Jeffrey Bland connects epigenetic research to public health, citing Moshe Szyf's rat studies showing how maternal behavior alters offspring stress response through DNA methylation. He argues epigenetic changes happen fast enough to explain rising ADHD and antidepressant use, and warns that health policy ignoring environmental drivers will fail.
Intubation and hospitalization and dehumanization, which may go on for 20 years before we become a statistic. But somehow there's a different mentality that has to rise up in our culture because if we believe that the solution is going to be to prevent disease and manage disease with a new to nature molecule that's chasing an elusive tail, that Randy journal with his epigenetics that I interviewed him today, would tell us, you're going down the wrong path. Let me close and then I'll take some questions with one last concept. This is a big concept and it bears on everything I just said. I've been focusing probably I think just on nutrition, but I want to use nutrition really as a metaphor to the whole nature of self regulation. So now I want to go to Moshe Sayef and his work at McGill University. Pretty profound work. What did Sayyef and his group find? They took rats, which are known lab rats, to have two type of personalities. The common lab rats are used to being handled. So you can pick them up if you're a lab rat handler. And you know, they're not aggressive, they don't bite you. They kind of maybe don't like it too much, but they're not really that aggravated. But then there are another group of lab rats. That boy, they are absolutely high stress prone. You put your hand in the cage, they just detect they're writhe. I mean, they're just really angry. It turns out that these stress prone lab rats, when they have litters, are generally abandoning mothers. They don't really care for their young, they don't groom them, lick them. And those baby lab rats as they grow up are like their parents. They're aggressive, they bite, they're angry. People in animal biology hit these animals. Now what happens if you take the pups from the mother who doesn't groom the abandoning mother, and you put those pups over with a mother who is licking and grooming her babies just like normal rats should do. But what happens is when those babies grow up, they're not aggressive, they're not stress prone, and you can handle them fine. Now let's take the babies from the mothers that were grooming them and put them over here with the mothers that were abandoned. And what happens when they grow up? They grow up to be aggressive and not like to be handled and bite. Now here is the kicker of all this. Moshe Syef has then gone and analyzed the sequence of the epigenome in these animals, asking did you actually change the genetic pattern of how their book of life was expressed by, by handling or not handling these animals, by giving them love and affection, licking them and grooming them. And it turns out that the methylation patterns on their genome are related to the grooming, not to their parentage. They lock in a genetic pattern of high stress by altering the way their genes are expressed. That stays with them, like post traumatic stress syndrome. Now think of our society. I know we're not rats, but just think of what this could mean, what I'm just describing, if in fact our overall environment was influencing rapidly, way faster than you get a natural selection where it takes millennia to change genes by mutations and select them. You know, the Darwinian model, that's a slow process, like slow water torture. Here we're talking about things that can happen in real time in less than a generation. And then ask yourself, do you see patterns of dysfunction occurring? Where is ADHD coming from in our society? What happens if we bombard our children with violence? What happens if we compress them in front of the TV and video games? What happens if they don't exercise outside? What happens if we feed them fast food and all they see are time compressed kind of antisocial environments? What are the implications on their epigenome? And are we then becoming the legacy of our own environmental experiment? These are profound questions that you don't find the solutions to out of a prescription pack. Why is it that 20% of boys in some school, elementary school systems are now unriddled? Why is it that in some metropolitan areas in this country, 30% of adults are on SSRIs, remote altering drugs for depression? Did we just suddenly wake up with melancholic genes? These are the profound underpinning questions that sit below universal health access. And I believe unless we deal with that, we don't get health care reform, we just get more of the same. Thanks.
