Happy Health News: Free Will Can Trump Genes!

My old biochemical determinism takes a happy hit this morning: one small study has found that lifestyle changes can cause genetic changes. Thirty men with low-risk prostate cancer skipped conventional medical treatment and instead changed their lifestyle by eating healthy, exercising, and working on stress management (ommmm...). Sure, they got healthier, but biopsies also found changes at the genetic level:

After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes -- including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off.

The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research was led by Dr. Dean Ornish, head of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, and a well-known author advocating lifestyle changes to improve health.

"It's an exciting finding because so often people say, 'Oh, it's all in my genes, what can I do?' Well, it turns out you may be able to do a lot," Ornish, who is also affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, said in a telephone interview [Will Dunham, "Healthy Lifestyle Triggers Genetic Changes," Reuters* via Yahoo, 2008.06.16].

Wow -- we can actually make good genes get back to work and bad genes sit down and shut up. That finding puts an interesting spin on the nature-versus-nurture debate. Just curious: does exercising or meditating to make my own genes activate or de-activate count as genetic engineering? And if it does, will I be banned from entering the EU?

Dr. Ornish's results likely require more study and replication. But why wait? Pass the peaches, and ride that bike!

* Still safe to cite, since it's not from those greedy devils at AP -- thanks for the tip, Bob! I don't know if I can boycott AP completely, but I'll certainly keep an eye out for these desperate tricks from the legacy media.