next rising tide: medicine-dependent youth. These children will age faster, suffer emotional problems, and develop never-before-seen diseases. In my experience as a doctor, parents have an intuitive sense that their children are already dealing with more health problems than they ever did, and they worry about their future, for good reason. But no parent is helpless. If you have children, or are planning to, I can think of at least one child who can do something to avoid all this illness and start getting healthy—yours.
if you were breastfed. Were they? Learn whatever you can about who was born when (including birth spacing). Dig up as many family pictures as you can find to look for the telltale signs of Second Sibling Syndrome.
The more you know about your family history, and the more objectively you measure your health and appearance along with that of your partner, the more clues you will have to assess your genetic, and epigenetic, health.
Let’s give it a try. Let’s attempt to gauge a person’s genetic momentum using Claudia Schiffer as our case subject. Though both her parents were tall and reasonably attractive, you wouldn’t guess they could produce the superstar beauty they did. Their genetic equation was complicated by the fact that her father and mother were born during the Depression and raised under the conditions of post-war food shortages.
Claudia’s secret weapon of genetic wealth may be that her great-great-grandmother grew up in the most wholesome and remote of farming communities in Austria, a town near Elbigenalp, which changed very little in the thousands of years before Claudia’s grandmother’s birth.193
This close relation to someone living in a successful, stable, indigenous society is truly a rare gift. Adding to this, Claudia’s father’s family was affluent, meaning that (during their formative years) he and his parents presumably had access to the best foods of the early twentieth century. Put the two together, and keep the good food coming, and—voilà—a genome operating under moderate duress for a spell is effectively rehabilitated.
SKELETAL RESPONSES TO DIET CHANGE
Short stature may be a kind of biologic “choice,” an epigenetic adaptation to inadequate bone-building material in a previous generation’s diet. Rather than build weak, breakable bones, the genome makes bone of the same strength, only less of it. When the nutrient supply increases, the genes respond again, taking advantage of the extra material to build a bigger frame.
Let’s look at a broader example of genetic rehabilitation, this time dealing with height. Height is one of the most desirable proportions for a man. Aside from the obvious social and mating advantages, the professional advantages gained with every additional inch of height are well documented. Studies show that tall men take home higher salaries, obtain leadership positions more often, and have more sex.194
Hawaiian archeological evidence shows that for hundreds of years a man’s stature helped to secure him a better official position in the class hierarchy. Our language—”big shoes to fill,” “big man on campus,”
“someone you can look up to”—reflects society’s universal preference for the tall. The positive perception of the taller among us often extends to women, as well. I am not suggesting that taller people are better, only that height affords certain physical and social advantages. With that in mind, can relatively diminutive parents who want those advantages for
their children have a baby who might someday walk tall and rise above the fray to stand head and shoulders above the rest?
Absolutely! This potential is encoded in our genetic memory. We’ve all heard that we used to be a lot shorter, how few of us could fit into one of those little suits of armor worn by medieval knights. But around the world, accumulating evidence suggests that thousands of years prior, our Paleolithic predecessors were at least as tall, if not taller, than most of us are today.195 Even in the early Middle Ages, 1,000 years ago, European men were nearly as tall as they are now. What caused the temporary skeletal shrinkage? As the population grew, crowding reduced access to nutrients until stature reached an all-time low in the early 1700s.196 Improvements in agricultural technology, most notably the series of inventions attribued to lawyer-turned-farmer Jethro Tull, revolutionized the process of tilling soil, vastly increasing productivity.197 By the late 1700s, having recovered some of its former nutritional inputs, the European genome rebounded—and with it the average European’s height. But it would probably have dipped again, so that a tall man today might measure just over five feet, were it not for the early twentieth-century invention of refrigeration. The ability to freeze food meant that fishermen could travel as far as they needed and fill their hulls to brimming. Refrigeration also meant that even during winter, wealthy countries could reach down to the tropics for summer fruits and vegetables, making it profitable for millions of acres of rain forests around the globe to be converted over to crop production. For the past 100 years, industrialized nations have had consistent access to enough nutrition to achieve our Paleolithically pre-programmed height.
Of course, height doesn’t equal health. But generally speaking, when a genome has access to a surplus of complex nutrition, it is far better positioned—and may be said to have a built-in preference—for the production of offspring with more robust, larger frames.
The Sibling Strategy
So what is the strategy I recommend? As we’ve seen, optimizing a
child’s growth involves optimizing nutrition in order to best assure the development of biradial and dynamic symmetry, as well as prime the child’s body for normal hormone responses in utero.
To optimize nutrition, we need to start eating the Human Diet, as outlined in Chapter 13. To facilitate normal in-utero hormone responses, we need to avoid the dietary substances that can interfere with hormone function, namely toxins. Later, we’ll learn more about how sugar and vegetable oils, the two most common toxins in the modern diet, prevent you from being as healthy and beautiful as you deserve to be, and how avoiding them can improve your own and your children’s health both immediately and in the long run.
Ideally, you will give yourself at least three months prior to conception to detox and refortify your system but I would recommend six to twelve months if you are prediabetic or overweight because both these conditions can involve profound metabolic and hormonal dysfunction and imbalance. If you are worried about your biologic clock, consider that by improving your nutrition you will not only facilitate faster conception when the time comes, you will also improve pituitary function, essentially reversing time in your baby-making systems.
Avoiding toxins seems like a pretty sound idea. But how, exactly, to do that? It gets confusing because a product can call itself healthy when there’s not enough nourishment in it to keep a rat alive. I’m not kidding.
According to industry insider Paul Stitt, author of Fighting the Food Giants, a popular cereal company did a study in the 1940s that showed its puffed rice product killed rats faster than a starvation diet of water and minerals.198 Similar puffed and processed whole grain products are still sitting on store shelves today, sold under every major brand label. In fact, even store-bought granola, loaded with unhealthy oils and sugar, makes for an unhealthy way to start your day. Much better alternatives can be found in the fresh food departments, as we’ll see. To understand the depth to which our food supply is saturated with products that keep us barely alive, I’ll take us back in time to understand where and when things started to go wrong with the way we think about food.
PART TWO