Robert Lustig explains how the first thousand days of life, from conception through age two, shape lifelong health through epigenetic changes. Environmental and nutritional factors alter gene expression during this critical window, creating tissues that look normal but function differently, increasing disease risk and shortening lifespan.
Chapters
A Time magazine article about epigenetics, this whole concept of the first nine months. And now we've got this thing called the first thousand days, because we realize that it actually extends two years after birth, that this. This critical window, okay, when things happen, okay, it alters the epigenetic programming of cells and tissue via alterations in growth factor and hormone concentrations, which I'll show you in a moment. It results in changes in gene expression and protein regulation, which we call functional alterations. These lead to tissues that look normal but are metabolically not, that they actually don't act like normal tissue, and that these changes actually persist. They don't go away once things go back to normal or back to baseline, okay? And they can ultimately lead to altered susceptibility and decreased lifespan. Okay, everybody with me so far? So a bad start lasts a lifetime. That's basically where this comes from.