Who or What Determines Your Health?...

Health comes from the inside out. If you are not putting in the proper things that your body needs in order to be healthy and maintain the ever changing dynamic of the living body, you will have deficiencies. Most people who consume the standard American diet do. Our Food Guide Pyramid is basically upside down with too much emphasis on grains and breads, but it is a large market for the farming in America…coincidence or business? Anyway, that’s not the band wagon I have intentions of hopping on during this blog...... I want to talk about what health is and how you can tell someone is healthy. Yes, it can be tricky because we are taught by society and Hollywood that if you are skinny you are healthy, but that’s just a lie. Skinny doesn’t mean healthy. Fat doesn’t mean healthy. Fit and active people who live a lifestyle of movement and eat real foods are healthy.  There are ways to get a general idea of someone‘s health. Traditional Chinese Medicine has long been looking to the eyes, gums, nails, and tongue for clues into disease and the health of a person.

Recently a new patient of mine pointed out these vertical ridges on her nails and noted that they had worsened in the past 6 months, but thought they were hereditary because she remembered her mother having them too. Heredity often gets blamed for things and we assume we can do nothing actively for it. My mom always talks about "genes and germs". I hear this lot in my day to day work. “My dad had a bad back, guess I got it too”. That’s not exactly how it works. Spinal curves are genetic. A person’s body type or build are genetic, but degeneration at certain places in the spine and wear and tear of joints and bones and ligament laxity has nothing to do with your DNA.  It does have a lot to do with your minerals and vitamins present for your body to use or the lack thereof. It does have a lot to do with your lifestyle and posture and habits. How we get minerals and vitamins in our body is through our diet. That’s the whole point of eating! Yes, I know eating is fun and it tastes good and it’s a social thing we do, but that’s the atmosphere we have created and not the purpose of the act. We forget that sometimes. My point is that yes, we do all have genes. Genes are simply instructions for how our DNA should act. It doesn’t mean that it will go that way. Whether or not the gene gets expressed is determined by a multitude of other things.  The genotype is the actual genetic makeup of a trait in a person. The phenotype is basically the genes that get expressed physically. As you can see in the examples below, environment has a direct correlation with the outcome. So whether you have good genes, or bad, you DO have control over how it all turns out. YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM OF YOUR DNA! I refused to take the defeatist or victim role of the things that have been biologically passed down to me that I cannot help. I DO have a say in my health and my future. So mom, I'm not afraid of genes or germs! :) (Germs are a whole different blog).

The interaction between genotype and phenotype has often been conceptualized by the following relationship:

genotype (G) + environment (E) → phenotype (P)

A more nuanced version of the relationship is:

genotype (G) + environment (E) + genotype & environment interactions (GE) →

phenotype (P)

If you have genes that you don’t want expressed, like we all do…then I encourage you to ask yourself: “What am I doing to prevent these things from happening? What is my lifestyle like? What do I eat? Do I take responsibility for my own health or do I look for a magic pill? Would I rather pay for something to make me appear to be healthy or skinny from the outside, or am I considering how the inside of my body is working with the choices I make?” With every food choice we make we should ask ourselves: “Is this helping me be healthy or helping me remain unhealthy?”  Just like that patient with the ridges on the nails, that’s not just a bad nail gene. That’s a sign of deficiencies, specifically for calcium and iron and could suggest a greater risk for Oseoarthritis…..which is also considered genetic. You can see from the outside sometimes what is going wrong on the inside and when you see these signs in the eyes, on the skin, on the tongue, on the nails or wherever, you can make some dietary and lifestyle changes to make yourself less susceptible to these diseases.  Don’t just take the bad luck card from the deck. Fight to try to pull a better one!!!



http://www.naturalnews.com/019396_nutrition_the_USDA.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/036948_food_cravings_sugar_addiction.html