Suppose you are sitting on a train, on a bus, on a plane, or on a park
bench in between 2 other people. Look to
your left…Look to you right…Look in to your own hands…Now, realize a harsh
reality…Two of you are going to die of cancer, diabetes, or heart disease;
largely preventable diseases that have a deeper root in the way you live your
life than in the genetic hand you were dealt.
It may come as a surprise to you that you have a hand in preventing these
diseases. Twenty years ago it was
thought that you were dealt your “hand” and you had to live with it. The human genome project was undertaken to
identify these genes so that pharmaceutical companies could target them and
provide us with personalized therapies for what ailed us. It was theorized that human complexity was
determined by a large number of genes and once we mapped this genome we would
be able to use the power of pharmaceutical medicine to completely revolutionize
the way we practice medicine. The fruit
fly has about 12,000 genes, a piece of rice…40,000. With such simple organisms having such a
large number of genes, it was assumed that humans would have in excess of
100,000.
When the human genome project finished mapping the human genome, there
was a bit of disappointment. Not only do
humans not have more than 100,000 genes, it turns out we barely have
20,000. In addition, we share about 60%
of our genes with the fruit fly. To add
insult to injury, we share 50% with a banana.
So, in the grand scheme of things, we really aren’t that exceptional. That is, until, you look in to a little part
of the DNA sequence that was once referred to as junk DNA.
The human genome project looked at what are called protein-coding
genes. Protein-coding genes make
proteins in the body that ultimately make up you. At the time, it was thought that the rest of
the DNA outside of the protein-coding genes was junk and performed no real
purpose. Once it was found that the
amount of our protein-coding genes was so low, scientists realized human
complexity couldn’t be explained by protein-coding genes. They decided to take a second look at the
junk DNA and, lo and behold, they found something.
The original line of thinking that lead scientists to name this portion
of DNA junk was that if a gene doesn’t make anything, it couldn’t have any
relevance to human complexity or health.
When they realized the solution couldn’t come from the protein-coding
genes, they needed to change their line of thinking. By looking deeper in to the “junk DNA”, they
realized that it wasn’t junk at all. In
fact, the junk DNA is running the show.
While the junk DNA doesn’t make anything, it basically gives the orders
to the protein-coding genes to, “Make it happen!” Rather than making insulin, or cortisol, or
forming muscle tissue; the junk DNA acts as a switch and causes a number of
genes to be expressed, calling in to action the appropriate gene sequence based
on what you tell it to do. But how do
you tell it what to do and how does that impact your health?
There are 3 primary modifiable ways your body communicates with the
environment; your diet, your lifestyle, and physical activity. It is this communication with the environment
that tells your body what to do. In
other words, this communication drives evolution by natural selection. It does this via the hormones you produce in
response to this communication.
It is well known that a lack of sleep will cause excess cortisol
secretion, one of the primary hormones of your stress response. Excess cortisol in the long term negatively
impacts blood glucose, both by causing your blood glucose to rise directly as
well as increasing your appetite for carbohydrate containing foods. This in
turn may eventually lead to a malfunction in the hormone insulin, leading to
constantly elevated blood glucose and Type 2 Diabetes (T2D). Type 2 Diabetes is a major factor for many
chronic diseases such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer.
Most of the recent research on Alzheimer’s disease has identified insulin
resistance as a major predisposing factor.
In fact, this relationship is so strong that most researchers are
referring to Alzheimer’s disease as Type 3 Diabetes, or insulin resistance of
the brain. Furthermore, a relationship
has been established between Alzheimer’s/Dementia and lack of sleep, with sleep
troubles being an indicator of future disease progression. Given the relationship between sleep and
cortisol as well as cortisol and insulin resistance it would seem that the
answer to a cure for this disease may reside in the switches, not the coding
DNA. In other words your destiny isn’t
written for you, a significant amount of it lies in your hands.
When you look at the cellular changes that occur in cancer, insulin and
glucose are front and center. Not only
do most cancer cells primarily use glucose for fuel, cancer cells have 6 times
more insulin receptors on their cell membranes than healthy cells. This sounds like a pretty good adaptation to
an environment that is high in both glucose and insulin. Even better, the research on junk DNA
identified that most of the thousands of changes seen in cancer don’t happen in
the coding DNA, they happen in the switches.
Since they are happening in the switches, we have some control over
them. If you flip the switch on you get
problems, if the switch stays off the problems are kept at bay. This isn’t to say that once you have
established cancer that you can reverse or remove it by changing your
lifestyle, only that having the gene isn’t necessarily a death sentence
provided you do your best to provide the proper information to the switches. To the best of our knowledge, the best way to
do that is get 8 hours of sleep a day, get regular physical activity, and eat a
mostly whole foods diet while avoiding processed foods.
