Epigenetics, Processed Foods, and the Fate of the Human Race

By Patrick Earvolino
From issue Number 2, Volume 2

DNA is destiny. If you attended high school in the twentieth century, then you learned this old saw of genetics, which says the chances of developing a grave disease such as cancer or diabetes are dictated by the makeup of your genes.

Moreover, genetics says, the DNA you pass on to your children is set. Barring anything that might cause a mutation in the structure of your genes—like rummaging though a nuclear waste dump—what you do during your lifetime has no bearing on the genes you pass to the next generation.

Inherent in the DNA-as-destiny message is the idea that genes are static. You receive your genetic inheritance from your parents and you live the consequences. If the genes you got are prone to cancer, you get cancer. If they're not, well, lucky you.

But the idea of static genes has never been satisfactory. In identical twins, for instance, why does one twin sometimes develop a chronic disease while the other does not? How can two people with identical genes, whose destinies too should be identical, experience such different fates?

The answer is epigenetics.

"Above" Genes

When the landmark Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, investigators were baffled. After spending nearly 15 years mapping every strand of human DNA, they'd failed to find the over 100,000 genes they'd expected to account for human complexity.

Instead, they discovered our DNA comprises only about 20,000 genes—or approximately the same number, and types, as in a mouse or a fly. Our intricate design, it turns out, owes itself not to genetic diversity but rather to the various mechanisms that govern how our genes are expressed.

Surrounding and interacting with our DNA is a landscape of biochemicals that turn various genes "on" or "off." Together with non-genetic portions of our DNA that also affect gene expression, these chemicals make up what scientists call epigenes (epi meaning "above" or "on" in Greek).

If genes are the hardware of our construction, then epigenes are the software—orchestrating how our genes cooperate to create the traits and structures that make us us.

Now, scientists have known about epigenes for a long time. After all, a skin cell and a brain cell have the exact same DNA, so it's obvious that something causes our genes to express differently. But what they didn't know is that some epigenetic programming appears to be both alterable and heritable.

That is to say, environmental influences—what we eat, what we drink, the chemicals we breathe or ingest, etc.—change how our genes are expressed. And, more stunningly, these changes in genetic expression can be passed on to our children and theirs.

In one seminal study, for instance, the eating habits of a group of Swedish boys during pre-pubescence dictated how long their future grandsons would live.

Price and Pottenger: Prophets of the New Genetics

For most scientists, brought up to believe that DNA is destiny, the discovery that food choices can alter the genetic expression and thus health of our grandchildren is a bombshell. But for two of nutrition's great pioneers, it's merely a tragic "I told you so."

Back in the 1930s, Dr. Francis Pottenger, Jr., conducted a feeding experiment on successive generations of cats that revealed a clear link between nutrition and epigenetic inheritance. In it he fed one group of cats—along with their offspring and their offpring's offspring—a diet of cooked meat and milk. He fed another group mostly raw meat and milk (i.e., foods more akin to a cat's natural diet).

The results were dramatic. While the raw-food cats remained in perfect health through generations, the cooked-food cats experienced progressive debilitation "including malformations, disease, and mental deterioration" until, finally, the third generation in the line became decrepit and sterile.

In the same decade, Pottenger's findings were echoed in human studies by Dr. Weston Price, who crisscrossed the globe to find non-industrialized populations in the process of switching from their traditional whole-food diet to one of modern, processed foods such as refined flour and sugar.

Though ailments such as cancer, diabetes, and other "diseases of civilization" were previously unknown in these cultures, they soon appeared after the adoption of processed foods. And, individuals who made the switch tended to give birth to children with greater tendency to physical defects and mental disorder—just like the offspring of Pottenger's cooked-food cats.

The message was clear: malnutrition is inherited. And now we know why. Processed foods—devitalized and deficient in essential nutrients—alter epigenes. By eating defective food, we are introducing viruses into our genetic software.

Food is Destiny

To Drs. Price and Pottenger, the implications of their studies were as grim as they were obvious. If humans continued to eat processed foods, not only would they experience degraded health themselves, they would seriously compromise the health of their descendants.

Moreover, if those successive generations also ate deficient foods, they would compound the problem until one day, like Pottenger's cats, the human species might become so sick and malnourished that it can no longer reproduce itself.

With processed foods the norm for almost a century now, Americans are on the third and fourth generations of our own version of Pottenger's experiment. And just as he and Dr. Price predicted, our adult population is rife with disease while our children are born with increasing rates of defects and degenerative illness.

Yet the situation isn't hopeless. Dr. Pottenger found that by changing the diet of some cooked-food cats back to raw foods, he could restore the health of those cats' descendants within a few generations. It appears that just as compromised foods introduce viruses into epigenetic software, whole foods erase them.

So it's not too late. We can still reverse this catastrophic trend if we step up and ban the processed foods that are reprogramming our epigenes. But we best get to it. Otherwise, we face the frightening prospect of pushing our species beyond the point of no return.