What is Epigenetics? Back to the Basics

In this episode, I’m going back to the basics. I’ll be sharing what epigenetics is… and what it is not. And… next week, I continue the discussion with “Why It Matters” followed by the next week with “What’s Next For Epigenetics?”

🌟Topics in this episode🌟
04:45   Response to environmental factors & UV light exposure
06:10   What is epigenetics
08:41   Review of Holocaust study exploring the impact on their children
10:28   Review of Dutch famine study and psychological and physical impact on their children
11:34   Review of a twin study on impact of genetics versus lifestyle and environmental factors
13:42   Aging: decreased ability to nutritionally support our genes
17:42   Diet can have a negative impact on your epigenome
23:09   The gut is the seat of inflammation management
24:55   Statin medications deplete CoQ10
25:49  The health implications of social isolation and subsequent stress
30:35   Your Owners Manual for your body

🖐CONNECT with Dr Brian Brown
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 🧬Find more information about genetics, epigenetics and how they impact your overall health and performance🧬 in Dr Brian's FREE 5 Day Gene Hack Boot Camp
https://drbriangbrown.com/genehack/bootcamp

Transcript

 ITZ_EP77_What is Epigenetics?

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

epigenetics, epigenome, genes, genetics, study, inherit, twins, lifestyle, support, genome,  gut, DNA

 Dr Brian G Brown  01:02

The mission is simple: to help high achievers naturally eliminate emotional and physical obstacles, so they can optimize their life for higher achievement. Welcome, you just entered the Genesis zone. Good day, and welcome to the Genesis zone show. This is Dr. Brian Brown, thank you for taking time out of your busy Thursday to join us. 

In this episode, I'm actually going to go back to the basics. We've gotten some questions about epigenetics and what it is and realize that if you're just now joining us in the past months, you may not even know what we're talking about when we're talking about epigenetics. So, I'm going to be sharing what epigenetics is, and more importantly, what it's not. 

And next week, I'll actually continue the discussion about why epigenetics matters. And then the following week after that, I'm going to share what's next for epigenetics. Because I think it's really cool where things are headed in research and what's going on. 

For those of you who are tuning in, I'm actually going to be doing a little bit of a slide presentation. If you're listening to this on the podcast, don't worry about it. I'm going to be describing everything as I go. But if you're watching it live, or you're watching on a replay, or on YouTube, you get the distinct pleasure of seeing some slides. So let me go ahead and pull my slide deck up here. And we'll get started. 

So, what is epigenetics? 

It's a great question. And it's a question that comes up a lot, because it gets confusing. Epigenetics is not your genome or your genetics. And I'm going to explain that in a little bit more detail here in just a second. 

In order to understand epigenetics, we have to understand first what the comprehensiveness of DNA. This is a quote from Pavel Sen is one of the top researchers in genetics and the entire world. And he tells us, if you drew out a DNA that was wound up inside every single cell nucleus, it would be six feet long. Okay? 

So, imagine this thread that is six feet long, and it's wound up around a little protein spool. I don't know if you remember when your mother or grandmother would have spools leftover, when they ran out of thread, they were the coolest things to play with. By the way, we had fun playing with those when I was a kid. Some spools were small, some spools were large. But in this particular case, there's this protein spool called histone, that DNA is wrapped around, because imagine trying to pack six feet worth of material into the nucleus of a cell, granted, it's sub microscopic here. So, we're talking very, very, very tiny, but it's six feet in length, relatively speaking, to everything else around it. And it houses all the material that's needed to make you who you are. So, it's very extensive when we're talking about DNA. Now, I'm not going to get into a class on what DNA is and so on so forth. 

We know that DNA is just a building block for what makes us who we are. And up until about, I would say around 2007, when the field of epigenetics came out, the field of science thought that your DNA was your DNA, you couldn't change it. You were born with it, and it was what it was. And then when the human genome project finished first, and they realized that they did not find the answers that they wanted, they were hoping to find answers for the genetic causes for every disease known to man. They did not find that, in fact, less than 10% of diseases were attributable to genetics. So that got them to scratching their heads, so to speak. And that's where the field of epigenetics came out of. And so, let's go on to the next slide.

