What Is the Metabolic Lifestyle?
By Ryan Heeney / February 10th, 2022
To understand The Metabolic Lifestyle, I think it’s important to first understand what the metabolism is. Once you understand the metabolism down to the level of the cell, I think you’ll be able to see why it is the key to health.
Our body is made up of about 37 trillion cells. Within each cell there are thousands of different functions and processes happening every single second. Some cells are skin cells, some are brain cells, some are liver cells, some are lung cells, and so on, and so on.
These trillions of cells form together to make up biological material we call “tissue”. This tissue then makes up organs, and your organs make up the organism (you).
Below is a good visualization of the biological order of things to put this into perspective:
You could look at it this way—if all of these 37 trillion individual cells (the building blocks for all of your tissue) are functioning optimally, then you will be functioning optimally as well. Conversely, if all your cells are functioning poorly, then you can expect to be functioning poorly too.
The better your skin cells function, the healthier your skin will look and be, the better your heart cells function, the healthier your heart will be, the better your thymus cells function, (the gland responsible for immune function), the better your immune function will be. You could continue this same reasoning with every aspect of your body.
There isn't one piece of tissue in your body that isn't made up of one of these trillions of cells and the health of the organism depends directly on the health of each of these cells. In my opinion, this is THE common denominator for all aspects of what we know of as health and it is this concept of health that has been completely forgotten about.
I think this quote from biochemist Dr. Gilbert Ling illustrates this point well:
““Smiling, laughing and other normal physiological activities tell us that a baby is well. This is just a short way of saying that the trillions of cells making up the baby are well. Similarly, when the baby is sick, it is a short way of saying that some or all of the baby’s cells are sick.””
But here's the real secret... YOU have complete control over of how well every single one of these cells functions.
But how could that be?
If you remember back from biology class, there is something called "ATP". ATP, which stands for “adenosine triphosphate”, can be thought of as the “energy currency of the cell”. Throughout this article “ATP” and “energy” might be used interchangeably but in the context of the metabolism they essentially mean the same thing—ATP is just the molecule that carries energy from place to place. ATP carries the fuel (energy) that keeps a cell functioning and assists in the thousands of different tasks being performed within the cell at every moment. The more ATP your cell produces, and the quicker and more efficiently it does, the better that cell will function. The slower and less efficiently your cell produces ATP, the more hindered the cells processes become and the more poorly it will function. Also, if energy production in a cell is low enough it can actually create harmful byproducts, begin to impair the system and sometimes the cell can eventually die altogether.
Let’s use the liver as an example. If your liver cells aren’t producing sufficient amounts of ATP, it will eventually lead to a decline in function of the entire liver itself. Over long periods of time poor liver function can eventually lead to issues with detoxification, nutrient metabolization, etc., and this cascade of problems quickly become a systemic issue within the entire body which can then lead to a serious disease or even death.
While it’s a bit simplified, it’s an example of the consequence of impaired ATP production.
So where does ATP come from in the first place?
To understand this it’s probably a good idea to become familiar with things called “electrons”. All matter is made up of electrons and they are the negatively charged particles that surround the atom. This matter even includes food. When you eat food full of these electrons, it goes through many steps of digestion and is eventually broken down into something called glucose. This glucose (still carrying the electrons) is now able to enter the cell to begin the process of being broken down into energy. This process is called cellular respiration.
Cellular respiration is made up of 3 steps:
Glycolysis
The Krebs cycle
The electron transport chain.
While there is some energy (ATP) formed during glycolysis and the Krebs cycle, most of the ATP created happens in the final step, the electron transport chain. At this step the electrons transfer from the food you ate to the oxygen found in your cell (which originally comes from the air you breathe in). This transfer yields lots of energy in the form of ATP. This process is happening constantly within every cell in your body.
Below is a simplified diagram of cellular respiration. Again, the final step labeled “electron transport chain” yields much more ATP than the first two steps—glycolysis and the Krebs cycle:
To put electrons into perspective in where they fall in the biological order of things, I’ve expanded the first “levels of organization chart” to include electrons. You can see that along with protons and neutrons, electrons are some of the smallest units in biology.
