Yes, our genetic makeup determines a lot of things for our lives. But they are not our fate. Because we can influence them through our diet. It's called epi-food and it's quite a trend right now.
Imagine your body as a giant computer. Constantly rebuilding itself, dating itself, at all hours of the day and night. Repairs cells, removes metabolic products, builds proteins. It does this all by itself, automatically. But how smoothly it runs is up to us - or, to be more precise, how our computer is equipped and how we handle it.
Genes are similar to a computer operating system.
Our genes are similar to the biocomputer's operating system. Each cell's data record is encoded and kept there, similar to how our body's hardware is encoded and stored. For a long time, people believed that genes could not be changed. However, since the human genome has been decoded, we now know that genes have a smaller role in our health than previously thought. Only a small percentage of them are read. Many are even turned off permanently. A woman's breast cancer gene, for example, may be present but not activated.
Like a computer, our body's operating system also has software. Genes contain so-called on-off switches that ensure that gene programs unfold and can be read over longer periods of time, or that they close and are thus switched off. This folding and unfolding is known as epigenetics. And this is where it gets really exciting: because we can influence this software ourselves with our lifestyle!
These on-off switches are activated by biochemicals from meals, as well as the way we spend our life - sports, stress, and environmental contaminants. So, while our genes do not govern us, we do have some power over our genes - and thus our health.