Believe it or not, designer babies aren’t a new idea. People “designed”
babies in ancient times. No, they didn’t aim for a particular eye or hair color; their goal was more practical—to give birth to healthy, bright, and happy babies. Their tools were not high technology in the typical sense of the word, of course. Their tool was biology, combined with their own common sense, wisdom, and careful observation. Reproduction was not entered into casually, as it often is today, because the production of healthy babies was necessary to the community’s long-term survival.
Through trial and error people learned that, when certain foods were missing from a couple’s diet, their children were born with problems.
They learned which foods helped to ease delivery, which encouraged the production of calmer, more intelligent children who grew rapidly and rarely fell sick, and then passed this information on. Without this nurturing wisdom, we—the dominant species on the planet as we are
presently defined—never would have made it this far.
Widely scattered evidence indicates that all successful cultures accumulated vast collections of nutritional guidelines anthologized over the course of many generations and placed into a growing body of wisdom. This library of knowledge was not a tertiary aspect of these cultures. It was ensconced safely within the vaults of religious doctrine and ceremony to ensure its unending revival. The following excerpt offers one example of what the locals living in Yukon Territory in Canada knew about scurvy, a disease of vitamin C deficiency, which at the time (in 1930) still killed European explorers to the region.
When I asked an old Indian … why he did not tell the white man how [to prevent scurvy], his reply was that the white man knew too much to ask the Indian anything. I then asked him if he would tell me. He said he would if the chief said he might. He returned in an hour, saying that the chief said he could tell me because I was a friend of the Indians and had come to tell the Indians not to eat the food in the white man’s store…. He then described how when the Indian kills a moose he opens it up and at the back of the moose just above the kidney there are what he described as two small balls in the fat [the adrenal glands]. These he said the Indian would take and cut up into as many pieces as there were little and big Indians in the family and each one would eat his piece.10
When I first read this passage in a dusty library book from the 1940s called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, it was immediately obvious just how sophisticated the accumulated knowledge once was—far better than my medical school training in nutrition. My textbooks said that vitamin C only comes from fruits and vegetables. In the excerpt, the chief makes specific reference to his appreciation of the interviewer’s advice to avoid the food in the trading posts (“white man’s store”), demonstrating how, in indigenous culture, advice regarding food and nutrition is held in high esteem, even treated as a commodity that can serve as consideration in a formal exchange. We’ve become accustomed to using the word share these days, as in “Let me share a story with you.”
But this was sharing in the truest sense, as in offering a gift of novel weaponry or a fire-starting device—items not to be given up lightly. In
fact, the book’s author admitted consistent difficulty extracting nutrition-related information for this very reason. There is an old African saying,
“When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground.” And so, unfortunately, this particular human instinct—an understandable apprehension of sharing with outsiders—has allowed much of what used to be known to die away.
Today we are raised to think of food as a kind of enriched fuel, a source of calories and a carrier for vitamins, which help prevent disease.
In contrast, ancient peoples understood food to be a holy thing, and eating was a sanctified act. Their songs and prayers reflected the belief that in consuming food, each of us comes in contact with the great, interconnected web of life. Epigenetics proves that intuitive idea to be essentially true. Our genes make their day-to-day decisions based on chemical information they receive from the food we eat, information encoded in our food and carried from that food item’s original source, a microenvironment of land or sea. In that sense, food is less like a fuel and more like a language conveying information from the outside world.
That information programs your genes, for better or for worse. Today’s genetic lottery winners are those people who inherited well-programmed, healthy genes by virtue of their ancestors’ abilities to properly plug into that chemical information stream. If you want to help your genes get healthy, you need to plug in, too—and this is the book that can help.
For fifteen years, I have studied how food programs genes and how that programming affects physiology. I’ve learned there is an underlying order to our health. Getting sick isn’t random. We get sick because our genes didn’t get what they were expecting, one too many times. Most importantly, I’ve learned that food can tame unruly genetic behavior far more reliably than biotechnology. By simply replenishing your body with the nourishment that facilitates optimal gene expression, it’s possible to eliminate genetic malfunction and, with it, pretty much all known disease. No matter what kind of genes you were born with, I know that eating right can help reprogram them, immunizing you against cancer, premature aging, and dementia, enabling you to control
your metabolism, your moods, your weight—and much, much more.
And if you start planning early enough, and your genetic momentum is strong enough, you can give your children a shot at reaching for the stars.