Who or what determines our future? Is it us? Or God? Or perhaps it's some distant and intangible element of the universe? Is our current and future health simply just the tangible effects of our genes, or the natural process of evolution within our set of genes? Or perhaps our environment and the elements of our chosen lifestyle play a role? And if so, does this mean we must succumb to the level of health that we are then confined to the parameters of and that thereon becomes our existence? Is our life and our destiny pre-determined? Do we get to have a say in how it all pans out? And the million dollar question – is there a way we can change or control our future?
So many questions. But they're all questions we've no doubt asked ourselves at various stages in our life. And they're questions which demand an answer but that which have probably rarely delivered an answer that we're satisfied with. But the power that is hidden in the real answers, the ones that are scientifically proven and just, we simply could not put a price on. The good news is that the many layers of science hidden within the field of epigenetics may well be bringing to the surface the answers we've been longing for.
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We know that we are scientifically proven to be unique – each of us bioindividual in our genetic make up (what we call our genotype). Who we are today is a product of our genes and the things that we've exposed our bodies to so far in life. This is what "epigenetics" is – the things that influence our genes from the outside. The body and face we see when we look in the mirror is a reflection of the genes that are activated at any point in time – this is what we call our phenotype. Our current phenotype gives us direct insight into our health status. What we see on the outside tells a story about our body on the inside at any point in time.
Epigenetics is about all the factors in our environment that encourage our genes to be switched on and working at full power, or switched off and dormant. This applies to both good and bad genes. That's correct – we have the power within us to determine which genes, be they good or bad, that are switched on or off as a direct result of what we expose ourselves to in our environment. How powerful is that!? A staggering 95 per cent of our genes are in fact malleable in this way. Our destiny, therefore, is literally in our own hands.