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The Detox Prescription: Supercharge Your Health, Strip Away Pounds, and Eliminate the Toxins Within

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Woodson Merrell

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“Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.' The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development. [...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.”

ScienceNatureBiologyNurtureDnaGeneticsEye OpeningSad TruthNature Vs NurtureEpigenetics
Author:Siddhartha Mukherjee
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“The depth at which we take in the preceding generations astonishes me. There is likely an epigenetic component to this as well as transmission through the internalizations that get passed down through the generations. Whole cultures are carried forward that way, so it makes sense that family legacies might be transmitted that way as well.”

HopeHealingIntergenerational TraumaEpigeneticsFamily Violence Cycle
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Charles experienced a shamanic visitation … The haw is in the air and I hear its screech. The hawk flies about me, then I can feel its talons on my scalp. It lets go and faces me. I look into its eyes. The hawk is ancient yet I seem to know who he is. The hawk speaks, "I am the spirits from the past, and I come to you because it is difficult for you to to come to us." [When Charles resists the hawk digs its talons into his face and pecks at him.] I fall on my back and shout out to the hawk that I will follow his commands. The beat of the hawk's wings heal the wounds as if I was never attacked. I gaze into the hawk's eyes and see unhappy spirits walking among the trees in a single file. they are roped together and walk in silence, gloom, despair. At the front of the line are my parents, and behind them are their parents, and parents going back in time. The hawk tells me that I must loosen the rope that binds them together. I tell the hawk that I do not know how to do this, but the hawk bestows a feather on me that tells me that I "have one life in which to find these spirits. And do not forget that the spirits need you.”

GhostsEpigeneticsFamily Constellation
Book:Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
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“All sorts of changes in cellular machinery have shown up that have nothing to do with the sequence of DNA but still have profound, and heritable, impacts for generations to come. For example, malnourished rats give birth to undersized pups that, even if well fed, grow up to give birth to undersized pups. Which means, among other things, that poor old Lamarck was right—at least some acquired traits can be passed down.”

ScienceEvolutionBiologyDnaGeneticsDarwinismDarwinEpigeneticsDna SequencingLamarck
Author:Thomas Hayden
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“My colleague Rachel Yehuda studied rates of PTSD in adult New Yorkers who had been assaulted or rapes. Those whose mothers were Holocaust survivors with PTSD had a significantly higher rate of developing serious psychological problems after these traumatic experiences. The most reasonable explanation is that their upbringing had left them with a vulnerable physiology, making it difficult for them to regain their equilibrium after being violated. Yehuda found a similar vulnerability in the children of pregnant women who were in the World Trade Center that fatal day in 2001. Similarly, the reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by how calm or stressed their parents are.”

TraumaEpigenetics
Book:The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
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“From the famed but ethically bankrupt experiments of Harry Harlow, to the excruciating testimonies of refugees and concentration camp survivors, science and history are replete with the mind-shattering and life-altering impacts of psychological trauma. For carnivores, the story is eerily similar. With drastic losses of habitat, a constant threat from hunters, high mortality, and unreliable food sources, life for the average carnivore has changed dramatically and rapidly from historic norms. Under highly stressful physical or emotional conditions (food deprivation, decreased habitat, loss of one's mother, social disruption), species-normative brain processes are compromised. What goes around on the outside, comes around on the inside. Each unusual change in the environment telegraphs directly into the brain and body, altering the organism's inner blueprint. These neuroepigenetic changes then are expressed as variations in personality, stress regulation, and immunological resilience. The result is a puma who is not quite a puma.”

EnvironmentTraumaAnimalsWildlifeEpigenetics
Book:Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are
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“Hope is Nature's Defibrillator (The Sonnet) Hope is nature's defibrillator that, Electrifies the heart to unsubmission. Hope rescues us from the depths of despair, Hope drags the being even out of cremation. Hope lights the way when clouds convene, Hope brings sight when smog sets in. Hope is the bird that heralds the dawn, Hope is the answer to all things disheartening. Never let intellect trod on the sapling of hope, When things get rough intellect is first to scarper. The brain needs backbone to trudge through hardship, Without hope, backbone is first to lose its caper. But again, most times inaction sets in, disguised as hope. Real hope sets you on fire, it doesn't make you mellow.”

HopeDestinyDespairHopefulHopelessInactionMoraleHopefulnessDisheartenedTake Charge
Book:Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission
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