What makes the new genetics astonishing is that it has caused us to realize something that’s easy to forget. Nothing is more remarkable than the human body. It changes dynamically with every experience, responding with perfect precision to life’s challenges—if only we let it. Beyond normal health and vitality, your body is the platform for radical well-being. Every cell is prepared for this transformation, powered by the super genome, but our mind hasn’t been. Now you have the knowledge in hand, and we hope you’ve accepted a much more expanded view of possibilities.
You need to awaken these possibilities. As long as people’s lifestyles had no genetic consequences, the only proven approach to greater well-being was standard prevention. Now, with two major breakthroughs—epigenetics and the microbiome—our genes can say yes to a broad range of positive changes. Any gene has the potential to become a super gene when it cooperates with our intentions and desires. Personal evolution needs this cooperation, or we can’t move forward.
All well-being, whether radical or not, contains two simple steps.
First, find out what’s good for you and what’s bad.
Second, do what’s good for you while avoiding what’s bad.
When it comes to the first step, a lack of knowledge—along with a host of mistaken beliefs masked as knowledge—had to be overcome in the new genetics. If you know, as we now do, that only 5 percent or less of disease-related gene mutations are fully penetrant (deterministic), that leaves 95 percent open to change in their activities.
The second step is about implementing your knowledge, and here is where the biggest challenges lie. Standard prevention, with its well-known risk factors and familiar advice, has broadcast the same healthy message for more than forty years. Why, then, aren’t people healthier than ever? Cancer death rates have decreased only marginally since the 1930s, despite some dramatic successes with early detection. Smoking remains a problem for 25 percent of the population, and obesity rates keep rising. The devil, it turns out, isn’t in the details; it’s in the denial.
Deepak attended a conference recently on the benefits of meditation in which the news was remarkably promising. The speaker, a world-famous genetics researcher, was focusing on how meditation produced beneficial gene activity through the epigenome (we’ll talk more about the relationship between meditation and your genome later). When the period for questions came, someone in the audience asked, “Given all of these fantastic findings, do you meditate?”
“No,” the researcher replied.
The questioner was shocked. “Why not?”
“Because,” the speaker said, “I’m looking to develop a pill that will bring the same results.”
He got a laugh, but being humorous about your noncompliance leads to the same outcome as other kinds of denial. Motivating people to do what’s good for them and to avoid what’s bad must be the first order of business. We all contend with the voice in our head that says
I’ll get around to it later.
It’s too much trouble.
I’m probably all right anyway.
Would it really make that much difference?
The “it” can be anything you know needs improvement—a better diet, regular exercise, stress reduction, and so on. Sometimes denial doesn’t need any voice making excuses. A kind of convenient amnesia sets in when we’re tempted by a piece of chocolate cake, which we’re not even hungry for, or by a favorite TV show that makes us forget to take a walk after dinner.
Let’s do a quick spot check on your present situation. Following is a quiz in two parts—the first part is about doing what’s good for your genome, the second about avoiding what’s bad. We want you to self-assess as honestly as you can. Your answers will serve as a good preparation for the lifestyle choices outlined in this section of the book.
We begin with the lifestyle habits that send positive messages to your genome.
___ I allow my life to unfold naturally, without a hectic schedule and constant demands.
___ I get sufficient sleep every night (at least 8 hours) and wake up feeling refreshed.
___ I follow a regular but not rigid daily routine.
___ I pay attention to staying in balance with my diet, eating from all the healthy food groups.
___ I avoid toxic food, air, and water, including food loaded with artificial ingredients.
___ I don’t skip meals.
___ I don’t snack.
___ I take steps to minimize my stress and manage the stresses that are unavoidable.
___ I give myself some time out every day to let my body reset itself.
___ I meditate.
___ I do yoga.
___ I eat moderately and maintain a healthy weight.
___ I avoid long periods of sitting, moving my body at least once an hour.
___ I don’t smoke.
___ I drink alcohol sparingly or not at all.
___ I avoid red meat, and if I do eat it, I do so sparingly.
___ I do my best to eat only organic foods.
___ I am physically active.
___ I understand the danger of chronic inflammation and take steps to avoid it.
___ I place a high value on my own well-being and practice self-care every day.
Score: __________ (0 to 20)
Now assess the negative side, the lifestyle habits that send the wrong messages to your genome.
