The Month of November is American Diabetes Month.

Not only are sleep and movement good for you right now to help make you balanced, they have a long-term effect on you. Your sleep and your movement have a large impact on which genes get to rule in your body. The choices you make every day in movement, sleep and nutrition impact the types of cells your body replaces every minute of every day throughout your life. Healthy cells emphasize your good genes. Weak cells emphasize your bad genes. So make healthy choices regularly to create healthy cells. You need to surround yourself with the healthiest environment you can. Every single choice has an impact. You will make poor choices every now and then, everyone does. That is normal. It is human. But overall, you want to make good choices as much as you can because all these choices add up. If you think about putting all your choices on a scale, hopefully your good choices far outweigh your poor choices. However, you have to know what the good choices are, know you have control to get and keep your body in healthy balance. Your whole environment has an impact on your health. Be in as healthy a community as you can. There are many aspects of a healthy community: a clean and safe place to live, positive and content people surrounding you and the ability to be the person you are. It works the other way around too! Just like your community has an impact on you, you have an impact on your community. You need to be a positive and supportive person to other people in your community. Have you heard the cliché, "What goes around, comes around"? It is very relevant in this context. If you are a healthy part of your community, then those around you can become healthier and then you find yourself in a healthier community. Never before did an entire generation grow up knowing that it really can control the way its genes work. Take advantage! At the same time, help others become healthy. Make the Healthy Choice: Choose to eat whole plant-based food because it is real food and healthy for you. Processed/fake food is not healthy for you. When you put fake food into your system, the cells that your body is making every minute of the day have a higher likelihood of being unhealthy cells. However, if you continually make healthy choices in food, then your body has a much higher likelihood of making healthy cells. This is why your health is a cycle, going 'round and 'round. Every choice you make with sleep, movement and nutrition impacts your health. Refer to pages 88-89 to read more about how establishing a routine is good for you and your community.

It is true that you are born with your genes. Your ancestors and your parents gave them to you. You cannot exchange them for different ones. Your genes control many things about you. Some you can see like your eye color. Some you cannot. Your genes also control your health, how you feel inside your body. Unlike your genes, the trillions of cells inside of you are always replacing themselves. Scientists estimate that 300 million cells in your body die every minute! As your body replaces your 300 million cells every minute and you regularly make healthy choices - get good sleep, have good movement, eat good food - then you can produce new healthy cells. Epigenetics is basically everything in your life! All the stimuli moving in and out of your body What you eat Where you live Who you interact with (your community) When you sleep How you exercise All of these can eventually cause chemical modifications in your cells that house your genes. Over time, these chemical modifications can turn your good genes on. The opposite is also true. Poor health choices can make the weak genes dominant. This is why you need to continually make good health choices. To modify your genes and make the good ones strong, you first need to know you do have control over this. Once you know that every decision you make about sleep, movement and nutrition affects the kinds of cells your body makes, hopefully you make good choices. Make the Healthy Choice Realize that different circumstances in your life can cause your genes to be silenced or enhanced over time. A vast majority of your health is driven by your choices. A much smaller percentage is determined by your genes. Yes, you can have some bad genes. But if you consistently make good choices you can make those bad genes weaker. You can also make your good genes stronger to compensate and take over. STOP AND REALLY THINK ABOUT THIS: Every time you put food in your mouth, you impact whether your body will make good healthy cells, or potentially diseased cells. Refer to pages 83-86 to read more about your ability to impact how your body replaces 300 million cells every minute!

Part I of III on Epigenetics What more is there to nutrition than food? As it turns out, when you eat food, there is a lot going on inside your body. The natural desire of your body is homeostasis, which means to be in balance. It is important to know that your body is uniquely you. You have about 20,000 genes in your body. Your cells make up your body, but it is your genes that make you, uniquely you. For example, your genes determine whether you are a boy or a girl or whether you have brown, blue or green eyes. While you will always have the genes you are born with – your eye color will always be your eye color – you can influence how your genes react within your body. You have trillions and trillions of cells in your body. All together those cells, whether they are healthy or diseased cells, make up your body. The good news is: you can make choices in your life to support your healthy cells and minimize the diseased cells to Become the Whole Healthy You. Shaping your genes – making the good ones stronger and pushing and keeping the weaker ones down – is the study of epigenetics . Epigenetics is how you can either positively or negatively shape the genes within your body. Make the Healthy Choice: Know what the word Epigenetics means – the study of cells and physiology that are caused by external or environmental factors that switch your genes on and off. It is how your cells read your genes. Researchers have found that genes can turn themselves on or off and it is not solely due to your DNA structure. The largest external factor that impacts your body is the food you choose to eat. Part II will discuss why the food you eat impacts your epigenes. Refer to pages 81-83 to read more about the meaning of epigenetics.

