Hey @Tamala! Always great to connect with other like minded health-interested folks. I'm testing the steemit waters and am really liking it so far.

I'm not that shocked, a lot of people are rightfully concerned about 23andMe's data habits. Its honestly very nebulous as to what the risks really are right now. I use their data for the analysis I do, and with any clients that are concerned I ship them a kit myself that buy, they use a fake name, and then there's nothing to even link it to their address.

In the next few months, I'm actually going to be switching to smaller, private company that has the same Illumina sequencing chip that 23andMe uses except the data is owned by the customer. And, my colleagues and myself have worked out a custom panel with them where we'll have access to all the SNPs they analyze in 23andMe from both version 4 and 5, the last two updates, plus some SNPs that aren't available in 23andMe at all. You'd never notice unless you were using their raw data, but they switch certain SNPs in and out when they make updates to their system. There were some amazing SNPs available in version 4 that I lost when they came out with the update last fall. Some neat ones in version 5 I didn't have access too previously as well, but I'm looking forward to having more control over what I can look at with a more ethical company.

I think genetic testing in general is really helpful information to know, especially if you're doing any kind of biohacking. It can really give you great information about "whats going on behind the lab value." Being able to look at specific pathways and get an understanding of which ones are functioning well and which ones could use support allows for precision that's just not possible (or would require really expensive lab testing) to discern other ways. For some things, it has it's drawbacks and lab testing is more useful. But, overall, with the type of information that's available now through genome-wide association studies, it's really powerful information to have about yourself.

For example, with genetic testing, my wife and I figured out why she was getting fat while I was losing weight on a more paleo/bulletproof style approach. I do all the cooking so she was eating what was right for my body, not hers. It wasn't until I looked at her genes did I really understand how I needed to modify her meals to give her a better balance of macros. Now, I add coconut oil and ghee, she adds olive oil and more starchy carbs.

One word of advice though, coming from someone who looks at this stuff all the time, is that many of the DIY gene analysis services (livewello, nutrihacker, etc) have really confusing or sometimes flat out wrong information because much of it is crowdsourced info. I've even found a few errors on Selfhacked (and hope they fixed them, cause I emailed em about it). So, if you decide to go at it yourself, make sure to double check source studies when you can.

Anyway, look forward to connecting with you more on steemit!