Genes were misunderstood for many years, but a newer field of science called epigenetics shows how we can control whether we manifest our genetic coding in healthy or unhealthy ways.

     Hi there it’s Elaine Gardner, the founder of DesignYourHealthyLife.com. A few weeks ago on May 26th, I posted a video about how negative thinking undermines your health, and I talked about how positive thinking actually changes your body chemistry. Today I want to dig a little bit deeper into this topic.

     A few weeks back, I had the immense pleasure of spending a weekend at Kripalu [Center for Yoga and Health] in Western Massachusetts, to attend a seminar with Bruce Lipton. Bruce Lipton is a Cell Biologist and he wrote several books, but one of them is called The Biology of Belief. Bruce was at the cutting edge, way ahead of his time many years ago, with the new science of epigenetics. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about epigenetics, I’m going to explain it to you, or parts of it to you, because it’s such a powerful new field of science. It’s a new understanding of the way that genes work in the body, and is so powerful in overcoming fear of hereditary diseases and things like cancer, because the common thought when genes were actually identified, was that genes controlled your destiny and that you have no control over that. But genes are only 50% of the equation and genes in actuality, are only a blueprint. And everyone knows that a blueprint cannot build itself.

     So while the genes are the blueprint and show what the building can look like, they cannot actually do the building in and of themselves. So what does do the building is your body, and what reads or interprets the blueprints, are proteins. So genes are 50% of the equation and proteins are the other 50%. But the real clincher is that the proteins shift and change and will read the DNA differently, depending on what is affecting the proteins. So the proteins are not static, they shift and change, and they read the genes in a different way, so that genes are not necessarily etched in stone as previously believed as well.

     So what really controls this whole process is the environment. So Bruce discovered this, (and again, he is a Cell Biologist), back in the forties and fifties. In his lab he had stem cells that he was experimenting with. Now stem cells are genetically identical, so he had three separate petri dishes, and they had three separate mediums or environments. And because he had stem cells that he was working with, and they are genetically identical, he should have gotten the same cells by growing from stem cells in each of the three separate petri dishes. And he did not. So he had genes that were identical, different cultures or different mediums – different environments, and he got three different results. So these tests have been duplicated or replicated many times over, and so the understanding now is that again, the genes are not etched in stone.

     So your destiny is not controlled by your genes. What actually activates/deactivates, reads the genes in a healthy way or reads the genes in a negative way, or changes how they manifest in your body, is actually the environment. So that’s the wonderful news because the environment is actually controllable. So what controls your environment? A healthy lifestyle. A nutrient-dense healthy diet free of pesticides and chemicals, non-toxic personal care products, controlling all of the things that you can control to the best of your ability to do so, so that your body is actually a healthy environment, because that environment is what either manifests healthy gene expression or unhealthy gene expression. And even if you have diseases that run in your family, even though they may be in your genetic coding, you can control whether you manifest those things or not, by the environment of your body. So keeping a healthy body can literally change the outcome of your long-term health. It’s very very powerful, and very very cool science.

     The other part that Bruce talks so energetically and passionately and enthusiastically about, is something that has often been overlooked in this whole conversation. So we know that we can change the environment by what we do with our bodies, but going back to the short video that I posted back on May 26th about how negative thinking undermines your health, your thinking and your brain activity is so pivotal and so powerful at affecting this environment. As I was explaining in that video, when you have negative thinking, the hormones that your body is putting out create an unhealthy environment throughout your whole body. And vice versa, when you have positive thinking and you’re happy, and you’re creative and you’re living in your genius, and you’re excited about your life and you have healthy relationships, the chemicals that are coming out of your brain create such a powerfully healthy environment in your body, and that’s going to affect your genes at the cellular level.

     So this is really really powerful science. Again, if you have hereditary diseases that run in your family that you’ve been afraid of coming down with, or having them affect you in some way, even things like cancer, the science is showing that we can either activate or deactivate things in our cellular blueprint, in our genes, in our body, that either make us resistant to cancer or really make us vulnerable to developing cancer. So incredibly powerful information, and I hope that gives you more fuel for creating a healthy lifestyle for yourself because I think most people are not focused on their health when they’re feeling well on a day-to-day basis. But it’s a huge mistake because tragedies can happen at any given moment and we can be developing diseases over years that seem to manifest overnight, but we’ve been working on them forever. So even if you feel well, developing a healthy lifestyle is such a powerful tool to maintain your wellness and really really significantly reduce your chances of succumbing to any of the major health issues that many many people struggle with.

     So I hope you find that this information is powerful and enlightening. Bruce Lipton is a wonderful scientist, he loves to share his message. I would encourage you to look him up on the internet and to look at epigenetics. More and more people are talking about epigenetics and this understanding about how it affects the genes and how we can control our own genes. So it’s very powerful, very interesting, and as always, adopting a healthy lifestyle and being empowered and understanding how your body works is so important. Change your lifestyle so that you can be healthy on a day-to-day basis and also have a healthy lifestyle as a preventive factor so that you can live a long healthy lifestyle and not succumb to many of the things that people are experiencing.

     If you have any questions about the science of epigenetics or Bruce Lipton or about how you can go about changing your mindset and the things that happen in your brain, I’m more than happy to support you with that. This is truly what I’m passionate about. As always, I want you to have the health that you deserve so that you can live the life that you deserve.