Your disease today may have been "caused" by your grandmother's diet.

[SoCalDem]

many articles

Nova "A Ghost in Your Genes" was re run tonight.. and WOW!! I missed it in July when it premiered..

Look for this and please watch it..

the main website
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genes/

[Swamp Rat]

1. Then I'm already dead.

My German grandma was a lush, took tons of pills, and was a heavy smoker.

[dweller]

3. my gramma lived to 98 1/2, and her pill bottle

said "Laughter is the best medicine"

i'm still kicking.
dp

[Swamp Rat]

5. "Spricht du Hoch Deutsch!"

she'd say half drunk and smiling. :D

She lived to about 77, but her smoking caught up with her - emphysema. She was a fantastic painter and a gregarious member of the New York avant garde.

[tainted_chimp]

13. She sounds amazing.

Someone I would have loved to meet! : )

[izzie]

12. May be you are looking at the wrong grandmother?

I do family history and it is scary how long most of these people lived. Quotes like 'oldest women on Mayflower' or this or that town keep jumping up and my grandmother died at 98. Yet my mother was dead in her early 30's. Hard to say about all this but I always felt it was a family thing.

[kurth]

2. Great show

with an outstanding explanation of key concepts.

[TahitiNut]

4. My! Lutefisk is deadlier than I thought, then.

:dunce:

[backscatter712]

6. You eat lutefisk before you conceive your child,

and people will still pick up the stench from your grandchildren.

The smell of lutefisk is, well, memorable...

[TahitiNut]

7. Indeed it is. Uffda!

:silly: I'm still washing traces of the odor off my skin 35 years since the last time I was present when it was served.

My grandparents loved it ... and so does my mother. We even have some in the freezer - only to be cooked when I'm at least a mile from the house. (I'm afraid the neighbors might find out and attack.)

[Eurobabe]

8. Only 47 more years to go -- wow I've reached the half-way point?

Gram was 94 when she died. RIP Grammy, I love your genes!! :hug:

[Pierogi_Pincher]

9. Show sounds quite interesting. Will watch.

(Hope the pierogies, the jellied pigs feet and the slivovice doesn't have me marked!)
P_P

[grasswire]

10. the upshot is this

we can't affect our genome, but we can affect our epigenome in ways that will change genes passed on to our descendents.

Example:

A man who had plenty of food in his youth is more likely to have a grandson with diabetes than a man who suffered hunger in his youth.

A woman who suffered famine while she was in the womb is less likely to have a diabetic granddaughter than a woman who had plenty of nutrition in her mother's womb.

They are just beginning to see corollaries and envision research on the epigenome.

[Trillo]

11. This was one of the findings described in "Pottenger's cats"

While the book and work has been well debunked by critics, I cannot find a snippet to cut and paste that shows the generational degradation of a deficient diet that I remember reading in the book itself.

It went something like the 2nd generation of kittens didn't weigh as much
the 3rd generation was quite susceptible to diseases.
the 4th generation generally didn't live for long after birth.

My relayed specifics of symptoms are likely somewhat off, but I do remember the 4th generation as being the final one. The main point was that the deficient diet of the forebears was passed along to the kittens, and what else could that be besides genetic in origin.

It's possible that one reason the ideas have been debunked and attacked could be because some new researchers wanted the glory.