Epigenetics - Lifestyle Trumps Family History
Environmental Epigenetics
A revolution has taken place in healthy living circles over the last ten years. It is the science of epigenetics. Epigenetics is really new, and has profound implications in many different fields, especially for our natural health and wellness.
Lifestyle Reprograms your DNA Family History
The nature nurture debate has finally been definitively answered by the science of epigenetics. Your genes and hereditary information has been conclusively shown to be influenced by their environment. People are not victims of their DNA, but are rather architects of their own health future.
One of the central dogmas of conventional medicine that says genetics controls life has been definitively proved wrong. Environment has been shown by epigenetics to control your genes. In short, every one of us can in fact overcome their own unique family history by changing their lifestyle. In short, as long as your lifestyle promotes optimum health and improves your natural immunity then the impact of your own unique genetics or family history is nil, when given enough time to achieve benefits from your healthy lifestyle. When dramatic lifestyle changes are made, gene expression in your DNA can be changed in as little as three months.[1]
Lifestyle Changes Gene Expression in your DNA
Epigenetics takes natural health out of the mere speculation, quackery, or pseudoscience category and officially recognizes it as a hard science capable of reprogramming your DNA. With epigenetics, lifestyle, whether good or bad, positively without a shadow of a doubt affects health outcomes and has the potential to completely downplay the negative effects of family history.
Epigenetic Non-Toxic Cancer Treatments
Epigenetics is NOT a pill. It does NOT provide any magic bullets. What it does do for you is provide you with more confidence that lifestyle does in fact work. Knowing that you are actually reprogramming your own DNA is a fantastic motivator to keep working on your healthy living lifestyle efforts. Being fluent in epigenetics allows you to defend the soundness of your health position against both hostile physicians and science people. It provides you with ammunition to fight back against all hostile critics. And, oh by the way, epigenetics will eventually come up with non-toxic gene manipulation cures for cancer and other lifestyle diseases that will be close to 100% effective.
Physicians and science people know nothing about the benefits of nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle. They know even less about epigenetics.
Unfortunately, the terminology and chemistry of genetics and your hereditary information contains a lot of jargon and is rather confusing.
The nuts and bolts of how lifestyle reprograms your DNA family history.
Human DNA is unbelievably big. Each cell of your body contains a double coiled DNA molecule that is literally 3 feet long. In a matter of speaking, it records the blueprints of all life on earth from the very beginning of time. The theory of recapitulation is a hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors. In other words, the human embryo is often said to go through a series of stages that resemble fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and so on as it develops over time in the mother's womb. All of this information is recorded in your DNA. Hence, only a very small part of your DNA records information about what is unique about human beings. The DNA of both mice and human beings, for example, are 98 percent identical.
The health benefits of your healthy lifestyle pass to your children through epigenomes' reprogramming your DNA.
When it comes to human genetics, the genome is the preferred term over gene, because genomes refers to a whole family of DNA sequences that share a biological context. Genomes are part of your DNA and for all practical purposes are fixed. The human epigenome is likewise stored on DNA, but is influenced or can be changed by its environment. Lifestyle is capable of changing the human epigenome, but NOT the corresponding genome.
A simple explanation of your genes and heritiary information is that if the genome is the computer hardware of your DNA, then the epigenome is artificial intelligence software that is constantly reprogramming itself.
Epigenetic reprogramming of your DNA are chemical additions to genetic sequences that are physically a part of genes. These chemical additions are referred to as epigenetic "marks." They are responsible for turning genes on or off. The same reprogramming process determines whether the identical DNA information in a given cell is going to develop into bone, muscle, nerves, etc.
"Epigenetics, in a broad sense, is a bridge between genotype and phenotype -- a phenomenon that changes the final outcome of a ... chromosome without changing the underlying DNA sequence. For example, even though the vast majority of cells in a multicellular organism share an identical genotype, organismal development generates a diversity of cell types with disparate, yet stable, profiles of gene expression and distinct cellular functions. Thus, cellular differentiation may be considered an epigenetic phenomenon, largely governed by changes in what Waddington [in 1942] described as the "epigenetic landscape" rather than alterations in genetic inheritance. More specifically, epigenetics may be defined as the study of any potentially stable and, ideally, heritable change in gene expression or cellular phenotype that occurs without changes in ... DNA."[7]
Lifestyle has been shown to reprogram your DNA Family History that in turn are pass down to your children.
People are not victims of their DNA, but are rather architects of their own health future.
