I just informed you that cancer is a metabolic disease and that only 5% of mitochondrial damage is due to genetic causes. Why am I now starting the next bite of information as “genetic predisposition”?

Cancer is a metabolic disease. And, each of us has our own specific predisposition as regards metabolism. I believe that will be fairly obvious to everyone. We have all seen someone who can eat all they want and not gain weight and we all know someone who struggles with weight even when doing the things that are supposed to result in weight loss.

We also have individual predispositions in the efficiency of our detoxification mechanisms, our endocrine balance, and various other factors that affect our risks.

What is your predisposition? There are a variety of ways to find out more about it. If you have the motivation to make changes based on the information you receive, it’s well worth utilizing one of the following methods to understand where you can make lifestyle choices that will improve your personal individual metabolic functioning to prevent illness of all kinds, not just cancer.

If you are following along in this series and have looked at The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, you will see that the premise begins with the Terrain Ten, which is all about looking at your predispositions.

I already shared in Part 2 about using dietary tracking and a glucometer to look at how specific foods affect an individual’s blood sugar. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to get an idea of how foods are affecting you metabolically. There is a free version of an app called Cronometer that makes food tracking much easier. When looking at purchasing a glucometer, look at the cost of test strips. It isn’t the glucometer itself that ends up being the cost of this method, over time it’s the cost of the test strips that adds up.

Simply track your food, take a morning fasting blood sugar and one blood sugar reading 2 hours after a meal. Pay attention to the patterns. That’s it. Usually a couple of weeks of this is enough to learn a good bit about how you are responding to the foods you eat regularly.

Another option is a continuous glucose monitor which a doctor can prescribe for you if you have any indications that blood sugar is an issue. Keeping a food journal alongside allows you to correlate the numbers to the foods you are eating. Less finger pricks, yay! Here’s another article with useful information.

Another way to look at genetic predisposition is to test your DNA genome, specifically with a company that provides a report that is geared to what you can do with lifestyle choices to maximize your genetic SNPs (Single nucleotide polymorphisms). SNPs are variations in the genes that are passed down generationally. Some of them can have a profound effect on cell’s abilities to metabolize various macronutrients and micronutrients, on detoxification, on hormonal balance, etc, and therefore, on cancer risk.

This kind of nutrigenomic test will give you information as to whether your metabolism of carbohydrates and fats is highly functioning, partly compromised or significantly compromised. It will give you a view into how effectively your body is able to do the methylation process, a critically important process in gene expression as it is the process by which the information from a gene forms a functional gene product. The other areas it can give information that are helpful to optimizing cancer prevention are: DNA repair, stress response, hormone regulation, inflammation and detoxification. There are many companies, Nutrition Genome is one example. If you want a discount code, message me.

These approaches do not need to be either/or, each will give you a window into information that can help you optimize for your individual needs.

Yet another way to learn about your individual glucose and insulin responses to various foods is to use up and coming metabolomics testing. Day Two is a company that offers testing and recommendations about individualized blood sugar balancing based on the individual’s gut microbiome. This advanced system is able to predict the blood sugars that a meal of various foods will have on an individual accurately from their microbiome data. How cool is that?! People are eating the foods that their microbiome does well with, avoiding the ones it doesn’t and getting their blood sugar regulated and losing weight with less restriction on their eating. I still recommend clean eating all the way around, but if too much dietary restriction keeps you from having better blood sugar balance, I can see the value in this approach.

If you are in the position of having, or are at risk for, a type of cancer that is hormone receptor positive, nutrigenomic results for hormone pathways may be helpful to understand. Optimizing the epigenetics of these pathways can help reduce the risk and make changes to the progress of these types of cancer.

From a homeopathic standpoint, we do have strategies that also are aimed at helping to re-pattern the inherited pathways that lead down the corridors to known doors of various diseases, including cancer.

Personalized epigenetic optimization of lifestyle is something many people can access now. What we understand is that your predisposition is not your fate, your choices can flip the switches of these genes on and off. If you have the information and are willing to make the choices, you have the power to shift your odds.