Island Health Paradise

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Posts Tagged ‘prostate cancer’

Genes Can Be Influenced with a Healthy Lifestyle

Posted by maikeru76 on June 19, 2008

Yes, you heard that right. A new study has shed light that having a healthy lifestyle; that is by eating right, exercising, and eliminating risk factors for disease like heavy alcohol intake and smoking, has shown that not only do our physiques improve, but our genes can undergo dramatic changes for the better.

The study was done on 30 prostate cancer (low risk) patients, who denied having conventional treatment, were prescribed a program that sought to change their eating habits, have light exercise (30 minutes of light walking), and stress management methods incorporated to their daily routines.

The results, after 3 months, were as expected such as weight loss, improved blood pressure levels and other health improvements. What made this study different was that biopsies from the patients’ prostates were compared with before and after they took the changes in their lifestyles.

The findings were astonishing. Gene markers for disease like prostate cancer appeared to have been turned off. It was also found out that genes that helped prevent predisposition of cancers and other diseases appeared to have strengthened.

The findings and study have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research study was led by Dr. Dean Ornish, a world-renowned advocate of healthy living and head of the Preventive Medicine Institute based in Sausalito, California.

Though the study can been deemed inconclusive due to the small group it was done on, it appears that genes can be influenced for the better through healthy living. The common knowledge that our predisposition to diseases like cancer “is in the genes” has been opened to new scrutiny.

What we could do right now is to get a start on having a healthy lifestyle. Like what the program study prescribed to the cancer patients, that is by eating healthy, having a low impact exercise program like walking and eliminating risk factors like heavy alcohol and tobacco use; prevention can become a part of the cure.


