Peter D'Adamo: Exemplars

In addition to my feverish efforts to bring www.dadamo.com back into the Information Age ---the shoemaker's kids do in fact often lack shoes--- the so-called holiday week finds your humble blogger finally mastering the intricacies of Apple's wonderful Keynote presentation software. If like me you've always used PowerPoint, Keynote is indeed a revelation.

The purpose of using presentation software is to give presentations and my upcoming lectures in Arizona are providing the necessary threat-impetus.

At the request of the Arizona Naturopathic Medical Association (AzNMA) on Saturday, January 10, 2009 I'll be doing a total of four hours of lecturing to docs and a one hour public lecture (with a half hour reserved for questions and answers) at the Doubletree Paradise Valley in Scottsdale, AZ. If you are in the Phoenix area why not plan to stop by. I can promise you that the slide/multimedia/rumination presentation may well give old Al Gore a run for the money.

Any trip to Phoenix also affords the extra benefit of seeing our good friends Paul and Laura Mittman. I'm so proud of what Paul has accomplished at Southwest College.

Found this little unused snippet from the volumes of material that was prepared for The GenoType Diet but never used. Thought it might make for interesting reading.

The high water mark of hunter-gathering is often called the Mesolithic period ('Middle Stone Age') which began around 10,000 years ago and ended with the introduction of farming. The onset of farming differed from place to place, starting early in the Near East and much later in Europe. Hunter-gatherer technology reached its apex during the Mesolithic era; fishing tackle, stone adzes, canoes and bows have all been found preserved at various sites.

Popular culture tends to depict our Stone Age ancestors as crude, simplistic animals perpetually at the point of starvation. "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Though small in number, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well, satisfied with very little in the material sense. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was not necessarily a one way process, and evidence seems to disprove any notion that hunter-gatherers were saved from extinction by the advent of farming technology. They seem to have been familiar with farming practices when it arose, but for the longest time simply rejected it, or used it as a marginal supplement to the diet.

As these late hunter-gatherer societies evolved, they began to develop specializations such as fishing and seafood collection, harvesting nuts and fruits, or trapping small animals. They often had simple forms of representative government, based around family or clan.

Perhaps it is not coincidental that the story of the Garden of Eden in the Bible shares some of the same elements in its storyline. Some anthropologists have hypothesized that the Garden of Eden does not represent a geographical place, but rather represents cultural memory of the simpler times of hunter-gathering, when man lived off God's bounty, as opposed to being civilized and toiling at agriculture.

A large percentage of the world's cultures have stories of a Great Flood that devastated earlier civilization. This flood is sent by God or the gods as an act of divine retribution to destroy civilization. Noah and the Ark in Genesis, Matsya in the Hindu Puranas and the Epic of Gilgamesh are among the most familiar versions of these myths, all of which divide prehistory into a pre-flood or Antediluvian and a post-flood world.

Certainly there were major changes to the planetary water table at the end of the last ice age, as melting waters for the rapidly diminishing glaciers would have caused the levels of the seas and oceans to rise about 125-150 feet, deluging and destroying many prior land bridges, such as that between Alaska and Siberia, and isolating many populations. The end of the last ice age was also accompanied by the mother of all volcanic eruptions as the movement of the African plate opened a fault-line under the Mediterranean Sea, creating a string of volcanoes that still exist, such as Vesuvius and Etna. There is some geological evidence suggesting that a massive prehistoric flood occurred around 8000 years ago as the Mediterranean Sea spilled into the present day Black Sea.

William Ryan and Walter Pitman, geologists from Columbia University proposed what came be called the 'Black Sea Deluge Theory' which hypothesizes that melting of the last great glaciers caused the rising Mediterranean to finally spill over a rocky sill at the Bosporus eventually flooding 155,000 square kilometers of land. Despite some supportive findings, the theory remains an active subject of debate among archaeologists.

Although by this time agriculture had already reached the plains of central Europe, the Ryan and Pitman linked its spread with farming people displaced by the flood. It has been suggested that the memories of these displaced survivors was the source of the Great Flood Legends.

Here are the .mp3 audio transcript and .pdf handout for the lecture that I gave at the 2008 New York State Naturopathic Association Conference. The audio is rather large for the Internet (40 mb), so be patient:

Click here for the audio file

The handouts are in the form of a Adobe Acrobat file (pdf) so you can work through the lecture exactly as it was presented.

