FAQ / Support

Genteract is a new kind of service which provides actionable insights on the effects of foods and nutrients on people based on their genetics.

Other companies can't accurately determine how foods and nutrients will affect your body over time, because they look at only a few locations in your genome (SNPs or Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms). One SNP can make the difference between having a genetic deficiency disease or not, but for complex interactions, like how you metabolize carbohydrates, dozensdozens or hundreds, or even thousands of these SNPs have to be considered. Genteract finds and uses as many SNPs as necessary to create reliable insights. Other companies don't.

Genteract analysis creates insights about the effects of different foods and nutrients on specific health parameters like Body Mass Index, sleep quality, mood, cognitive measures, blood pressure, etc. By increasing or decreasing (within safe limits) one or more nutrients, you may be able to change one or more of these health parameters in a direction you want.

Genteract is not a medical service. We only provide insights about the effects of foods and nutrients on measured health parameters. We don't diagnose or treat any disease conditions. Please see a doctor for any medical issues you may be experiencing. It's also a good idea to consult your doctor before trying to use any of the insights Genteract analysis finds.

Genteract analyzes your genetic data and creates insights specific to you. Other people may get some of the same results, if they are genetically similar to you in specific ways, but overall it's unlikely anyone else will get exactly the same results as you.

Genteract Whole Genome Sequencing looks at every position in your DNA and produces a comprehensive view of the entire genome. This is in contrast to Genotyping, which looks only at a vastly smaller set of positions (only about 600K Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms or SNPs), and to Whole Exome Sequencing, which looks at only about 1% of genome. Genteract Whole Genome Sequencing is a 1X sequencing which means that the entire genome is scanned once. The result of this is then analyzed using a process called Imputation, to get a comprehensive list of SNPs (over 60 Million SNPs). The results of this process have been shown to be more accurate than Genotyping (see here for example) while being far more comprehensive.

Although Genteract Whole Genome Sequencing is performed in a CAP/CLIA certified laboratory, your genetic data is not intended to be used for any medical or legal purpose. Specifically, it should not be used to indicate genetic carrier status or predisposition to genetic diseases or cancer, or for any other medical or legal purpose. Genteract Analysis is Polygenomic and does not rely on the correctness of data describing any particular SNP, so it can retain exceptional accuracy even with a percentage of errors the data. Other types of analysis are not polygenomic and can produce erroneous results when any SNP is called in error.

Genteract is dedicated to protecting our customers' privacy and making sure that you control your own data. We store all genotype data on separate systems which are not connected to the public internet. So even if hackers got into our web servers, they'd have no access to your genetic data.

We provide a simple "Delete My Genetic Information" button in user settings. If you press that button, your genotype data will be deleted from all of our servers (it may take up to 30 days to delete the data from backups... but we're working on making that faster).

We will never release any of your data to anyone for any reason except with your explicit permission or if we are legally required to. In the future we may allow customers to opt in to participating in clinical studies -- in that case the study would still have access to anonymous data even if the customer deleted it from our system. But that would only apply if for customers who explicitly opted in and wanted to participate in a study.