Meet “Epi”—the Ghost in Your Genes

This particular ghost can be a friend or foe, and can swing to the formidable fringes of each extreme. I’m writing about Epi, or better known as epigenome.

Remember the Human Genome Project? Well, that’s nothing—the genome can’t operate without an instruction manual, and that’s what the epigenome does. As well as providing instructions, the epigenome also regulates what the genome does.

Here’s how Epi can become your friend or foe: everything you eat, everything you’re exposed to, and every response and reaction to certain stimuli gets encoded into your eggs or sperm. Then, this information gets transmitted to the next two generations. The information gets expressed in different rates for each gender—males express their “negative information” in late childhood while women begin expressing theirs in the womb. We are all essentially the genomic and epigenomic expressions of our grandparents--their lives, their diet, and their experiences.

This is why you must eat cleanly, live cleanly, and have largely positive outcomes when it comes to relationships, responses, and reactions—you’re setting code for your kids and grandkids.

I learned this very interesting and absorbing material from a PBS/Nova Science show last night called The Ghost in Your Genes. It was so interesting that it dragged me away from The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert.

If you’d like more information about Epi, PBS provided this link. Another helpful article is here.

Sad to say, it’s already too late for the kids you have, as well as the grandkids (born or unborn)—you’ve already laid your mark upon them. All you can do now is pass on this information and hope future generations take it to heart and begin cleaning up the family’s DNA. This is going to be the key to affordable health care down the road—eliminating and avoiding disease simply by virtue of eating right and living right.

This is what led us down the path of disease and defect in the first place, and no government-sponsored program is going to get us out of it—we did this to ourselves, and continue to do it with every cigarette we light up, every drink of alcohol we take, every bite of non-nutritious, pesticide-laden food we eat, every drug (legal or no) we ingest, every emotional shock we experience, and every day we continue to carry out these very injurious actions. Now we also know the EXTENT of the damage we’re causing to ourselves and our family line, and how we can stop it.

We must think and act long-term, and remember that we're all living for three (instead of the old adage of mothers eating for two) each and every day.

UPDATE: Apparently now Australia has come around to epigenome eating with this article: You Are What Your Mother Eats.