Epigenetics
Gene Expression: Your Most Powerful Tool
Your genes are not your destiny. The lifestyle choices you make—how you eat, move, and live—activate or deactivate hundreds of genes and ultimately determine your health and longevity.
Epigenetics
Your genes are not your destiny. The lifestyle choices you make—how you eat, move, and live—activate or deactivate hundreds of genes and ultimately determine your health and longevity.
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We all need to remember one crucial thing
Everything you do—or don't do—each day influences the activity of your genome.
We inherit genes from our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. This creates a unique, individual mix of genes from many different ancestors. In the past, scientists thought genes determined your fate.
To some extent that's true, because our genetic makeup sets a corridor within which we can move. But within that corridor, we have the power to shape our future. Through the environmental influences we expose ourselves to, we can turn genes on or off, making them more or less active.
Everything that happens to you each day shapes who you are right now, in this moment. We like to say tongue-in-cheek: if you want to suffer and look like someone living a Western lifestyle, then eat like someone living a Western lifestyle. In scientific journals and research articles, this sounds a bit more professional. There they state that the 'Western lifestyle' is responsible for civilization diseases—insulin resistance, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even some cancers.
Translated, that means: this Western lifestyle activates or deactivates certain genes in a way that creates a sick body. Simple, yet complicated. Anyone who wants to be healthy and have a different body must fundamentally change something.
Aborigines provide a particularly clear example of this. How Aborigines originally looked versus how they look today under the influence of the Western lifestyle [source no longer available]. Their genetic makeup hasn't changed one bit, but the lifestyle that controls gene expression has changed dramatically. The results couldn't be more striking.
The degree of metabolic dysfunction under a Western diet depends directly on how "old" the genes are. Aborigines show virtually no adaptation to the Western lifestyle, so they become very sick very quickly. The diabetes rate among Westernized Aborigines is significantly higher compared to Australians in general.
One thing is clear: the fact that a large portion of today's Europeans are insufficiently adapted to their local diet is evident in the fact that most of the population develops metabolic problems—often spending decades with elevated blood sugar or insulin-resistant muscles—and one in two even dies from damaged blood vessels, equally an expression of metabolic dysfunction that doesn't occur in the wild among indigenous peoples.
Kerin O'Dea is a scientist who studied Aborigines for decades. There are numerous publications from her on this topic. From a 1991 paper [source no longer available], we'd like to cite the five observations she made:
Aborigines, like every human before the invention of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago in Anatolia—in other words, for 99.5% of our evolutionary history—ate a lot of lean meat, meaning plenty of protein, large quantities of plants (with low starch content; no grains), accordingly plenty of fiber, with low overall caloric energy density and high levels of physical activity.
O'Dea concludes: this diet "has important therapeutic implications for the treatment and prevention of many chronic degenerative diseases of Western affluent societies." Written in 1991. These problems have not improved since then, quite the opposite, but that shouldn't be our focus now. The fact is:
Genes need the right fuel and the right lifestyle.
Otherwise, we end up like domesticated Aborigines. Do you have bad (nutrition) genes? No. If a cream cake directly turns you into a diabetic, then you simply still have many hunter-gatherer genes in you that need to be treated accordingly (or must be).
We read these three articles and studies this week:
Quote: Collagen formation requires large amounts of glycine, proline, and lysine. Previous studies from our group have shown that glycine is an essential amino acid that must be present in large quantities in the diet to meet the requirements for collagen synthesis. (...) Increasing the glycine content in the diet could be a strategy to support cartilage regeneration by increasing collagen synthesis, which could contribute to the treatment and prevention of osteoarthritis.
Quote: Gluten proteins make up about 80-90 percent of the total wheat endosperm (kernel) protein. About 35% of its amino acid content consists of glutamine and 15% of proline residues [8,15]. Due to this unique amino acid composition, combined with a high proportion of hydrophobic amino acids (19%), certain protein sequences in gluten are very resistant to degradation by human digestive enzymes [16,17], including pepsin, trypsin, chymotrypsin, carboxypeptidases A and B, elastases, and enzymes of the small intestine mucosa. The reason for the inefficiency of these proteases in breaking down these gluten sequences lies in the generally lacking cleavage site activity for residues after proline in the protein.
Quote: These results suggest that coffee increases skeletal muscle function and hypertrophy through regulation of the TGF-β/Myostatin - Akt - mTORC1 pathway.
