Live Younger Longer

Health doesn’t exist in a vacuum
The truth is, our health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It results from a complex
interplay between what’s going on inside our bodies and what’s happening
outside of them in the environment.

---

Human beings have a dynamic internal system that shifts and responds to
triggers from the environment. The outside world contains a host of health
challenges — from microscopic viral invaders to sweeping tsunamis and
hurricanes.
Every moment of every day, our bodies are working hard to keep our
internal systems in balance and ready to adapt to change. But if our
defenses are undermined and internal systems become unbalanced, illness
and disease can occur.
How do our internal systems become unbalanced? The body’s internal
harmony (homeostasis) can be disrupted by a number of factors, some of
them within our control, some not.
Internal malfunctions, such as genetic mutations, are often beyond our
control. The wear and tear on our organs and blood vessels due to aging is
also somewhat inevitable.
But today’s leading causes of death aren’t generated primarily by internal
malfunctions. More often, they’re brought on by our interactions with the
world around us. Luckily, many of us have a lot of control over these
exchanges.
Internal malfunctions
Every so often, diseases occur because of something going wrong with the
body’s genetic code — a DNA malfunction. For example, certain inherited
genetic mutations are known to cause specific diseases, some of which can
be fatal. Huntington’s disease is a rare yet devastatingly straightforward
example of an illness caused by a single genetic mutation.

---

Other times, genetic variations aren’t a direct cause of disease, but they
create vulnerabilities that predispose people to certain kinds of illnesses.
For example, some people are born with a genetic predisposition to certain
types of breast cancer or to an autoimmune disorder such as celiac disease
that makes them allergic to gluten.
Even more-common illnesses, such as heart disease and diabetes, have been
linked to genetic variants called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).
Individually, these small genetic variations don’t cause harm, but together
they can increase a person’s chances of developing a certain disease.
An example of this is something as simple as your blood type. If your blood
type is A or B, your risk of heart attack is increased approximately 20%
compared with someone who has blood type O. If your blood type is AB,
your risk of heart attack is increased 40%. This doesn’t mean that a heart
attack is definitely in your future, only that your risk is increased.
Genes play a smaller part in our health than we might think. All told,
genetics accounts for maybe 20% of overall health. Thinking back to my
sister’s experience with breast cancer and my own double bout with cancer,
I reflected that even if I did have a genetic tendency toward the disease, it
was not a fait accompli, so to speak. There was more to my health puzzle
than just genetics.
While we cannot change our genes, we can certainly modify how our
bodies express our genes by altering our lifestyles.