___ I approach my day as an endless round of things I have to get done.
___ I feel exhausted by the end of the day.
___ I habitually drink to unwind.
___ I am driven to be a success, even though it has personal costs.
___ I get poor or erratic sleep. I wake up still feeling tired.
___ I go to bed with my mind full of thoughts, often worrisome.
___ I smoke.
___ I allow my body to get pretty far out of balance before I tend to it.
___ I don’t bother about food labels and the ingredients on the package.
___ I complain about stress but do little to manage it.
___ I am constantly busy and on the run, leaving no time for me to be quiet and calm.
___ My diet is careless.
___ I snack, particularly late at night.
___ My weight isn’t where it should be.
___ I don’t pay attention to whether food is organic or not.
___ I prefer red meat over chicken and fish.
___ I sit for long periods of time (2 hours or more) without moving, either at work, on the computer, or watching TV.
___ I am considerably less active than I was ten years ago.
___ I worry about aging but don’t follow any anti-aging regimen.
___ I don’t think much about caring for myself.
Score: __________ (0 to 20)
Looking at your two scores, here’s a rough evaluation.
Part 1: On the positive side, if you checked around 10 items, you are living like the average American. Prevention has made an impression on you, but the results are hit or miss. A score less than 10 implies that you are running considerable risk for problems down the line. A score over 15 is very good news—the super genome is already saying yes to your lifestyle.
Part 2: The scoring here is about sending negative messages to your genome more than half the time. If you score a 10, which is probably close to average for how Americans live today, you probably enjoy good health but run the risk of future problems. Even one bad habit has the potential to modify one or more genes in undesirable ways. A score of less than 10 puts you in good shape for moving forward. A score of 12 or more implies that you should urgently consider how to improve your well-being.
We’d love it if everyone got a 20 on the first quiz and a zero on the second one. But being realistic, there’s always room for improvement. Even though the lifestyle habits we’ve listed are well known in standard prevention, what’s new is the precise and constant attention that the super genome is paying. Nothing escapes its attention. That’s great once you decide to make positive changes, not so great if you remain in the same groove. We can illustrate the situation created by the new genetics through one woman’s story.
Renée, now in her early fifties, has been steadfast in doing what’s good for her. She eats a diet of whole foods from every group (fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains). She never eats fast or junk food and hasn’t touched alcohol in years. Every day in summer she swims; when the weather gets cold she takes a brisk walk after dinner. Renée’s marriage is good, and she thoroughly enjoys her work as an alternative therapist. Why, then, does she weigh over 225 pounds, having struggled with her weight since her early teens?
Renée’s denial is one of timing. When food is in front of her, she has no impulse control and digs in as if she has no weight problem. It’s when the meal is over, in all the hours between meals, that she suffers from the realization that her problem is real and not getting better.
Hank would seem to be in a much better situation. He’s sixty-five and has no physical problems other than the extra twenty pounds he associates with middle age. Since he has no aches or pains and rarely gets even a cold, he considers himself fortunate compared with many of his friends with their rash of hip and knee replacements. “I can still eat anything,” says Hank, who claims to have no digestive problems, which fits in with his claim that he’s never had a headache, backache, or stomachache.
His is a subtler form of denial than Renée’s. Hank denies that time will bring future problems. Because he feels good today, he ignores almost all disease-prevention advice. He doesn’t exercise and sits for long hours a day at the computer, virtually without moving. He eats a wide range of junk and fast food, with frequent snacking. He has no idea what his blood pressure is, having stayed away from doctors for decades. Is he going to be the exception to all the risks he’s running?
On the spectrum of denial, most people fall somewhere between these two extremes. Finding the motivation to do what’s good for them is hit or miss. Most days they might be careful about what they eat; a couple of hours a week they may find the time for physical activity; sleep problems, if they exist, are generally sporadic. But from our perspective, this situation, which feels normal to millions of people, denies them the possibility of radical well-being. Let’s see how that can change.
See yourself sitting in your favorite restaurant, feeling relaxed and content. You’ve eaten just enough, but the waiter comes around with a familiar temptation: “Leave room for dessert?” You don’t give in immediately but ask to see the dessert menu. “Coffee, after-dinner drinks?” he asks.
