The gene itself doesn’t physically change-the expression of the gene changes, and that expression is what matters most because that is what affects our health and our lives. The 61-year-old New Jersey-born chiropractor with a striking resemblance to Wallace Shawn and a voice like your Italian uncle after inhaling helium has in recent months. So as we react to a situation in our external environment that produces an emotion, the resulting internal chemistry can signal our genes to either turn on (up-regulating, or producing an increased expression of the gene) or to turn off (down-regulating, or producing a decreased expression of the gene). What do I mean by the environment within our body? As I said previously, emotions are chemical feedback, the end products of experiences we have in our external environment. But we now know through the science of epigenetics that it’s not the gene that creates disease but the environment that programs our genes to create disease-and not just the external environment outside our body (cigarette smoke or pesticides, for example), but also the internal environment within our body: the environment outside our cells. So if many people in someone’s family died of heart disease, we assumed that their chances of also developing heart disease would be pretty high. “Making Genetic Changes We used to think that genes created disease and that we were at the mercy of our DNA. quite literally supernatural by nature if given the proper knowledge and instruction.
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