Gene Expression & Gut Health

This is Dr. Tim Spector. After training in medicine and becoming a consultant rheumatologist, he’s turned his attention to medical research, and is these days a specialist in twin studies, genetics, epigenetics, microbiome, and diet.

What does he want us to know?

For one thing: epigenetics are for more than just getting your grandparents’ trauma.

More usefully: there are things we can do to improve epigenetic factors in our body

DNA is often seen as the script by which our body does whatever it’s going to do, but it’s only part of the story. Thinking of DNA as some kind of “magical immutable law of reality” overlooks (to labor the metaphor) script revisions, notes made in the margins, directorial choices, and ad-lib improvizations, as well as the quality of the audience’s hearing and comprehension.

Hence the premise of one of Dr. Spector’s older books, “Identically Different: Why We Can Change Our Genes”

(*in fact, it was his first, from all the way back in 2013, when he’d only been a doctor for 34 years)

Gene expression will trump genes every time, and gene expression is something that can often be changed without getting in there with CRISPR / a big pair of scissors and some craft glue.

How this happens on the micro level is beyond the scope of today’s article; part of it has to do with enzymes that get involved in the DNA transcription process, and those enzymes in turn are despatched or not depending on hormonal messaging—in the broadest sense of “hormonal”; all the body’s hormonal chemical messengers, not just the ones people think of as hormones.

However, hormonal messaging (of many kinds) is strongly influenced by something we can control relatively easily with a little good (science-based) knowledge: the gut.

The gut, the SAD, and the easy

In broad strokes: we know what is good for the gut. We’ve written about it before at 10almonds:

Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)

This is very much in contrast with what in scientific literature is often abbreviated “SAD”, the Standard American Diet, which is very bad for the gut.

However, Dr. Spector (while fully encouraging everyone to enjoy an evidence-based gut-healthy diet) wanted to do one better than just a sweeping one-size-fits-all advice, so he set up a big study with 15,000 identical twins; you can read about it here: TwinsUK

The information that came out of that was about a lot more than just gene expression and gut health, but it did provide the foundation for Dr. Spector’s next project, ZOE.

ZOE crowdsources huge amounts of data including individual metabolic responses to standardized meals in order to predict personalized food responses based on individual biology and unique microbiome profile.

In other words, it takes the guesswork out of a) knowing what your genes mean for your food responses b) tailoring your food choices with your genetic expression in mind, and c) ultimately creating a positive feedback loop to much better health on all levels.

Now, this is not an ad for ZOE, but if you so wish, you can…

• Get the free ZOE gut health guide (this is good, but generic, gut health information)
• Take the ZOE home gut health test (quiz followed by offers of lab tests)
• Browse the ZOE Health Academy, its education wing

Want to know more?

Dr. Spector has a bunch of books out, including some that we’ve reviewed previously:

• Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food Is Wrong
• The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat
• Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well

You can also check out our own previous main feature, which wasn’t about Dr. Spector’s work but was very adjacent:

The Brain-Gut Highway: A Two-Way Street

Enjoy!

The Five Keys Of Aging Healthily

This is Dr. Daniel Levitin. He’s a neuroscientist, and his research focuses on aging, the brain, health, productivity, and creativity. Also music, and he himself is an accomplished musician also, but we’re not going to be focusing on that today.

We’re going to be looking at the traits that, according to science, promote healthy longevity in old age. In other words, the things that increase our healthspan, from the perspective of a cognitive scientist.

What does he say we should do?

Dr. Levitin offers us what he calls the “COACH” traits:

1. Curiosity
2. Openness
3. Associations
4. Conscientiousness
5. Healthy practices

By “associations”, he means relationships. However, that would have made the acronym “CORCH”, and decisions had to be made.

Curiosity

Leonardo da Vinci had a list of seven traits he considered most important.

We’ll not go into those today (he is not our featured expert of the day!), but we will say that he agreed with Dr. Levitin on what goes at the top of the list: curiosity.

• Without curiosity, we will tend not to learn things, and learning things is key to keeping good cognitive function in old age
• Without curiosity, we will tend not to form hypotheses about how/why things are the way they are, so we will not exercise imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and other key functions of our brain
• Without curiosity, we will tend not to seek out new experiences, and consequently, our stimuli will be limited—and thus, so will our brains

Openness

Being curious about taking up ballroom dancing will do little for you, if you are not also open to actually trying it. But, openness is not just a tag-on to curiosity; it deserves its spot in its own right too.

Sometimes, ideas and opportunities come to us unbidden, and we have to be able to be open to those too. This doesn’t mean being naïve, but it does mean having at least a position of open-minded skepticism.

Basically, Dr. Levitin is asking us to be the opposite of the pejorative stereotype of “an old person stuck in their ways”.

Associations

People are complex, and so they bring complexities to our lives. Hopefully, positively stimulating ones. Without them to challenge us (again, hopefully in a positive way), we can get very stuck in a narrow field of experience.

And of course, having at least a few good friends has numerous benefits to health. There’s been a lot of research on this; 5 appears to be optimal.

• More than that, and the depth tends to tail off, and/or stresses ensue from juggling too many relationships
• Fewer than that, and we might be only a calendar clash away from loneliness

Friends provide social stimulation and mutual support; they’re good for our mental health and even our physiological immunity (counterintuitively, by means of shared germs).

And, a strong secure romantic relationship is something that has been found time and again to extend healthy life.

Note: by popular statistics, this benefit is conferred upon men partnered with women, men partnered with men, women partnered with women, but not women partnered with men.

There may be a causative factor that’s beyond the scope of this article which is about cognitive science, not feminism, but there could also be a mathematical explanation for this apparent odd-one-out:

Since women tend to live longer than men (who are also often older than their female partners), women who live the longest are often not in a relationship—precisely because they are widows. So these long-lived widows will tend to skew the stats, through no fault of their husbands.

On the flipside of this, for a woman to predecease her (statistically older and shorter-lived) husband will often require that she die quite early (perhaps due to accident or illness unrelated to age), which will again skew the stats to “women married to men die younger”, without anything nefarious going on.

Conscientiousness

People who score highly in the character trait “conscientiousness” will tend to live longer. The impact is so great, that a child’s scores will tend to dictate who dies in their 60s or their 80s, for example.

What does conscientiousness mean? It’s a broad character trait that’s scored in psychometric tests, so it can be things that have a direct impact on health, such as brushing one’s teeth, or things that are merely correlated, such as checking one’s work for typos (this writer does her best!).

In short, if you are the sort of person who attends to the paperwork for your taxes on time, you are probably also the sort of person who remembers to get your flu vaccination and cancer screening.

Healthy practices

This means “the usual things”, such as:

• Healthy diet (Mediterranean Diet consistently scores up top)
• Good exercise (especially the tendency to keep moving in general)
• Good sleep (7–9 hours, no compromises)
• Not drinking (or at least only very moderate consumption, but the only safe amount is zero)
• Not smoking (just don’t; there is no wiggle room on this one)

Want to learn more?

You can check out his book, which we reviewed all so recently, and you can also enjoy this video, in which he talks about matters concerning healthy aging from a neuroscientist’s perspective, ranging from heart health and neurodegeneration, to the myth of failing memory, to music and lifespan and more:

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