Dr. Nicole LePera

The entirety of our experience, but it's again how those genes are expressed or not.

And so through different mechanisms like methylation, certain genes, particularly around our stress response system, can again really simply turn on or off and impact us.

So I'll use an example that I actually used in the book to maybe visualize this.

There was a very fascinating study.

It happened in the Netherlands some years ago when a community of people were experiencing such a severe famine that they at times were relying on literally sawdust to make bread.

They had no nutrients, no calories.

And they studied women who were pregnant at this time and realized

What they found was that even once, so this person's body, to understand the science behind it, when food was unpredictable or scarce, they were in a famine, so they didn't know when they were going to get the next dose of food or if there was going to be any nutrients in it.

The beautiful thing that a body does is it will change certain systems.

Again, I'm going to simplify it.

It will hold on to fat, right?

It'll use energy in a different way.

Because it will be preparing for the expectation of continued food insecurity, uncertainty or scarcity.

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—