Epigenetics

Welcome to an introduction to epigenetics by a social scientist, aka me. As a social scientist, I'm often concerned about the environment and how it affects people, for me, especially their learning, but that's not our topic, today. When I learned about epigenetics (a few years back), I got excited. Here we have the intersection of genetics (what you were handed by your parents) and your environment!

What you do in life can make a difference and help you overcome some of the, ahem, problems you may have been dealt in the meiotic mixing and the gametic game that led to the zany zygote that became you. Epigenetics is how the environment affects the expression of your genes.  What you eat, breathe, or intake in any way; plus, how you exercise, and how much you stress is in your life affects the expression of your genes. 

If you have bad genes, you can't change that and make them go away, but you can turn them off and pretend they aren't there by eating and NOT eating certain foods.  (Epigenetics gives me hope that the medical community, and society in general, will someday believe that food is a powerful medicine.  Now if we could somehow get a cut of the action to the drug companies...)

Take a look at this post by my happy healthy friend about the 9p21 gene.  Here's a gene that increases inflammation in epithelial cells and if you have one or two copies of it ups your risk of a heart attack. The conclusion over there is to eat more fruits and veggies.

Eat more fruits and veggies is usually the answer for helping turn off bad genes.  Seriously.  It's that simple.  In the case of diabetes and the SLC30A4 gene variant, that is linked to beta cells producing insulin in the pancreas, eating more carrots (or veggies/fruits with beta carotene) might help that gene direct the beta cells in the right way.

There's a lot to learn about epigenetics, but what researchers have been finding is that doing "good things," aka exercise, controlling stress, eating more veggies and fruit seems to turn off the bad genes. I don't have "scientific evidence" that eating well and exercising make me healthy, but I feel good and strong; quality of life is important, in my opinion.  I can't believe I'd feel like I do if I ate crap and didn't exercise.   

Mostly though,  research, exercise, and epigenetics aside, I was super excited to see I should eat more pumpkin!  I'm very into my pumpkin bars and have been playing around with the recipe.  Expect a post on my new version sometime in the near future--as soon as today as far away as next week.