Is Disease "Inheritance" More Random than Once Thought?

This article from 2007 talked about new research that shows cells often deactivate a pair of gene copies from either the mom or the dad. This is really interesting because it helps explain why some children inherit diseases and disorders while some don't, which is what we have been working on and trying to learn this week. One example of an interesting thing that I learned is when these alterations happen it unfortunately helps Alzheimer's disease manifest itself. Cells inactivating alleles actually happens so often that it can be just as big if not more of a part in human diseases developing in individuals than DNA mutation, or at least than we previously believed. This research also stated that so far, no genes seem to be immune to this, which is pretty scary but when you think about it its not because this has been happening all along we just didn't know it was going on, this new information is just expanding our knowledge on cell activity and gene inheritance. I am taking away some knowledge from this and am going to apply it, at least by talking to my mom because she is into biology and probably didn't know this when she was in college. I don't think I can apply this in class because we have been working on how genes directly translate to the parents' offspring and most kids are already confused and adding a 5-10% chance (or something similar) to those sheets or those kids knowledge could just confuse the crap out of everybody, but I am glad that I have learned this knowledge and was intrigued by this article.

Forks Over Knives

Americans are getting fatter and sicker mostly do to our western diet of animal based foods. In Biology over the last 2 days we watched a movie called "Forks over Knives". It was a documentary and the narrator was one of the main characters, he was not very healthy and had high blood pressure and cholesterol as well as some other health problems. So he went to a new doctor that makes his patients change their diet as part of there treatment. This movie followed three other people in the same situation as the narrator and how they got better and fixed most of their health problems by switching to a whole natural plant based diet. In the end all of them fixed their health problems and could stop taking the medicine that had to take before they changed their diet. Two doctors in this movie were shown and talked about a lot and their studies in this field and gave a lot of evidence and statistics to why your diet causes these health problems and how what most Americans believe to be healthy or good for you really isn't, like dairy and meat. Here are some of the things that the doctors studies and what they have learned over the years. We have over doubled our meat,sugar,and dairy intake over the last century. We are one of if not the worst country when it comes to cancer and heart disease. Kenya, Japan, China, and many other countries have almost no cancer compared to America. Another interesting key statistic is that in an experiment, rats eating 20% of a certain kind of animal protein started to get liver cancer, and then rats eating only 5% were completely healthy. When the 20% rats would be switched to be fed 5% their cancer stopped growing. The biggest thing that I am going to take out of this movie is that we should watch our diet by limiting our intake of highly processed foods and animal based foods. Basically, natural is better, and everything should be taken in moderation, except for maybe veggies because that is what you should eat most, whole plant based foods.