For the sake of brevity I have saved the details of this subject for another time, but for now it’s important to know that the better you can turn the food you eat, into the energy (ATP) that your cells use, the better and more efficient your entire system will function and the healthier you will be.
This is the true definition of having a “high metabolism” and I believe it is the key to optimizing health.
While this could seem like a new concept, to certain people it’s definitely not. Dr. Raymond Peat, who has his PhD in biology, has been trying for decades to get the word out that biological energy is essential for health, vitality and avoiding and treating disease. In fact in his dissertation, he outlined how energy and structure are interdependent at every level—and that was written in 1972.
I believe THE issue and the absolute lowest common denominator of all diseases (even those associated with aging), is the disruption of the flow of biological energy in the form of ATP. I believe this “biological stress” is the true root cause for disease, even for diseases thought to be “genetic”.
“Energy production being more impactful on health than genetics” isn’t just theory either, this is backed and proven by many studies and reputable scientific sources that are beginning to see the light of day. Many of those sources and studies will be provided in this article.
The constant flow of biological energy in the form of ATP through every cell in our body is the difference between us and the car. Almost like magic, the ATP which our body is producing constantly can make repairs on its own and bring the system back into working order (if it is produced in sufficient enough amounts). It’s the difference between the dead lifeless material of the car and living human tissue.
More important than the ability for biological energy (ATP) to fix a problem once it happens, the constant flow of biological energy can even more greatly prevent disease or illness from occurring in the first place.
The Alternative Health World
If I had to describe the alternative health scene in one phrase it would be reductionist thinking.
First, the ketogenic or “keto” diet is a belief that burning fat for fuel is superior than burning glucose. Included in this list are those that are carnivore, zero-carb, low-carb or any other group that bases their belief on the fact that "carbs are the enemy”. It’s largely believed that once you drop carbohydrates, your blood sugar drops to normal, you lose weight and all is solved.
What could be wrong with this approach?
Imagine there's a small hole in the bottom of the boat you're in. That hole is letting in water and causing the boat to slowly sink. Everyone on board is in a panic. They’re trying to come up with new ways of getting the water out of the boat and over the side so the boat doesn’t sink. All sorts of methods are being used… scooping the water out with buckets, trying to scoop it out with their hands, frantically attempting to splash it out, etc.
Well how about just plugging the hole?
With keto/low-carb/zero-carb/carnivore there seems to be no interest in just plugging the hole in the bottom of the boat and this is where I see a huge error in the keto community’s thinking. The problem isn't glucose—it's that your cells can't metabolize glucose. That is the real issue, not the carbs you’re avoiding at all costs.
If you find yourself to be glucose intolerant or insulin resistant, avoiding carbs is NOT the long term answer. Your system needs to reboot and work again, but it will forever be broken if carbohydrates aren’t eventually reintroduced.
A great example from Kyle Mamounis, who has a doctoral degree in nutritional science, is his analogy of blood sugar issues and the gym: if you went to the gym everyday, but had an extremely weak body part (let’s say legs for example), would you remedy your weak legs by going to the gym and just continuing to skip training your legs everyday because of the fact your legs are weak?
Or would you remedy your weak legs by slowly starting to add resistance training to that lagging body part to build strength and muscle mass?
To parallel that to insulin resistance, trying to remedy your high blood sugar and insulin resistance by removing something that is not the cause of the high blood sugar and insulin resistance will not be doing you any good. Especially in the long term. What you should be focused on is the deeper issue and what is actually causing blood sugar and insulin issues. By removing carbohydrates you are not solving the problem and are merely putting a band-aid over a wound that needs stitches.
Insulin resistance is a situation in which things can indeed be fixed, but the solution will not be found in ignoring the cause.
Outside of insulin resistance there is an even more systemic and long-term issue when removing carbohydrates.
