The Higher Health - A New Map for Prevention (Part1)
Category: SF Gate
The first is certainly true. America's obesity epidemic isn't improving because the information about how to reverse it didn't lead to motivation. The same is true for the other standard points of prevention, such as a reduced fat diet, less red meat, more vegetables, lower salt and sugar, and more fiber. The government can jiggle the food pyramid, but that won't matter as long as Americans haven't stepped on to the pyramid in the first place. The same goes for exercise, since only a small minority of adults get even the minimum amount to promote good health.
But this post isn't a scolding about compliance. It's the second part of wellness - waiting for genetics to deliver amazing cures and new wonder drugs - that is not a promise likely to be kept. If we want to rise above the plateau where we find ourselves, we actually have to reverse the promise of genetics. Instead of waiting for science, each of us must learn to influence our genes in a new way.
Ten years ago, with the map of the human genome in hand, researchers ran eagerly after magic bullets, that is, simple treatments for fixing damaged genes or "bad" genes that were causing everything from cancer and type 1 diabetes to obesity and smoking, not to mention mental disorders like depression and free-floating anxiety, both of which are reaching epidemic proportions.
No one is talking about magic bullets anymore, for the genetic map, combined with imaging techniques like the MRI and CT scans, revealed the opposite of what everyone wanted to find. Instead of simple genetic connections, there are dozens and sometimes hundreds of genes involved in various disorders. Even to find fixed sets of these genes has proved elusive. Each individual seems to possess unique patterns of genetic influence. Now medicine realizes that breast cancer, for example, isn't one disease but dozens. Faced with such unforeseen complications, the hope for genetic cures, while still alive, has become ten times more complex.
Yet in a different way the human genome has opened the door for the higher health. We now realize that our genes are far more flexible, changeable, and easily influenced by lifestyle choices. This post is too short for me to detail how such a revolutionary change occurred in genetic thinking, so I will only point to the findings of Dr. Dean Ornish, the country's most respected advocate for heart prevention, which indicate that improving your diet, exercise, and stress levels leads to improved genetic output from 400 to 500 genes.
This indicates that standard prevention has a real physiological basis, which is good news. Compliance is more than ever the wisest choice. But the new view of genetic flexibility points much further. You are in a constant conversation with every cell in your body, meaning that at the molecular level, every thoughts and action has consequences. It has become clear that genes are eavesdropping on every detail of life, including not just diet and exercise but your moods, beliefs, and every experience that registers in the mind.
In other words, you can be the controller of your body's trillions of cells, and the control switch lies in consciousness. Higher health depends on taking advantage of this breakthrough idea. Far beyond the placebo effect and psychosomatic illness, beyond faith healing and spontaneous remissions, the mind has unlimited potential for achieving a higher vision of wellness, as we'll discuss in the next post.
Read Part2 HERE!
Published by The San Francisco Chronicle
All comments
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Absolutely NOT. The cure involves understanding the source of illness is resistance to wellness. Genetics is just showing us physical manifestations of the resistance. Looking at genetics once an illness is manifested is the same as looking at the illness. Genetic coding changes along with the illness. The experiment that is needed to prove this is to collect DNA from infants, analyze it but do not report (I know, ethical issues here but it is necessary in order to have proof that no information is given to parents/child re: findings and that no one who does the analyzing have more than a numerical identifier for the child). Then, have the parents/child report as life goes on any supposedly genetic diseases/`defects` that show up. You will find that the genes have changed. When the thoughts cause the resistance that causes the disease the genes change, the change in genetics is just another physical manifestation of the disease. Therefore looking at the genes after the manifestation (or before) is not productive. When genetic information is communicated (such as supposed pre-dispositions) then (at the quantum level) the probability increases. If you do not think genes mutate you should look at the experiments involving lactose intolerant bacteria that had a choice of changing their genes to be able to digest lactose or starve (they all changed their genes). Darwin was totally and completely wrong about evolution being random. We all (every consciousness evolves) but it is not random. Here is the path to wellness: http://youtu.be/_8GYMWehCu8
Jeanine Broderick // 2012-02-08 11:06:38 // 1 Like(s) // -
Wellness? As in wiping out illness? We do not need to wait that long. The total cure does not rest with genetics.
Eleni Adamopoulos // 2012-02-06 18:25:24 // 0 Like(s) // -
Genetics will leap in unpredictable ways, with or without us, and we will be along for the ride whether we like it or not. Allowing too much untested science out of labs and into the food supply, air, and waterways delivers a difficult reality which even the rich are not immune in avoiding. Zoom! Zoom!, or is it... Doom! Doom!, as in really Dumb! and Dumber! Stop messing with nature. It counters in unseen ways ... and has more time than any of us to play it out...
