You are what you eat right? And you also are the expression of your genes. So which one is most important to your health and how do the 2 factors affect each other?
Recently I’ve been researching questions like do your genes determine your ideal diet? Does your diet change your genes? Can your eating decisions today have an impact on your children’s and grandchildren’s health?
To answer these interesting questions we need to look to the science of Nutritional genomics. This is a longish post so I’ll tell you my conclusions upfront:
- epigenetics, especially the history of your parents and grandparents, is the number one factor in determining your predisposition to disease;
- your diet can be the big factor that triggers that predisposition, i.e. what actually makes you sick;
- fixing your diet can do wonders to improve your health and life expectancy (like you didn’t know that already!);
- making the wrong eating choices can do your grandchildren some serious harm – but this may be limited to age 12 for boy and during pregnancy for woman; and finally
- despite good intentions, fixing your diet is unlikely to do anything to change the genetic predisposition you pass on to your children. (Fortunately you can easily use RPT to change it, which is what yesterday’s post was about).
Let me explain why… I’ve spent the last month deep in my epigenetic research here in the South Pacific islands. As I wrote about recently, there is a clear epigenetic factor in the distribution of diabetes in these islands, and the epigenetics seems to outweigh the other big cause of diabetes – diet.
We know that diet is a factor in diabetes – for example when an indigenous culture adopts a Western diet; studies suggest that diet can increase the rate of diabetes from 1% to 20% in ethnic Chinese and to over 50% in native American people.
So the big question I want to ask today is just how important is your diet in preventing or curing disease?
I was inspired to write this article after reading a really interesting blog written by my friend and teacher Anand. Anand’s “living food” workshops are awesome. Anand was sharing on his blog last week about how his children healed themselves from a genetic illness through adopting a live food diet. He made a comment which I found interesting, that hopefully his children wont pass the disease on to their children.
This got me and others thinking and sparked a little discussion in the comments section about nature v nurture, and epigenetics versus diet. One of Anand’s readers introduced me to a new term: Nutrigenomics.
The role of diet: Nutrigenomics
Wikipedia defines “Nutritional genomics” as the “science studying the relationship between human genome, nutrition and health.” It has several aspects, one of which is Nutrigenomics, the study of how diet affects our health through altering the genome. The other branch, Nutrigenetics looks (in simple terms) at how people with different genes will benefit from different diets – so that one day you can do a blood test and get a personalized health diet program.
A detailed study of Nutrigenomics is way beyond the scope of today’s blog, though I recommend this Wikipedia article.
What interests me is simple – can your diet alter the way your genes are expressed? Put a different way: if you can heal yourself of a disease by fixing your diet, does that prevent your children getting that disease?
My short answer is “no.”
A simple model of disease
In order to answer these questions I want to remind you of my simple model of disease from recent articles:
- Some people are predisposed to get certain diseases, like cancer. In the past we called this a “genetic” predisposition, but recent evidence suggests that it has more to do with how the genes are expressed rather than variations in the genes themselves.
- This makes it an “epigenetic predisposition.”
- Just because you have the predisposition doesn’t mean you’ll get sick, the predisposition is usually switched on by an environmental stress.
- The environmental stress can be emotional (e.g. trauma) or physical (exposure to toxicity from food or environment such as smoking).
I believe that most disease processes can be explained by this simple model.
What about healing?
Since most diseases are made up of both a pre-disposition and an environmental stress, it follows that it might be possible to heal the disease by removing (healing) either one of these factors. If you took away the stress, just having a predisposition wouldn’t make you sick, or vice versa.
In practice it makes sense to try to clear both the predisposition and the environmental stress, and this is what Reference Point Therapy is all about.
Back to Nutrigenomics
Back to our key question for the day: can your diet alter the way your genes are expressed? I think a full answer to this question will take years of scientific research. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to wait for this research because I think that scientists are asking the wrong question.
Reading academic papers on the subject like “The Epidemiology of Diabetes” made me realize that scientists are still looking for genetic answers when they should be looking for epigenetic answers. Geneticists are still searching for the gene that explains why indigenous people have higher rates of diabetes than Anglo-Saxons when they switch to a Western diet. Once the diet is the same, they reason that the difference is genetic.
The difference is not genetic, it’s epigenetic. There does not need to be a difference in our genes. You cannot compare the health of Anglo-Saxons to the health of (say) African-Americans or Native Americans without considering the history of slavery and persecution. My research in the Pacific Islands has convinced me that it is the family history of trauma that is the most important factor in determining how diet expresses itself as disease.
