It’s a fact that our genes have not changed for thousands of years. We have the same genetic make up as our ancestors.

It’s a fact that our ancestors did not suffer from the chronic diseases plaguing western societies nowadays, namely, diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancers.

It’s also a fact, that cultures around the world today, who live a similar lifestyle as our ancestor, do not experience the chronic diseases that we suffer from.

Simply put, our genes cannot be blamed for the current ill health of western societies. Our lifestyle, on the other hand, should be.

We are currently enduring chronic diseases produced by a mismatch between our genetic requirement for health and our “modern lifestyle”.

An article in the journal Preventative Medicine, states that the “ … cultural evolution has processed more rapidly than has genetic evolution, thereby producing ever-greater dissociation between the way we actually live and the lifestyle for which our genome was originally selected … This discordance fosters the chronic degenerative diseases that cause most morbidity [sickness] and mortality [death] in contemporary affluent nations.”

Stated another way, our health and wellness are dependent on proper gene expression. Our genes were originally selected or designed for a lifestyle like our ancestors’. A lifestyle that involved hunting and walking around gathering fruits, vegetables and nuts. Our ancestors had to walk, run, climb, lift, farm, gather, dig… They lived a very active life style. Our ancestors never had to eat hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, white bleached flour, sodas and the rest of modern day “marvels”. Our genes, like their genes, are designed to have physical activity, vegetables and fruits. Our genes require them for proper gene expression.

Since those same genes have not changed, then we still require the same type of lifestyle as our ancestors for proper health. However, our lifestyle has changed, producing the mismatch that fosters the chronic diseases of modern society.

Our modern lifestyle is not congruent with healthy gene expression, nor with health and wellness.

“From a genetic standpoint, humans living today are Stone age hunter gathers displaced through time to a world that differs from that for which our genetic constitution was selected… Our current discordance… acts as a potent promoter of chronic illnesses; atherosclerosis, essential hypertension, many cancers, diabetes mellitus, and obesity among others…Although our genes have hardly changed, our culture has been transformed almost beyond recognition during the past 10,000 years, especially since the Industrial Revolution. There is increasing evidence that the resulting mismatch fosters “disease of civilization” that together cause 75 percent of all deaths in Western nations, but that are rare among persons whose life ways reflect those of our preagricultural ancestors.”

(American J. Med., 1988.)

“In other words, physical inactivity is an abnormal event for a genome programmed to expect physical activity, thus explaining, in part, the genesis of how physical inactivity leads to metabolic dysfunctions and eventual metabolic disorders such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and so forth…There is now unequivocal evidence in the literature supporting the notion that all environmental factors combined, including physical inactivity, account for the majority of chronic health conditions…Indeed environmental factors (lifestyle) have been identified as 58-91 % of causal factors for three of the most dominant chronic health conditions afflicting individuals in modern day America: Type 2 Diabetes, coronary heart disease and most site specific cancers. This is a dramatic shift in the preponderance of incidence of such conditions that once were very rare.”

(J. Appl. Phys., 2002)

“In comparison with the diet habitually ingested by preagricultural Homo sapiens living in the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000-10,000 years ago), the diet of contemporary Homo sapiens is rich in saturated fat, simple sugars, sodium and chloride and poor in fiber, magnesium and potassium. These and numerous other postagricultural dietary compositional changes have been implicated as risk factors in the pathogenesis of “diseases of civilization”, including atherosclerosis, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and certain types of cancer.”

(American. J. Clin. Nutr., 2002)

This should be good news. Since we cannot change our genes nor select our parents, it’s good to know that there is nothing wrong with our genes. The problem is our lifestyle and we can do something about that.

How do we return to normal genes expression? What is a healthy life style? How do we implement it? How do we reach our optimum health potential? That is what we focus on in our office. That is what we cover in our lectures. That is what our wellness program consists of.