Janice Luft // 2012-02-06 16:28:03 // 0 Like(s) // -
What does compliance mean to them and who are these people?
Heather Connor // 2012-02-06 15:05:36 // 0 Like(s) // -
We`ve heard - You are what you eat. Now we are how we live.
Paquette Holistic Health Services, LLC // 2012-02-06 13:39:39 // 0 Like(s) // -
How can our genes be "flexible, changable and easily influenced by lifestyle choices"? The genetic code of any living being is set, barring minor mutations in cell reproduction. Are you arguing against genetic determinism? If so you surely mean that our bodies and our lives are flexible and changable, not our genes. What is our genetic output? How would an increase the number of our genes be related to an increased level of well being? Do the new genes do anything the old ones don`t? Can you supply a link to the research you cite?
Chris // 2012-02-06 13:16:20 // 0 Like(s) // -
a major leap in our consciousness as a second part of the sentence....thats why we must teach people meditation on the ancient way from techer to adept so that they can experience higher levels of consciousness very fast cos the given mantra will have strong energy and with that energy it will brake the obstacles of the mind very fast....with that experience we can create better,healthier and happier society.Only after the thoughtless state the mind drops by iself all need for endless wonderings and cravings that leeds to suffering....NO ONLINE(INITIATION)- meditation can achieve that experience ,only from initiation did by Siddhi teacher experience like that can be achieved.JGD :)))
Marko Baljkas // 2012-02-06 12:45:47 // 0 Like(s) // -
Dr....heal thyself... <3
Cindy Wilson // 2012-02-06 12:44:20 // 1 Like(s) // -
agreed...!!!
Harshit Munshi // 2012-02-06 12:44:01 // 1 Like(s) // -
WOW!! Good message, thanks!
Diane Belair // 2012-02-06 12:36:10 // 1 Like(s) // -
I do not agree. On a more fundamental level I believe we need to be more loving, compassionate, wise and responsible.
Troy Badmammal Thompson // 2012-02-06 12:33:22 // 0 Like(s) // -
is not that easy... unfortunately...
Rosa Maria // 2012-02-06 12:21:34 // 0 Like(s) // -
I´m inclined to think that making peace with the past, loving the present and being kind and caring to the planet and each other for the future will do an enormous amount for our wellbeing!
Suzanne K Forster // 2012-02-06 12:19:45 // 0 Like(s) // -
I would say a fair helping of enlightenment would help. But perhaps you are including that in compliance.
Jim Patterson // 2012-02-06 12:18:45 // 0 Like(s) // -
ONE could start with mississippi and prohibit the sale of junk food eith food stamps!
Thomas E. Brown // 2012-02-06 12:16:16 // 0 Like(s) // -
More compliance from and towards ones body comes naturally during practice of yoga. Yoga gives you all kinds of mindful exercises. Makes you become aware of them. This is very different of just doing gym. The exercise of visualizing contact with your own cells and sending them loving energy is the next step. I also have a little booklet guiding me in this. This all is my own experience and has nothing to do with laboratory experiments on animals. I am myself enough...
heartphone // 2012-01-31 05:11:57 // 5 Like(s) // -
Any knowledge derived from the mistreatment of animals is false. Therefore being that Deepak Chopra justifies a lot of his points by referring to labratory animals and the experiments performed upon them....it is accurate to say that Deepok Chopra misleads a lot of people. This is NOT a spiritual man!
forthelabanimals // 2012-01-30 21:50:05 // 1 Like(s) // -
Thank you, believe this is true. Grateful for yoga which totally changed my point of view, so many years ago, for me it had to go, this way and my dharma has proven me to stay on this healthy scheme, fulfilling my ultimate dream :)
heartphone // 2012-01-30 16:29:26 // 8 Like(s) //
Top comments
Thank you, believe this is true. Grateful for yoga which totally changed my point of view, so many years ago, for me it had to go, this way and my dharma has proven me to stay on this healthy scheme, fulfilling my ultimate dream :)
heartphone // 2012-01-30 16:29:26 // 8 Like(s) // LikeMore compliance from and towards ones body comes naturally during practice of yoga. Yoga gives you all kinds of mindful exercises. Makes you become aware of them. This is very different of just doing gym. The exercise of visualizing contact with your own cells and sending them loving energy is the next step. I also have a little booklet guiding me in this. This all is my own experience and has nothing to do with laboratory experiments on animals. I am myself enough...
heartphone // 2012-01-31 05:11:57 // 5 Like(s) // Like