Katie Couric had a guest on her show recently who said that 85% of all physical illness and disease is stress related. Interestingly, around the same time, National Public Radio broadcast a study that showed that negative effects of stress are greatest when the individual believed that stress was bad for them. People experiencing similar levels of stress but who did not believe that they would suffer negative consequences as a result displayed significantly fewer stress-related symptoms.
The difference between the two groups was merely the thoughts they entertained about their experience. Remarkably, cell biologist Dr Bruce Lipton has proven that the same can be said about our genes which, it seems, are not what we have been told they are.
Dr Lipton says our DNA is not an irrefutable, infallible or irrevocable blueprint for the possibilities of our life. Our DNA is, in fact, merely a starting point, and how it works, for good or for bad, is up to us.
In his book Biology of Belief Lipton demonstrates that the effect of our DNA is almost completely shaped by the environment in which it exists, and that the environment is created by our thoughts.
It is well known that thoughts of anger, hatred, revenge and fear release certain hormones and enzymes that cause deleterious effects in the long term, including cardiovascular and gastrointestinal damage. Constant, persistent thoughts of love, peace and forgiveness have the opposite effect. If we have constant thoughts of fear, dread, or limitation then we create a stressful environment for our cells and eventually they, and our body generally, show the signs of this stress.
This is no longer mere conjecture. It is science. Dr Deepak Chopra says it is called genetic plasticity or epigenetics and he recently outlined the implications of this science on CNN:
“This means the way you think, the way you feel, your personal relationships, your social interactions, and of course the quality of your sleep and how you manage stress, and if you have laughter and love in your life, that will actually change the expression of your genes. There are about 500 genes [related to] inflammation, and inflammation seems to be the background in many diseases including autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses like heart disease, arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and bronchial asthma.
Only 5% of genes are set in stone. The rest, Chopra says, are influenced by how we live and we can alter the activity of 500 genes within three months by changing our lifestyle. We can, as Chopra says, “dial up the good genes and dial down the bad genes.”
This changes everything. Instead of cutting off our breasts because we have been told we have the cancer gene; instead of limiting our life prospects because someone tells us our gene pool is deficient; instead of being defeated by genetic theories that, as both Bruce Lipton and Chief Medical and Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President of the American Cancer Society, Dr Otis Brawley, contend, they are based on bad science.
Bruce Lipton says the idea that our DNA controls our bodies was only ever a hypothesis, which came to be accepted as good science purely by assumption:
“There was never any scientific validation for [this notion] yet we all bought it because a belief already existed that this would be the answer to what controls life so when the data looked like it would fit it was simply assumed that this was right.”
Similarly, Dr Brawley argues that common cancer treatments, such as those for breast cancer - namely chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant - became accepted practice merely because doctors told their patients they were effective. He argues that the practice may have been rooted in the self-interest of both the doctors and the hospitals providing the therapy. Nevertheless, as early as 1999 three highly regarded clinical trials demonstrated that breast cancer treatments were not more effective than other treatments and, in some cases, were more harmful.
It’s time for us to re-think our genes.