The true harm in not taking in enough carbohydrates is the fact that your cells will be producing much less carbon dioxide, which is another greatly misunderstood aspect of health. Often thought of as a “wasteful byproduct” of cellular respiration, carbon dioxide is extremely beneficial in the organism and much more of it is produced when cells are oxidizing carbohydrate as fuel as opposed to fat.
The extra carbon dioxide that is produced when cells oxidize carbohydrate instead of fat is actually vitally important and this is because of something called the “Bohr effect”. What the Bohr effect essentially means is that the oxygenation of tissues in our body is proportional to the amount of carbon dioxide they produce. Oxygen is crucial in many steps of the metabolic process within the cell.
Knowing all this, you can essentially say that low carbon dioxide levels within the body lead to a lowered, or “hindered” metabolism. And while there are some side benefits to the keto diet (and the following current fad diets I’m going to mention), unfortunately for all of them, the bad outweighs the good.
And I'm only picking on the “keto crowd” first because it seems to be the most popular at the moment and is a great example of “reductionist thinking”.
This line of thinking seems to be found in many different alternative health scenes.
The Paleo crowd bases their dietary philosophy on the assumption of what a person who lived in the Paleolithic era ate. They assume this diet would work the same in today's day where stresses, food quality, and life in general are much different. Also, just because humans may have subsisted on a certain diet for periods of time does not mean the diet they ate was optimal. There's a reason we have systems designed for stress and starvation—which the Paleo crowd oddly tries to emulate. Hormesis can be great in theory, but to the degree the paleo crowd stresses their systems, I believe it’s overdone.
Here’s a question for the Paleo crowd: how might one know how much fruit someone from the Paleolithic era ate? All that would be left of the fruit after being eaten would be its seeds or pit. And what does that pit or seed turn into? A fruit tree, right?
But since the Metabolic Lifestyle is a philosophy focused on both nutrition and lifestyle, I must say the Paleo folks do get a lot right. Sunshine/vitamin D, the importance of sleep, and the importance of healthy movement are all good examples in which the Paleo folks nail things down really well.
There's also a group that seems to be extremely focused on the gut microbiome. This community seems to have a lot of overlap with the Paleo crowd, but focuses on the gut even more intensely. Don't get me wrong, the gut is very important, but it's just another example of reductionist thinking. The gut is a part of a much larger system. If you take a look at even a fraction of what the liver does, you’d have to wonder how there's not a health community as big as the gut microbiome community backing up the liver in the same way.
How about the fitness/bodybuilding crowd who focus only on aesthetics and looks? Fitness models, bodybuilders and social media physique “influencers” often chase fitness and aesthetics but are not in the pursuit of true health (even though the manner in which they give advice seems to give off that vibe).
Their meals typically consist of foods like lean meats/egg whites, starches (like white rice and potatoes), vegetables and protein powders—which makes their body look a certain way on the outside, but doesn’t do so much for true health.
Even athletes are often unhealthy. Yes, they are fit, but fitness and aesthetics do not necessarily equal true health. A good example of this is found in the famous cases of women athletes that experience "the female athlete triad". This is a combination of three conditions: disordered eating, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis. This is actually quite common in Olympic female gymnasts.
Your average muscled up bodybuilder that steps onto a Mr. Olympia stage is often far from the picture of health as well (and I'm sure most of them would admit to that). Many top pro bodybuilders often experience severe health issues both during and after their careers. Fitness and true health can sometimes overlap, but they are definitely not synonymous with one another.
What about vegans and vegetarians? I really respect these groups for their thoughtfulness and empathy. In my opinion, factory farming must be totally revamped and most of the practices involved in that system are very wrong. But my mission here is the pursuit of truth in the subject of health, and if I find philosophies that don't happen to align with truth then I cannot endorse them. I do think you can be perfectly healthy on a vegetarian diet with some thoughtful planning... and maybe be even on a vegan diet as well, but that may require even more thoughtful planning.
