A recent article in Time magazine entitled, “Why Your DNA isn’t Your Destiny,” (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951968,00.html ) profiles a new science called epigenetics. As a therapist, I very am very often helping my clients to understand their experience of life within the context of nature and nurture. This is a fascinating article that raises many questions with implications on how we understand what we inherited biologically. Epigenetics is the study of how gene activity that doesn’t alter our genetic codes is passed down to a successive generation. It wouldn’t surprise me if the former sentence didn’t make sense, so maybe by exploring some of the research in the article things will clear up a little.
To summarize – a researcher in Sweden studied the health records of a Swedish village that was so remote it subsisted totally on the crops they could raise in a season. The harvests in this village were so unpredictable that it was literally feast or famine, with those who went hungry in previous years being able to overeat in good years. This Swedish researcher compared health records with agricultural records and found that the effects of parents eating habits within the good and bad years affected the lives of their grandchildren. This research suggests that our early experiences could change the traits we pass on to our children.
As the article says, the bad news is that smoking and overeating could therefore predispose your kids to poor health…but…the good news has many profound possibilities…especially for mental health. By silencing bad genes and activating good genes, scientist could potentially silence genes that play a role in mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Therefore (as the title of the article says) we do not have to be our DNA. Very interesting research with very interesting implications for our mental health.
Leave a Reply