New Study Indicates DNA Can Be Altered Through Diet and Exercise

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 by: Richard Stossel
Tags: DNA, health news, Natural News

(NewsTarget) A new study that was recently published sheds more evidence to what many have been saying for a long time, that DNA does not control the body or predestine you to being overweight, ill, sick, weak or anything else, but that the majority of our health and destiny lies within our own power.

Here is an excerpt from Yahoo news:

In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy. The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation.

After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes -- including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off. The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's an exciting finding because so often people say, 'Oh, it's all in my genes, what can I do?' Well, it turns out you may be able to do a lot," Ornish, who is also affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, said in a telephone interview. "'In just three months, I can change hundreds of my genes simply by changing what I eat and how I live?' That's pretty exciting," Ornish said. "The implications of our study are not limited to men with prostate cancer."

I have been talking against the idea of DNA causing illness for many years. The idea that someone who is an alcoholic, overweight or has serious diseases being caused by faulty genes goes against the almost countless stories of people who were told that yet somehow managed to heal themselves with diet, exercise, nutrition, breathing, meditation and other lifestyle changes that are well within their control.

Now there are some people out there who will not be too happy to hear this news, strange as that may seem. "Why?" Because there are people out there that like to blame their own problems on something outside their control as this alleviates their own responsibility for their actions, especially in terms of weight control, diet and overall health.

This concept really started with the psychoanalytical ideas of Freud. In his seeking deeper understanding of the inner workings of the mind, Freud theorized that a person's sins and negative habits and actions were not really their own fault, but that of the unconscious mind which you have no control over. While there can be some medical truth to the statement in a broad way, to conclude that a person has no control over their negative actions is ludicrous and goes against the experience of the vast majority of mankind.

Now we do know that certain nutritional deficiencies can lead to serious psychological abnormalities and in that case make it much more difficult for a person to control certain moods and can lead to depression, moodiness and sometimes other more severe abnormalities. In this case there is a traceable physical cause for the mental or emotional behavior.

But Freud took the idea of the unconscious too far in his attempts to explain away the need for personal responsibility of one's actions, all borne out of a desire to eliminate guilt. Guilt was said to be very bad so by shifting the blame of a person's actions to the unconscious mind which we can't control, we're then absolved of guilt and the need to try and control ourselves. It is from this idea that the concept of "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense seems to have come into being.

What does this have to do with DNA and genes? A lot actually. Once DNA was mapped and began to be studied in the 1950's by Crick and Watson and many other scientists, some started to relate the control the genes have upon various physical traits to emotional traits such as behavior, as well as to various mental and emotional disorders. As they started to test people who were alcoholics, had cancer, asthma, diabetes and just about everything else, they saw a common denominator in that these people many times had the gene for each of those diseases turned on or corrupted. Well, as is typical with western medicine, they take the symptom of the disease and mistake it for the cause of the disease itself.

This is done all the time with the germ theory of disease as they're always looking to blame colds and illnesses on some bacteria or virus. What they never tell you is that when the organs are kept strong and healthy and the body has all the nutrients that it needs in the true proper amount, which is not the so called RDA, then it's nearly impossible for a person to get sick via the normal germs in the atmosphere that we're all exposed to every day. Many studies and tests have shown that when people who lived a healthy lifestyle of exercise and a good diet high in fruits and vegetable, and those who were out of shape and lived a more sedentary lifestyle were exposed to the same amount of a cold virus, nearly all the active healthy people were immune or had greatly reduced symptoms and the time they were sick was also significantly reduced.

Western medicine is always looking for a reason to convince you that it's not your fault for your condition. Why? Because if you can be convinced that it's not your fault, then you'll just as easily be convinced that there is nothing that you can do to correct your condition on your own so you won't seek out other remedies or treatments and that only through their "genius" of medical technology and deadly concoctions of powerful and useless drugs, can you ever hope to possibly be helped or cured. Never mind that no drug has ever cured any disease in history and that nearly all western treatments only mask symptoms to make it appear that you're healthy when you're actually getting worse. Very much like how magicians use their own sleight of hand and misdirection to make you see and believe what they want.

