other nutrients that would benefit us. If we could somehow view these grocery staples as they now exist nutritionally, they would look like ghostly afterimages of their former selves, semi-transparent shapes of apples, cucumbers, the various cuts of beef. Of course, in real life it all looks relatively fresh and appetizing. It had better: most are grown and engineered with eye appeal in mind. These pretty displays hide the fact that it is more difficult to purchase nutritionally rich foods today than any time in recent history.
Without healthy soil to nourish them, plants are unable to use the energy from the sun to manufacture optimal levels of vitamins. Without vitamin-and mineral-rich plants for animals to eat, they can’t add the next layer of chemical/nutritional complexity we have evolved to depend on. We are here today because our ancestors taught their children how to garden, hunt, and prepare their food so that they could one day raise healthy children of their own. Their hard work and due diligence in building and maintaining a healthy environment to support a healthy human genome can, however, only take us so far. We are coasting along on the nutritional momentum left over from millennia of enacted nutritional and environmental wisdom. If our food is composed of far fewer nutrients than it was four generations ago, it’s a fair bet that our physiologies—our connective and nervous tissues, our immune systems, etc.—have taken a hit. What about our genes? Might they be affected as well? What might be the expected effect of generations of nutritional neglect on our own children?
That depends, in large part, on the choices each of us makes. But there is little doubt that physicians like me are going to be very, very busy.
clear vision and her own set of teeth. Her weathered skin sat atop features that looked as though they were chiseled from granite. More often than not, she was the healthiest of the bunch and had a thin medical chart to prove it. The youngest child, on the other hand, often presented symptoms of the whole set of modern diseases: attention deficit, asthma, skin disorders, and recurrent ear infections. Like many of today’s generation, one or more of his organs wasn’t put together quite right. Maybe there was a hole in his heart, or maybe he needed surgery to reposition the muscles around an eye. While the exact effects may be hard to predict, what is predictable, given the dwindling dietary nutrients and proliferation of toxic materials, is some kind of physiologic decline.
Within a given family, the earlier the abandonment of traditional foods for a diet of convenience, the more easily perceptible the decline.
I’m thinking of one little boy in particular, the great-grandchild of one of Hawaii’s many wealthy missionary families who developed an ear infection during his visit to Kauai from another island. This little boy bore none of his great-grandmother’s striking facial geometry. His jaw was narrow, his nose blunted and thin, his eyes set too close, and his cheekbones were withdrawn behind plateaus of body fat. The lack of supporting bone under his eyes made his skin sag into bags, giving him a weary look. His ears were twisted, tilted, and protruded, and his ear canals were abnormally curved, predisposing him to recurring external ear infections.
Narrow face, thin bones, flattened features—sound familiar? This is a dynamic symmetry shift. The nature and degree was something I’d expect to see if he were child number three or four of siblings born in quick succession. But the young man sitting on my exam table was only the couple’s second child, and though mom had given herself a full four years between the two, it hadn’t protected his health. He was the fourth-generation product of a century of nutritional neglect and the consequential epigenetic damage. The last century has derailed our entire culture from the traditions that sustained us, so he is far from alone in enduring visible epigenetic damage. And the consequences
impact more than a child’s skeletal system; his entire genome is at risk. I believe this is why, according to a landmark 2003 Center for Disease Control (CDC) report, this child, like all others born in 2000, had a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes, a condition that reduces life expectancy by between ten and twenty years.179 What is going unreported is the fact that it isn’t just diabetes on the warpath. Every year, growing battalions of familiar diseases are cutting a wider and wider swath of destruction through the normal experiences of childhood.180
THE REASON MEN SHOULD TAKE PREPARATION FOR PREGNANCY AS SERIOUSLY AS WOMEN
Healthy, high motility (left) versus less healthy, low motility sperm (right). Think of the project of making a healthy baby as a competition—because it is. This is a snapshot of what that competition looks like moments after the starting pistol goes off.
Already, a survival of the fittest contest has been set in motion, and one winner from each of these two contests will be selected for advancement. Once they enter the world the two finalists will be pitted against all other surviving finalists in the lifelong battle for resources and opportunity.
Whereas in previous centuries part of a parent’s responsibility was to work hard to prevent their children from getting sick, today so many of us are sick ourselves that we’ve grown to accept disease as one of life’s inevitables—even for our children. Today’s kids aren’t healthy. But rather than make such a sweeping and terrifying declaration, we avert
our eyes from the growing mound of evidence, fill the next set of prescriptions, and expand our definition of normal childhood health to encompass all manner of medical intervention. This latest generation of children has accumulated the epigenetic damage of at least the three previous generations due to lack of adequate nutrition along with the overconsumption of sugar and new artificial fats found in vegetable oils.
