Vitagene Review

Most teenagers asked for the latest Apple gadget or James Charles’ eyeshadow palette for Christmas, but not me — the first item on my Christmas list was a DNA kit. Before I even finished opening up my other gifts on Christmas morning, I found my inner nerd reading the instructions on my Vitagene Ancestry and Health DNA kit.

Three minutes worth of swabbing my cheek and packaging up my DNA into a biohazard bag (I never thought I’d ever type those words) later, and my DNA samples were mailed off to the Vitagene testing center in San Francisco. Four weeks later I was able to access my results, and I even have a PDF file of my raw DNA sequence on my laptop.

The three main results you get back are the ancestry and health reports, but Vitagene also gives you the 411 of your body with exercise, diet and genetic trait reports. Not only did Vitagene give me an inside look to where my roots are, but it helped me positively change my lifestyle with vitamins and supplements — not to mention the kit only cost $79, whereas 23andMe’s ancestry and health kit is $199.

Along with the DNA test, you also have to complete five short surveys about your eating habits and lifestyle in order to make sure your results accurately reflect your current state of health. The surveys ask you everything from your height and weight to any genetic diseases that might run in your family to the physical activities you do — unfortunately for me that survey was minimal, I retired from sports in middle school.

The results from my ancestry report did not surprise me in the slightest — I’m 99.97 percent European. Afterall, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather William Bradford sailed over on the Mayflower in 1620 and eventually became the first governor of Jamestown. How’s that for a history lesson! And the other .03 percent? Who’s to say, maybe I have a teeny amount of Pacific Islander Princess DNA in my system.

The most interesting of my results was from my supplemental report. I found I was beyond insufficient in eight vitamins, the top three being Vitamin B12, Magnesium and Vitamin D3 — which explains why I am walking around half asleep like a zombie and am stressed out to the max 80 percent of the time.

Vitagene conveniently offers individual prepackaged supplements, but for a hefty price. The f
our supplement pack comes in a one month supply for $50, while the one-month eight supplement pack is $80 — all while my Amazon cart totaled a mere $30 for three months worth of the same supplements.

Based on these results, I Amazon-Primed Vitamin B12, Magnesium and Vitamin D3 supplements and within a month I was back on my A-game, ready to take on the world one Harbinger deadline and shift at Bijin at a time, without dozing off in English class.

For the skeptics out there, to verify my Vitagene results my parents dropped a few hundred dollars on a doctor who told me I was lacking in the same vitamin categories as my Vitagene results told me. Why pay hundreds of dollars to see a nutritionist if you can find out the same results from the comfort of your home for $79? I took one for the team and le
arned that lesson the hard way.

Along with the ancestry and health reports, Vitagene’s exercise report suggests the amounts of calories you consume and burn to either stay your current weight or to lose weight based on the activities you listed in the surveys.

The diet report warned me to stay away from milk and gluten. To combat this, Vitagene provides five days worth of breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack ideas and recipes that fit your body’s needs. For example, a yummy breakfast curated to my body consists of an oatmeal with strawberries and a spinach, mushroom and a Feta cheese scramble.

Thanks to Vitagene’s genetic traits report, I know that I’m at low risk to gluten sensitivity, but I do have a slow carbohydrate metabolism rate — so long, all-you-can-eat breadsticks at Olive Garden!

There’s no time like the present to explore where your ancestors are from and what vitamins you’re lacking. And who knows, maybe the conspiracy theories might be right and it could be helpful to have a copy of your DNA stored somewhere when science advances to the point where you can clone your young self.