A quick note on the subject of veganism and vegetarianism:
I went to school in Iowa and you would typically know a field had recently been plowed when you saw hawks circling overhead. The reason this happens is because when a field is plowed to get ready for something like corn, lettuce, kale, or other crops to be planted… hundreds of little rodents and other animals are churned up in the process. This ends up being a feast for the predatory hawks circling overhead. So when eating a kale salad—while your intentions are good—the process in which that salad came to your plate may be more primal than you think.
To quote a farmer who I read about on this subject recently, “… anyone who has sat on a plowing tractor knows the predatory birds that follow you all day are not there because they have nothing better to do. Plowing and harvesting kills small mammals, snakes, lizards and other animals in vast numbers."
While I don’t mean to paint such a tragic picture, I am merely tying to point out the potential logical flaws associated with vegetarian and vegan philosophies. While a tractor churns up hundreds of rodents preparing a field for farming, a hunter might kill one elk that will feed their family for an entire year.
There are many other factions and groups with certain philosophies (like the Zone Diet crowd, Atkins, the pescatarians, etc.), but in my opinion they all fall into the same problem... reductionist thinking. It seems they often have a part of the puzzle down, but not quite everything. The human body isn't a collection of parts, rather it’s a system that is interconnected on every level, in every way.
Some good news is there’s actually a new line of thought in medicine called "endobiogeny" which talks extensively about the body being a system and treating every disease as a systemic problem. A very interesting article can be found about that here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3833585/pdf/gahmj.2013.2.1.011.pdf
I think those in alternative health circles should ask themselves, "what is at the root of my method or philosophy?" What is my basic premise?
This “root” or basic premise should encompass the entire organism and leave no stone unturned.
That’s because it has to.
Every cell in our body is connected and nothing in the organism is separate.
I believe that the basic premise of your philosophy on health should be able to be written on something as small as a sticky note. You need a simple but solid foundation on which your philosophy lays. You need that root or there will be no context for the rest.
The confusion in the world of nutrition seems to stem from a lack of context. Once you have a solid context for why you believe the things you do, everything else will click into place. But basing a whole idea of health around things like blood sugar levels, vague assumptions from 10,000 years ago, or simply “the gut”, is not a good enough foundation for health when considering the entire organism.
In my opinion, the cell’s ability to produce energy in the form of ATP is a foundation in which everything can sit atop of. The cell’s ability to produce energy will combat stress and promote vitality throughout the whole organism—from the bottom up.
Lastly and unfortunately, the last group I have to pick on is the professional nutritionists themselves. And since nutrition is a large part of health, I feel that examining this field is necessary.
Full disclaimer: I did not get a degree in nutrition so I can't speak from direct experience, but I am in touch with people who do have their degrees in nutritional sciences. Some of whom have their PhD’s in nutritional science. They happen to be very frustrated at the academic world right now. It seems like the most prominent studies in nutrition are often funded by the ones with the most money in their pockets, and often those entities tend to be the pharmaceutical companies.
From what they tell me, it seems like studies that a pharmaceutical company might be involved in will be financially "propped up”, while studies that go against their interests or“agenda" get pushed to the side or are suppressed.
There are also a lot of rules and standards in nutritional studies which can only be described as “ridiculous".
For example: a study that might be done to determine what effect a low-fat diet will have on someone with type 2 diabetes might use 40% of their calories coming from fat (and the study in this example’s predetermined parameters consider that to be "low-fat"). Eventually once the study gets published the headline might read something like "Low-Fat Diets Extremely Dangerous for Diabetics!', but once you read the fine print, you discover it was hardly “low-fat” at all.
Even the different types of fat are treated this same way. For example: studies purporting to be done to determine the effects of saturated fat on heart disease will use a mixture of something like 30% saturated fat, 30% monounsaturated fat, 40% polyunsaturated fat, but will still be labeled a "high saturated fat diet". These parameters and regulations are ridiculous, and I feel that you must be vigilant and read the fine details of a study before making a judgement or opinion you might get just from a headline.
Finding out who is funding the study is also a very important factor and is always worth looking into when evaluating nutritional literature (or any scientific literature for that matter). It seems that those with the “deep pockets” are really the ones who make the rules when it comes to studies in nutrition and science.