Dr Brian G Brown  05:28

To understand epigenetics, I also want to include a quote here from Pavel Sen. Again, he says, “Our epigenetic processes are under exquisite control in our bodies, but they're also extremely influenced by the environment.”

 Let's say you go to the beach, and you get exposed to a lot of ultraviolet rays. In other words, you get sunburned. Certain regions of your skin cells genome are going to react to that exposure and produce byproducts that may not be good for your skin and other words, it could be on the low end of the spectrum, damage to the skin that causes a hyperpigmentation or a freckle. Freckles are just the result of damage from the sun, okay. 

Or it could be something a little bit more progressive, like a pre cancer cell, that we have to get investigated by the dermatologist or it could be like a melanoma or basal cell carcinoma, or sarcoma. I mean, you get the idea. So, there are lots of changes that can occur due to ultraviolet light exposure, and they're all epigenetic. Now, that still really doesn't tell us what epigenetics is, but just know that our epigenetic processes are under exquisite control by our bodies. And in a moment, you're going to see what else it's under control by as well. So, the definition of epigenetics as simply as I can put it is, it's a new field of study that's rapidly expanding. And it focuses on the relationship, this is key, the relationship between your genes, your heredity, your environment and your lifestyle. Okay?

Dr Brian G Brown  07:14

So, what do I mean when I'm talking about this relationship between your genes, and your heredity, environment and lifestyle? All right? Imagine just for a minute that six-foot-long thread, which is your genome, it's your genes within every cell of your body. Sitting above that is this mechanism called the epi genome, in fact, the root word EPI, in epigenetics, literally means in Latin, to sit above. Epigenetics sits above all the other genetics.

Epigenetics acts as this filter through which we filter our environment, and our lifestyle, to communicate to the genes at their root level. Now, so it's this interpreting factor. And epigenetics, as best we can understand it is, is a group of chemical messengers that will cause the genes to react in a certain way. So, I'm gonna get to heredity here in just a second because it gets a little confusing, because you're thinking, Brian, didn't you say that less than 10% of chronic diseases were attributed to genetics that we inherit? That is true. But research also shows that we can inherit epi genome traits, as well as genetics, two totally separate things. 

Don't get them confused, it's easy to get them confused. But don't get them confused here, we can inherit our genes, which make us who we are, give us our eye color, our hair color, our frame, our body frame size, our muscle structure because we all look just a little bit different. We all built just a little bit differently. And we tend to look like other members of our family and those particular aspects. So don't get those confused. Those are just firm genetics. 

Holocaust Survivor Offspring Study

But then the epigenome sits above that, and we can inherit some of our epigenetic traits. In fact, I'll just go ahead and share this with you. One of the earliest studies that was done after the field of epigenetics came to be in 2007 was it was called the Holocaust survivor study. And what they did, they didn't look at those who had lived through the Holocaust. They wanted to follow the Holocaust survivors’ children, their offspring, and they followed them for years. And here's what they found, and it was absolutely amazing. And this study was published in about 2010, 2011. 

They found that the Holocaust survivors’ children actually inherited Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They had all the characteristics of post-traumatic stress disorder, yet they had never been through any trauma. And again, scientists were scratching their head, like how can this happen? We know that there's not an inheritable gene for post-traumatic stress disorder. So why are these people inheriting these, appear to be inheriting these traits for post-traumatic stress disorder? And the answer is it was epigenetics. And so, they inherited, the epi genome got modified in their parents. And when that epigenome as well as the genetics get passed down to their offspring, the offspring inherit the filter, through which outside environmental forces are filtered, and our influences are filtered. And they have the stress responses to them. Absolutely fascinating. 

Dutch Famine Study

There was another study that rolled out about the same time 2010, 2011. And it was the Dutch Famine study where they did the same thing. The Dutch famine occurred in 1944 to 1945, if you remember from history class, and in the Dutch famine, they followed the survivors of the Dutch famine, and found that their children struggled with issues like depression, and anxiety. Their children struggled with issues like obesity, because they tended to hoard food, and they tended to overeat because their ancestors, their parents had a lack of that. And so, we find in the Dutch famine study is that these people tended to struggle with obesity issues, therefore, cardiovascular disease and diabetes and things like that. 

