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Making Healthy Choices: Change Your Biological Destiny, with Deepak Chopra, Founder, The Chopra Center and Co-author, Super Genes
We are born with 23,000 genes. That’s what happened the moment after conception after your parents returned from their picnic. It started out as a double strand of DNA and that multiplied approximately 50 times to create the 100 trillion or so cells in your body. But as you were coming outside into this world through your mother’s birth canal, or even if you were a caesarean section, you also ingested her bacteria that lived in her skin, in her colon, intestine, as you were breastfed, as you were cuddled, as you were touched, kissed, and then, of course, there was contact with the environment. So you acquired actually 3.3 more million genes as a result of that. This colony of bacteria is called the microbiome.
Then, of course, as you started to experience life there was a sheath of proteins around your DNA that started to respond to your life experiences, whether you were loved or not, given attention, every experience from food to emotions to relationships to social interactions to the environment, created this very complex interactivity between the genes that you were born with, the microbiome, and now what we call the epigenome, which is not only the proteins, but it’s something called micro RNA and many factors go into the structure of this epigenome.
All of this is an activity. It’s not a thing. You see, we think of biology as a material thing, but it’s not. Your body is constantly responding to eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, thoughts, feelings, emotions, relationships, environment. If you start to understand that the body is an activity then even your genes are an activity.
And, all genes are good but there are mistakes sometimes called genetic mutations, which are variations in the sequence of the nucleotides that make up your genes. So the nucleotides, your DNA is like the letters of a language. Your gene is a stretch of DNA that codes for a protein or a unit of hereditary. That’s how it’s described. So some gene mutations can be harmful. Gene mutations can be bad, but there are also gene mutations that can be good for you. And so this is how I would frame it: There are certain things that can upgrade your gene activity so that it results in self-regulation, it results in healing, it results in what we call homeostasis.
And then gene activity can be downgraded in a way that results in too much inflammation in the body. And if that happens then you’re at risk for heart disease, and diabetes, and obesity, and actually, inflammation in the body that causes or puts you at risk for autoimmune illnesses and many types of cancer. So even when you look at cancer, only five percent of cancers are a fully penetrant gene, the rest are epigenetically influenced through diet, through stress, through lack of sleep, through food that contains contaminants like pesticides, insecticides, these are petroleum products that cause inflammation in the microbiome and in the genes. So if you have lack of sleep, if you are stressed, if you have unhealthy emotions like hate or fear or hostility or anger or shame or guilt, that might influence activity that we would call downgrade the activity of the genes.
Essentially we should say that your genes are influenced by experience, what you think, what you feel, what you eat, how you behave. Everything from personal relationships to social interactions determines the activity of these genes for good or for bad. [0:10:09.7]
In the year 2003 when the genome was basically decoded, President Clinton announce “We know the alphabet of life,” we didn’t know all this. We thought, “You have fixed genes, and they are your destiny.” You do not have fixed genes. What you have is a fixed… I’ll repeat that, you do not have fixed gene activity, and your genes are an activity. Only, as I said, five percent are fully penetrant and for that we’ll need drugs in the future. So if you have a fully penetrant gene for breast cancer like the BRCA gene, we don’t know how to influence that right now. Of the 40/50 genes for Alzheimer’s only three are fully penetrant. So these are rare. I think the message here is that you change your experiences, you change your genetic activity, and you change your biological destiny.