Part II_Jeffrey Bland_Town Hall Seattle_6_2_2008

What are the mutations and combinations you can conceive of 25,000 genes being expressed multiple at a time. It's an infinite array, virtually. Right. So there is the human diversity is in the expression of families of genes, what are called cassettes of genes. Now, what regulates the expression of cassettes of genes? It is the promoter regions of genes that are the regulatory units that by the way, are to be found in the portion of the human genome that used to be called the junk DNA. Yes, there were people, very intelligent, wise, molecular biologists, molecular geneticists, who couldn't devise or define why there was all this relic DNA sitting in our genome that didn't seem to do anything. So they called it junk DNA. Now, those of us 15 years ago who looked at this said, be cautious what you call junk because it may be that you just don't know what it's doing. It's not just artifacts from viral infections from the flu of ages gone by. And in fact, what they found now is in that junk DNA resides really the regulatory regions, the what are called introns that ultimately regulate then through promoters, the cassette of genes that express certain function. Now, I hope I'm not being too technical for you, but let me cut to the chase. Cut to the chase is going back to the methylating story with folate and B12. It turns out that the way genes are silenced, some things you don't want to express, like onycho genes, cancer producing genes. So how does those messages that may be locked into your genome give? Supply gets silenced and it's by methylating the promoter region of these genes that silences them. Therefore there's a connection then between B12 and folate and B6 and betaine, nutrition and how your genes are turned on or turned off. And in fact, this whole process of programming your genes through what's called the epigenome above the genome, EPI above the genome is what then regulates how we influence our influence by our environment and ultimately express our function or a phenotype. Now, with all of that in mind, let's go back to Randy Girdle. I'm still on the white mouse fat with a big waist to hip ratio and diabetic looking for their metformin, that's a drug to treat diabetes. So what did Dr. Girdle and his colleagues find when they supplemented the pregnant agouti mouse? They found that, lo and behold, the offspring, for the first time ever, were not white. The color of their fur was mottled, it was brown. It was sometimes looking like a calico Cat never before shown before. Now they didn't change the genes, right? The genetic structure, the genetic code of those offspring that for the first time had different colored coat is identical to that of their parents. Well, what else did they find? They found that not only was the coat color different in these offspring, but they didn't get fat, they didn't get diabetes, they didn't get heart disease and they didn't get cancer. These animals have the identical genes that we said were cancer genes, heart disease genes and diabetes genesis, but in a different environment that epigenetically silence those expression characteristics. You don't see them in the phenotype. Now let me ask you a provocative question. What's been the rising prevalence of autistic Spectrum Syndrome or ASD in our culture over the last 20 years? When I was in medical school, my first years, autism was such a rare condition in neurology, it was said unless you specialize in neurology, you would Never see was 1 in 8 to 12,000 life births. And what is it today? A billboard down here on i5 tells us, doesn't it? Full advertisement down there on fife on the freeway. 1 in 300 births from 1 in 10,000 approximately to 1 in 300 in the 30 years. Well, I guess I'll have to say 40 years since I was in, in my first years of medical training. How did that happen? Did our genes just suddenly fall apart? Is it all because of better diagnosis? Or is there something else going on that's epigenetic that modulates the function of expression of genes to produce what we see and to put a name on called asd? Autistic spectrum disorder. Let me not just stop there. What about allergies, Atopi, eczema, asthma? How prevalent are those in our society? Do you suddenly think we just produced a bunch of allergens overnight? Or are there things that are occurring that are creating a change in the functional capacity of our book of life, Our human genome locked into 23 chapters. Half of each chapter written by our biological mother, the other written by our biological father to express itself or to be read differently. In fact, in each of our books of life, there are many stories. There are books of karmic destiny, love and great adventure. And there are books of tragedy from the great Greek wars. Which chapters do we want to read? Remember, every cell of your body has the identical information in its book of life to make every other cell. So the liver cell has the message for the brain cell, which has the message for the stomach cell, for the heart cell, the skin cell. So why is the liver cell the liver cell? Because it epigenetically modulated itself to express only liver cell stories and. But what happens if the liver cell starts expressing itself as an embryonic cell? What do we call that? Oncogenesis. And what principles does that have? Rapid replication, dedifferentiation, invasion and metastasis. The cell didn't change. What changed were the regulatory units that are creating its expression in the phenotype. So I hope I'm just kind of getting you to see that where we are right now is we're on the threshold of an irreversible revolution in thinking second to none in the history of the human species. This whole precept that we've had of disease determinism. Mendelian. Remember when we studied in school? Crossover frequencies and we could have pedigrees and you could say well with these principles you'd expect to get this many people with red hair and this many people with brown hair and this many people with black hair because of recessive and dominant characteristics in our genes. That's called Mendelian determinism. And we all believe that somehow we hope we didn't get the bad luck of the draw. Heart disease genes, cancer genes, diabetes genes, alcoholism genes or a bad day. Isn't genes right what we hoped that we were going to get? Even when we didn't fill out an application card we were going to get the right message maybe if we were lucky. But if we got the bad luck of the draw, woe is us. Because now our number might be cold. There's little we can do about it because it is in our genetic age inheritance. And now what we're learning is that in almost every chronic age related disease genes constitute probably less than 25% as a hardwired deterministic component of the expression of those diseases. So where did they come from? What is 75% of the contributor? It's how the outside and inside environment intermix with the book of life. To read the book in a certain way that gives me expression that we call health or disease or which is totally under the control of a society. And what have we done with this society? Time urgent people a second time. Compressed high stress. Eat on the run. Eat things that human beings have never seen before. Partially hydrogenated transoid containing fats not made for nutritional value but for shelf stability. Made for convenience, not made for. Someone actually asked the question could it be good for humans? We just made the assumption. The burden of proof was on us to be sick enough to finally prove it was not good. And when you change all these variables simultaneously, you change the air, the water, the food, the lifestyle patterns, you change reproductive patterns, you change circadian rhythms, you put people in different environments where they are not used to being and suddenly you do a great social experiment. The results are coming in. And what do they say? Based on the World Health Organization, health outcomes in the United States, which spends twice per capita on health care of any country in the world, is 37. Now that's what an economist would call diminishing returns. Now whether you argue for that 37th being right or wrong, because there's big debates about this, the Cato Institute feels this is a specious number because they say it's built on some presumptions about health outcomes of equality which are not really part of the health equation. Equal access and things of that nature. Whether you want to call it 37 or 15 or 12, it doesn't really matter. What matters is we're staying twice per capita in health care and we're not number one in health outcomes. You can argue if it's 37th or 15th, but we're not one. No one can argue that with all the wonderful technology, all the life saving measures, all the pharmacopoeia, all the biotech that's available, we are a country getting sicker, you know that. So now let me talk about the 208, health reform and went back to my elections.