The Role of Epigenetics and Nutrition

Genetics is not destiny. You are not destined to be fat because your mom or dad was overweight. The concept that your lifestyle and diet can change and influence they way your genes express themselves is called epigenetics. It explains how nature is affected by nurture.

How to Fit into Your Genes

Your health is not predetermined by the genes you inherited. Scientists now know that the kind of lifestyle you live and the food you eat play a huge role in determining how long you will live and how healthy you will be. The choices you make in diet, exercise, and how you deal with stress, control your health much more than the genes you were born with. The epigenome that sits on top of the genome tells the gene how loud or how quiet to express itself. Not every gene from every cell should express itself.

The Role of Nutrition

Nutrigenomics is the study of how our food choices turn off or on our genes. With a huge percentage of Americans that are overweight, choosing to eat healthy is essential to preventing the diseases we are most genetically prone to be afflicted with.

Studies have been done on men diagnosed with low risk prostate cancer. These men opted out of traditional treatments for cancer such as surgery or radiation and chose instead to make dietary and lifestyle changes for three months. They ate diets rich in fruits, vegetables, soy products, legumes and whole grains. They practiced lifestyle changes such as daily walking, meditation, and support group therapy.

The results were astounding. Not only did the men lose weight and improve their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, biopsies taken before and after the three months demonstrated that around 500 genes had significant changed in activity at the end of the three months. Forty-eight genes preventing disease were turned on, and 453 genes promoting disease were turned off.

The implications of this study go way beyond curing cancer. In the future, we will eat for our specific genome type and encourage the expression of our healthy genes, to prevent disease and live a long and healthy life.

Further studies in the field of epigenetics show that these changes in gene expression are passed on to our children and grandchildren. When our food choices turn off our fat gene, diabetes gene, or cancer gene, those genes although inherited in our children, can stay turned off through at least two successive generations.

The 4 foods to reduce or eliminate to encourage healthy genes:

• Saturated fat. Animal products such as meat, poultry skin and full-fat dairy need to be limited. 
• Sugar. High fructose corn syrup, white sugar, maple syrup, agave syrup, dextrose, fruit juice concentrates. Any sugar that is added to food should be reduced or eliminated completely from your diet. 
• Trans Fat. Partially hydrogenated oils are oils not found in nature and are processed versions of their naturally occurring counterparts. They inhibit the way enzymes metabolize fat in our bodies and are considered a poison by some. 
• Grains that are not 100% whole grain. They have been stripped of their healthy outer shell and germ making them no better than eating white bread.

Making healthy lifestyle and dietary choices are important for our own health and wellness goals and that of our children. Let Russ Curran help you achieve these goals through the study of epigenetics. Please visit http://www.EpigeneticsAndNutrition.com for more information.