Adult Twin Study

So, does heredity and environment and lifestyle really matter? Well, I want to point out another study and this study was published in Aging Journal in about 2016. And it was a twin study, and in this twin study, they compared twins, adult twins, that is not childhood twins, because children live in the same home, they wanted to see adult twins who lived in separate areas lead separate lives. And what they found was absolutely amazing. 

The one half of the twin group that lived in a less stressful environment, and led a better lifestyle actually had a longer lifespan. The other half of the twin group or twin pair that led a more stressful life or had a more stressful life and lived in a more stressful environment actually lived a shorter amount of time. So, researchers started looking at this, and they concluded that about 20 to 30% of a person's lifespan, meaning their longevity is determined by the genes. 

You remember that that six-foot thread, those genes that we inherit, but the other 70 to 80% is epigenetics. It's all lifestyle and environmental factors. And even though the study didn't point it out, I would say heritable or inherited epigenetic factors, how we inherit those things the way our parents responded to their environment and lifestyle. And we inherited that.

So that epigenome, okay, so absolutely amazing study this twin study was, is to really first bring to light in 2016. And that tells you how new this field is. It brings to light that 70 to 80% of what's going on with us. This particular study was about lifespan, but what shortens lifespan but chronic conditions. And the study does bring that out, but it doesn't specifically say this one chronic condition was worse than another or more prominent another. Just lifespan was shorter because of the development of chronic conditions related to stressful environments, stressful lifestyle, so on and so forth. But if you didn't have those things, you actually live longer, really, really critical point here and a large leap forward in the field of epigenetics and understanding epigenetics and why it's so critically important. So, let's break it down even further and make it easier.

Dr Brian G Brown  14:23

Senescence

If we give the example of say lifestyle, as we age, and this starts changing in our 30s, as we age, our ability to break down food, and assimilate and absorb those nutrients the way we should, so we can support healthy cellular structure and cellular and genetic structure and formation and division and multiplication and so on so forth, create healthier cells. Our ability to do that decreases over time. In the grand scheme of things. It's a process called senescence. 

Since, but that's a whole other conversation for another day. But as we age, we have to eat more nutritionally dense foods. And we have to supplement our diet with the right supplements in order to nutritionally support our genes at the highest level, and we need to do that. So that good switches, I'm talking about genetics, which is good genetic switches get turned on and bad genetic switches get turned off. 

Gene Switches

Now, my final slide and today's explanation of what is epigenetics. We'll talk specifically about those switches, because I don't want to confuse you with genetics and epigenetics and things like that and multiple analogies. But in this particular analogy, this switch analogy is how the communication occurs between the epigenome and the genome. Imagine a switch in between an epigenetics control that switch, and we're going to talk about that here in just a moment. 

But just know for now, as the example goes, as we age, we need to eat more nutritionally dense foods, we need to supplement our diet with the correct nutrients in order to nutritionally support our genes so that they function at the highest level, the only way we can do that is to check our genes and our genetic code, or our epigenetic code and see, how does our body respond? How is it wired to respond? What things can we what measures can we put in place to make sure that those things are supported the way they're supposed to be supported.

Now this slide, and I'm going to be describing it for those that are just listening. This slide is an epigenetic modulation slide. Modulation is just a fancy word for all those things that have an influence on your epigenome. Okay, so genetics are the baseline. They're what you inherit, epigenetics sits above that they're the controlling factors, the regulator, the switchboard of sorts. And then outside of that is environment, lifestyle, what we inherit and as far as the epigenome is concerned from our parents. 

The Importance of Diet

So, all of this environment and lifestyle stuff, the first one that comes to mind is diet. Diet is a critical factor. In fact, if you look at studies and studies are coming out more and more and more every day, as the field of epigenetics grows, we understand now that a poor diet can have a negative impact on the epigenome. So, it will turn on inflammation, it will decrease detoxification, it will decrease neurotransmitter genes and neurotransmitter output, it'll decrease mitochondrial function, it'll actually damage them. 

So that brings to mind on the previous slide where we were talking about the example of as we age, we need to eat more nutritionally dense foods, we need to eat more organic foods and things like that to protect our genome. See, it's not just something that a coach tells you to do. There's a reason behind it. And the reason behind it is, it's there to protect your epigenome so that we can protect your genes so that we can protect every cell in your body. 

