What you eat now can affect the DNA of future generations.

Avoiding toxins and eating the most healthy diet possible can help fuel the future for success.

Epigenetics refers to changes in gene expression from outside forces. Different from a mutation, epigenetic changes lie not in the DNA itself but rather in its surroundings — the enzymes and other chemicals that orchestrate how a DNA molecule unwinds its various sections to make proteins or even new cells.

Recent studies have shown how nutrition dramatically alters the health and appearance of otherwise identical mice. A group led by Randy Jirtle of Duke University demonstrated how mouse clones implanted as embryos in separate mothers will have radical differences in fur color, weight, and risk for chronic diseases depending on what that mother was fed during pregnancy.

DNA profiles may not have much to offer most people.

It seems that other than informing you of the potential to develop certain diseases, your lifestyle choices are the greatest predictor of your health.

“Genomic tests will not be substitutes for current disease prevention strategies,” said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, one of the authors and a pioneer in the search for genes that increase cancer risk.
So a blood test of the future will not free you from the need to eat healthy, exercise, keep extra weight off, not smoke and get useful cancer detection tests such as pap smears and colonoscopies. Nor will it relieve the ongoing possibility of nasty surprises about diseases you may have never feared.

But isn’t our genetic blueprint our destiny? Many scientists thoroughly believed that not long ago. As they have learned more about genes, however, that prediction appears ever more simplistic.
Most diseases arise from a complex mixture of the genes we inherit from our parents at birth— not only what is measured in the whole gene test, but also our lifestyle and environment, and random events such as gene mutations occurring in individual cells in our body later in life.

This is great news.

We are able to have a great deal of influence on our future based on all of the choices we make everyday.