The choices you make each day in your diet and lifestyle have a direct influence on how your genetic predisposition is expressed - for better and for worse. You're only as old as your genes, but how your genes are expressed may be modified by exercise, diet and lifestyle choices much more than had previously been believed - and more quickly.
Interpretation
Your daily choices in diet and lifestyle significantly affect how your genetics manifest.
This quote emphasizes the profound impact that everyday decisions about food, exercise, and overall lifestyle can have on our genetic expression. It suggests that while genetics play a role in determining aspects of our health and aging, our conscious choices can modify how these genetic factors are realized, potentially leading to better health outcomes more rapidly than previously understood.
In practice
During a health seminar to stress the importance of nutrition and exercise.
When we understand the connection between how we live and how long we live, it's easier to make different choices. Instead of viewing the time we spend with friends and family as luxuries, we can see that these relationships are among the most powerful determinants of our well-being and survival.
Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing what's causing the problem.
Eating a vegetarian diet, walking (exercising) everyday, and meditating is considered radical. Allowing someone to slice your chest open and graft your leg veins in your heart is considered normal and conservative.
I've found that if I tell somebody 'Eat this and don't do that,' it's not only not helpful, it's counterproductive because even more than being healthy, we want to feel free and in control, and as soon as somebody tells us to do something, there's a tendency to do just the opposite.
If we can reach populations in developing countries and help them understand the value of their indigenous diet and lifestyles rather than copying ours, perhaps we can reverse the exponential rise in cardiovascular disease that is plaguing them.
Whether you're six or sixty, if you go on a diet and lifestyle program and feel constrained, you're likely to go off it sooner or later. Offering a spectrum of choices is much more effective; then, you feel free and empowered.
The craving for 'the return of the day', which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.
When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic.
It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.
Eating is always a decision, nobody forces your hand to pick up food and put it into your mouth.
We have forgotten that curing cancer starts with preventing cancer in the first place.
And so our goal on health care is, if we can get, instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it's going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we've made huge progress. And by the way, that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That's why we did it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.