Why Do We Get Sick? Genetics versus Environment

I was taught in medical school that genetics are the greatest factor determining whether or not we get sick. For many of us, this is quite a depressing idea, as we ruminate about the illnesses that plague our family trees: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disease, and more. If it were true that genetics play such a substantial role, like being dealt a hand of cards that we couldn’t trade in, we would be totally helpless to affect our health.

You probably know on some level that this is not true. Let’s look at type II diabetes as an example. Type II diabetes is one of the diseases linked to genetics that we commonly see. It is not unusual to know an entire family in which most people have this awful disease: grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, etc. Now, imagine that one person in the family who prefers eating vegetables and is slim and fit. Would you expect them to get diabetes along with their overweight siblings?

Probably not. Why is that? It’s because we all know that diabetes usually develops after a person becomes obese. That means it has to be activated by the person’s continuously poor eating habits. In other words, even diseases strongly affected by genetics, like type II diabetes, need to be triggered. How do we trigger our genes for illness? The environment of our body, which is created by what we eat. This is true for not just diabetes but most diseases killing people today, including autoimmune diseases.

Your cells are created out of the foods you put into your body. If you eat purely for taste and convenience, as many people do, you are likely eating nutrient-poor foods that cause dysfunctional cells. When you eat foods that nourish your body, your cells can repair themselves, and the new cells will be high-functioning healthy cells.

Unhealthy foods create chronic inflammation, a condition that can be destructive to the body in which the immune system is constantly activated. Inflammation is the body’s healthy, normal response to injury or infection. However, when the inflammation becomes chronic, such as due to constant assault on the gut by the wrong foods, the inflammation can cause diseases like lupus, scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis, colitis, and many other chronic inflammatory diseases.

I Got My Life Back—You Can Too

Eliminating the most inflammatory, unhealthy foods from your diet can reverse your disease and save your life. Almost thirteen years ago, I discovered this lesson myself. I grew up eating an unhealthy vegetarian diet full of processed foods, cheeses, and eggs. When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with systemic lupus nephritis; I was only months away from dialysis when aggressive chemotherapy was able to save my kidneys. Even with the chemotherapy and steroids, I still had abnormal kidney function, arthritis, migraines, and rashes. By the time I was in medical school, in my midtwenties, I was having ministrokes from antiphospholipid antibodies caused by the lupus.

At twenty-eight, I changed from an egg- and cheese-filled vegetarian diet to a hypernourishing plant-based diet, and my body completely eliminated the disease that had almost killed me multiple times throughout my life up until that point. When I changed to a hypernourishing plant-based diet, my symptoms rapidly fell away, and my blood tests all normalized within a matter of four months.

Almost thirteen years later, I have had two healthy children, no signs or symptoms of any disease at all, and normal labs.

I know what it is like to be devastatingly ill, and I know the joy and blessing of healing and getting to live a life I love without the fear of illness robbing me of everything. That is why I am tirelessly devoted to helping my patients and anyone who can hear or read my words get their health back from disease by learning how to eat to heal. I got my life back, and you can too.

You are not just a victim of the genes you received from your parents’ shuffled deck. You have the power to keep your health, and if you are already ill, you have a choice to make: you can trade in your cards and play out a better hand.

Our bodies are constantly shedding old cells and creating new ones. Recall that you build your cells from the foods you eat. That means you can transform, one cell at a time, one bite at a time, from a sick, tired, achy body to a healthy, strong, vibrant body. You are building your next body with every mouthful!

You Can Get Healthy One Step at a Time

In my book Goodbye Lupus, I teach in detail the six steps to reversing autoimmune disease with supermarket foods. It truly is as simple as following six steps to change your diet and get yourself as healthy as possible. These six steps saved my life.

If you are super motivated and prefer a sprint over long-distance running, you can take on all six steps at once; if you have difficulty embracing too much change at once, you can take them one step at a time. Choose the path that will lead you to success, because being successful at this is what matters most. The worst thing that can happen is that you feel like a failure and give up. Instead, take it at your pace. A great place to start is by eliminating the foods that are causing your illness.

The first three steps, which I outline below, focus on the foods that cause chronic inflammation. These are the foods to eliminate if you want to create maximal health. If you don’t eliminate these foods, you will continue to contribute to the cause of your illness even if you eat more healing foods. These inflammation-causing foods always cause damage; however, eating these unhealthy foods occasionally when you are healthy is akin to getting a paper cut when you are healthy: it hurts, but your body can rapidly heal. If you eat these foods regularly when you are already sick, it is like continuously pulling the scab off a healing wound. That is why these three food groups must be avoided during the healing process.

