The GenoType Diet: Change Your Genetic Destiny to live the longest, fullest and healthiest life possible

CHAPTER ONE Your Genetic Autobiography You and Your Prenatal Environment At conception, you become a fetus, with your very own set of genes. Your town meeting is populated and you're ready to spend the next nine months in the womb, interacting with your prenatal environmentamniotic fluid, placenta, and a host of other influences. You'll also respond to your prenatal "diet"the nutrition you take in through what your mother eats and makes available to you. So right from the beginning, your town meeting is under way, with diet, environment, and genes beginning their lively debate. This debate has enormous significance for the being who will emerge into the world nine months later. For example, your genetic potential at conception encoded a certain range of arterial flexibility. But how strong will your arteries be, and how flexible? A lot of the answers to those questions depend on what happens in the womb. So that's one of your first town meetings. The genes that encode the delicate branching architecture of your nerves and arteries show up, ready to take part. And there are our friends, environment and diet, up there on the platform as they will be throughout your life, helping your "cardiovascular genes" and "nerve genes" decide what to do. A good diet with lots of protein and healthy fats will encourage your artery genes to make your arteries rugged and elastic. On the other hand, if your mother is unlucky enough to be living in a famine, your "artery genes" will have to compete for those scarce nutrients with the genes that control the growth of other organs and tissues. The result might be a greater tendency for heart disease or high blood pressure. As you can see, the same genes are always at the meeting, but they're responding very differently to the information given by diet and environment. Obviously, the health of your arteries is only one of the ways that your tissues and organs are affected by your time in the womb. Those crucial nine months help determine whether you gain weight at the drop of a hat or lose weight far too easily. They help nudge you toward a hair-trigger immune response that views the entire world as its enemy, or toward a welcoming immune response that may not always know which invaders to turn away. They predispose you to certain foods that you'll be able to digest easily and turn you away from others that won't suit your particular metabolism and digestive tract. Right from the beginning, your genes interact with diet (in this case, Mom's) and environment (in this case, the womb) to determine who you are. And then you're born. This is the point at which your GenoType is determined. Your GenoType represents your survival strategy, the decisions that have been reached collectively among your genetic potential, your prenatal diet, and your environment. Although the town meeting will continue for the rest of your life, with genes getting louder and softer in response to diet and environment, certain elements of this meeting are now fixed. They've formed certain patternsone of six patterns, to be exact, which I've identified as the six human GenoTypes. GenoTypes: A Human Survival Strategy So far, we've been telling the story from an individual point of viewyours, to be exact. But since everyone in the world falls into one of those six GenoTypes, let's step back for a moment and see where these GenoTypes came from. In the beginning was the environmenta challenging place for our ancestors, to be sure. People had to make sure they could get enough food, that they could survive whatever climate they were born in or migrated to, and that they could resist infectionsDr. Peter J. D'Adamo is the author of 'The GenoType Diet: Change Your Genetic Destiny to live the longest, fullest and healthiest life possible', published 2007 under ISBN 9780767925242 and ISBN 0767925246.