Click here for the lecture handouts

If you right-click and choose "Save As" you can download the files to your hard drive. If you find this information interesting, consider burning the lecture and handout files onto a CD and passing it along to friends and colleagues.

New research shows that sugar deposits may be the major cause of skin aging.

Skin science appears to have caught up with the humble sugar molecule. Wrinkles, sagging skin, and pigment deposits may stem less from the sun and more from one-way sugar molecules that we make as part of the aging process but cannot remove. With no small amount of serendipity, scientists call these wrong-way sugars ‘AGE molecules’ (the AGE stands for 'Advanced Glycation End-products').

AGE molecules are all around us, and often taste pretty good: Any time we brown an onion or caramelize sugar we are making AGE molecules. However, when you make these molecules under your skin, you’ll probably find much less to like about them.

Unlike most other complex sugars, AGE molecules are not easily removed from the body (Just think back to a time you tried to clean burnt sugar off of a piece of crockery!) And because they stay in place for years, the immune system can react to tissues they deposit in, causing inflammation, damage, and aging.

AGE molecules: Good on marshmallows, bad on people.


NAP recently released the next three D’Adamo Genoma Skin products, which now expands the line to four products:

The Day Light Face Crème is the original formula. We’ve has virtually 100% customer satisfaction with the product, including unsolicited comments from three users that it was the only product that worked on their facial rosacea.

To this base formula, I’ve added an AGE (Glycation inhibiting) toner, a rich night crème and a tissue cleanser that uses a few very interesting botanicals.

For the rest of the month, at my request, NAP is offering the complete set of four products at a savings of 50%. I asked that they try to do this so that as many people as possible can try the line. If you are looking for a great skin care line at an unbelievable price, either as a holiday gift for someone or even yourself, you might want to look into these products.

However, do it before December 31, 2008.

You are a collection of cells, literally trillions of them, each with a specific design and function. With a few exceptions, cells have a basic architectural design, most of the time being depicted as looking like a fried egg cooked sunny side up. However, in reality they are three dimensional beings, so it might be better to think of the average cell as a golf ball that you’ve cut across its midline. The “white” of our cell model is the body of the cell, and here are found many specialized areas called organelles that do particular jobs, much like our own internal organs have specific jobs as well. The “yolk” of our cell model is called the nucleus, and in this compartment there lies the object of our affections, the chromosomes.

Chromosomes were first discovered at the end of the 19th century by a German biologist named Walther Flemming. Flemming was looking at cells under a microscope and got the idea to use colors to dye the cell to make it easier to see things. The idea must have worked better than anticipated since he at once began to see spaghetti looking things in the nucleus that dyed a very deep color. As is the fashion, he named these entities chromosomes which is Greek for “colored bodies”.

Chromosomes are one of the more dynamic faces of Nature; they have to be, since they are responsible for the passing on of the Baton of Life that we call reproduction. The number of chromosome in the cell nucleus differs somewhat from species to species. We human have 46 chromosomes; dogs have 78; alligators 32; cabbage plants 18.

Your chromosomes are both the governess and chauffeur of the most important molecules in your body; DNA. Like any blueprint, DNA needs to read in order for the work order to be constructed. Now, DNA is a long, long molecule. If it were completely unraveled it would be about six feet long, yet so thin that it would be invisible. If the entire DNA, in every cell of your body, was stretched out and laid end-to-end in a straight line, it would reach to the sun and back over one thousand times.

I think an effective way of describing the dynamic qualities of the chromosome is to use a few metaphors. My older daughter likes to knit, so we often visit the knitting supply shop in town for fresh yarn. Yarn usually comes wrapped in skeins, a length of yarn wound around a reel. Most yarn comes in lengths of 80-150 yards. One of the nice things about buying yarn this way, rather than just as one long unwound string, is that you can put it under your arm and walk to the car. This is certainly better than tying a knot to the rear bumper and pulled the unwound string all the way home. Thus, the first important lesion of chromosome dynamics; if you’re going to reproduce you’ve got to stuff that entire DNA into a very small, tight package. Chromosomes are just that: tight packages of DNA.

On the other hand, it is very difficult, if not downright impossible to knit anything if the skein of yarn still has the paper label wrapped around it. In order to use the yarn, you have to unwind it. That’s the formula: when the cell needs to use DNA to get information about how to make a protein, it has to unwind it. When it needs to reproduce, or turn off the DNA information flow, it needs to concentrate and condense it.

