[quote author=When the Body Says No]
The actual results of the genome project are bound to be disappointing. Although the scientific information uncovered is important for its own sake, very little can be expected from the genome program that will lead to broad health benefits in the near future, if ever.
First, there are many technical problems still to be solved. Our current state of knowledge about the genetic makeup of human beings may be likened to using a copy of The Concise Oxford English Dictionary as "the model" from which the plays of William Shakespeare or the novels of Charles Dickens were created. "All" that remains to duplicate their work now is to find the prepositions, grammatical rules and phonetic indications, then to figure out how the two authors arrived at their storylines, dialogues and sublime literary devices. "The genome is the biological programming," one of the more thoughtful science reporters wrote, "but evolution has neglected to provide even the punctuation to show where genes stop and start, let alone any helpful notes as to what each gene is meant to do."
Second, contrary to the genetic fundamentalism that currently informs medical thinking and public awareness, genes alone cannot possibly account for the complex psychological characteristics, the behaviors, health or illness of human beings. Genes are merely codes. They act as a set of rules and as a biological template for the synthesis of the proteins that give each particular cell its characteristic structure and functions. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. Genes exist and function in the context of living organisms. The activities of cells are defined not simply by the genes in their nuclei but by the requirements of the entire organism-and by the interaction of that organism with the environment in which it must survive. Genes are turned on or off by the environment. For this reason, the greatest influences on human development, health and behaviour are those of the nurturing environment .
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It is a marvelous way to put it. Puts the whole genetic profiling in the diet at a second stage.
The genetic code contains only the hardware for life, it is the epigenetic code who has the software determining how the hardware behaves. This is what you want to focus on since genes are codes that are turned on and off by the environment which includes the foods we eat, nurturing or the lack of it, our toxic world, and so forth.
It is the epigenome which consists of chemical compounds that modify, or mark the genome in a way that tells it what to do, where to do it and when to do it. The marks, which are not part of the DNA itself, can be passed on from cell to cell as cells divide, and from one generation to the next.
Epigenetic control is basically how your environment signals control over the activity of your genes. The information that your environment signals goes on to a regulatory protein, and only then does it go to the DNA which will end up coding a protein. The contribution of nature (genes) and the contribution of nurture (epigenetic mechanisms) have to be considered if we are to make sense of ourselves.
And the most important tool we have to change our health is the food we eat. The food we eat has the information needed to affect our health in the fastest way.
As an example, let’s take for instance the agouti mice experiment where scientists found that an enriched environment with nutrients that are typically in animal foods can override genetic mutations in mice. Agouti mice are yellow and extremely obese, and are predisposed to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer: our modern age maladies. In the study, scientists used B-complex vitamins including choline found in high amounts in animal foods, and betaine found in high amounts in spinach. These nutrients are very rich in methyl groups which are involved in epigenetic modifications. Methyl groups attach to a gene’s DNA, changing the way regulatory proteins bind to the DNA molecule. If the proteins bind too tightly to the gene, the gene cannot be read. Methylating DNA can silence or modify gene activity. In the experiment, scientists gave these nutrients to pregnant yellow mice with the abnormal “agouti” gene that were obese, and they ended up giving birth to the brown lean mice, even though the offspring had the yellow agouti gene. The agouti mothers, who didn’t receive B vitamins, had yellow pups, which ate much more than the brown ones. A grain-based diet will lead you to a deficit of B-vitamins which leads to hyperhomocysteinemia: a risk factor for strokes and heart disease. It can be treated with a diet rich in animal foods!
Babies that were undernourished during pregnancy are more likely to be obese and experience metabolic problems later in life. It makes their metabolism thrifty, readily converting the overabundance of carbs into fat and leading to insulin resistance and obesity. It would have made them survive much easily periods of famine and scarcity. It was handy for our Paleolithic ancestors, who never had carb rich foods foods like the ones we have today.
Another story that should give us all pause is Francis Pottenger’s cat experiments. In the 1930s, this scientist conducted a series of feeding experiments and which spanned more than 10 years and several feline generations. From the 2nd generation onwards, the cats that were fed processed foods showed vulnerability to disease, more structural deformities, allergies, reduced learning abilities, reproductive problems and stress-driven behaviors. It took around 4 generations of healthy food feeding in order for the cats to return to normal. If we are too many unhealthy generations of “Pottenger’s cats” into the Big Agra Revolution, the odds are against us and we can no longer afford to ignore this. It is catastrophic to see that we no longer have the same strength and resilience some cultures enjoyed before the industrial era.
Despite the extent of the damage, it is equally important to give ourselves the chance to effect epigenetic changes through a diet in which humanity thrived for most of its history. We can “control” our genome through our food rather than being controlled by it. There is indeed hope!
As outstanding as the genetic profile stored in the nucleus of the cells is, it is actually our fatty cell membranes which happen to be the interface between the cell and the environment. As biologist Bruce Lipton explains, information from the environment is transferred to the cell via the cell membrane. The cell membrane ("mem-brain") monitors the condition of the environment and then sends signals to the genes inside the cell so they can engage cellular mechanisms, which in turn, provide for its survival.
