I was recently doing a course on the impact of gluten sensitivity on neurological disorders and came across a quote that I thought was most poignant and expressed what I think is the truth about health and disease. This quote comes from Dr. Jeffrey Bland, PhD, one of the world’s most renowned nutritional biochemists, former Director of Nutritional Research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, a leader in the field of functional medicine with over 100 peer reviewed research papers on nutritional biochemistry. In other words, he is one smart dude.
“Throughout your life the most profound influences on your health, vitality and function are not the doctors you have visited or the drugs, surgeries or other therapies you have undertaken. The most profound influences are the cumulative effects of the decisions you make about your diet and lifestyle on the expression of your genes”. What this means, and once again affirms, is that it is not so much your genetics that determine whether you will fall prey to disease, but the lifestyle choices you are making and how those choices “trigger” your genes to express disease. Your genetics are like a loaded gun. You can carry a loaded gun around every day of your life and never have it fire, but once you take the safety off it can easily discharge and hurt someone. It is your lifestyle choices that, in this analogy, take the safety off. Enjoy the game of making great decisions for yourself and for your family.
