms do “the bare minimum to be Gdpr-compliant”, according to Dr Emiliano Cristofaro, head of information security research at University College London, “but they don’t always have the users’ best interests at heart”.
A few privacy concerns aren’t enough to dent the booming industry; an increasingly popular Christmas gift, tests will probably see a further sales spike in the coming months. The roots of this obsession are simple, Dr Brody says: “We would like to be able to be better than we are,” and these tests, which “in theory sound quite attractive and [are] often cheaper than a personal trainer”, seem like the perfect shortcut.
Yes, the idea of a tailor-made health plan in exchange for a simple cheek swab “is an attractive proposition. I certainly wish I could be more fit and weigh less,” Dr Brody says.
But he knows the only way to achieve that is “more time, not a genetic coach”.
‘In theory, DNA tests sound attractive – and cheaper than a personal trainer’