The family genome has been getting battered relentlessly for almost a century—even during key, delicate periods of replication. The physiologic result of these accumulated genetic insults? Distorted cartilage, bone, brain, and other organ growth. Many physicians have noted an apparent increase in young couples complaining of problems with fertility which, given the implications of epigenetic science, should come as no surprise. Children born today, I’m afraid, may be so genomically compromised that, for many, reproduction will not be possible even with the benefit of high-tech medical prodding. This is why I call these children the Omega generation, referring to the last letter in the Greek alphabet.
SIX WAYS NUTRITION CAN OPTIMIZE YOUR CHILD’S GROWTH
1. Height. Pour more milk. A meta analysis concluded that for each additional 100 milliliters of milk (roughly 3.3 ounces) consumed daily, children grew an extra 0.2 centimeters (roughly 1/8 inch) per year.181 Children in the study were aged two to twenty and the study duration ranged from a few months to two years. The study’s authors noted that the growth effect was especially powerful in teens. It is not known if higher and sustained milk supplementation would have additive effects. But if avid milk drinker and NBA player Jeremy Lin is any example, at six-foot-three with five-foot-six parents, then perhaps it may.
2. Vision. Look for lots of variety. In a study of children between ages seven and ten, children who developed nearsightedness compared to children who did not consumed significantly less of a
wide variety of nutrients: protein, fat, cholesterol, vitamin B1, vitamin B2, vitamin C, phosphorus, and iron.182 Of note, although the myopic children ate roughly 300 fewer calories, there was no difference between the two groups in several anatomic metrics:
height, weight, or head circumference. This suggests that while normal height, weight, and head circumference are indications of sufficient nutritional intake they are not definitive indicators of optimal nutrition. It also suggests that the children with normal vision may have been more physically active.
3. Cognitive development. Skip starchy snacks. Nutrients shown to correlate most strongly with high IQ include vitamin E, omega-3, and iodine. Studies have shown that the higher a child’s vitamin E, the better their language and social skills.183 Similarly, the higher a newborn’s omega-3 (as measured in maternal umbilical cord blood) the higher that child’s IQ later in childhood.184 Additionally, cognition has been shown to be impaired by a “snacky pattern” of eating high-carb foods “characterized by foods that require minimum preparation such as potatoes and other starchy roots, salty snacks, sugar, preserves, and confectionery.”185 Presumably this effect is mediated through reduced nutrition-to-calorie ratio.
4. Life span. Beget big babies. Larger children, born to non-diabetic moms, have greater muscle mass, a higher resistance to diabetes and obesity, and longer telomeres (the part of the DNA that determines how many more divisions a cell can undergo, thus influencing cellular lifespan)—all known to be associated with longer life expectancy.186, 187
How to grow a big baby without developing gestational diabetes? Aside from being tall and well fed during your own childhood, we don’t know much about specific interventions to produce bigger babies. But we do know something about how to avoid having a too-small baby: don’t smoke, don’t conceive while you’re undernourished or underweight, and don’t restrict protein (i.e. if you’re vegan, you may need to supplement).
5. Immune system. Maximize microbes and micronutrients.
Researchers at UC Davis found that individuals with subtle deficiencies of various micronutrients are more prone to develop a variety of common day-to-day infections and are more likely to have more severe infections with prolonged convalescence.188 Allergies, asthma, and auto-immune illnesses are more prevalent in children with reduced microbial gut flora diversity. Experts recommend breast feeding to optimize early gut flora development and are considering recommending soil-based probiotics.189, 190 Including fermented foods in a child’s diet and encouraging outdoor play would be my preferred methods of introducing immune-boosting probiotics.
6. Puberty. Avoid insulin resistance. Junk food consumption and being overweight are both associated with insulin resistance. Insulin resistance impacts boys and girls in different ways. For girls, it causes precocious puberty, so common today that we find breast development, typical of eleven-year-olds a generation ago, often occurring in seven-year-olds and, rarely, in three-year-olds.191 Aside from its detrimental psychological effects, precocious puberty typically reduces the child’s adult height. In boys, insulin resistance reduces testosterone levels. Low testosterone during puberty is associated with decreased development of muscle mass, impaired growth of the penis and testicles, reduced deepening of the voice, development of breast tissue, and lack of normal male hair growth.192
Born by cesarean section (often necessitated by maternal pelvic bone abnormalities), briefly breastfed (if at all), weaned on foods with extended shelf lives—the human equivalent of pet foods—these Omega generation children see the doctor often and, whether first-born or not, will likely suffer from both biradial and dynamic symmetry shifts. In the same way we talk about bracing for the aging baby boomers’ medical needs, we had better reinforce the levees of our medical system for the
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.