In comes the idea of genes and DNA. Stories abound of people curing themselves of the supposedly incurable diseases that we know. I'm reminded of a story of a woman who became about 100lbs overweight and developed asthma, diabetes and heart disease. She used to be rather athletic and fit before some personal tragedies caused her to delve into food for comfort. She got herself genetically tested and it showed that she had defective markers for asthma, diabetes and heart disease. She resolved herself to her condition for a time, but after five years of being overweight and feeling terrible, including taking various medications for her conditions, she got sick of it and decided to start working out and eating much better, back to a fruit and vegetable diet. After about eighteen months, she knocked off nearly all her weight and hadn't felt that good in years. She decided to have her DNA tested again and what did they find? That the "cause" of her problems, her supposedly faulty genetic markers in her DNA, were no where to be found.

Author Dr. Bruce Lipton, a former medical school professor (University of Wisconsin) and research scientist (Stanford University School of Medicine), is a leading scientific researcher in the field of Epigenetics (new biology) and has written a book called "The Biology of Belief - Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles". In the details of his experiments, examining in great detail the molecular mechanisms by which cells process information, have revealed that genes do not in fact control our behavior, instead, genes are turned on and off by influences outside the cell. These influences include our perceptions and beliefs. He shows that our beliefs, true or false, positive or negative, affect genetic activity and actually alter our genetic code.

To the Chinese, this is really nothing new. While they did not know specifically about DNA, genes and other aspects of the cell and biology, the Chinese have known for millennia that "The mind controls the chi, and the chi control the body". They've know all along that the mind is the true regulator of your health, life and destiny. It's not the unconscious, not fate, not your DNA or genes or anything else. While we do know that the subconscious can exhibit a powerful influence on our habits and beliefs, often times this is because of the negative reinforcement and bad programming that we got before the time that we were six years old, which is when so much of who we are and what we think and believe was formed.

Via the powerful vehicle of meditation, coupled with breathing, dietary changes and physical exercise, we can exhibit a powerful influence on our body's systems including our genes, the mind and spirit and begin to reprogram our minds to strip away bad habits, doubt, fear and negative programming that are keeping us down or holding up back from attaining our goals and dreams in life and even those negative thought patterns that are making us sick.

Dr. Lipton's work is very important because it will finally start to debug the myths that we're all subject to our genes. We know that pharmaceutical companies do not want this information to get out because it will only further prove the utter uselessness of their toxic drugs and chemicals and prove them to be unnecessary over time. Drugs are only 5-8% more effective than placebo which is virtually zero when it comes to treating an illness. New studies have concluded that drugs are in fact actually no more effective than placebo at all.

Never let any doctor or anyone else close off the path of healing in your mind. Through countless stories of natural healing, the great understanding of Chinese medicine and natural medicine from other cultures including American folk medicine, we know that it's more than possible to truly heal yourself of sickness both physically and mentally. If you're truly motivated to get healthy and stay that way and are willing to put in the effort both mentally and physically, then you can truly heal yourself from all the troubles you have no matter what it is. As Dr. Lipton's works shows, it starts in the mind which via an energy mechanism in the body begins to change the very nature of our genes and DNA. The Chinese know this energy mechanism to be Chi, the true controller of the body. As stated earlier, the mind controls the Chi and the chi controls the body. Once again modern science back ups and proves what the Chinese have written and taught for thousands of years in regards to health, healing, the mind, and so much more.

If you would like to learn about the mind, meditation, breathing, nutrition and more about Chi-gung (energy work) in general, be sure to visit my website (www.chinesehealthandfitness.com) to also learn about my new video I'm producing to teach this and much more.

Source Article: (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080617/hl_nm/ge...)

About the author

Richard is a network engineer and longtime practitioner of Chinese martial arts, medicine and chi-gung for over twenty six years. Having learned many Chinese health and healing arts from old world gung-fu and healing masters and practitioners, he has helped many people to overcome their health issues and achieve their fitness goals. Through diligent study and experience he has taken this knowledge even further over the years including reading scores of books on Chinese medicine, health, chi theory, science, physics, nutrition, supplements, meditation, martial arts, and many other subjects. Utilizing the web, health and fitness videos, newsletters, articles, teachings and lectures, Rich is passionate about spreading the true knowledge of health, healing, fitness and spiritual truths. I'm proud to be writing articles for NaturalNews.com You can read many articles, hear audio interviews, and learn more about the highly praised Chinese Health and Fitness video by visiting Chinese Health and Fitness.com