Another way to think about it is to compare it to cigarette smoking. A healthy nonsmoker who decides to smoke some cigarettes at a party might cough, get a headache, or feel some general malaise afterward, but as long as they do not continue to smoke, their lungs will quickly heal the damage and will not develop lung diseases like emphysema or cancer. Compare that to a chronic smoker who has lung cancer. The best way to help the chronic smoker recover is not just to have a healthier diet and medical care; it is to quit smoking and give the lungs a chance to heal.

As a bonus, the same foods that cause chronic inflammation and lead to autoimmune diseases like lupus and scleroderma are known triggers for heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. By eliminating them from your diet, you prevent all of these diseases.

Reversing Autoimmune Disease with Supermarket Foods: Steps 1–3

When you are trying to heal your body, all foods that increase inflammation must be avoided. The following three steps focus on three such food groups.

Step 1: Eliminate Animal Products
Animal products include all types of meat, like beef, pork, lamb, fish, and chicken, plus eggs and dairy products. These foods cause massive amounts of inflammation in the body, and research has indicated that they are inflammatory in multiple ways.

A recent study in Scientific American showed that saturated fat destroys the healthy protective bacteria in the gut, inflames the gut wall, and initiates an immune response, tissue damage, and even hemorrhage.^[1]

Meat and dairy are also direct sources of arachidonic acid and other omega-6 fatty acids. These compounds directly produce inflammatory immune mediators, prostaglandins, and leukotrienes, creating inflammation in the body. The more meat and dairy you consume, the more inflammation you create.

You may have heard that omega-6 fatty acids are essential fatty acids, which means that our bodies cannot make them. We must consume them to meet our needs. This is true. The issue is that most foods people eat nowadays, such as meat, vegetable oils, and processed foods, are heavily laden with omega-6 fatty acids; meanwhile, their balancing anti-inflammatory counterpart, omega-3 fatty acids, is largely absent.

The body uses omega-6 fatty acids to create inflammatory immune cells. Conversely, omega-3 fatty acids are responsible for creating the anti-inflammatory immune cells. When we eat a healthy plant-based diet our body will have a balanced ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, whereby our immune system can make inflammation when necessary but also eliminate it when appropriate. Unfortunately, most people are inundated with omega-6 fatty acids from meat, dairy, eggs, oils, and processed foods, but they rarely, if ever, consume any omega-3–rich foods like chia seeds or flaxseeds. Consequently, they suffer from massive amounts of chronic inflammation, leading to chronic inflammatory diseases like autoimmune disease.

One study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology did a meta-analysis of nine prospective studies. It showed that eating animal products increases the risk of all-cause mortality, meaning it raises your risk of dying from any disease.^[3] Most folks are familiar with the idea that eating meat increases their risk of heart disease, but they don’t realize that eating meat increases their risk of death from all causes.^[17]

Our society consumes enormous amounts of dairy products in the form of milk, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. Dairy causes not only massive amounts of inflammation, which can trigger and sustain autoimmune disease, but also a whole host of other diseases such as cancer, obesity, osteoporosis, and diabetes.^[2][4]–[9] I was a vegetarian from the age of twelve but ate dairy products every day. At the age of sixteen, I developed lupus that only went away when I eliminated dairy and embraced a nourishing plant-based diet.

When I teach this information to my clients, their first question is “how do I get calcium?” They fear that they will weaken their bones without dairy products. Research has shown that dairy products actually cause bone loss; countries that have the highest rates of dairy consumption, like the USA, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand, also have the highest rates of osteoporosis.^[10][11] The lowest rates are among people who eat the fewest animal-derived foods, like natives of rural Asia and rural Africa.^[10][11] These people also have lower overall calcium intake than dairy-consuming cultures do. Calcium is abundant and easy to absorb from green leafy vegetables like kale and broccoli, which come without the risks accompanying dairy products.

Animal products are highly addictive. It can seem impossible to give up these foods. But the less of them you consume, the better you will feel. You need to eliminate them to have the best chance to heal. I always tell people I am now way more addicted to feeling healthy than I ever was to cheese, and as a former cheesetarian who ate cheese at every meal—and sometimes ate a block of cheese as a meal in itself—that speaks volumes!