“Let’s see,” you say, relenting a little bit more. As you glance over the dessert list, there’s a pause, which could last only a few seconds, and then you pivot into action. Nothing is more important than this pivot. It’s where you call upon a certain aspect of yourself, the choice-making part. Do you give in to temptation or not? Unless you fall into one extreme of total self-discipline or the other of total lack of impulse control, there’s no predicting what you will choose.
Choice making is difficult, even when it comes to small daily decisions, and so instead of getting better at it, approaching it as a skill, we behave haphazardly. Between knowing what’s good for you and doing it there’s a gap. In this gap is where the skill of choice making is learned. Eating a rich dessert and having chocolate remorse afterward comes too late.
Yet if you could make just one significant change a week, your progress toward radical well-being would be hugely accelerated. After a month you would feel some real benefits; after a year the transformation would be complete. Reduced to a steady string of easy choices, the problem of noncompliance would disappear. You can even allow yourself to be in denial without feeling guilty, just as long as you alter one thing a week, whether it’s in your diet, your daily routine, or your physical activity. Just deciding to stand up and move around every hour, which seems like a trivial choice, sends positive messages to the super genome, enough to make a difference in gene activity.
The goal of one positive change a week won’t be attainable, however, without a workable strategy. If you try to change by making a resolution, you’ll fail. Millions of people make New Year’s resolutions, which constitute only one change in the coming year, and yet the vast majority, well over 80 percent according to polls, don’t follow through on their resolutions for more than a short time. Making promises to yourself, feeling guilty over your lapses, and feeling lonely and self-pitying are all counterproductive. Someone addicted to alcohol or drugs wakes up every morning with these feelings. Their past is littered with broken promises to themselves.
In the welter of advice that repeats the same thing over and over—“Make good choices”—very little advice is given on how to do so. Let’s consider three basic principles we must deal with in making choices.
1. There are easy choices and hard choices.
Both kinds present themselves every day, but we usually don’t stand back and pay attention to which is which. We carry on as usual, driven by habit, old conditioning, and sheer unconsciousness. The hard choices, then, are those that try to move the psychological machinery in a different direction. On the surface, a choice may seem quite small, but big or small isn’t the issue. The issue is how hard the choice is. To someone with a severe phobia of insects, picking up an ant or a dead cockroach constitutes a hard choice, and at times an impossible one. On the other hand, soldiers in battle routinely risk their lives, rushing in under heavy fire to rescue a fallen comrade. The objective facts about a choice—whether you are risking a little or a lot, whether the choice is easy for other people or not, whether it will bring pain or pleasure—is secondary and sometimes totally beside the point. What’s primary is whether the choice feels hard or easy to you.
2. Bad choices sometimes feel good.
There’s no mystery here. If you want instant gratification, a shot of joy juice can be had from ice cream at midnight or “eating the whole thing.” Guilty pleasures provide a double boost by offering gratification while briefly making the guilt go away. The downside, which isn’t news, is that the feel-good result starts being less effective, and after a while the guilt is so great that nothing really feels good anymore.
3. The gratification from good choices is usually delayed.
This has become a classic psychological axiom, thanks to a famous test from the sixties and seventies known as the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. In one version, young children were sat down with a piece of marshmallow candy in front of them. “You can have the marshmallow now,” they were told, “but if you wait ten minutes, you will get two marshmallows.” The researcher left the room, and the children were observed through a two-way mirror. Some children immediately ate the marshmallow or ate it after a brief struggle with themselves. Other children waited, even when showing signs of struggle, for the delayed gratification.
From this simple test, some psychologists believe, you can tell much about what kind of adults these children will grow up to be. The instant gratifiers will become prone to impulsive decisions, regardless of the consequences. They may possibly take more risks or ignore the risks in a given situation. Their ability to plan for the future will be diminished. None of this is so surprising if you remember Aesop’s fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The real issue is whether the bad habits of live-for-the-moment grasshoppers can be changed.
Anyone should be able to see how these issues are at work in their own lives. If you look back at the three people’s stories given as examples of denial, it hardly matters that Ruth Ann, Saskia, and Renée are very different as individuals. The basic principles of choice making apply to all of us. The question is how to use these basic principles of choice making for our own advantage. Following are what we believe are the most workable answers.
