“It’s in my genes”.

Sounds familiar? It’s the excuse used by scores of humans as they try to hand off their shortcomings, deficiencies and other health issues to the bad decisions of their forefathers. Well, not so fast! Key lifestyle changes, a diet based on natural foods and regular exercise can overcome the most severe of genetic traits that you may think you have acquired.

“Control Your DNA Destiny” reads the Self Magazine headline on MSNBC Health that gives you tips to follow from head to toe. From your heart and skin to your brain and lungs, the right choice in your everyday decisions can vastly improve your odds of beating your genetic make-up. For example although it’s known that stopping smoking improves your chances of avoiding lung cancer, other steps could help too:

The best way to prevent lung cancer is to kick the habit and avoid secondhand smoke: Nonsmokers have a 20 percent to 30 percent greater chance of developing the disease if they’re exposed to smoke at home or work, according to a Surgeon General’s report. And test your home for radon, an odorless gas released from rocks and soil that’s linked to up to 14 percent of all lung cancer deaths each year. [MSNBC Health]

As for your brain, while it’s certainly true, that memory is dependent on DNA, “use it or lose it” is equally true. Other things to try:

The best way to maintain a sharp mind is to keep both your brain and body busy. “Exercise helps prevent plaque buildup in your brain that has been linked to Alzheimer’s, while mental stimulation keeps neurons firing away,” Dr. Tan says. One activity that gets you moving and thinking: dancing, which was linked to a 76 percent reduced risk for dementia [...] [MSNBC Health]

So it looks like whatever your genetic composition might be, there is always something you can do to positively change the effect of your genes on your way of life.

Allwe need is the will to want to overcome our genes.

Stress, the previously much-ignored minor by-product of a busy and restless day is now rapidly gaining prominence as a leading indicator of weight gain and other maladies. 7 Ways To Beat Stress, a Prevention Magazine news item on MSNBC Health gives the full details about how stress acts on our bodies and also describes a few ways to combat the ill-effects it can produce.

Stress, causes the body to apparently behave as if its in real physical danger and releases a surge of the hormone adrenaline (also known as epinephrine) which gets the body ready for “fight or flight”. One effect of adrenaline is to rapidly elevate blood sugar by converting glycogen to glucose in the liver and also breakdown the lipids in the fat cells. As you can expect, one of the obvious consequences of this reaction is to make one feel more hungry:

At the same time, you get a surge of cortisol, which tells your body to replenish that energy even though you haven’t used very many calories in your stressed-out state. This can make you hungry … very hungry. And your body keeps on pumping out that cortisol as long as the stress continues. Sadly, few of us reach for carrot sticks in these situations. “Instead, we crave sweet, salty, and high-fat foods because they stimulate the brain to release pleasure chemicals that actually do reduce tension […] [MSNBC Health]

Another unfortunate side-effect of this adrenaline surge is the slowing down of production of the all-important testosterone hormone which aids in muscle-building. This leads to lower metabolism rates over time and further weight gain as you end up burning fewer calories in the rest-state.

While stress can obviously not be eliminated, the article gives you some good tips on reducing it including getting some exercise and even, counter-intuitively, giving in to cravings! Read the rest of the techniques and see if some of these could help you reduce the stress in your life.

A while back, when I wrote about why we crave sugar, I primarily focused on the physiological processes that, over the centuries, have tunes our bodies to look for foods with higher energy density. But as with almost anything you can think of, there is a mental aspect to this topic as well and the Boston Globe article “Cravings” attempts to dissect this point of view of the story.

This much, apparently is true: calories have a lot to do with cravings and in particular the amount of carbohydrates and fat in a food seems to affect how much we crave for it. But there is a biological aspect to this as well:

Cravings […] activate the caudate nucleus, one of the parts of the brain involved in habit formation; it’s also activated during drug cravings. A cocaine user who has physiologically kicked the habit might find himself craving cocaine in a situation he associates with the drug. Cravings work pretty much the same way for a doughnut user. “If you go by a doughnut store on the way home, it can trigger a habitual response […] If you’ve gone in before, just seeing it may cause you to cross the street and go in again. But it can also make you think of doughnuts, and another part of the brain involved in food cravings is the circuit that’s involved in obsessing.”

Then there are associations: those invisible links we create between foods and the emotions and the emotion they invoke in us. If a certain type of food is almost universally associated with happy memories (birthday=cake! football=wings! celebration=pizza!), then guess what  – people gravitate toward those foods when they are hit with cravings.

In that regard, chocolate seems almost universally liked:

“Chocolate is perfect […] It’s got fat, it’s got sugar, it’s got stimulants. And it has these wonderful sensory qualities.” In other words, it’s simply an extremely palatable high-calorie food, one many people have positive associations with.

What foods do you crave most? Have you ever analyzed the mental rather than physical reasons for these cravings? Read more about Cravings and share your thoughts.