By Danette Vernon
If you have ever heard someone say in regard to their temper, or weight, or the early onset of diabetes, “Well, it’s my genetics,” what you heard in that moment…was somewhat of a myth. Something that you may have learned in school, that no longer exists as pure fact.
In truth, for every ill, or for every thought you have that requires a chemical reaction, and they all do, your cells do the work, not your genetics. If you are on the verge of a temper tantrum, your cells send a message throughout your body to increase your heart rate, deepen your breath, shut down stomach processes, etc. And if your body detects an infection, the same, your cells post a message to all areas of concerns, communiqués to fight, to heal. 
The ONLY time your cells access your genes, your internal blueprint, is when they have to replace a cell, or when they have come up with a response that they have never dealt with before. Your genes merely wait to provide information, your cells reflect YOU, what you eat, drink, and think, every day, and that is the science of Epigenics. You are not your genes, you are your responses to your environment. But it goes deeper than that.
Here is reality: what you do, what you eat, actually affects the genetics that you pass on to your children or grandchildren. If you eat junk food, regular meals at fast food restaurants, consume ready-made foods, GMO’s and genetically modified foods, foods laden with pesticide; or if you focus on all of the evil in the world, never easing up on yourself or giving yourself a day full of gratitude, or even a moment of joy, it’s not just you, in your time, that is affected. It’s your genetic material that is affected.
“In 2005 scientists from Spain that studied Epigenetics showed why twins with identical DNA might develop completely different medical problems. And this is very important because conventional medicine wants us to believe that many diseases are out of our own control, that beautiful and healthy people are just a matter of luck and genetic chance.
The study showed that “if one twin smokes, drinks and eats nothing but junk food while the other takes care of her body, the two sets of DNA are getting entirely different chemical ‘lessons’–one is getting a balanced education when the other is getting schooled in the dirty streets of chemical chaos.”
In her book Deep Nutrition, Catherine Shanahan, MD, talks about how genes are affected by the foods we eat:
“Epigenetic researchers study how our genes react to our behavior, and they’ve found that just about everything we eat, think, breathe, or do can, directly or indirectly, trickle down to touch the gene and affect its performance in some way. Not only does what we eat affect us down to the level of our genes, our physiques have been sculpted, in part, by the foods our parents and grandparents ate (or didn’t eat) generations ago.
So take a deep breath, have an organic carrot stick, and strengthen generations to come.