According to the science of epigenetics, your grandmothers lifelong diet is actually part of the family history or hereditary information that you were born with. Genetic twins at birth, are born with identical epigenomes but over a lifetime they are changed by the influence of lifestyle factors. The human epigenome explains why one identical twin can end up with cancer, while the other twin does not. Further, your own lifestyle affects both your own health and the epigenomes that you will pass on to your children. In short, your lifestyle controls how your inherited genes are expressed by way of your epigenomes which in turn are capable of short-circuiting human evolution and can pass along new traits in a single generation to your children. For various complex technical reasons, the maternal side of your parents had more of an impact upon your own epigenomes, then the paternal side did due to mitochondrial DNA which comes entirely from your mother.
According to the science of epigenetics, your family history is what you were born with, but your lifestyle from day one has been changing your genetic blueprint by way of epigenomes.
Epigenetic cancer treatments that work by manipulating your genes by way of your epigenomes offer the best hope for curing cancer.
The molecular basis of epigenetics is complex. DNA methylation is reported to play a role in epigenetic inheritance systems. Turns out that vitamins B-12 and folic acid play a key role in DNA methylation.[6]
Genes are inherited, but their behavior through gene expression depends upon environmental factors, including pollution, carcinogenic triggers, diet, exercise, stress and experience. Even the social environment provided by parents nurturing their child can affect each child's methylation patterns. Your DNA epigenetic marks is what activates and silences genes in different tissues at different times and according has a profound effect on both your health and your potential for getting lifestyle disease. Even more profound than that, epigenetics makes parents the designers of their children's family history and architects of their child's health.
The Optimum Diet contains Meat from Animals or Fish
The science of epigenetic to has profound health implications for healthy diets. Folic acid has a strong link to green leafy plant based-diets. Just as obviously, vitamin B-12 ONLY comes from the animal kingdom. Thus, if vitamin B-12 plays such an important role in shaping your own destiny by way of turning on and off genes with your epigenomes that certainly provides definitive justification for including some meat in your healthy diet.
Any health research study that talks about turning on and off genes, or up and down regulate genes, is actually talking about the epigenetic manipulation of your genetics by way of your human epigenomes.
In a 2008 health study conducted by Dean Ornish, after three months of changes in diet and exercise, men with prostate cancer experienced changes in about 500 genes, including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off. The activity of the disease-preventing genes were reported to have increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer, were shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.[1] Lifestyle works for one thing because at least 40 plant-based dietary components, and phytochemicals have been identified that can turn genes on and off. These substances consist of things like amino acids, ginseng extract, the carotenoid lycopene, the component curcumin of turmeric spice, pomegranate juice, and fish oil.[8]
There have been other health research studies published that likewise have documented that lifestyle is capable of turning on and off genes.[2],[3],[4],[5] Under references shown below, I have included five different lifestyle epigenetic studies. By following the links you can read these research studies in their entirety for yourself, online for FREE.
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References:
- Changes in prostate gene expression in men undergoing an intensive nutrition and lifestyle intervention. Ornish D, Magbanua MJ, Weidner G, Weinberg V, ... Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jun 17;105(24):8369-74. Epub 2008 Jun 16. PMID: 18559852
- Dietary carbohydrate modification induces alterations in gene expression in abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue in persons with the metabolic syndrome: the FUNGENUT Study.
Kallio P, Kolehmainen M, Laaksonen DE, Kekäläinen J, ...
Am J Clin Nutr. 2007 May;85(5):1417-27.
PMID: 17490981 - cDNA microarray analysis reveals novel candidate genes expressed in human peripheral blood following exhaustive exercise.
Zieker D, Fehrenbach E, Dietzsch J, Fliegner J, ...
Physiol Genomics. 2005 Nov 17;23(3):287-94. Epub 2005 Aug 23.
PMID: 16118270 - Exercise affects the gene expression profiles of human white blood cells.
Büttner P, Mosig S, Lechtermann A, ...
J Appl Physiol. 2007 Jan;102(1):26-36. Epub 2006 Sep 21.
PMID: 16990507 - Effects of exercise on gene expression in human peripheral blood mononuclear cells.
Connolly PH, Caiozzo VJ, Zaldivar F, Nemet D, ...
J Appl Physiol. 2004 Oct;97(4):1461-9. Epub 2004 Jun 11.
PMID: 15194674 - Effects of vitamin B12 and folate deficiencies on DNA methylation and carcinogenesis in rat liver.
Brunaud L, Alberto JM, Ayav A, Gérard P, ...
Clin Chem Lab Med. 2003 Aug;41(8):1012-9. Review.
PMID: 12964806 - Epigenetics: a landscape takes shape.
Goldberg AD, Allis CD, Bernstein E.
Cell. 2007 Feb 23;128(4):635-8. Review.
PMID: 17320500 - Diet, nutrients, phytochemicals, and cancer metastasis suppressor genes.
Meadows GG.
Cancer Metastasis Rev. 2012 Jun 13. [Epub ahead of print]
PMID: 22692480
