Holistic Health Secrets of the Epigenome

Importance of the Epigenome

Today, a majority of the population does not realize the impact of a poor lifestyle on health, or at least greatly underestimates it.

Although your DNA is undeniably important, what is going to change and evolve during your lifetime is your epigenome. 

In that sense, we can say that the epigenome is the biggest health field for improvement. 

To give an illustrated example, we can say that your DNA is like a gift that you receive at birth, and your epigenome is what you do with that gift during all your life. You cannot change the gift but you can hugely impact what you do with it.

Sadly, there are many hassles along the way that prevent people from understanding the crucial importance of the epigenome, here are the biggest two:

• Society’s norms
• Delayed consequences

Society’s norms

This is an ancestral issue based on the fact that everything is relative depending on what we are comparing. Most people like conformism, and therefore they aspire to be “normal,” like the others. 

When the general population is healthy, then this is not a problem, but when it becomes sick then it quickly creates an issue. 

Lowering the average health level creates a new normal that is in reality, not normal. 

By comparing themselves to others, people get the feeling that, overall, their lifestyle is quite good when, in reality, it is clearly harmful to their health.

This is why, in a Holistic natural care approach, we always teach our patients to compare their health state only with their previous health state and not with somebody else. That way, if the global population has a bad lifestyle, they will not fall into the trap of thinking that they have a good one by comparing it to others.   

Delayed consequences

We can say that this is a positive and negative point at the same time. It is positive because it’s one of the vital functions needed for us to survive. It is negative because it gives us a hard time understanding the consequences of our mistakes.

In other words, it is not because we don’t immediately pay for our mistakes that we should do them on purpose for all our lives or at least think that the bill will never be paid.   

For example, bad fats, bad sugars, and inflammatory proteins destroy your vessels, but it can take 10, 20 or 30 years before you have a stroke or a heart attack.

Another good example is with drugs. Smoking or drinking damages your whole body, but it can take years before you develop severe diseases like cancer or liver cirrhosis. 

For that issue, the only remedy is knowledge and wisdom. Knowing how the epigenome works and how the lifestyle and environment influence it is key to getting wiser in life choices regarding your health.

Oversimplification and bad advice

Now let’s imagine that we need to explain the impact of lifestyle habits and the living environment on current or future diseases, the mechanism of which would be the disruption of DNA expression. It’s an arduous task.

That’s why conventional medicine decided to take a very different approach to the subject compared to natural medicine. 

Health authorities have basically oversimplified and summarized disease prevention with advice such as “eat five fruit and vegetables a day”. Needless to say that we’re going nowhere with this kind of advice.  

The reality is that the epigenome is complex and needs to be approached with personalized health care done by professionals. 

Although oversimplification and shortcuts are bad, it’s important that the patient understands it to become more independent and capable of making better health choices. 

This is why we have created Holistic Natural Health Experts, to give to the people an accessible knowledge about various health topics, including the epigenome.  

The Relationship between Holistic Health and the Epigenome

As we mentioned above, it is within the core of natural medicines to care for the epigenome. For that, they are mainly working on two different aspects:

• Preserving health and preventing disease
• Treat illnesses naturally within the limits of their possibilities

Natural medicines did not study the body at the molecular level as we do today. Nevertheless, molecular discoveries only confirm the knowledge of natural medicine. 

Observation, the study of human and animal physiology, ecosystems, diet and the absence of chemical pollution have enabled us to understand the causes of disease, and the impact of climate, physical activity and emotions on our bodies. 

Of course, this didn’t happen overnight. Knowledge was built up differently from one era and country to the next, but today we have access to the consolidation of this knowledge and its practical application.

Constitution and temperament

The particularity of the analyses and advice given by experts in natural medicines is that they are personalized according to the patient’s constitution, temperament and health problems.

The constitution and temperament presented in our health concept webinars are intrinsically linked to a person’s genetics and epigenetics. This means that our advice, like our treatments, will be personalized!

Natural medicine experts use not only their knowledge to personalize their advice, but also specific blood tests to highlight physiological dysfunctions.

Healthy food

At the heart of the natural medicines we advocate, diet is certainly the mainstay of the epigenome for three reasons: 

• The supply of macro and micro nutrients essential to the functioning of our organism (and therefore of the cell and the epigenome)
• The development and maintenance of a healthy flora 
• Exclusion of food pollutants and toxins, as well as harmful foods (which are detrimental to the functioning of the cell and the epigenome).

While a plant-based diet, as described in our book: “Healthy Food: Your Fundamental Right”, is the healthy food of reference, it must be personalized according to the individual’s constitution, temperament and lifestyle.

What’s more, with healthy eating we obviously include the non-use of legal or illegal drugs, as well as an overall healthy lifestyle.

Yet many people downplay junk food, even homemade junk food, when in fact epigenetic studies have shown an alteration of the epigenome (through disruption of intestinal flora) with just a weekend of junk food.

Movement and sport

Unquestionably, without physical activity, our epigenome cannot function at its optimum.

A sedentary lifestyle is the bane of our society. As a matter of principle, blood and lymph circulation, which nourish our organs and tissues as well as evacuate our waste products, need movement. 

Without physical activity, intestinal movement diminishes and disrupts transit. Without physical activity, particularly walking, our cerebral hemispheres communicate less well. And at a microscopic level, for our cells, without movement, everything goes haywire.

All natural medicines have advocated movement, walking in the fresh air, in nature, thermal baths and sun exposure. 

The naturist movement defends the concept of maximum contact of our bodies with nature, but without going that far, the simple act of walking barefoot on the grass or lying down in it considerably reduces the stress accumulated in our artificial dwellings. And stress is the enemy of our epigenome.