Step 2: Eliminate Added Oils
One of the fastest ways to minimize inflammation and jump-start the healing process is to eliminate excess sources of omega-6 fatty acids. As I mentioned earlier, animal products are a source of omega-6 fatty acids. Even more so are vegetable oils a source of omega-6 fatty acids, except olive oil.

The flooding of our bodies with these omega-6 fatty acids drives the body to create more and more inflammation, which creates more illness and impairs the body’s ability to heal.

I’ve had a handful of clients who were vegan and came to me for chronic inflammatory health issues, perplexed as to why they were sick. Their continued consumption of processed foods and vegetable oils is usually the culprit, and when we correct their omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, they feel better quickly.

I did mention that olive oil is not a big source of omega-6, so it isn’t inflammatory like the other oils and won’t drive the chronic inflammation that fuels autoimmune disease. However, too much of any kind of oil will disturb the fluidity of your blood in your blood vessels and the responsiveness of your cells to the signals they need to receive.^[14] It basically gums up the system while it’s in your body. Oils, even olive oil, raise blood triglycerides (fats) immediately after consumption and decrease the functioning of the precious lining of the blood vessels, so while olive oil isn’t inflammatory, it is by no means healthy and should be avoided as well, especially if you have heart disease.^[14]

(Learn about oil-free cooking from CNS.)

Now, when I talk about avoiding fats, I am not talking about whole plant foods like avocados and coconuts. I have seen many well-meaning health coaches misinterpret this data to suggest that people should limit naturally fatty plant foods like avocados, raw nuts, and seeds. Fat in whole plant foods is easily recognized and processed by the body. I myself eat two to three avocados a day most days; they are filling, creamy, and delicious! When I healed myself of lupus, I ate a lot of guacamole every day and reversed my symptoms in a matter of weeks. So, in general, don’t worry about the fat content in fresh whole plant foods; just avoid adding oils to your food. If you are going into an aggressive healing phase, you will want to limit raw nuts and seeds to about a half cup a day because these nutrient-rich foods are also rich in omega-6. But you won’t have to worry much about measuring them out once you are healthy.

The more you avoid added oils, the better your cells, organs, and immune system will function.

Step 3: Eliminate Processed Foods
Processed foods contain ingredients that do not occur in nature. People call them food, but they’re more like synthesized edible products. One quick way to find out whether a product is a processed food is to read the label. If it has a long list of ingredients that you cannot pronounce or cannot be produced without a lab, it is processed.

(Learn more about identifying processed foods.)

It is common in many households to reach for a box or a can when preparing a meal or to grab something from the freezer and stick it in the microwave. Eating this way is convenient and often cheap but does not provide optimal nourishment to the body. And nourishing ourselves, not just avoiding hunger, is the real reason we are supposed to eat.

Processed foods are not only lacking in nourishment; they have been shown to cause inflammation in the body.^[15] This is true of processed sugars as well as refined grains, such as processed breads, cereals, pizzas, and tortillas, which have been shown to increase inflammation markers in the bloodstream and directly increase rates of diabetes and heart disease.^[16] Processed foods are also normally bogged down with oils, making them another contributor to the flood of omega-6 fatty acids most people consume daily.

Eating to Heal

If you can eliminate animal products, excess oils, and processed foods from your diet, you will immediately decrease the inflammation in your body and very quickly start feeling better.

If getting rid of all three at once seems a bit intimidating, start with step one and work your way down. You don’t need to race to the finish line. Transition in a way that you know you can sustain.

Our bodies are not meant to digest any of these foods, yet they have become the main sources of food for many people today. That is why people are so sick. If you are one of those people who eat mainly meat, dairy, oils, and processed foods, then take this as good news, because there is hope!

The body can recover if you get out of its way by stopping the constant assault on it with these dangerous foods. You can make a difference in your health by changing your shopping list.

References

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13. Kimpimaki T, Erkkola M, Korhonen S, et al. Short-term exclusive breastfeeding predisposes young children with increased genetic risk of type I diabetes to progressive beta-cell autoimmunity. Diabetologia. 2001;44:63–69.
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15. Jenkins, David JA et al. Glycemic Index: Overview of Implications in Health and Disease. Am J Clinical Nutrition July 2002; 76 (1) 266S-273S
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