03/07/2023
‼️Your genes are not your destiny‼️
You don’t have to be sick because your mom had diabetes or your dad had heart disease, or whatever.
Your lifestyle choices and your environment control how your genes are expressed, and thus whether or not you will develop an illness, disease, or other condition.
(At least, this is true for most conditions we see today, like diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and so on. Some conditions like Downs Syndrome/Trisomy 21 or Huntingtons Disease are 100% caused by genetic factors that make them harder to alter with lifestyle, but these conditions make up less than 2% of our overall disease burden.)
Your genes load the gun, but your environment pulls the trigger.
The choices that you make and the environment you create - what you eat, how active you are, who you surround yourself with, and so on - affect your disease risk. The lifestyle choices you make impact your genes, activating some and deactivating others.
Another aspect of genetics is this idea that you just have on/off switches for diseases. When it comes to these lifestyle diseases, you don’t simply have a “Diabetes=Yes” gene - you have a gene that changes how your body responds to increased blood sugar, or how responsive you are to insulin, or how able you are to convert excess sugar to fat. These disease-related genes change the function of your body, the pathways of your metabolism. These altered pathways cause disease.
But good news - genes can negatively alter these pathways, but your lifestyle choices positively alter them. You can mitigate these negative effects by eating well, exercising, managing stress, etc. By doing so, you set yourself up to avoid the diseases your family had.
‼️If you’re interested in learning more about your specific genes and how you can improve your health, contact Northbound Chiropractic today! We offer Nutrigenomic Testing, which looks at your genes and how they’re affecting your metabolic pathways, providing us information about choices you can make to best support your health and well-being.‼️