Back to the question of whether diet can alter the DNA? My answer is “you are asking the wrong question.” Unless the epigenetic history of trauma is cleared, the disease process will manifest itself in different ways through other genes.
We need to ask the right question, which might be: can we heal our epigenome through correcting our diet? My answer is “maybe.”
Nutritional epigenetics
This brings us to the crux of today’s article: how does diet affect the expression of our epigenome (which causes most of the diseases relevant to our work). There is a new scientific study called nutritional epigenetics (e.g. see this excellent article).
We already know that our diet rewrites our epigenome – in fact one of the groundbreaking epigenetic studies (discussed in the videos we hosted in Part 1) looked at the history of famine and surplus food in Scandinavia. The experience of famine and especially of surplus altered the epigenome for 3 or more generations. (Eating too much did more epigenetic damage than eating than too little. This is not as surprising as it sounds because the people who really starved didn’t live long enough to have babies, so it skewed the statistics.)
We know that food abuse (too much or too little) causes epigenetic change and disease. But can food be used as therapy to cure this? Research is required, but I think the answer is “no.”
Studies with mice showed that an epigenetic changed caused by diet can take many generations (of supposedly “correct diet”) to heal. The usual explanation is that the epigenome is self-correcting, that it goes back to “normal” after a number of generations without trauma.
Is there a quicker way to positively influence the epigenome through diet? The only way I can think of that improving diet would create a short term epigenetic change is if the change in diet is itself a (positive) trauma.
For instance anyone switching from a high protein diet straight to a raw food diet is likely to experience some traumatic healing crisis symptoms. Usually people feel sick as they detox, but their health significantly improves over a period of months. The health improvement is attributed to improved nutrition and detoxification. The interesting question is whether their children would also benefit because the trauma of the detox changed their epigenetics? I don’t know the answer to that, and it would be almost impossible to test.
Remember from our recent epigenetics articles that the most critical moment in our epigenetic history occurs at age 12 for boys and in utero for girls. Unless a woman was switching to a raw diet whilst pregnant (with a baby girl), the odds of the raw diet having an effect on the epigenetics are low. If there was an effect at other times, it would be so hard to measure given the million other variables (in diet alone) that affect people over the course of their lifetime.
Conclusion – the role of diet in healing
My personal opinion is that correct diet plays a very important role in our healing journey – but very little role in the genetic legacy we leave our children.
Given the increasingly toxic environments people live in, and the decreasing rates of vitamins and minerals in store-bought food, proper diet is a huge factor in our health. Poor diet might be the stress factor that triggers many different epigenetic conditions.
For this reason the reverse holds – correcting our diet can remove the stress and heal many epigenetic conditions. Anecdotally at least there are many cases of diseases like diabetes being healed on a raw food diet (e.g. see here). However there is no reason to believe that correcting diet would change the genetic or epigenetic patterns.
In fact the safest answer would be to say that a good diet is a much more effective prevention than cure. If you keep yourself free from toxicity and have plenty of nutrients, there’s every chance that you will remain fit, healthy and disease free. Even if you carry epigenetic or genetic markers for disease, a healthy diet can reduce the risk of those predispositions being activated. I highly recommend a organic, healthy diet for this reason. Prevention is so much more efficient than cure.
If it’s too late for prevention – if someone already has an epigenetic condition, then you should correct the diet and clear that predisposition. The easiest way to do this is through Reference Point Therapy (directly acknowledging and clearing the ancestral trauma).
Diet remains an important factor in both preventative health (avoiding the stresses that cause disease) and in alternative medicine (aiding nutrition and detoxification). The perfect healing system should account for both diet and epigenetic factors.
Comments and questions
If this is your first visit to our blog and you are not familiar with the emotional instant
healing technique we use, please visit our homepage to watch an instant healing demonstration (spontaneous healing of knee injury).
If you value the information I research and share freely, please leave a comment. A simple “thank you” is enough. Consider comments to be your (free) currency by which you “pay” for the information shared here.
If you have any questions or suggestions for future research, please post them here. You are welcome to post anonymously.
Please join our mailing list to be the first to find out about important updates on our website or developments in RPT.
Blessings
Aya 
Tom Jones 
Eva 
Katie 
Natalie 
Peter Svenning 
Jørgen Mæhre 
Liz 
George Duisman 
chiara ghiron 
great article Simon, I appreciate all the research you did (the links you provided etc). You put a great deal of thought into your work.
cheers
John
[Reply]