Give your DNA the edge over cancer

Have you heard of epigenetics?

Sounds like science fiction, right?

It’s definitely science, but the reason this is important is that the study of epigenetics is the study of why your DNA is not your destiny.

Conventional medical thought has always been that your DNA – your genetic material – is unchangeable. They’ve told us that what you have is what you have, and there’s no changing it.

Not so fast. Here comes epigenetics to tell us that our environment, what we do, how we live, what we eat, where we are and what we do can affect how our genes express themselves.

In other words, the chemical reactions inside our bodies influence how our genes act.

You can make your DNA act younger, you can keep a gene for heart disease from ever turning on, and you can help a gene that protects you from disease express itself more powerfully.

It’s up to you.

Taking control of your genes

A good example is prevention of breast cancer. You may already know that calorie restriction turns on a certain set of genes called “sirtuins” that help you live linger.

Those same sirtuins can also help you survive – and protect you against – breast cancer.

Clinical trials show that cutting the amount of food you eat if you’re being treated for breast cancer may extend your life.

The experiments indicate that a 30 percent reduction in daily calories helps fight off even one of the deadliest subtypes of breast cancer. The drop in calories restricts the cancer’s ability to spread and metastasize in other parts of the body outside of the breasts.

The lab tests showed that this drop in food decreases the cancer cells’ manufacture of what are called microRNAs 17 and 20 (miR 17/20). This group of miRs is associated with in triple negative cancers that metastasize and kill.

“Calorie restriction promotes epigenetic changes in the breast tissue that keep the extracellular matrix strong,” says researcher Nicole Simone. “A strong matrix creates a sort of cage around the tumor, making it more difficult for cancer cells to escape and spread to new sites in the body.”

Resveratrol is the compound in vaccinium berries that turns on sirtuins. So if you want to give yourself an epigenetic advantage against cancer, it might be a wise idea to add red huckleberries, cranberries, lingonberries and blueberries to your diet.

But breast cancer isn’t the only cancer or disease you can avoid by taking control of your DNA.