Kyle Mamounis, who has his doctorate in nutritional science, has direct knowledge with this subject and gets into things a bit more deeply in this short clip:
Besides ridiculous paraemeters in most studies, the barrier to entry when submitting studies to journals is equally ridiculous. Just submitting a study to be published in a prominent journal like "Nature" will run you around $10,000. And again, that is just to submit your study to the journal. Meaning that once you pay that $10,000, you have no idea if the study will even get published, let alone looked at.
Even the recent, highly regarded idea of "Evidence-Based Medicine" has been a failure. What started off as something positive in theory has been hijacked by biased studies, funded by those with big money—and unfortunately money and truth are often not one in the same. You can read about the failure of "Evidence-Based Medicine" here:
It is also being discovered that most clinical research in many branches of science is overwhelmingly flawed…
John Ioannidis, a physician-scientist, writer, and highly respected researcher at Stanford University has spent most of the recent part of his life exposing just how poorly the findings in published research actually are. He believes nutrition itself to be one the worst areas concerning these matters and claims a mere 1% of published studies in nutrition could be considered legitimate.
You can find more information on that subject here:
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002049
Also, the following link below is a great write-up of the flawed research and studies behind millions of prescription drugs prescribed by doctors every year:
One of the other main problems with nutrition in academia at the moment is the fact that it is full of statisticians. Statisticians are people who collect, process and analyze data to look for patterns, probabilities and statistical significance to find links between variables. Sometimes they find correlations, and will base assumptions on those correlations. What’s the problem with this?
You can think of it this way:
Instead of looking at exactly how the human body might function (like a biochemist might), a statistician will look simply look for trends and patterns and base their conclusions on those instead.
One of the earliest things you learn in statistics 101 is that "correlation does not imply causation”. I feel as though this rule of thumb has been completely forgotten about in nutrition and the opposite philosophy dominates the field at the moment.
Here's a good example of what I'm talking about and why correlation does not often imply causation:
Did you know that ice cream sales and deaths from drowning have an almost perfect positive correlation?
How could this be?
Is there some ingredient in ice cream that is causing people to drown? Maybe the cold temperature of the ice cream has an effect on the person’s lung function? Or maybe there’s something about ice cream which causes stomach cramps and makes swimming more difficult?
Nope.
It's just the fact that during the hotter summer months more people tend to swim and also during the hotter summer months people tend to eat ice cream and ice cream sales go up. So while the numbers of swimming deaths and the amount of ice cream being sold have an almost perfect positive correlation, one does not cause the other.
But again, this is what is happening in nutrition, the field is being dominated by statisticians.
In my opinion, nutrition should be comprised of more biologists and biochemists. A biologist/biochemist is trained to understand exactly how the body functions—as opposed to someone who might have a vague idea of how the body works based on theories and statistics.
Say if your engine breaks down… do you want someone to hand you a bunch of studies on why similar engines broke down in certain conditions and why your engine might be one of those that broke down based on various patterns and variables? Or would you rather just have a mechanic pop your hood, take a look to see what the problem is and tell you how to fix it?
While statisticians are important in other areas of the world, I don’t think they belong in nutrition… at least nearly to the degree they do now.
This is a glaring issue in nutrition at the moment and is one of the many things that needs to be changed.
But let me get back to what excites me about concept of “biological energy” for a moment.
Remember the person mentioned in the beginning of this article who was just basically “getting by”?
Their blood labs didn’t indicate anything seriously wrong, there weren’t any diseases presenting themselves yet, they were simply “free of disease” in that moment—but they weren’t full of vitality either.
Yeah, they were tired, a bit overweight, had no zest for life—but their blood labs were okay.
On paper they were “fine”.
But what if we could upgrade that person beyond fine?
And no, not like plastic surgery. I’m talking about changes down to the level of the cell. Changes that could make a person more vibrant, youthful, energetic and full of vitality like a kid again. Changes so positive and drastic the person wouldn’t have even thought it was possible.
Unlike a car, we have cells which produce energy and have the ability to improve the cell (and tissue) itself.
