Understanding your genes is understanding how our life choices with the importance of stress (good and bad), diet, lifestyle, exercise, mindset (good and bad), environmental factors, and even love can effect our genes. We are always making a choice. Every single one of us are raised in a different environments with very different values and lifestyles, which also play a huge role in how we develop into our adult self. We have a choice on how we choose to be now. When we were young we may not have had the means to make proper decisions with diet, lifestyle, or where we lived, however, we do now have the choice and chance to make the best decisions we can for the healthiest lifestyle.
“Epigenetics is the study of mechanisms that cause changes in the gene expression but not the changes in the DNA sequence itself.” -Restorative Wellness Solutions. Epigenetics is, in a sense, how our body reads the expression of the heritable genes without the actual change in sequence of the gene. Basically, we have a chance, when certain genes are inherited, we can turn them on and off from how we are affected by our environmental factors, age, environment, diet, disease states, and lifestyle. We can actually determine how our cells read the genes and how we express them. Our bodies have an incredible ability to turn our genes “on and off” at will or when needed, because our environment is constantly changing and we need to adapt.
“Throughout your life, the most profound influences on your health, vitality, and function are not the Doctors, you have visited or the drugs, surgery, or other therapy you’ve undertaken. The most profound influences are the cumulative effects of the decisions you make about your life and lifestyle, and how those decisions affect the expression of your genes.”
-Functional Medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Bland
DNA methylation and histone modification are two of the most well studied mechanisms that effect gene expression. We want to keep certain genes turned “off” and when we have a methyl group (DNA methylation) attach to the DNA it prevents the mRNA from being able to “land” and turn into the DNA to bring on a possible disease state or reaction of whatever that DNA is trying to express. Their main role in our bodies is to inhibit gene transcription. Histone modification is another way where these methyl groups keep mRNA from “landing” to express the DNA. We want to keep our DNA completely wrapped up tightly around histones so the gene cannot be expressed, with poor health these can become “unwrapped” or “loosened” leaving them vulnerable to become expressed. With a process called de-acetylation we can reverse this process and keep them wound up nice and tight. DNA modification will turn the gene off completely, however, histone modification is happening all the time, so it’s super important to keep diet and lifestyle in check.
What we do in our lives can physically affect methylation process and histone modification. This is why it is necessary and so crucial to live a clean healthy lifestyle as we also don’t want these patterns to be passed down to other generations.
Diet is one of the most obvious ways we can keep our genes healthy and keep the specific changes in our genes turned off. Diet factors along with lifestyle and stress won’t allow changes to our “imperfect” genes to be turned on, or allow histones to be unwound and allowing acetylation to happen. The cleaner eater we are, not only do we receive the benefits from the nutrient dense foods, but we also help “clean up” the ways of unwanted gene expression. Having a healthy diet will keep our gut health robust allowing better digestion and less likely leading to extra stress levels in the body.
Stress is another “check-in” with our bodies. Stress brings havoc to every part of our body and is huge factor at turning on these mechanisms for gene expression. Stress comes in so many forms. When one can keep up with stress reducing practices, daily, it allows our body to find the parasympathetic state more frequently being able to relax, digest, and heal. Stress reduction practices can look like breath work, meditation, napping, or even exercise. Everyone is so very different and respond differently to life, balance is always key, finding your stress reduction practice/s may look different than someone else’s.
Healthy lifestyle practices goes along with stress reduction practices, but if we take a closer look, these can also look very different. Where you live (pollution, air quality) can have a major role in gene expression, or more importantly, who you live with. Are you in a moldy atmosphere, smoking environment, how’s the job status, vacation/work load, screen life? We need balance with inside life with outside life – time in nature. So many things to consider with how we live our life, and this circles back to choice. Sometimes we may feel overwhelmed, and we feel like we don’t/can’t have a choice, but in the end when it comes down to health and even our gene expression, we sometimes have to make that healthier choice for a better outcome.
Remembering the biggest misconception about genes is that just because we are dealt a specific hand and may have a predisposition to certain ways or disease, they, have in no way determining or predicting our influence to these diseases..
