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Introduction:

Discover how your exposome—the sum of all your life's exposures—shapes your genetic expression and, in turn, your health. You can direct your genetic expression by controlling your exposome, making lifestyle changes that profoundly influence your health outcomes. From nutrition to stress management, exercise, and more, learn how to upgrade your operating system for a healthier, more vibrant life. Your health and longevity are worth the investment, and this episode provides the guidance you need to age with confidence and embrace the future with enthusiasm.

Your exposome controls so much of your experience of your body.  What predispositions you have, what diseases you get, what treatments will work best for you.  It’s a big deal, so you want to know about it.  You also have tons of control over it, so don’t leave it up to chance.

Quick Story About the Discovery of DNA:

For story time today, let’s start in Switzerland in 1869.  Sounds kind of idyllic to me.  A Swiss physiological chemist named Friedrich Miescher was working on an experiment that involved persuading a local surgical clinic to give them all their used pus-coated patient bandages so he could study them.  Getting a little less idyllic.  In his studies of the white blood cell rich pus, he discovered a new substance in the nuclei of each cell that had different chemical properties than any other protein, high in phosphorus and resistant to degradation.  He called them nucleins.  

A Russian biochemist named Phebus Levine, who was born in 1869, discovered that the order of the purines and pyrimidines (like the G,T,C,A) -remember those? Mattered.  It does. That’s what differentiates you from a hippopotamus or a mosquito.  But they didn’t know that yet.  This was in the 1890s.  Fast-forward to the 1940s, when an Austrian biochemist named Erwin Chargaff started studying nucleic acids and discovered what he called a chemistry of heredity.  He made a lot of discoveries, but couldn’t quite figure out how it all fit together.

Enter one of the greatest scientific races of all time.  Discover the three dimensional structure of DNA.  In the early 1950s, a researcher named Rosalind Franklin was working in her lab in King’s College while 50 miles away, 2 researchers named Francis Crick and James Watson were working in their lab in Cambridge University.  Crick was British but Watson was an American from Chicago who had been on a radio show called “whiz kids,” and started college when he was 15. Rosalind’s lab assistant, Maurice Wilkins, showed one of her x-ray generated molecular photographs to James Watson without telling her and (since he was a whiz kid) he knew instantly the direction they should take.  They were terrified that Linus Pauling, who pioneered the field of making 3-d models of molecules would figure it out before they did, so they set to work making a model using Dr. Franklin’s photograph that she didn’t know they had seen.  Rosalind Franklin kept working on her x-ray created molecular photographs.

On February 28, 1953, Crick and Watson announced over lunch at the pub that they had discovered the secret of life. In 1962, Maurice Wilkins, James Watson and Francis Crick received the Nobel Prize in medicine.  Are you thinking what I was thinking when I first heard this story?  What?  Maurice Wilkins got the Nobel Prize for showing her x-ray photograph without her permission and Rosalind Franklin did not?  Ahhh!  Watson and Crick never told Franklin or anyone else that they had seen her images and used them to make their discovery.  Ahhh! Well, not till many decades later.  As it turns out, you can’t get a Nobel Prize after you die, and she died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at age 37, probably due to her exposure to x-rays, so she couldn’t have gotten it anyway, but I’m still enraged on her behalf.  And so sad that she had to die because of her pioneering work.

Francis Crick died in 2004.  James Watson, the whiz kid, is still alive, which I think is pretty great.  He’s 95, born in 1928.  So he must have done some things right.  Pretty cool that you could still chat with a guy who started college in 1943.  Amazing.  He helped establish the Human Genome project in 1990.  Everyone thought that elucidating the structure of DNA in 1953 would be the beginning of the end of all of our medical problems.  The human genome project, which was the project to map every base pair of the entire human genome, took 13 years and was sure to be the end of all non-communicable diseases.

I remember it pretty well, because I was at the end of my 3rd year in pharmacy school when the project was completed with the full mapping of the human genome.  It was a big deal, and very exciting.  We knew we’d unlock the secrets of every type of cancer, other diseases that run in families like cardiovascular disease, dementia and obesity.  It was going to be great.  There’s no denying that DNA with its double helix structure and the way it’s passed from generation to generation is super cool.  I can see the allure of thinking that sequencing the entire genome would solve all of our problems as humans.  But here we are in late 2023 and we’ve still got problems.  Why?

What Is Your Exposome?

