Feeling Good in Your Genes
Transcript from the National Health Show Talk - Saturday October 23

By Tanya Smith

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just turn on a switch and have better health? how many of you would flip that switch?

I am a Doctor of Chinese Medicine with a focus on treating fertility. My clients ask me all of the time what they should do to be healthier and more fertile. Yet, when I dig a little deeper, they usually seem to know the answers already.

There is no shortage of information in books, on the internet and in the media about how to live healthier, yet, there is still a disconnect between the loads of information and action. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just turn a switch and have vibrant health?

It takes motivation to move from knowing to doing. But motivation is a finicky thing. Just like with New Years resolutions, we stick to it for a week or two, or even a month before our original inspiration fades. Sustained motivation to preserve a change needs understanding. I think understanding is incredibly motivating. So I am here to day to talk about the inspiring and motivating science of epigenetics!

Let me explain.

I make lifestyle recommendations to every single one of my clients to support the work we are doing in our sessions. I know these suggestions, these new daily habits, when they are incorporated make a huge difference. I can explain why in terms of Chinese Medicine, but have not had a satisfying way to explain using language we can all relate to.

I think I have found my answer in this science called epigenetics.

Epigenetics simply means “around the gene”, or if you will, the soup in which we bathe our genes. This soup is determined by human choice. And our genes are constantly responding to the ingredients of this soup. Only certain sections of the gene respond at any one time and which section responds is determined by the soup. Healthy ingredients stimulate healthy sections and toxic ingredients stimulate unhealthy sections. This explains how, when siblings have a genetic predisposition to heart disease that one sibling will develop disease and the other will not.

This flies in the face of the idea that the genes we inherit from our parents seals our fate. In the classic nature vs. nurture debate, it turns out that our lifestyle is as important as the genes we inherited in determining our health.

Isn’t this exciting?! You have the power to turn genes on and off. Kind of like a switch for vibrant health? If you have already developed a disease or condition, it is never too late to make a positive change. Let’s talk a little bit more about how this works. Here’s an example: If you sister or your mother had breast cancer, there’s probably and area in your genetic code that puts you at high risk for breast cancer. Research is telling us that even if your family has a history of cancer, there are things you can do to bathe that gene in a way to keep it from expressing itself, or essentially turning that gene off. This means your genes may produce healthy breast tissue instead of tissue that is diseased or cancerous.

By now, you’re probably curious about the secrets to flipping this genetic switch. What turns it on or off? What can you do to minimize your risk of cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes or other illnesses that may be part of your genetic predisposition?

It all has to do with the ingredients of the soup you are making that your genes bathe in. We have a choice to bathe our genes with joy, happiness, exercise and nutritious foods or we can bathe them with anger, hopelessness, junk food and sedentary lifestyle. This is how our lifestyle matters.

Just to be clear, I am not here telling you about this fascinating science so you can just avoid disease. Motivation through fear of dying doesn’t last long! I want to inspire a new vision of the joy of living which has a happy side effect of keeping you healthy.

I have identified a few key ingredients to a healthy, inspired life and want to share them with you. These come from the observations I have made of the inspiring elders in my life and the observations that others have made of elders around the globe like in Okinawa Japan, the Mediterranean and China.

Here are the keys:
Community
Exercise
Nutrition
Being in the “Flow”
Purpose

Lets explore each of these:

One of the best strategies to a long, healthy and happy life is connectivity. These kind of personal relationships and a sense of responsibility to our community is powerful stuff. Studies show that it not only helps to extend our lives, but actually offers some degree of disease protection.

Just take a look at one study. This was done by David Spiegel at Stanford. He took women with metastatic breast cancer, randomly divided them into two groups. One group of people just met for an hour-and-a-half once a week in a support group. It was a nurturing, loving environment, where they were encouraged to let down their emotional defenses and talk about how awful it is to have breast cancer with people who understood, because they were going through it too. They just met once a week for a year. Five years later, those women lived twice as long-- and that was the only difference between the groups. It was a randomized control study published in The Lancet. Other studies have shown this as well. So, these simple things that create intimacy are really healing, and even the word healing, it comes from the root "to make whole."

