CUARTO CURSO DE SECUNDARIA

If having an Omega Generation baby sounds terrifying, you can do something about it. You can get off the sugar and vegetable oils that would block your child’s genetic potential. That means cutting out processed food, fast food, junk food and soda. And you should give yourself at least three, preferably four, years between pregnancies and make every effort to fortify your body with vitamin- rich foods (or if you can’t, at least use prenatal vitamins) before conception. Those who want to do everything possible to have a healthy baby will find additional instruction throughout this book. But this discussion opens up a new question: If I do everything right, how beautiful and healthy can I expect my child to be?

My first answer to that question is that, of course, all children are beautiful. But if you’re asking if your child will have extraordinary health, excel scholastically and in sports, and be so physically striking as to elicit the envy of peers, then the answer is it depends. It depends on how much genetic wealth you gave him. Which, in turn, depends on what you inherited from your parents.

Genetics is all about information. Your genetic wealth is a function of how much of the information in your genes has been damaged or remains intact, and how well the supportive epigenetic machinery is able to express the surviving data contained in your genetic code. To gauge the present condition of your genetic data, you can begin by asking your parents and grandparents what they ate when they were little. Find out if you were breast-fed. Were they? Learn whatever you can about who was born when (including birth spacing). Dig up as many family pictures as you can find to look for the telltale signs of seconds sibling syndrome. The more you know about your family history, and the more objectively you measure your health and appearance along with that of your partner, the more clues you will have to assess your genetic, and epigenetic, health.

Let’s give it a try. Let’s attempt to gauge a person’s genetic momentum using Claudia Shiffer as our case-subject. Though both her parents were tall and reasonably attractive, you wouldn’t guess they could produce the superstar beauty they did. Their genetic equation was complicated by the fact that

her father and mother were born during the depression and raised under the conditions of post-war food shortages. Claudia’s secret weapon of genetic wealth may be that her great-great grandmother grew up in the most whole-some and remote of farming communities in Austria, a town near Elbigenalp, which had changed very little for thousands of years.110 This close relation to someone living in a successful, stable, indigenous society is truly a rare gift. Adding to this, Claudia’s father’s family was affluent, meaning that (during their formative years) he and his parents presumably had access to the best foods of the early 20th century. Put the two together, and keep the good food coming, and voilà, a genome operating under moderate duress for a spell is effectively rehabilitated. Along these lines, if Kevin Dillon (Matt Dillon’s younger brother) was to marry say, Carole Ann Schiffer (Claudia’s younger sister), and these two were fully dedicated to their perfect diets and provided the same for their children, chances are good they would right the genetic ship and produce a child of nearly ideal physiologic proportion and outstanding health.

Let’s look at a broader example of genetic rehabilitation, this time dealing with height. Height is one of the most desirable proportions for a man. Aside from the obvious social and mating advantages, the professional advantages gained with every additional inch of height are well documented. Studies show that tall men take home higher salaries, obtain leadership positions more often, and get more sex.111 Hawaiian archeological evidence shows that, for hundreds of years, a man’s stature helped to secure him a better official position in the class hierarchy. Our language—big shoes to fill, big man on campus, someone you can look up to—reflects society’s universal preference for the tall. The positive perception of the taller among us often extends to women, as well. I am not suggesting that taller people are better, only that height affords certain physical and social advantages. With that in mind, can relatively diminutive parents who want those advantages for their children have a baby who might someday walk tall and rise above the fray to stand head and shoulders above the rest?

Absolutely! This potential is encoded in our genetic memory. We’ve all heard that we used to be a lot shorter, how few of us could fit into one of those little suits of armor worn by medieval knights. But around the world, evidence is accumulating that, thousands of years prior, our Paleolithic predecessors were at least as tall, if not taller, than most of us are today. Even in the early Middle Ages, 1,000 years ago, European men were nearly as tall as they are now. What caused the temporary skeletal shrinkage? As the population grew, crowding reduced access to nutrients until stature reached an all time low in the early 1700s.112 Improvements in agricultural technology, most notably the series of inventions attributed to lawyer-turned-farmer Jethro Tull, revolutionized the process of tilling soil, vastly increasing productivity.113 By the late 1700s, having recovered some of its former nutritional inputs, the European genome rebounded—and with it the average European’s height. But it would probably have dipped again, so that a tall man today might measure just over five feet, were it not for the early 20th century invention of refrigeration. The ability to freeze food meant that fisherman could travel as far as they needed and fill their hulls to brimming. Refrigeration also meant that even during winter, wealthy countries could reach down to the tropics for summer fruits and vegetables, making it profitable for millions of acres of rain forests around the globe to be converted over to crop production. For the past 100 years, industrialized nations have had consistent access to enough nutrition to achieve our Paleolithically preprogrammed height. Of course, height doesn’t equal health. But generally speaking, when a genome has access to a surplus of complex nutrition, it is far better positioned—and may be said to have a built-in preference—for the production of offspring with more robust, larger frames.

The two basic steps to accomplishing genomic rehabilitation are 1) stop eating toxins, and 2) start eating according to the Four Pillars of World Cuisine. Later, we’ll learn more about how sugar and vegetable oils, the two most common toxins in the modern diet, prevent you from being as healthy and beautiful as you otherwise would, and how avoiding them can improve your own and your children’s health both immediately and in the long run.

Avoiding toxins seems like a pretty sound idea. But how, exactly, to do that? It gets confusing because a product can call itself healthy when there’s not enough nourishment in it to keep a rat alive. I’m not kidding. According to industry insider Paul Stitt, author of Fighting The Food Giants, a popular cereal company did a study in the 1940s that showed its puffed rice product killed rats faster than a starvation diet of water and minerals.114 Similar puffed and processed whole-grain products are still sitting on store shelves today, sold under every major brand label. In fact, even store-bought granola, loaded with unhealthy oils and sugar, is an unhealthy way to start your day. Much better, alternatives can be found in the fresh food departments (as we’ll learn in Chapter 7). To understand the depth to which our food supply is saturated with products that keep us barely alive, I’ll take us back in time to understand where and when things started to go wrong with the way we think about food.

Six