Instead of some rusty old car that gets you from point A to point B… why not upgrade to a 700 horsepower supercar?
I believe you can. I believe you can take your old car and make it a Ferrari.
We only get one body so why not treat it the way it’s supposed to be treated... like the high performance, efficient vehicle it can be. Full of life, energy and vitality.
Some of these methods you will hear at the Metabolic Lifestyle will sound unconventional but they are by no means “gimmicks". These philosophies and ideas come from figures like Albert Szent-Györgyi and Otto Warburg who won Nobel Prize’s in physiology and medicine. Or people who are PhD’s and legends in the fields of biology and biochemistry like Dr. Raymond Peat, Dr. Broda Barnes and Dr. Gilbert Ling.
The one thing that these people all have in common is that they recognized the regenerative power of energy in the form of ATP. They saw that human beings were not just slabs of lifeless meat, but instead living tissue that had a constant stream of biological energy flowing through each cell—and that this energy was pure potential and was the secret to true health.
And while I, nor any of these other people can give you a magic wand, I believe you can find the blueprint here to become the master of your own health and to be in control of your own biological destiny.
You can expect to lose fat (and keep it off); alleviate or cure symptoms of depression or mood disorders; stop and reverse pattern baldness; improve your hair, skin and nails; increase energy levels; sleep like a rock at night; improve your libido; cure acne and improve your skin; improve PMS symptoms; think more clearly, improve memory and cognition; increase muscle mass... and the list goes on and on and on.
These are the results of a body and its 37 millions cells working correctly and efficiently.
These are the results of your metabolism in peak form.
Yes, this might sound “too good to be true”, but it is not a magic pill. Understanding your body takes work, dedication and a focus on yourself. I do believe this is the only way to true health and vitality.
The methods, strategies and indicators you will learn to implement and identify will not only improve your well-being and vitality, but will also help prevent and treat disease—including diseases thought to be “genetic".
But aren’t the genetics we are given our destiny?
Not quite.
The scientific and medical community are beginning to realize that the focus they’ve put on genetics may have been a mistake. Mapping the human genome has largely been a failure and a recent study has found that your genes have less than 5% to do with your risk of developing a serious disease in your lifetime.
You can read the quote from the study here:
“In most cases, your genes have less than five percent to do with your risk of developing a particular disease, according to new research by University of Alberta scientists. In the largest meta analysis ever conducted, scientists have examined two decades of data from studies that examine the relationships between common gene mutations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and different diseases and conditions. And the results show that the links between most human diseases and genetics are shaky at best. “Simply put, DNA is not your destiny, and SNPs are duds for disease prediction,” said David Wishart, professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Computing Science and co-author on the study. “The vast majority of diseases, including many cancers, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease, have a genetic contribution of 5 to 10 percent at best.””
The source of that paper can be found below in the link below:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0220215
This philosophy is crumbling as times goes on.
In recent decades, mainstream medicine has been slowly pulling back their proclamations of genetic determinism and have began introducing the the idea of “epigenetics”—which technically means “the changes observed in organisms is caused by a modification in their gene expression by environmental factors”.
As evidence mounts that our destinies are not purely a product of our genes and DNA, the mainstream has begun distancing themselves from this idea and moving towards the idea of “epigenetics” instead.
A saying that I feel encompasses this idea is, “genes are a tendency, not your destiny”. But I have a feeling that the “epigenetic model” of disease may actually not even deserve that much credit.
While I’m glad the medical community seems to be moving in the right direction with the idea of epigenetics, I feel that they are severely underestimating the power of environmental factors, such as stress on the organism—while also underestimating the positive, rejuvenating power of increased energy (ATP) production within the cell.
Yes, genetics do play a role in things like eye color, hair color, and even a small certain number of certain diseases like the BRCA associated cancers. But for most chronic diseases, the genetic explanation from mainstream medicine is falling apart quickly.
On the other hand, the case for environmental factors like food choices, lifestyle choices and other external factors—which alter the cell’s ability to produce energy—is becoming stronger by the day. It finally seems like the mainstream is slowly beginning to catch on.
