Dr. Nicole LePera

So what they found was that women who were pregnant at that time of famine, even though the famine thankfully went away, you know, food went back to quote unquote normal, so to speak.

When these children were born, what they saw in their epigenome, right, their DNA didn't change at all.

But their same signals, right, that turned on and off to hold on to fat, to use energy differently, again, simplifying, were the same as if they were present during the famine.

Because think about it.

Logically, right, that is beautifully smart from a body.

If, assumably, right, the offspring are going to be born up in the same environment, our body always wants to predict what's going to happen next so we can sustain survival through what's going to happen next.

So if what's going to happen next is we don't know when food's going to come next—

then it makes sense that I'm prepared in this epigenetic way in case if and when that happens again.

So that, again, simple example, which is why some of us have in our ancestral lineages, food insecurity, financial insecurity are the scarcity that is quite literally wired into us, giving us a hyperreactive stress response around certain environments or stimuli or fears or worries.

that we're beautifully adaptive, assuming that we were born into the exact same environment.

But what's happened for most of us, right, is our environments change, our resources have changed, our relationships have changed.

Some of us are living on the complete other side of the world than the body that we were wired or than the environment that our body was wired to exist in.

So epigenetics, again, how the genes are expressed, impact everything from inflammation, stress regulation, our immune response, our physical, our emotional health,

But they're coming again from a beautiful adaptation at one time where that worked, was necessary in the environment.

The good part of this is just to wrap the hope into this with the story.

They continue to study these individuals who were in utero and then born.

And they found that those who committed to lifestyle changes, to regulating their body and had nutrition available to them were equally able to.

to epigenetically shift the genes on and off in the other direction, so to speak.

And this is what my hope is for all of us, not only to have some compassion for why we are stuck and our body is reacting to environments that maybe we're not living in, but to give us the physiological tools to when we say break cycles, we're not just talking about showing up differently and creating a little impact in terms of behaviorally.

We're actually talking about changing the way not only our genes are turning on and off,