AMEN 2014: Joined Together

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Breakout Sessions C

Zeno Charles-Marcel

Epigenetics

Lisa Walke

Christian Witness in a non-Adventist Work Environment

Tim Howe

Lyn Howe

The Husband and Wife Team in Health Ministry

Lyndi Schwartz

Choosing a Specialty and Finding a Residency

Let's start with a word of prayer, please.

Our Father in heaven, indeed we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

And so, at this time, as we learn a little bit more about how you have put things together.

We ask that you would open our minds so we can see your fingerprints all over this topic.

How many of you have studied something about epigenetics before?

Well then, I guess I might be redundant because we're gonna be talking about epigenetics, but let's see how we can deal with this.

I have no conflicts of interest and nothing to disclose, so you don't have to be quiet about anything here, right?

And what we're going to do is more or less talk about things in this manner.

As, as Seventh-day Adventists, as clinicians, as, as people, We're called to reason from cause to effect, and epigenetics actually stresses us as we try to stretch into understanding how things get transmitted from 1 generation to another to another to another, as you were hearing before.

Epigenetics involves the regulation of gene activity and the expression without the alteration of gene sequences.

And we're going to do a little bit of kind of basic genetics, and then we'll talk about epigenetics in detail.

We also have something called nutri-epigenetics and microbial epigenetics, and these things show that we have some interaction between not only our own cells and the food and the environment, but also a large internal environment that we have called the gut.

We have about 10 times as many gut microbes as we have cells in our bodies.

And then we have complex diseases like type 2 diabetes, asthma, some addictions, schizophrenia, inflammatory bowel disease.

All of these things show that there's some interaction, right, between environmental factors and epigenetic regulation.

Now, obviously, 1 of my biggest challenges was how to distill things down just so it'll fit into about 50 minutes, okay?

So, let's see if I was successful or if God was good in leading me to which things I need to talk about.

Epigenetics and the complementary complex, concepts of metabolic imprinting or metabolic programming provide a compelling model for how environmental influences, how environment influences us through development of lifelong and lifelong health and health practices, how these things can interact.

There's a definite interplay between epigenomics and the human microbiome, and from conception to the first 1, 000 days of life has become now, according to the latest science, that's the very crucial period for things to happen in someone's life.

However, as you will see and as you know already and you heard from the last talk, these things are not set in stone, right?

The good news about epigenetics is that things can be changed, and we're not just a product of our genes.

We can actually influence how the genes are expressed, and we can actually influence the genes themselves, even though we're not going to talk much about the influencing of genes per se.

Councils of Parents and Teachers says, The Lord bids us to reason from cause to effect, to remember that we are his property, and to unite with him in keeping the body pure and holy.

And that parents should teach their children to reason from cause to effect.

And parents and grandparents and great-grandparents have a part to play in the next and the next and the next generations if time should last.

What do you think the picture represents?

You're supposed to see an old man's head, okay?

And depending upon the resolution of the projector, you may or may not see all of the things that are there.

I put this up because on the surface, this is supposed to represent a man.

That's supposed to be his nose, his mustache, his beard.

He's obviously military, and that's supposed to be his right hand with his fingers on his chest.

It's actually a man in here, an older fellow with a hat and a beard.

These are his legs and those are his pants.

And this is a woman over here and this is her skirt.

She has something in her arms, maybe a baby.

And there's some hay or something like that in the background there.

And this is the entrance of a portico going inside.

This is the street, cobblestone type street, and that's a dog that's lying there sleeping.

Now, why I put this up is because depending on how you look at things and how in depth you look at things, you can see more and more and more.

And for years, the idea was that our genes were these very deterministic types of things that were passed on very rigidly from 1 generation to the other.

And the history of this, as you may or may not know, when Gregor Mendel was first talking about this, people didn't believe that anyway.

And just before his death, there were some papers that were published.

And all of a sudden, this became the going idea.

As a matter of fact, it even lasted up to about 20 years ago.

People believed that Mendelian inheritance or some form of neo-Mendelian inheritance was the way things were.

However, in 1940, 1 doctor looked at what was going on with the X chromosomes.

He looked at what was happening with the X chromosomes and recognized that women have X chromosomes, too.

I don't see anybody here being surprised about that.

And if women have X chromosomes, how come those X chromosomes don't do anything for the women but they do so much for the men.

So we'll have to look and see how our current thinking is.

And we always have to talk in terms of current thinking, because tomorrow something else will be discovered, like in this picture.

There's something else that we don't see.

And God's painting of his creation, we're told we're going to learn about this, how long?

So there's more to see even than what we're going to see now.

Now, over the last 14 years or so, there's been a very interesting incline in the amount of publications dealing with epigenetics.

This was published in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News in 2013.

Lots of interest, lots of, you know, it's so interesting when something becomes in vogue, everybody wants to know something, everybody wants to do something with it.

So there's a lot of research, a lot of funding going into this.

And of course, people are looking for ways, not just to find out how things are, but actually looking for ways that they can exploit for therapy and things like that, and especially for the development of, you know what, right, drugs, okay?

How can we develop some drug that will solve some other problem that we have.

Time magazine put out this issue saying that epigenetics, DNA isn't everything.

There's something beyond genetics, and we're going to see what that is.

The new science of epigenetics reveals how your choices you make can change your genes and those of your kids.

And they went on to say, you are what your grandmother ate.

But I had to add, and your mother, what your mother ate, okay?

And your grandfather, what your grandfather ate.

And even your father, what your father ate?

And as you are aware, chromosomes are actually quite long and coiled up into what we would call those chromosomes that we see during mitosis or meiosis.

When I was in medical school, when the first was DIRT, That's how long ago I was in medical school.

Series

Breakout Sessions C

Epigenetics

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Why Are You Adventists So Obsessed with Health?

43m

Health & Family

The (Epi)genetics of Sin and Salvation: The 3rd and 4th Generation Effect

1h 28m

Track 1 Seminars

WIN! Wellness Homes of Hope & Health, Part 1

1h 23m

Breakout Sessions B

Ghost in Your Genes OR God in Your Genes

50m

ASI 2010 Seminar: Health

The Transforming Power of our Health Message: Good News about Re-engineering Genetic Health Risk

1h 13m

Seminar: Health

Essentials Ingredients for Successful Local Church Health Outreach

1h 30m

AMEN 2011 Breakout Seminars

Making Your Church a Health Evangelism Center, Part 1

45m

Community Health

SDA Dietary Philosophy

1h 34m

AMEN 2009 Breakout Seminars

Creation-Science Evangelism

2h

Track 2 Seminars

Jesus Methods in the 21st Century, Part 6

1h

Reengineering Genetic Risk

How to Turn Good Genes ON & Bad Genes OFF!

1h 18m

Shaken but Not Forsaken

The Power of Habit

26m

Sound Doctrine