Dr. Dean Ornish tells a story of his swami, during Grand rounds at the University of Wisconsin medical school, what is the difference between illness and health. He took a piece of chalk and wrote the following on the blackboard.
(I)llness vs. (We)llness

Exercise
There is no question that exercise is healthful. It boosts metabolism, helps maintain a healthy weight (very few vibrant elders are overweight), improves circulation, keeps bones strong and muscles supple. And exercise also releases pleasure hormones, particularly if you enjoy the activity. This decreases our stress hormones, improves our mood and helps us sleep. If you exercise with a group of people, such as in group sports, this has the added benefit of community.

Nutrition
Again, no surprises here. The foods we eat provide the physical nutrients that our genes respond to. However, our foods can also be carriers of toxins, so eating as whole and as cleanly as possible is important.
The way in which we eat is extremely important as well, a calm, relaxed meal when you can pay attention to the flavors that nature provides can be a vital experience. As can preparing and sharing food with people we love nourishes us beyond the nutrients in the food!

Here’s a tip: If you are inspired to make healthy changes to your life, I would recommend starting with something other than diet. It is so easy to get obsessed and overwhelmed and to feel deprived when making diet changes. I would recommend starting with something else like connecting with nature or exercising. You will naturally gravitate to healthier diet choices once you are feeling better about how you are taking care of yourself.

Being in the Flow
This may sound a bit woo-woo, but what I am talking about is managing the stress in your life. I just don’t like talking about managing stress, because who wants stress to manage? It gives me a rash to think about it. I would rather focus on what I do what which is being in the flow more, allowing my emotions an outlet so things don’t get bottled up.
If you watch a toddler ... Every vital elder has a sense of flexibility, willingness to let go, forgive and forget, to embrace change whether that’s the loss of a friend or learning how to use the internet and to laugh at themselves and share their sense of humor with the people around them.

You know, the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn’t develop spiritual techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure or unclog your arteries, even though it can do all of these things. They’re powerful tools for transformation, for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience what it feels like to be happy, to be peaceful, to be joyful and to realize that it’s not something you pursue and get, but rather something you have already until you disturb it.

Purpose
I was recently listening to an interview with a man who was celebrating his 112 birthday, somewhere in the US. When he was asked his secret to his long life, he said, you have to have a reason to get up everyday. A sense of purpose whether it’s a legacy you want to leave, a responsibility to a community or something special that only you can contribute is vital.


Similar to what I have noticed with my clients, I am sure you already knew much of what I have spoken about today. If you are here, you likely care about your health.

The very behaviors that we think of as being so sexy in our culture are the very ones that leave so many people feeling tired, lethargic, depressed and impotent, and that’s not much fun. But when you change those behaviors, your brain gets more blood, you think more clearly, you have more energy, your heart gets more blood.

And many of you have kids, and you know that’s a big change in your lifestyle, and so people are not afraid to make big changes in lifestyle if they’re worth it. And the paradox is that when you make big changes, you get big benefits, and you feel so much better so quickly. For many people, those are choices worth making, not to live longer, but to live better.

When I work with clients, we take a close look at what they are doing and how their body is responding and customize the things we talked about today to give them an individualized plan, special for them. TCM developed in a very different way than western medicine. In ancient china, doctors were only paid if their patients stayed healthy. They got no payment when someone got sick. So they cared for preserving health rather than treating disease. This is the perspective I come from every time I sit down with a fertility client.

What I am offering here today is a fresh perspective about why health promoting daily habits are so important. They create the soup that turns healthy genes on and unhealthy ones off.
And it’s really doable, in consistent baby steps. If you brush your teeth every day you can do anything!