Another important aspect to consider is that our genes live inside the cells, and the nutrients that best protect them from undesirable effects are those who are able to cross the fatty cell membrane that encloses the cell, that is, fat soluble nutrients in animal foods.
In "Art and Science of Low Carb Living" it is explained how the genome consists of 3 billion base pairs on the 23 chromosomes. The DNA length that contains a typical gene extends about 50,000 base pairs, of which only a fraction (i.e. 3,000) encodes a protein. Each of us has around 22,000 genes scattered around the genome. What all of this means, is that the majority of the genome (98%) consists of DNA which was considered to be junk because it didn’t encoded protein. In fact, it is called non-coding DNA. But nowadays functions for this “junk” are starting to be elucidated. Some are like genetic switches that regulate when and where genes are expressed.
We are told that a person’s DNA is about 99%-99.5% identical to any other person’s DNA and our differences relies on what is called copy number variants – places in the DNA where the number of copies of a gene can vary from one to many hundreds. Copy number variations took place over a million years ago, others a few thousand years ago. Another way in which we can differ to each other is what is called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – a location on the DNA where one of the four nucleotides (whose pairing constitute DNA's base pairs) has been replaced by another. Two people can differ for about 3 million SNPs, which is about 0.1% of their total DNA.
This teensy percentage may account for a lot of differences between each one of us, including the way we tolerate carbohydrates. But experiments which severely restrict carbs point to a consistent shift in our metabolism with little variability. That is, we are hardwired to respond to carbohydrate restriction in a reliable and healthy way. From a genetic point of view, our ability to thrive under a low carb diet is highly conserved as opposed to our ability to tolerate a high carb diet intake. Low carb eating seems to be the normal metabolic state associated with health, which is consistent with the view that throughout most of our human evolution, we thrived under a low carb diet.
All the info is in the Life Without Bread thread and more so on the Ketogenic thread. But here is a primer FWIW of "LWB".
There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. According to Dr. Eades, author of The Protein Power, “the actual amount of carbohydrates required by humans for health is zero.” Our bodies are perfectly capable of making sugar to sustain our bodies without no carbs from our diet.
This non-essentiality of carbs to our bodies is related to our ancestral past and the medium in which our brains and bodies thrived where carbs were really a dispensable food.
It is recognized that the change in diet since the Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age has systemically destroyed our health and that the mismatch between our ancient physiology and current diet is at the root of many so-called diseases of civilization: coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, type-2 diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, etc. which are virtually absent in hunter-gatherers and non-westernized populations. Most of the human genome has ancestral genes that adapted for over millions of years to a caveman diet.
Basic human physiology goes back hundreds of thousands of years, if not a million or two. Our physiology did not changed with the consumption of vast amounts of sugar in the span of a few thousand years.
We are here today because our ancestors survived prolonged periods of fasting while they hunted for foods and they were able to thrive on animal foods under very interesting conditions.
We are children of the Ice Age, that is, our ancestors survived major cooling and glacial ice sheets which began and ended roughly every 11,500 years. This had a major impact on our human physiology; it is what made us human. We have spent a significant amount of time on an Ice Age. Only those who adapted under such frigid and difficult conditions survived. It is certainly food for thought as we approach the next ice age.
Animal fat was our primal energy, as it was - and still is - the most efficient, dense and long-burning fuel. It is agreed by experts that our extended dependence on meat and animal fats (i.e. fish fat) throughout these continual freezing periods of time actually encouraged our brains to enlarge and develop so that we became human. We became smart because we ate animal fat and meat. Thus, it is not surprising to note that evidence is growing that vegetarians and members of agrarian societies have smaller brains.
The case for our evolutionary history is a strong one and it is made by evolutionary biologists which have been researching and writing about this for a long time with no agenda to support the food industry as the medical profession researchers have.
Essentially, we are much more alike physiologically than not and even though we all have our own genetic susceptibility and biochemical individuality, we all still have the same fundamental anatomic and physiological landmarks and laws. Genetically speaking, we are essentially the same with respect to genetic expression to those humans living over 40 thousand years ago. Our physiology is the one of those people who lived during the Paleolithic Era, which refers to the human evolutionary time spanning from around 2.6 million to 10 thousand years ago right before the Agricultural Revolution. We are not alien bodies from a different planet meant to be eating processed foods for astronauts; we are simply the direct descendants of our paleo ancestors eating something aberrant until very recently.
We are highly optimized and geared by nature to be hunter gatherers from a biological, genetic, physiological point of view. As for human evolution, we have been mostly skilled hunters eating high-quality animal foods that were hormone, antibiotic and pesticide free with no genetic alteration. It was very high in fat which was hold very dearly and low in carb. The little carb ingested, if any, was eaten as seasonally available.
For most of us, from an evolutionary perspective, a high sugar diet is a metabolic challenge that some find difficult as early as they are born and many fail to meet as early as adolescence. It is evident that these negative consequences can be dealt with avoidance of carbs, intermittent fasting, resistance training and stress reduction through meditation and play. Arguably how our ancestors lived.