We all have the genetic code inherited from our parents, like computer hardware controlling our biological functions.  It’s exponentially more complex than computer code, but the order of our A, G, C and T DNA components determines what makes you different than an earthworm or a panda bear.  DNA codes for the production of proteins, and proteins make our tissues and organs and the chemical messengers that regulate everything happening in our body.  DNA is like hardware that doesn’t change.  And a lot of things, like sickle cell disease and ALS and cystic fibrosis are very much influenced by the code in that hardware.

If DNA is like the hardware, what really determines our experience of life and whether we develop the majority of non-communicable diseases is our software.  Our operating system, if you will.  What runs the program is called our epigenome.  You’ve probably heard of it.  Almost all of our cells have the instructions (in the form of the DNA in our nucleuses) to become any cell in the body.  But our eye cells have the instructions to become a liver cell, an eyelash cell, or any other cell turned off.  Only the part of the DNA needed to become an optimally functioning eye cell is expressed.  Ideally.  

While we expected the human genome project to unlock the secrets of all diseases, we’re starting to see that the majority of chronic diseases are the downstream consequences of changes to our epigenome.  Not something that’s hardwired into our genes, but not someone else’s, which is why we’re sick and they’re not.  The majority of chronic diseases, especially the chronic diseases of aging, are not solvable by genome sequencing, like we had hoped.  They’re not hardware problems.  Which seems a little bit discouraging until you realize that software problems are way better to have when there’s no way to go to the store and buy new hardware.  A software problem is a coding problem we can control to a vast degree.  That’s the best news ever, because you don’t have to be stuck with poor gene expression if you don’t want to be.

How do Epigenetics Work?

There are a few ways our epigenome functions, but the main one is by methylation.  Methylation is when chemical caps or ties, called methyl groups, wrap around DNA to turn genes off, or are removed from DNA to turn genes on.  Methylation also regulates DNA repair, hormone and neurotransmitter production, metabolism, energy production, detoxification and more.  Many enzymes and coenzymes affect the process of methylation.  Those enzymes and coenzymes are largely controlled by our exposome.

What Contributes To Your Exposome:

The word ‘exposome’ was invented by an epidemiologist named Christopher Wild, and I think it’s fabulous.  I wish I had thought of it.  Your exposome is all of the things you’re exposed to that add up to make your experience what it is.  

Obvious things like: 

-The food you eat

-Whether you apply toxic personal care products every day

-Whether you eat produce soaked in herbicides and pesticides

-The air quality available to you to breathe  

And maybe less obvious exposures like: 

-Whether you move regularly throughout the day

-How often you change the focus of your eyes from a near point to a distant point

-Whether you eat produce from mineral-depleted soil (which unless you grow it yourself and are fastidious about your dirt, you probably do)

-Whether you over breathe (which most people do)

-What altitude you live at

-How intense your workouts are  

-How much deep sleep and rem sleep you get

-How stressed you are

-Your feelings toward your relationships with others

-Eraumatic experiences of your ancestors

-The frequency of light you’re exposed to

-The types of sounds you’re exposed to

-How many hugs you’ve received 

-Your thoughts and emotions

-How your mother’s endocrine system worked when she was pregnant with you

-All of the infections you’ve ever had

-Your posture

-Your ability to focus

-Difficult people in your life

-All the times you’ve meditated

-Every snack you’ve ever eaten 

I could go on and on.  I’m sure you could come up with some great ideas I haven’t thought of.  My favorite houseplant is right in my line of sight above my computer screen, it’s a big dracena fragrans if you’re curious, and I’m sure it contributes positively to my methylation in some way or another.  I have no idea how.  But everything does, so it’s a pretty safe bet.

How Can We Influence Our Epigenome?

If our genome is like our hardware and our epigenome is like our software, our exposome is like our keyboard.  We can input a hilarious message to a good friend, the information to pay our property taxes, a prize-winning novel or complete nonsense that completely crashes the computer.  It’s up to us.  Our job is first to know what we’re trying to accomplish.  Are we trying to write a novel or animate a movie? Pay our taxes or play Legend of Zelda?  Once you know what specifically you’re trying to create, you need to figure out which combination of keystrokes will tip the odds in favor of you getting that result.

There will be some trial and error, but you’ll get better with time.  It’s up to you, via your keystrokes, whether you write a story of disability and disease or of vitality, strength and longevity.  It would be great if we could just wait for a notification that a system update was available.  Time to move from jellybean to oreo, and then kitkat.  Or whatever those android OSes are all about.  I can’t keep track of them.  It’s not quite that brainless and hands-off, but it is absolutely possible to upgrade your operating system.