Diet is critical here, diet can have a negative impact on your epigenome, it can have a positive impact, then there are seasonal correlations, depending on what area of the country you live in, what humidity is like, what temperature is like. There are changes that can occur in your epigenome based on those factors. And a lot of times they have to do with how the Earth is tilted, how close we are to the sun, how far away we are from the sun, how much ultraviolet light exposure we get, how much air pollution we're breathing in, what our groundwater is like, what our soil structure is. 

All those things come into play. And all of those chains can change seasonally, and they can affect the epigenome positively or negatively. Another thing is disease exposure. So, there are viruses out there that can negatively impact. I don't really know of a virus or bacteria, other than the gut microbiome, and we'll talk about that in a minute that can positively impact the epigenome. But most of these, these parasites, fungi, mold, bacteria and viruses, they have a negative impact on the epigenome and it's something as functional medicine practitioners, we have to be keenly aware of when we're working with clients. 

Another thing is toxic chemicals. One of the worst toxic chemicals known to man throughout history, I think, has probably been tobacco smoke. Cigarettes, and now just in this past decade, with the advent of vape cigarettes and vape cartridges and things like that, and on all these other chemicals that people are getting exposed to and inhaling, we're now starting to see health consequences of that. 

Have we identified the epigenetic changes that are occurring, not with vape cartridges we have with tobacco. But I think over time and the next five or so years, 10 years, I think we're going to start seeing the epigenetic consequences of vape cartridges. We know they have negative health consequences, we just not been able to link it yet. 

And then there are drugs of abuse. It's obvious. If you're abusing street drugs, they can have negative epigenetic impact. Believe it or not financial status. Now, this particular one has to do with all the others. And I believe it has to do with access to care, it has access to diet, access to clean water access to clean air, because think about it, if money is not an option, you can move to an area of the world, an area of the country that you live in, has clean air, that has clean water, that is more health conscious and focuses on eating more healthy. 

You have access to healthier grocery stores, and healthier grocery store options. So, where you can buy organic foods and things like that. So financial status comes into play here, but it's more global, and that it affects all the others.

Exercise.  There's a word in functional medicine called hormesis. Hormesis is simply a positive stress on the body. Now, most of the time exercise is hormetic, meaning it's very positive, it's a positive stress. However, you can overdo it with exercise and push it too far. And that positive stress becomes a negative stress. So, with as exercise, especially, there's a fine balance there, I would say the same thing about diet, even if you're eating clean and green and organic, you can overdo it and consume 5000, 6000 calories a day. And that's going to be too much for you, it's going to create a negative stress for you. So, you get the idea.

I think the next step would be the gut microbiome. And with the gut microbiome, as opposed to disease exposure with these aberrant microbes and fungi and mold and stuff. With the gut microbiome, it's this beautiful balance between. And we're moving away from the language of bad bacteria and good bacteria, because we're finding that they're all good bacteria, they just have different jobs, and they keep each other in check. And it's this perfect balance. And when we remove a “bad bacteria”, it totally changes the health outcome for that individual. 

So, we know that these previously known as “bad bacteria” actually have a role in the gut. And in some ways, they're all good, it's just bad when it becomes imbalanced. For example, if you have an imbalanced gut, you're gonna struggle with obesity. This may sound gross, but they've done fecal implant studies with morbidly obese babies, where they've done fecal implants of thin babies. 

Twin Study on Gut Biome 

And I believe there was a landmark twin study, again, another twin study, where they had one twin that didn't have any weight issues, and another twin that had morbid obesity issues. And the difference was the microbiome. So, they took fecal matter from the thin twin, inserted it into with a catheter, put it into the intestines of the morbidly obese twin and the morbidly obese twin starts losing weight. Now, that's, that's cutting-edge stuff. And we're not there as far as clinical application yet, but it's getting there. 

The Gut and Inflammation

Okay. Another example is that the gut is the seat of all inflammation management. So, if you're inflamed throughout your body, there's a good chance that there's something going on in your gut that could be leading to that inflammation that you're having in your body. If you struggle with depression or anxiety, there's a good chance that you've got some kind of imbalance going on in your intestines, in your gut, that in the microbiome that's throwing that off. So, there are these epigenetic changes that occur because of good balance and bad balance in the gut. And our goal is to make sure that we have that in a good balance state. 