The answer to turning this principle to your advantage is to start your transformation with making small, easy good choices. As these good choices accumulate day by day, you will be sending new messages to your epigenome and microbiome, the two great centers of change in every cell. At the same time, each daily change, however small, is retraining your brain. It starts getting used to a new normal. In contrast, hard choices make you run into a brick wall, because the brain can’t face a drastic new normal. The inertia of the past is simply too strong.
That’s why going cold turkey on cigarette smoking is such an ineffective strategy in terms of long-lasting results. Studies have shown that people who successfully quit smoking give up the habit many times. By cutting back a little, a lot, or completely, they accumulate the experience of success. The success lasts only a short time in most cases because of the physical side of tobacco addiction. Yet with repetition, the body does adapt.
Any significant change involves repetition. Developing new pathways in the brain is like digging a new river channel. Water will keep running down the old channel as long as it’s deeper than the new one. By repeating the change you want to attain, you will be “digging” a shallow channel at first, but repetition deepens it. A physical metaphor can go only so far, however. Mental events are sometimes stronger than any physical history inside the brain. People addicted to alcohol and tobacco sometimes kick their habit overnight, once and for all. The percentage of such people may be tiny (and overnight success isn’t our aim in this book), but they remind us that the mind comes first in choice making, the body second.
This would be an arguable point to many biologists, who firmly believe that physical processes tell the whole story. But there’s no need for argument, thanks to the intimate connection between mind and body. Every message you send to your body elicits a response, and the response will influence your next message. This circular dialogue, or feedback loop, is crucial. The choice to send new messages affects the entire feedback system.
The answer to using this principle to your advantage is to welcome gratification instead of judging it negatively. Are you shocked to hear that? To quote a phrase from the famous TV science fiction show Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Resistance is futile.” Impulses and cravings have power over us because they hit in the moment. The brain opens a fast track to the desirable sensation, and the power of the rational mind to override the impulse gets postponed. However, studies have shown that a short pause is often enough to remedy this imbalance between reason and sensation. If a group of people wait for five minutes before acting on a craving, most of them won’t give in. They find reasons not to, and the reasons suffice because the moment of instant gratification has passed. (There are even food lockboxes that come with a time-delay mechanism. Let’s say you crave potato chips. When the craving strikes, you eat one chip and lock the rest of the bag into the box. It keeps the potato chips out of reach for a set time, typically between five and ten minutes, after which the lock releases. The idea sounds clever, but one wonders how many people are capable of eating just one potato chip when the craving arises, or who don’t have other salty snacks ready and waiting in the cupboard.)
Instead of trying to manipulate your cravings, let go of the struggle. Look for instant gratification from better sources. The nutritionist’s advice to eat a carrot instead of half a pint of chocolate gelato isn’t realistic, but perhaps two Oreos will do the trick, or half a cupcake. There are few strategies that stop cravings and none that bring them to an end permanently, not by direct assault. The best approach is to reset your microbiome by instituting easy lifestyle changes and then rely on your body to return to a state in which it has no cravings.
There’s also a major emotional component to cravings and the need for instant gratification. Dealing with this component successfully involves expanded awareness. When you discover what you’re really hungry for, the answer will be something deeper than peanut butter and jelly or pepperoni pizza. As we’ll discuss later, in the section on emotions, being fulfilled is an internal state that you can achieve if you know how to do so. Once you reach this state, the allure of external triggers will greatly diminish and then vanish. A craving for anything “out there” is best answered from “in here.”
The answer to working with this principle is that your microbiome can shorten the delay in gratification that usually follows good choices. The microbiome is constantly changing, and it responds quickly to diet, exercise, meditation, and stress reduction. As you continue to make small, easy good choices that also let you feel good right away, the positive effect of these choices begins to build. Very soon, instead of seeking to feel better, you will instead be trying not to lose the good feeling you already have. In contrast, someone addicted to instant gratification through making bad choices receives short jolts of pleasure that decrease over time, and only by feeding the craving is there any pleasure at all. Distraction from pain becomes the whole game.
