Diet, Exercise, and Yoga Influence Gene Expression

It’s a small study, involving only 30 men, but it was led by Dean Ornish, best-selling author and founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research
Institute and clinical professor at the University of California, San
Francisco, so we will be reading about the results. The Scientific American, for example, reports that Ornish and crew found the activity of more than 500 genes in the normal tissue of 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer
changed after the patients began exercising regularly and eating diets
heavy in fruit, veggies and whole grain (supplemented with soy, fish
oil, the mineral selenium and vitamins C and E) and low in red meat and
fats. The men also walked or worked out at least 30 minutes six days a week;
did an hour of daily stress-reducing yoga-type stretching, breathing
and meditation; and participated in one-hour weekly group support
sessions. Sciam reports that some genes believed to be tumor suppressors
turned on or became more active, whereas certain disease-promoting
ones, including oncogenes (in the so-called RAS family that are
implicated in both prostate and breast cancer), were down-regulated or
switched off. The findings were based on changes in levels of RNA
(molecules that carry instructions from DNA or genetic material) in
samples of noncancerous prostate tissue taken before and three months
after the men started the study.
Read more in the Scientific American.