DNA is packaged and concentrated by special proteins termed histones. This concentrated DNA is called chromatin, which is the DNA plus the histones that package DNA within the cell nucleus. Chromatin structure is also relevant to DNA replication and DNA repair.

Histones are very cool bead-like proteins that spool the DNA in a way that makes it either tighter or looser, sort of like the cardboard around which our skein of yarn is wrapped. Histones respond to changes in their structure by tightening the DNA wrap or loosening it. Whenever a cell needs to access the genetic information encoded in its DNA, the histones on the section of the DNA that is needed undergo a chemical reaction called acetylation by which a molecule called an acetyl group is stuck on the histones, causing them to relax and unravel. When business is concluded for the day, special enzymes come along and chomp off the acetyl group cause the histones to become de-acetylated, which makes them tighten up again, sending the DNA in the region back to its resting state. Think of it like this; when your DNA needs to work its histones chow down on acetyl groups for breakfast and they do yoga; when it needs to reproduce or shut down, the histones lift weights --the strain of which causes the acetyl group to pop out of their mouths.

Only until recent times have we understood this mechanism, and of its supremely paramount importance: That it is used by the environment to influence gene function and that influence, for either good or bad, can be passed on as inheritance. Amazingly, we not only inherit the genes from our parents, but state of histone acetylation of the genes as well. Thus, the histone acetylation patterns of the genome are a prime mechanism of epigenetic inheritance, along with DNA methylation.

Scientists have given each human chromosome a number, according to its size; thus chromosome number 1 is the largest, then number 2, etc. Chromosomes come in pairs, one from each parent. So there are 23 pairs, for a total of 46 in us humans. Numbers 1-22 are non-sex chromosomes called autosomes, and pair 23 contains the X and Y sex chromosomes.

In the few minutes it has taken to read up to here, this, around 400 million of your red blood cells were depleted and replaced, consistent with the set of genetic instructions contained in your DNA. This is where the genetic code comes in.

Growing up in Brooklyn I remember many exciting and fun filled trips to Manhattan --or as anyone from Brooklyn calls it, “The City.” One of the features I always looked forward to seeing was a huge advertisement for a paint company that featured a can of paint pouring itself over a globe of the world, its byline proclaiming “We Cover the Earth with Our Paints.”

Excepting the obvious question as to why anyone would ever want to cover the world in it, paint is not a bad metaphor for how most scientists viewed inheritance before Mendel, it being a sort of “blended essence” --a mix of the features of both mom and dad, much like how we might combine white and black paints to make grey. In the late 1800s Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism of inheritance by means of gemmules, imaginary granules or atoms which are continually being thrown off from every cell or unit, and circulate freely throughout the system. Yet Mendel’s research showed that it was nothing of the sort; being in fact much more digital, like how a computer makes all sorts of interesting stuff out of what are essentially zeros and ones. Mendel’s theory nixed that notion completely, although after a while things started to be observed that appeared to indicate that genetics wasn’t all that black and white, on and off after all, but I’ll save that for a later story.

I’ve married a blue eyed woman, and have two daughters. The first daughter has brown eyes just like me. Simple enough: My brown-eyed alleles squash my wife's blue-eyed ones. However, my second daughter has greenish-hazel eyes, much lighter than mine or her sister, but certainly not bright blue like those of my wife, so it would seem like a little blending is going on over there after all. Eye color is not a simple dominant-recessive trait, although knuckle hair and tongue rolling are. The eye color trait is what geneticists call polygenic, which simply means that it is not decided by one single gene. In order to account for my younger child’s green-hazel eyes, we have to add other factors to the mix.

My wife is pure Irish on her mother’s side and a mix of Slovakian and Hungarian on her father’s. Hungarians have the highest percentage of green eyes of any population, close to 20%, so something in my wife’s blue-eyed world (the blue-eyed allele of her Hungarian father) produced a variant that refused to role over and die, but instead made alliances with other genes --including a recently discovered one that may go back to the Neanderthals--- that slips green eyes and red hair in between things, ultimately producing my younger daughter’s wonderful green eyes. Given that, you'd think I'd get the tongue rolling gene and she the knuckle hair, but alas, the results are quite opposite.

Many traits are polygenic, and when when added to the tremendously under-appreciated epigenetic effects on gene expression, explain why we have never found a single gene for diabetes, or cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. If it were that simple, we’d have had the answers to these questions already.