By showing you how to work with the three big principles underlying choice making, we’ve put you in the position to create your own path to success. Being completely unique, you shouldn’t be expected to follow a set regimen, whether it’s the newest miracle diet, fat-burning gym routine, or power supplement. These methods all rely on the expectation that you will give up after a while and move on to the next profitable fad. What works is not restless wandering from one short-term solution to the next. Instead, you need to build a pyramid of easy choices that bring long-term results. The foundation of the pyramid is made out of the choices you consider the easiest to make. You then build the pyramid upward, level by level, with harder choices that have become easy thanks to the foundation. The capstone is radical well-being, which looks high and far away when you’re standing on the ground but is almost effortless to achieve if you know what you’re building and how to do it.
Let’s give an example of pyramid building that actually comes from someone quite close to one of the authors. We’ll call him Rudy’s older cousin Vincent, although that’s not his real identity. Vincent has been a practicing physician since the early eighties and has earned a name for himself in internal medicine. As often happens with doctors, Vincent doesn’t practice what he preaches. His daily routine involves long hours without physical activity and with much exposure to the stress of hearing his patients’ distressed reaction to illness. He prides himself on handling this very well. Years of dedication and ambition have made him what he is today, but Vincent has paid the price.
If he had come to himself as a patient, he’d be alarmed. Vincent carries forty pounds of excess weight. He drinks alcohol every day, sometimes to excess. He complains of insomnia and feeling fatigued. Recently the situation couldn’t be ignored any longer because he developed joint pain, particularly in his knees. Undergoing surgical replacement only partially relieved his knee pain. You might think that the accumulation of these negative effects would have set Vincent, given all his professional knowledge, on the road to change, but that’s not how human nature works. Having chosen denial as his chief tactic for dealing with his problems, Vincent had little choice but to double up on his denial as matters grew worse.
Then he made a discovery that got his full attention: the microbiome. Buoyed by the data, Vincent had found a way to bypass his denial while at the same time altering his lifelong view that only drugs and surgery are “real” medicine. The changes he made in his daily routine were all easy for him:
• Eating foods with soluble fiber like whole-grain bread, brown rice, bananas, oatmeal, and orange juice. This took care of his prebiotics, the food that intestinal bacteria feed on.
• Adding probiotic foods, which contain beneficial bacteria that would colonize in his intestines, primarily the colon. Active yogurt, sauerkraut, and pickles belong in the probiotic camp.
• Taking an aspirin a day for its anti-inflammatory effect.
• Cutting back on excess alcohol while not giving up his five-o’clock cocktail.
Vincent felt good about these easy changes, and he noticed results immediately in better sleep, pain reduction, and a general sense of feeling lighter.
He became convinced, as more and more doctors are, that fighting inflammation was the key. Now that he felt better, he regained his old optimism and hope. Getting rid of his problems seemed possible for the first time in years. The next stage of changes was made easy by his new attitude.
• He gave up drinking altogether. This wasn’t a hard choice, because he was feeling so much better that he didn’t need alcohol—and its inflammatory effects—as self-medication. At the same time he gave up the occasional cigar he used to enjoy with colleagues. The toxicity of tobacco became all too obvious to his palate and nose once they became sensitive again. Giving up smoking happened naturally as one outcome of his improved diet.
• He switched entirely to whole organic foods. There was no longer any attraction to foods with additives and preservatives, which were also possibly inflammatory.
• He reduced his salt intake, a craving that snack and junk foods heavily enforce. This was easy because his whole-foods diet had removed the desire to snack.
• After researching the possible benefits of taking a probiotic supplement, he chose one, with the intention of improving the kinds of bacteria that populate his microbiome.
Instead of suffering from a cascade of symptoms, many of them tied to inflammation and toxins leaking through the intestinal wall, Vincent was experiencing a cascade of recovery. Each easy step led to others that he would have considered hard choices if they had existed on a laundry list of good things to do. Instead, his lifestyle evolved day by day, and each change naturally led to the next.
Presently Vincent finds himself poised to make changes that were practically inconceivable even two months ago. Never a believer in the mind-body connection, he’s now willing to take up meditation. The studies on the benefits of meditation have been around for decades, but only today does he make a personal connection with them—he’s started thinking in terms of epigenetics and the microbiome, which are both affected positively by meditation.