December is the month for sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch. The sight of glistening lights. The sound of soothing songs and bells. The smell of pine branches. The taste of flavorful foods. The touch of hugs from family and friends. Movement into your body is called consumption and all day long you are consuming so many things through your senses. The number one thing you consume each and every day is air! No matter what, you need to breathe each and every minute of each and every day. Since breathing is a big part of movement, in fact, it is the center of all movement, you want to make certain you are breathing as well as you can. The biggest thing you can do on a regular basis to improve the way you breathe is to have good posture! One of the most important things to breathing well is to have good posture. The normal, healthy shape of your spine, looking from the side, is an S shape. Your spine should have two slightly inward curves. One contains your neck vertebrae, called cervical lordosis, and one is in your lower back, called the lumbar lordosis. Then in the middle you have one slightly outward curve, called kyphosis. However, as you sit a lot, or are always looking down, like at your phone or your game controller, you have a tendency to slouch. This can cause you to lose both your cervical (upper) and lumbar (lower) lordosis curves. In other words, your healthy S shape spine can become an unhealthy C shape spine. The C shape spine is not good. Make the Healthy choice Make the Healthy choice of sitting with good posture. Many people spend countless minutes and hours staring at computer screens or smart phones with the unfortunate “C” posture. Being aware of your posture will allow you to breath better and have less aches & strains in your body! Better yet, stand up and have face to face interactions with your family and friends. Go outside and smell the pine branches. Refer to pages 61-63 about your senses and posture.

Thanksgiving is a fitting time to be grateful for all the blessings we have in life. We gather with family and friends to celebrate how we are connected. We are thankful for nutritious food that nourishes our body. We are thankful for our healthy body that allows us to us to develop skills and share our talents with others. We are thankful for safe homes that keep us comfortable while we sleep. Taking time each day to focus on gratitude will indeed help you to sleep better at night, assist you in staying healthy, and yes! even help you to digest food. Genuine gratitude gives us compassion to help others who may not have as much as we have. Make the Healthy Choice: Sit comfortably, in a quiet place, mid-day and attach gratitude to calm breathing. Clear your mind of all other thoughts and focus on one specific person, thing or event that you are grateful for. Five minutes of slow calm breathing attached to a thought of gratitude sends positive energy from your your heart to your brain. Yes indeed! Your heart communicates to your brain. Refer to pages 60-62 to read about the science behind your heart communicating to your brain.

Sugar is consumed in large amounts the world over because of global trade. Sugary beverages and processed foods may say they are healthy on the label BUT THEY ARE NOT! Refined sugar is added to beverages and processed food in high quantities, so when you consume these fake food sources it spikes your hormone insulin. When insulin goes up, then glucagon goes down. Glucagon’s job is to take fat and use it as fuel. If you do not have enough glucagon, then you cannot effectively use your fat as fuel. Other hormones that refined sugar messes up are, ghrelin (your hunger hormone) and leptin (the hormone that makes you feel full). Refined sugar increases ghrelin and decreases leptin, so you stay hungry and do not feel full. So how do all these hormones get so messed up from eating sugar? Refined sugar depletes your gut bacteria leading to a leaky gut. A leaky gut leads to inflammation. Inflammation leads to the organs in your body not being able to work properly. Refined sugar and processed food DO NOT let your pancreas, liver, brain and intestines work properly. Have you ever eaten something like sugar cereal or donuts and it is hard to stop? That’s because when you eat a lot of refined sugar, you feel good, but not full. Refined sugar increases the amount of dopamine in your brain. Since dopamine makes you feel good, you become addicted to sugar. It turns into a vicious cycle, the more refined sugar you eat, the more your body wants to eat it, because you feel good and you are hungry. Refined sugar is an addictive substance that has become a world health crisis. Make the Healthy Choice: There is something we can all do to decrease the diabetes epidemic that is a world health problem. Choose to eat real vegetables and fruits that are in their natural state like a sliced avocado or a bowl full of blueberries. Try to have vegetables be a part of every meal you have in a day. Reach for vegetables and fruits as a snack instead of packaged/processed food. Every choice that you make about what you eat matters! Drink plenty of water each day, exercise and get outside for fresh air and sunshine each and every day! Refer to pages 22-24 to read about these 5 hormones pictured here and refer to pages 96-98 to read about the damage that refined sugar can do to your gut, hormones, and liver.