Your genes are not your fate - Dean Ornish

[Music] [Music] One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Craig Venter has so elegantly shown. Another is to change our lifestyles, and what we're learning is how powerful and dynamic these changes can be. That you don't have to wait very long to see the benefits.

When you eat healthier, manage stress, exercise, and love more, your brain actually gets more blood flow and more oxygen. But more than that, your brain gets measurably bigger. Things that were thought impossible just a few years ago can actually be measured now. This was figured out by Rob Williams a few years before the rest of us.

Now, there are some things that you can do to make your brain grow new brain cells. Some of my favorite things include chocolate, tea, blueberries, alcohol in moderation, stress management, and cannabinoids found in marijuana. I'm just the messenger. What were we just talking about?

And, other things can make it worse; it can cause you to lose brain cells. The usual suspects, like saturated fat, sugar, nicotine, opiates, cocaine, too much alcohol, and chronic stress, can have detrimental effects. Your skin gets more blood flow when you change your lifestyle, so you age less quickly. Your skin doesn't wrinkle as much.

Your heart gets more blood flow. We've shown that you can actually reverse heart disease; that these clogged arteries that you see in the upper left, after only a year, become measurably less clogged. And the cardiac PET scan shown on the lower left— the blue means no blood flow; a year later, orange and white indicate maximal blood flow.

We've shown you may be able to stop or reverse the progression of early prostate cancer, and by extension, breast cancer simply by making these changes. We found that tumor growth in vitro was inhibited 70% in the group that made these changes, whereas only 9% in the comparison group. These differences were highly significant.

Even your sexual organs get more blood flow, so you increase sexual potency. One of the most effective anti-smoking ads was done by the Department of Health Services, showing that nicotine, which constricts your arteries, can cause a heart attack or a stroke, but it also causes impotence. Half of guys who smoke are impotent. How sexy is that?

And we're also about to publish a study—the first study showing you can change gene expression in men with prostate cancer. This is what's called a heat map, and the different colors along the side on the right are different genes. We found that over 500 genes were favorably changed, in effect turning on the good genes, the disease-preventing genes, and turning off the disease-promoting genes.

These findings, I think, are really very powerful. They're giving many people new hope and new choices. Companies like Navag Genics, DNA Direct, and 23andMe that are giving you your genetic profiles are getting some people a sense of "What can I do about it?" Well, our genes are not our fate. If we make these changes, they're a predisposition. But if we make bigger changes than we might have made otherwise, we can actually change how our genes are expressed.

Thank you. [Applause]