You Are What You Eat, for Better or for Worse
Healthy food and lifestyle choices are more than virtuous practices. They are often the magic key to keeping our body running in its optimal and precision-tuned natural state of wellness. The unhealthy choices we make are frequently the driving force behind our body’s undue degradation as we age, far more than most people realize. Of course, we are going to decline with age, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be at the pace or severity with which many of us are currently diminishing.
Food is one of the most important influences on your overall health. Many of us erroneously chalk our health trajectory up to our genes, which is the biological equivalent of the luck of the draw. However, scientific research shows that about eighty-four percent of disease is actually determined by our epigenetics.
Among other things, epigenetics can be heavily determined by nutritional, environmental, and lifestyle factors, with food being a top driver. This means that our health is not simply impacted by our innate or hereditary genes acting out. These epigenetic influences help decide which genes “express” themselves, that is, which ones are active or dormant, and ultimately impact our health. So for someone that eats fried fast food every day, they may have genes that are not ideal turned on and active, while another person eating a healthy diet may have those same dangerous genes remain in the “off” position. To sum it up, it’s not just the genes you have in your DNA makeup, it’s also how they are influenced and triggered by outside factors like food that influence your overall health.
As a culture, many of our health indicators are declining because of the impact of these negative epigenetic factors. Chronic disease rates are skyrocketing, and experts believe that changes in our collective food choices and culture-wide eating habits are some of the primary causes. This does not simply impact adults. Chronic disease rates among children between 1994 and 2006 doubled! This is a disturbing trend that cuts across the age spectrum, but especially seems to be growing with each new generation of children.
Why is this? Where food is concerned, diets high in sugar, refined carbs, and highly processed vegetable oils are not compatible with healthy genetic expression. That’s right, genes don’t function well on the heavy doses of these substances that most of us consume. The bad genes that we hear about in the news, such as Alzheimer’s & breast cancer genes, don’t necessarily cause their damage unless specific conditions activate them. When negative gene expressions are triggered, this in turn can cause many diseases and negative health conditions.
In other words, our genes aren’t necessarily our destiny. The choices we make have a powerful influence, but the good news is that bad gene expressions have the potential to be reversed when controllable factors like food consumption are improved.
The bottom line for most of us is that there are too many irritants and toxins and not enough nutrients coming into the body. Nutrients can powerfully counteract the negative stimuli we are pummeled with each day, from air pollution to stress and poor food choices, among others.
“What you put on your fork is the most important thing you do every day. It influences your capacity to live a rich, energetic, connected, soulful life — a life in which you have the energy to care for yourself, to love your friends and family, to help your neighbor, to fully show up for your work in the world, and to live your dreams. If you enjoy real, whole, fresh foods that you cook using real ingredients, you are positively affecting everything around you. Simply put: Food is the doorway to living well and loving well — and to fixing much of what’s wrong with our world.” — Dr. Mark Hyman, Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?
The Proper Fuel for Our Bodies
It’s so important to give your body what it needs to function properly. You wouldn’t put diesel fuel in a premium unleaded engine. It would break down. And yet so many of us do just that to our own bodies by filling them with poor-quality foods.
You’ve also likely heard by now that consistently high levels of inflammation are unhealthy for the body. In fact, rampant inflammation is thought to be a primary factor related to heart disease, cancers, and other serious chronic health issues. (There is a strong correlation between excessive inflammation and negative gene expression as well.) A healthy whole foods diet will help balance out overrun immune systems, better restoring the body’s capacity to do what it is supposed to at an optimal level of performance.
All that being said, every body is unique. There is no “expert” out there who can replace your own innate wisdom when you are tuned into what you really need. When you clean up your diet, your senses and awareness of how your body feels when you eat particular things that either work for or against it will become more astute. You’ll be better able to gauge what you most need. Listen closely for what works best for you. This does not mean what your current taste buds or emotions want, but what your body systems want and need. Their signals are trying to communicate with you all the time, but the SAD diet (standard American diet) triggers so many disruptive signals that it’s much harder to figure out what is really going on until you give them more priority by cleaning up your health.
The encouraging news is that vibrant and enlivening health are well within reach for most people — and at the very least there is great potential for real improvements. Good food is medicine. Implementing positive nutritional practices into your life can help create substantial healing for your body and get you into the shape from which you can thrive. This can of course lead to a more fulfilling and energetic life. For better or for worse, the choice is in our hands — or more precisely, in our mouths.
This is an excerpt from the book Nourish Your Self Whole: A Guide to Core Dietary Pillars, with Achievable Steps for Vibrant Health by Matthew Albracht. Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Albracht.
Available for purchase at Amazon.
