How Diet Influences Your Genes

I think, you know, one of the striking things about your work is from the very beginning, you've talked about how to create balance. And you've talked about Ayurveda very early on in your book Perfect Health, which I read. And it really talks about using food as a therapeutic agent and food is more than just calories. And I'd love you to sort of share from your perspective now after 30 years, how that's changed and how diet influencing your genes and how you've gathered these insights from your work on Ayurveda and lifestyle and sort of put it together in this new book.

Well, the book is called Super Genes, and when I say super genes, it's the combination of the activity of your genome, your microbiome, and what we call the epigenome. So we are born with 23,000 genes. That's what started our life after your parents came back from that picnic. That's how we started. But then on the way out from the mother's womb, and then shortly thereafter, we acquired 3.3 more million genes. So 150 times more genes that are of bacterial origin. The number of bacteria outnumber ourselves 10 to 1. But the number of bacterial genes outnumber our human genes by a factor of 150.

So we're less than 10% human then.

Yes, less than 10%. We are a few human cells hanging on to a. We are the awakening of bacterial consciousness, which decided to say, who am I? So anyway, so that's the microbiome, and then there's what is now called the epigenome, which is a shell of proteins outside the gene. And these proteins actually influence gene activity as well. And there's what we call traffic of information between the epigenome, the microbiome, and the human genome through various metabolites produced primarily by the microbiome in our gastrointestinal tract. So the microbiome actually is the first thing that food comes into contact with. The microbiome being the ecology of the earth, literally. It doesn't like antibiotics, it doesn't like hormones. It doesn't like insecticides or pesticides or petroleum products, which go in the making of insecticides and that are on our food. Yeah. And it doesn't like alcohol, truly speaking. It doesn't like anything artificial, doesn't like anything that's refined, manufactured, processed, GMO'd, because again, GMO interferes with its ecology. It is the life of the Earth. And when it gets inflamed, it sends out metabolites that cause disruption of the Activity both of the epigenome and of the gene directly. In addition, your genome, your epigenome, which is a group of proteins, primarily what are called histones. They react to everything from sleep, to emotions, to stress, to exercise, to movement, to breathing, to food, of course. So this is the integrated activity which we call the super coming to Ayurveda. Ayurveda has always said food that comes directly from nature is the best food. And that food has six tastes. Sweet, sour, salt, bitter, pungent, astringent. The combination of sweet, sour and salt, it slows down your metabolism. Bitter, pungent, astringent speeds up your metabolism. Astringent, bittersweet is anti inflammatory. But sweet doesn't mean refined sugar. Sweet means anything that even has a sweet aftertaste. So complex carbohydrates and fats are considered sweet. Now in Ayurveda, they use fats like ghee, fats derived from plant products, nuts and avocados, and these fats and ghee, of course, which is very concentrated fat derived from milk. But if that fat is used in the absence of refined sugar, it's what is called lipophilic. It helps the membrane of these cells absorb other micronutrients. So fat is good as long as you're not having refined sugar. If you have refined sugar with the fat, it's devastating.

That's called sweet fat. Sweet fat, that's the problem. It's the donuts, it's the flour fried in fat that really causes the problems. And so fascinating to me that, you know, you sort of connected the genes with the epigenome, with the microbiome. It's all one super gene, I think.

One system.

Yeah, one system, yeah. And the power of our diet to regulate that is enormous. I mean, and it's affecting everything.

And of course it has a connection to every other activity. So if you don't have good sleep, you mess up hormones called leptin and ghrelin, which not only alter metabolism, but change the way you perceive satisfaction from food. What is called the satiety factor, which then builds up abdominal fat, belly fat, which then becomes an endocrine organ by itself, because it's all just steroid metabolism. So, you know, how we live our life, how we manage stress, how we relate to other people through love or compassion or joy or equanimity. These things influence everything that's happening in our metabolism.

It's true. I mean, I've been reading recently about the social genome, how our social connections, our social relationships, our interactions with one another can Actually literally in real time, change our gene expression for better or worse. If it's a good interaction, it makes you have better gene expression, reduces inflammation, helps you be healthier. If it's a bad interaction, can do the opposite. Is that what you found?

Yes, we found actually we started the first study done here at the Chopra center was just on meditation. And within four and a half days we found that the enzyme telomerase, which regulates the length of kilometers chromosomes, it went up 40%, but just in four days. And this study was in collaboration with Elizabeth Blackburn and her team, Nobel laureates. But we had saved the blood so we sent it to our friends at Harvard, Rudy, also at Mount Sinai Rickshaw. And what they found was that all the genes that are involved in healing or self regulation or what you and I would call homeostasis, they were up regulated, their activity went up and all the genes that were involved in excessive or inappropriate inflammation, which is a factor in everything from infections to autoimmune illnesses to inflammatory bowel disease, to many types of cancer, those genes went down. In fact, we now have a genetic signature for just meditation.

Amazing.

Now we're doing another study which involves pranayama, or breathing techniques, especially those that involve the vagus nerve. As you know, the vagus goes from the midbrain to the lungs to the heart to the abdominal organs. And we are finding that even simple breathing techniques like ujjay breathing, or when you raise your hands up like this and inhale, or cat, cow, in yoga, they stimulate the vagus nerve, which changes the microbiome, which actually shoots up oxytocin, dopamine, opiate serotonin back to the brain. So the vagus not only regulates your heart rate variability, which is a measure of stress, but actually helps you breathe slower, stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, changes the microbiome, changes inflammatory markers, changes leaky gut, changes the way the brain works. It's amazing that we never knew all this, that yoga did this. But people feel good after yoga, right?

It's true. I love yoga. I do it and I always feel transformed. And it's amazing that not only your genes are listening to your thoughts, but your microbiome, the bacteria are listening to your thoughts.