After years of dependency on painkillers and drug treatment for his high blood pressure, Vincent has decided to wean himself off both. The first to go were the meds for hypertension, because a whole-foods diet reset his microbiome, and this was enough to regularize his blood pressure. The theme of countering inflammation, which was his original inspiration, has obviously paid off and may be leading to long-term benefits that aren’t yet visible.
Your personal story—and your path to well-being—won’t be the same as Vincent’s. It shouldn’t be. There is no one-size-fits-all, not when it comes to making choices that you can actually abide by. What will make your path similar to Vincent’s is tending to the three issues in choice making. He applied the same answers being offered to you.
To overcome the problem of hard choices, Vincent made only easy ones every step of the way. Some of these would have seemed too hard at the outset, but they weren’t once he had laid the proper foundation.
To overcome the problem of instant gratification, he stopped resisting his impulses, which went a long way to ending his guilt and self-judgment. He gave alternative gratification a chance through foods he enjoyed, and he trusted that alcohol and tobacco would fall away naturally, which they did after his chronic pain subsided.
To overcome the problem of delayed results, he made choices in which the results came quickly, primarily by changing to a whole-foods diet. Staying on the program didn’t require patience and promises. You have to be patient if your choices don’t alter the situation in your body until years afterward, as is true for anyone taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, for example—the heart attack they are trying to prevent lies years in the future (not to mention that such drugs may lower heart attack rates for a large enough sample of people but aren’t guaranteed to prevent any specific heart attack, meaning yours).
You’ve probably noticed some areas that Vincent didn’t bring into his new choices. The most obvious is exercise. He cherishes weekend golf games, which for now satisfy what he wants from exercise. But he also knows that golf isn’t a cardiovascular activity, the kind of exercise that raises your heart rate and improves oxygen consumption, with the attendant benefits to cardiovascular function and blood pressure. Excess weight and joint pain had prevented him from doing this kind of exercise for a long time, so for Vincent, cardiovascular exercise still falls into the category of hard choices—a category that’s always up for revision if you approach it with the attitude of building a pyramid one easy choice at a time.
Now you’re prepared to construct your own pyramid, with each stone being one new choice per week that is easy to make. There are six categories of change that will have a meaningful effect on your epigenome, microbiome, and brain:
Diet
Stress
Exercise
Meditation
Sleep
Emotions
For each of these we’ll offer you a menu of choices. Each menu will be long enough to present choices that are easy for anyone to adopt. Once you have circled your preferences in all six categories, you’ll be ready to implement them with zero effort and every expectation of positive results. Pyramid building is the key to successful change that is lasting and cumulative.
Making changes one at a time selected from six different areas of your life increases their effect on the entire mind-body system. We recommend keeping track of the effects of your lifestyle changes by using the following list:
___ Digestion improves.
___ Upset stomach and/or heartburn decreases.
___ Constipation or diarrhea is no longer a problem.
___ Your body feels lighter.
___ You feel a growing sense of inner peace and calm.
___ Your thinking is sharper, more alert.
___ You are losing weight without dieting.
___ Signs of aging slow down.
___ Signs of aging actually reverse—you feel younger.
___ Life seems less stressful, and you can handle stress better.
___ Moods even out, no longer going up and down.
___ You have a sense of pleasant well-being.
___ Minor aches and pains lessen or vanish.
___ Hunger pangs lessen or vanish.
___ A natural cycle of hunger and satiation returns.
___ Headaches decrease or go away.
___ Bad breath lessens or vanishes.
___ Sleep becomes regular and uninterrupted.
___ Allergies improve.
___ Snacking is no longer a temptation.
___ Excessive sugar is no longer a temptation.
___ Cravings for addictive flavors (sweet, sour, salty) lessen.
___ Alcohol consumption decreases.
___ Tobacco consumption decreases.
___ Lower blood pressure
___ Normal blood sugar levels
___ Normal heart rate
___ Improvement in anxiety or depression, if present
___ Increase in HDLs (high-density lipoproteins, or good cholesterol)
___ Reduction in LDLs (low-density lipoproteins, or bad cholesterol)
___ Improved triglycerides (lowered risk of heart disease and stroke)
___ Normal kidney function
___ Better dental checkups (reduced plaques, cavities, gum inflammation)