And then there are therapeutic drugs. These are drugs that were intended for good. These are pharmaceutical drugs. One that comes to mind is one that has been out since the 1960s, at least, and it's used for type two diabetes, and it's saved countless lives. Okay, hear me when I say that. It's a good medication. It's called Metformin. But if you take Metformin, it epigenetically changes the body.

You don't absorb B12 well, and you have to supplement with B12 if you're taking Metformin, a lot of people don't know that, because if you take Metformin and you're not taking B 12, you're depleting your B12 levels at an alarming rate. Another one is a statin medications. Again, statin medication saves lives. And we could argue that there's a lot of people that want to argue that, but just for the sake of this teaching we’ll say that statin medications have some utility when it comes to controlling cholesterol and lipids. 

Do I personally think we take it a little bit too far? I do personally think that, but they have their place, and statin medications epigenetically change the internal components of the cell and deplete an enzyme called Coenzyme Q 10. CoQ10 is essential for the mitochondria to function. And if the mitochondria don’t function, the cell dies. If the cell dies, then the surrounding muscle tissue that cell is in, it dies as well.

Dr Brian G Brown  26:00

What's the one muscle in your body that is used more than any other muscle? It’s your heart muscle. So, can you induce congestive heart failure? There's some evidence that is true. 

Can it cause dementia like symptoms? There's evidence of that as well. 

Can it cause depression, there's evidence of that as well.

And it's all because the mitochondria have been starved of the essential nutrients that they need COQ10 in order to function, that's an epigenetic change.

And then there are social interactions, we find that people who are more isolated, are more stressed out. And they tend to pass those stress responses on to their offspring. 

And then psychology, the six-inch space between your ears, your brain is one of the most powerful tools you will ever have epigenetically. And I'm not saying the power of positive thinking, or you need to just get your thinking straight around this before you can move forward. Now, what I'm talking about is what I've talked about in previous episodes. 

Mindfulness and meditation are proven epigenetically to decrease inflammation in the body. Mind blowing, but it's an epigenetic change that occurs because that 6” spaces between our ears is balanced. That's right. Okay, so keep all of these in mind. And think about that one of the first examples I gave you with the Holocaust survivor study, and the Dutch famine study, these things were all many of these things were issues in those groups of people. 

Now, we're going to wrap up with this, I told you, I would finish with an explanation of switches, good genes, bad genes, things like that. Again, I don't really like the labels, good gene, bad gene. I think they're all good. I think some of them just need to be turned off. And some of them need to be turned on. And when we do an epigenetic profile, we can see which ones of those are bad that are turned on and which ones are “good” that are turned off. 

And our goal is to get that switch turned in the correct direction. Now, you might be asking, how do we turn those switches? How do we get a bad switch to turn off? 

And how do we get a good switch to turn on? 

The answer is we do that by nutritionally supporting the gene with the proper nutrition. 

We do that by proper lifestyle changes. 

We do that with proper environmental changes, can we change the heritable aspect of what we inherited in our epigenome? Yes, we can, we can't do anything about the inheritance. We inherited that that epigenetic tendency, but what we can do is we can change the environment and lifestyle factors that identify those switches when we do an epigenetic profile and say, Okay, that's a bad one that's cut on and this is a good one that's cut off, and therefore you're having problems with this, this and this, let's put systems in place to actually correct that. 

And there's more and more evidence coming out there showing, okay, this particular plant phenol, or this particular plant extract, or this herb, or this supplement, or this vitamin actually helps cut that on. 

Vitamin D

When I was going back and doing the research for today's episode, and I'm going to talk about that more next week. If you look at vitamin D alone, research shows that vitamin D interacts with 291 different genetic components throughout the body and the cells within the body. I mean, that's huge. That's astronomical guys. And so, again, we'll talk more about the impact next week. 