Below are some recent headlines from mainstream prominent journals, studies and publications which illustrate how the theory of genetic determinism has begun to crumble.
Sources for every publication, study and headline can be found at the end of this article:
And the list goes on…
But one of the most interesting examples of your genes and DNA not controlling your destiny are the studies that have been done on identical twins…
At birth, identical twins genes are nearly identical, but as they get older their genes change because of environmental influences and personal choices each make like smoking, dietary habits, etc. Here is a quote from this article on a study done on identical twins:
“Identical twins have identical genes, because they are born of an embryo that splits at a very early stage in development. Such twins are often indistinguishable in outward appearance. But over the course of time they may experience radically dissimilar health.
Most scientists have assumed that environmental and lifestyle differences cause such divergence. These things trigger chemical reactions that affect our DNA and the proteins entwined with our DNA, called histones. One such reaction, known as methylation, influences the expression of genes and so can have an impact on health.
Most people had the hypothesis that changes in DNA methylation are effected by the environment," says lead author Mario Fraga of the Spanish National Cancer Centre in Madrid. "This is the first time that somebody has demonstrated that this is the case." The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”
https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050704/full/news050704-3.html
There is another great article from The Atlantic that sums up the studies done on twins and genes/DNA here:
Here is the full link to that article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/twin-epigenetics/560189/
Genes seem to be a snapshot in time of your biological state, but the environment and every action you choose influences those genes and changes them in real time.
Biophysicist Dr. Josiah Zayner describes this process in the documentary “Unnatural Selection”:
…“I go outside in San Francisco and I breathe in something, it’s modifying my genome. I smoke a cigarette, it’s modifying my genome. It’s actually modifying my genome in that I can literally grow another organ, like a tumor. The sun, the UV light is modifying your genome when you’re out there.”
I also highly recommend watching the popular documentary “Three Identical Strangers”. It tells the story of three identical twins that are separated at birth and explores the influences of nature vs. nurture on each brother.
One of the main differences between the theories of The Metabolic Lifestyle and and the theories of mainstream medicine is the belief in one’s ability to change what we have been given.
So at this point you must be thinking, “well if genes don’t control my destiny, what does?”. And that can be distilled down to one word that everyone is familiar with…
Stress.
This word will be a common theme here at The Metabolic Lifestyle. While everyone has an idea of what stress is, the way the word “stress” is going to be used here will be quite different from the way that most people think of stress in the context of “emotional stress”.
In the context of The Metabolic Lifestyle, stress will essentially mean anything that interferes with the cell’s production of energy (ATP). This can be anything from eating the wrong types of foods, to not getting enough sleep, to not getting enough sunshine, to vitamin and mineral deficiencies or even actual emotional stress that elicits a physical stress response.
Over time this stress causes aging, disease and even cell death.
My goal is to arm you with the knowledge, methods and strategies to not only live a life free of disease but live a youthful life full of vitality.
The principles I will be sharing are time-tested, backed by peer reviewed studies, and based on well done science and biochemistry. They are simple, inexpensive and most of all—effective.
And while mainstream medicine might say, "Well wait just a minute! Depending on your genetics, some people just can’t have that Ferrari!"
But I'm here to tell you they are wrong and here at The Metabolic Lifestyle I will try to arm you with the information to do exactly that.
We aren’t purely structure like a car, we are ENERGY and structure.
You are not lifeless meat. You are alive. And the biological energy which flows through each one of your 37 trillion cells has has the power to rejuvenate, renew and even turn back the hands of biological time.
You are the one who is in complete control of your health.
Sources:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0220215.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2020.0154
https://phys.org/news/2020-04-dna-life-bookjust-jumbled-ingredients.html
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6335/320
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-environmental-memories.html
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/05/10/there-is-no-depression-gene
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/food-cancer/589714/
https://gizmodo.com/this-study-is-forcing-scientists-to-rethink-the-human-g-1796172648
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30629-3
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/its-like-all-connected-man/530532/
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