Another type of inheritance is very close to my heart. The allele (the set of alternate genes for any trait) for type O blood is recessive to the alleles for type B and type A. Again using my family as an example, biologically I am type A blood and my wife is type O. My daughters are both type A blood, so we know that they must have received a type O allele from mom and a type A allele from me. Their genotype for ABO blood type is A/o (recessive alleles are usually depicted in lower case, dominant in capitals, and genetic things are usually rendered in italics).

If I was instead type B blood and had provided a type B allele, the children would have type B, as type B is dominant to type O as well.

But here is where things get interesting. What happens if you were to receive one type A allele and one type B allele? Why, you would be blood type AB! The reason behind this is that although both B and A clobber O, they strike a tentative truce between themselves and split the kingdom and declare a dual monarchy. This is called co-dominance. There are not many instances of co-dominance in genetics, and ABO inheritance is almost always given as the example.

You may well ask why, if type O is recessive to types A and B, why hasn’t it disappeared, leaving only A and B to slug it out, and eventually producing a world of only type AB people? The reasons and proofs for this are mathematical, so I won’t bore you with them, but suffice it to say that if a population is large enough, and the individuals in that population tend to mate randomly, and there are no other major influences (such as one type being more resistant to an infectious disease), after one generation the gene pool will stabilize and reach a sort of equilibrium.

Since there is such a huge amount of o allele in the human population (so much so, in fact, that even though it is the recessive allele, individuals with type O blood constitute the majority of most populations around the world) it will keep propagating itself, whereas the type you’d have though would be replacing everyone else by now, AB, comprises at best about 2% of the population.

Most people probably have a negative concept of mutation, spawned by a slew of admittedly great science fiction. However, it might surprise you to learn that that vast majority of mutations, at least the ones that get incorporated into our genetic heritage, are not lethal and often don’t do very much at all. For example, let’s again turn to our trusty blood types. As we will explore in more later on in this book, genes are chunks of DNA that do things, like code for specific proteins. Although DNA is an incredibly long molecule (if all the DNA in all your cells was unwound and placed end to end it would produce a string capable of reaching to the sun and back several times) it is composed of a simple string of four repeating nucleotides abbreviated A,T,C and G. The sequence of these four repeating nucleotides is what contains the instructions for the protein.

The difference between having the gene for type A blood or type B blood is a variation of a mere seven letters out of the total of 1,062 that make up the entire gene. We even know exactly where they differ: letters number 523, 700, 793 and 800. If you are type A blood, you have C,G,C,G in these locations, whereas if you are type B blood you have G,A,A,C there instead. Yet however slight this difference is, it is enough to cause a major problem if you were to receive the wrong blood in a transfusion. These are called point mutations because they are a simple one-letter misspelling in a gene, unless as in the case of blood type it is a consistent variation that is inheritable, in which case it is called a polymorphism.

The type O gene mutation is even more interesting. It derives from a frame shift mutation. If you are type O you may be surprised to discover that rather than having a difference of letters, like A and B, you're just missing one letter, number 258, entirely.

So hopefully by now you are comfortable with the notion that mutations are just part of life, unless of course you are unfortunate enough to have gotten a lethal one (and there are many) which probably would never have allowed you to get so far in life as to be able to read this blog. Many, if not most, of these mutations are spontaneously terminated while the sufferer is still an embryo in utero. Virtually all of the well-known genetic disorders are semi-lethal.

There are may causes of mutations, including viruses and radiation, but the most common cause is the simple fact that when our cells reproduce, they must make a complete copy of there DNA, and sometimes the copies don’t turn out so great. Think about the photocopy of that great joke that circulated around the office cubicle the other day. If it was barely legible, with bloated letters that ran one into the other, it was probably because someone made a photocopy of the original, which was quite likely a photocopy of the previous copy. Each time a copy was made of a copy, the writing was degraded a bit more.

Genes are like that. Often as we get older, we tend to get more and more of this “photocopy effect”. Perhaps what was once a word string of CAG became CAA. Even if it is copied correctly, it will be CAA from there on. Perhaps not unexpectedly these mutations are called “copying errors” and given the enormous amount of cell division that goes on over the course of a lifetime it is the real surprise is just how good of a job we do at it.

Fascinating presidential election; certainly a very unique and historic outcome. It will be interesting to see --given the perilous state of affairs we find ourselves in-- whether 2008 is also the first presidential election in which (come January) it is the winner rather than the loser who demands a recount.