If you’re having trouble discerning your highest leverage behaviors and staying 100% consistent executing them, send me a message at healthcouragecollective@gmail.com or find me on healthcouragecollective.com and let’s get you rockin’ it consistently.  You deserve to feel confident about your future.  I want you to create whatever life you want, but I’m here to help you find ways to turn down the genes that cause inflammation, metabolic disturbances and cognitive decline and turn up the genes that suppress tumors, promote muscle growth, support mitochondrial health and hormone balance.

According to one article, 90% of chronic diseases are determined by our exposome rather than our genome.  This means that a great proportion of our health potential is under our control.  There are some parts of our exposome that we can’t control, like the experiences of our ancestors and our mother when she was pregnant with us, our childhood exposure or anything in our past, whether distant or recent.  And some things are much harder to control than others.  Like the personalities of members of our family, the air in the city we live in, and maybe if we have a demanding caretaking role that we’re not going to give up.  

What Steers Our Epigenetics Toward Chronic Disease?

You’re probably not surprised to find out that the best way to turn on all of the genes that cause the chronic diseases of aging is to live a ‘normal’ life:  

-Be stressed and overscheduled all the time

-Eat ultra processed foods high in industrial seed oils and fructose

-Sit all day every day

-Stay indoors all day every day

-Get poor quality sleep

-Stay away from in person interactions and compare yourself to people online

-Get comfortable.  Really comfortable.  

-Eat convenient foods engineered to be hyperpalatable

-Wear shoes with extra padding

-Never get down on the floor

-Don’t pick up heavy stuff.  

-Don’t say no to things you don’t want to do

-Don’t enroll in that class that you’re afraid you’ll be bad at

-Don’t apply for the job you’re not sure if you’ll get

-Don’t register for the competition you know you won’t win.

What Steers Our Epigenetics Toward a Longer Healthspan?

The strategies that I teach you in these podcasts and the others that you know to be beneficial are helpful in part because they’re part of your exposome.  They influence methylation - the silencing or turning up of certain genes within our DNA.  

-Getting enough of all of the nutrients your body needs   

-Moving your body frequently throughout the day 

-Mindfulness and working to heal past traumas

-Learning skills to manage your thinking and emotions

-Participating in loving communities 

-Avoiding as many environmental pollutants as possible, especially personal care products and home cleaning products

-Vitamins B6, methylated b12, methylated folate, choline, trimethyl glycine, DHEA and vitamin D3 influence whether you are able to methylate and demethylate the genes that  you want to turn on or off

-Making sure you eat fiber and a variety of vegetables  

-Hormetic stressors like working out, fasting, getting really hot in a sauna or really cold in a cold plunge 

-Optimal hormone levels

-Healthy light exposure

-Optimal hydration

-Clean air

-Meditation

-Otimal sleep

-Good relationships 

Every little thing we do is part of our exposome.  Every bacteria in our gut, every smile we offer, every bite we eat, every movement we make, every bit of exhaust we inhale, every loving interaction.  

The discovery of DNA in 1869 and the discovery of its shape in 1953 were both groundbreaking.  But the real secret of controlling our experience and tipping the scales in favor of longevity and health is by controlling our exposome.  We don’t have to wait for someone to crisper-splice our DNA or come up with million-dollar gene therapies for us.  Knowing that the little things we do matter and the more consistent we are with those little things, the more our epigenome knows what to do to keep the genes we want off off and the genes we want on on is life-changing.  Future changing.  You can direct your genetic expression.  It’s pretty powerful.

Conclusion:

Unfortunately, most people are on autopilot.  Mindlessly going with the flow and creating an exposome that results in epigenetic changes that cause cardiovascular disease, dementia, cancer, metabolic dysfunction like type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, chronic pain and cancer.  The average single dose of a gene therapy treatment is $1.5 million for a single dose.  If there were a gene therapy drug that could do the same thing sleeping well every night for several years can do for you, it would probably cost about that much.  Or one for avoiding industrial seed oils. Or standing up from your chair every 30 minutes and getting 6,000 steps/day.  One that changes the physical structure of your brain the way meditation does.  You get the picture.  

Powerful gene therapy worth big, big bucks is within your control.  It’s called your exposome.   You’re worth a $1.5 million treatment, and you’re also worth investing in support to get consistent on your highest leverage healthspan promoting behaviors.  I’d love to help you get set up to age with confidence and look forward to getting older. Come on over to www.healthcouragecollective.com and I’d be happy to take care of you.  Use your keyboard to upgrade your operating system and don’t be normal.