Your genes are not your fate Dean Ornish

one way to change our genes is to make

new ones as craig venter has so

elegantly shown another is to change our

lifestyles and what we’re learning is

how powerful and dynamic these changes

can be that you don’t have to wait very

long to see the benefits when you eat

healthier manage stress exercise and

love more your brain actually gets more

blood flow and more oxygen but more than

that your brain gets measurably bigger

things that were thought impossible just

a few years ago can actually be measured

now this was a figured out by Robin

Williams a few years before the rest of

us now there’s some things that you can

do to make your brain grow new brain

cells some of my favorite things like

chocolate and tea blueberries alcohol

and moderation stress management and

cannabinoids found in marijuana I’m just

the messenger what what were we just

talking about

and other things that can make it worse

it can cause you to lose brain cells the

usual suspects like saturated fat and

sugar nicotine opiates cocaine too much

alcohol and chronic stress your skin

gets more blood flow when you change

your lifestyle so you age less quickly

your skin doesn’t wrinkle as much your

heart gets more blood flow we’ve shown

that you can actually reverse heart

disease that these clogged arteries that

you see in the upper left after only a

year become measurably less clogged and

the cardiac PET scan shown in the lower

left the blue means no blood flow

a year later orange and white is maximal

blood flow we’ve shown you may be able

to stop a reverse the progression of

early prostate cancer by extension

breast cancer simply by making these

changes we found that tumor growth in

vitro was inhibited 70% in the group

that made these changes whereas only 9%

in the comparison group these

differences were highly significant even

your sexual organs get more blood flow

so you increase sexual potency one of

the most effective anti-smoking ads was

done by the Department of Health Service

is showing that nicotine which

constricts your arteries can cause a

heart attack or a stroke but it also

causes impotence half of guys who smoke

are impotent how sexy is that

and we’re also about to publish the

study the first studies showing you can

change gene expression and men with

prostate cancer this is what’s called a

heat map and the different colors and

along the side on the right are

different genes and we found that over

500 genes were favorably exchanged in

effect turning on the good genes the

disease preventing genes turning off the

disease promoting genes and so these

these findings I think are really very

powerful they’re giving many people new

hope and new choices and companies like

Navigenics and DNA direct and 23andme

that are giving you your genetic

profiles are getting some people a sense

of gosh whoa what can I do about it

well our genes are not our fate and if

we make these changes they’re a

predisposition but if we make bigger

changes than we might have made

otherwise we can actually change how our

genes are expressed thank you

you