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any doctor interested in nutrition must take it upon himself to study on his own.
And any physician hoping to fully understand how nutrients and toxins act in the body would need a particularly strong background in biochemistry and cell physiology.
Maybe because I explained how vegetable oil is bad for so many reasons—from damaging arteries to causing fatty liver and interfering with cell
development
Unlike the other vital organs, the brain lacks a sensory system to alert us when it’s in pain
the only technology that has consistently provided us with healthy children, healthy hearts, and healthy minds is the technology that has been under constant development and quality improvement since life on Earth began: the technology of nature.
there really are a lot of good diets out there.
This is also the first book to discuss health across generations. Because of a new science called epigenetics, it will no longer make sense to consider our health purely on the personal level.
Epigenetics is teaching us that our genes can be healthy or sick, just like we can. And if our genes are healthy when we have children, that health is imparted to them. If our genes are ailing, then that illness can be inherited as well. Because epigenetics allows us to consider health in the context of a longer timeline, we are now able to understand how what we eat as parents can change everything about our children, even the way they look.
If you’re fighting cancer, you’ll learn that sugar is cancer’s favorite food and how cutting sugar helps you start to starve it out.
substances present in our food that are incompatible with normal genetic function: sugars and vegetable oils.
We’re going to put calorie counting and struggling to find the perfect ratio of carbs to protein to fat on the back burner.
The better the source and the more undamaged the message when it arrives to your cells, the better your health will be.
We are less healthy today than our ancestors, despite boasting a longer lifespan.
Your genes are special material inside every one of your cells that controls the coordinated activity in that cell and communicates with other genes in other cells throughout your body’s many different tissues.
I had learned from leaders in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology that a layer of biologic complexity existed that would undermine the gene-mappers’ bullish predictions. It was an inconvenient reality these scientists kept tucked under their hats.
a new field of science, called epigenetics, had already proved this fundamental assumption wrong.
Epigenetics helps us understand that the genome is more like a dynamic, living being—growing, learning, and adapting constantly.
Mutations were, for many decades, presumed to be the root cause of everything from knock-knees to short stature to high blood pressure and depression.
Epigenetic researchers study how our own genes react to our behavior, and they’ve found that just about everything we eat, think, breathe, or do can, directly or indirectly, trickle down to touch the gene and affect its performance in some way. These effects are carried forward into the next generation, where they can be magnified.
they can change the next generation’s adult weight and susceptibility to disease, and these new developments can then be passed on again, to grandchildren.9
The body of evidence compiled by thousands of epigenetic researchers working all over the world suggests that the majority of people’s medical problems do not come from inherited mutations, as previously thought, but rather from harmful environmental factors that force good genes to behave badly, by switching them on and off at the wrong time.
It’s this complexity that makes it impossible to predict whether a given smoker will develop lung cancer, colon cancer, or no cancer at all.
concept of gene health is simple: genes work fine until disturbed. External forces that disturb the normal ebb and flow of genetic function can be broken into two broad categories: toxins and nutrient imbalances.
Since medicine is a business, medical research must ultimately generate some kind of saleable product.
saturated fat and cholesterol appeared to be beneficial nutrients.
single item of medical misinformation—that cholesterol-rich foods are dangerous—had drastically changed our eating habits and with that our access to nutrients.
Thanks to the plasticity of genetic response we can all improve the health of our genes and rebuild our genetic wealth.
1. Meat cooked on the bone 2. Organs and offal (what Bourdain calls “the nasty bits”) 3. Fresh (raw) plant and animal products 4. Fermented and sprouted foods—better than fresh!
This is how the body modulates genes in response to the environment, and it is how two twins with identical DNA can develop different traits.
so-called junk DNA (more properly called non-coding DNA) seems designed for change,
These decisions seem to be made based on environmental influences.
Junk DNA does all this by using the chemical information floating around it to determine which genes should get turned on when, and in what quantity.
reason different individuals develop different physiology stems not from permanent letter substitutions but from temporary markers—or epigenetic tags—that attach themselves to the double helix or other nuclear material and change how genes are expressed.
Their life experiences had tagged their genes in ways that meant these identical twins were, in terms of their genetic function, no longer identical.
This means the tagging is not just due to aging. It is a direct result of how we live our lives.
tagging occurs in response to chemicals that form as a result of nearly everything we eat, drin...
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“Poor in utero nutrition may be a major contributor to the current cycle of obesity.”
The article shows that children born to overweight mothers are epigenetically programmed to build adipose tissue in unhealthy amounts.
This finding is remarkable, as it suggests the effects of a pregnant woman’s diet can ripple,
at the least, into the next two generations.
What helps regulate all these cellular events? Food, mostly. After all, food is the primary way we interact with our environment.
Some molecular biologists feel that this capability to orchestrate a measured response to environmental change demands that we consider the language encoded in junk DNA as “important for … the evolution process”
implying the existence of an “independent mechanism for the gradual regulation of gene expression.”
In effect, DNA seems capable of collecting information—through the language of food—
about changing conditions in the outside world, enacting alteration
based on that information, and documenting both the collected data and its response for the benefit of subsequent generations. J...
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In each of the eleven countries Price visited, people who had stayed in their villages and continued their native dietary traditions were consistently free of cavities and dental arch deformities.
The genius of Price’s work is that he dared to scientifically examine the connection between outwardly visible signs of health and nutrition using the same systematic approach we bring to bear when studying any other biological phenomenon.
As unfair as it seems, less attractive people have more health problems.
