Biology

Biology is something I’ve always found generally fascinating.  I was a Health Science major in college, but looking back I would have done Biology with a minor in communication.

I think all of my explorations & previous career paths can be distilled into my two principal interests:  Figuring out how stuff works, and fixing what doesn’t.  That’s why I began school as an electrical engineer, after all.

As I got older though, I cared less about electrical/mechanical problems and more about health and social problems.  Then the developing interest in film brought me to the realization that I can have the best of all worlds:  Promoting better health through digital media.  Communication, Health, Film, and Problem-solving.  Bam.

Back to the title of this post, and what actually inspired this rant… I think it was a TED talk I recently listened to, where the keynote speaker said that dogs and humans have the same genes for detecting smell, but ours have been turned off.  I tried to verify this claim through a little PubMed research, and came across some fascinating articles; although my limited research (and limited understanding of the research) didn’t particularly verify this.

What I did find was this article:

“We identified 26 losses of well-established genes in the human genome that were all lost at least 50 [million years] after their birth.”

Evolution.  Natural selection.  Whatever you want to call it, it’s pretty damn cool.  Most of our DNA is “junk” DNA… meaning it doesn’t actually code for anything we use.  Why do we have it?  Because somewhere down the family tree, one of our ancestors did.  It got turned off due to epigenetics and/or natural selection.  Some mammalian grandmother of ours decided her family was going to switch their diet around, and eat more soft leaves & less grass.  Genes had to be finagled in order to handle the digestive requirements, so now there’s an extra piece of “junk” as we don’t use that particular enzyme anymore.  And so it went for hundreds of millions of years until today, with our massive collection of has-been genes that only serve as a neat historical account.

“Epigenetics”, or “above/beyond” genetics, the principle that DNA does in fact change throughout generations, is fundamental to evolutionary biology, and it’s fundamental to Peter D’Adamo’s research into diet and nutrition.

I’m pretty sure the major reason there are so many skeptics to the Blood Type Diet is the misunderstanding and/or lack of understanding of the biology.  And I get it.  Even though *we know from decades of research that blood type plays a huge role in so many physiological areas (fetal development, tumor detection, enzyme production, to name a few), public education, universities, and medical schools still only teach that blood type is the thing that can kill you in a blood transfusion.  Or if you get the advanced lesson, you’ll learn about pregnancy and the Rh (+/-) factor.

*We =  Those willing to accept the evidence.  It’s no secret.  It’s just not promoted or investigated by mainstream science or medicine.  Why?  Welcome to my world.  Get on board, and follow me as I search for the answers.

Because biology is cool, and the world needs more D’Adamo.