So, one question that I get when it comes to this whole switch analogy and people understanding that they need to nutritionally support their genes, they need to change and modify their environment, they need to change their lifestyle. They will ask me, “How long do I need to do that? Is it a one and done thing where we make these changes? Or we do it for a little while, and it's done kind of like a dose of medicine?”

Unfortunately my answer to that is a cheeky answer. It's a tongue in cheek answer. And my question back to people is, how long do you want to feel good, because at the end of the day, your genetics are your genetics, your epigenome is your epigenome. But it can be modified. So, if we put measures in place to modify the epigenome, so it communicates to your genetics, that, hey, you need to function a little bit better, you need to function a little bit more efficiently, more cleanly.

Dr Brian G Brown  30:50

And then all of a sudden, we establish that good communication, and then we remove that communication. It's kind of like saying that, hey, I want to maintain a good relationship with you, but I'm never going to communicate with you. We can't withdraw that communication. It's one of those things that you can if you don't want to feel good, but it's one of those things that we are identifying, much like an owner's manual. 

I mean, wouldn't it be great to have an owner's manual for your body? I mean, that's what epigenetics is, it is the owner's manual for your body. And it says, hey, if you want to run at this level of efficiency, if you want to run for this length of time, then you need to do this, this, this, this and this. Is it that set in stone yet, not exactly, are we starting to see things like the 2016 twin study about longevity, and understanding a lifestyle environment plays a huge role in that, and 70 to 80% of the time. Absolutely. So, I would hedge my bets on the 70 to 80%, that I need to nutritionally support my genes, and I need to watch my environment really, really closely. I would hedge on that every single time. 

So, in that particular case, then I'm going to go back to epigenetics, and I'm going to look at everything from the root cause. And I'll leave you with this. When I first started in functional medicine, I prided myself on treating people and their conditions, their challenges, their hang ups from a root cause level. And it dawned on me that we weren't really doing that. We were given that good lip service, but we weren't truly treating root cause issues. 

And in order to treat root cause issues, I mean, truly treat root causes us, we have to start with the epigenome. We have to, because it's the modifiable thread that runs throughout our entire being every aspect of who we are, is controlled and modifiable through that epigenome. We're learning more and more and more about it as time goes on. And it's getting really exciting. But is it mainstream? Sadly, it's not? Should it be? Yes, it should be mainstream, we should start every new patient encounter and I firmly believe this, every new patient encounter with an epigenetic profile. Because from that point, we're able to understand what's best for that client.

For example, if I have a client and I'm on their epigenetic profile, I know that they do not detoxify. Well, guess what's going to happen when they have surgery. And I don't take that into consideration. They're going to have problems with possibly depression, foggy thinking, memory lapses, low energy, all of those things, because they are epigenetically, poor detoxifiers. 

But if I put measures in place that support the detoxification system, when they get ready to have surgery, I can ramp those up. I've already got them on the maintenance to support those genes, but I can ramp those up prior to surgery, and then right after surgery, ramp them up for a very short period of time, and then bring them back down to normal maintenance. And it helps them recover faster. I've seen it personally over and over and over again with clients I've worked with, and it makes all the difference in the world. So why aren't we using this every single day? If you just look at the data with trauma, and the ACEs study that comes out of Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest causation studies that we've ever seen, where we understand that those who struggle with trauma are much more likely to have type two diabetes, heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, mental health disorders, alcohol and drug disorders. The list goes on and on and on. We understand that. 

But why are we checking the epigenetics of those people? It's become a passion project of mine. I'm currently looking for a grant writer, I'll just be completely honest with you; to do an interventional study with trauma survivors to see if we can change that risk. We have good data now to understand what that risk is. I believe personally with epigenetics, we can lower that risk for trauma survivors, I believe it with all my heart. I see it clinically. So, I'm gonna leave you with that. No call to action other than, hey, if

Dr Brian G Brown  35:37

you're interested in getting your epigenetics check, you're curious about it. You got more questions, please reach out to me on Messenger either on Instagram or Facebook at Dr. Brian G. Brown. And I'll be glad to dialogue with you all day long about what's going on what questions you have, is this the right fit for you? And what that looks like for you.

 So, until next time, I'm Dr. Brian Brown, signing off. As usual. Thank you for your time. I'm most grateful and most thankful that you spent this time with us today. Until next time, stay in the zone.