The Gene Therapy Plan: Taking Control of Your Genetic Destiny with Diet and Lifestyle

Mitchell L. Gaynor, MD, is the founder and president of Gaynor Wellness and a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College with more than twenty-five years of experience treating patients. His work has been featured in the New York Times, and he has appeared on many national television programs, including Good Morning America, The Dr. Oz Show, and The Martha Stewart Show. He lives in New York City.

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Copyright © 2015 by Mitchell L. Gaynor

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gaynor, Mitchell L., 1956–

The gene therapy plan : taking control of your genetic destiny with diet and lifestyle / Mitchell L. Gaynor, MD ; foreword by Mehmet C. Oz.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-61848-6

1. Genetic disorders—Diet therapy. 2. Nutrition—Genetic aspects. 3. Cooking for the sick. 4. Diet therapy. I. Title.

QP144.G45G39 2015

616'.042—dc23

2014038544

Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

The nutritional information in this book is not a substitute for professional medical care. Because everyone is different, a physician must diagnose and treat all health problems. All doses of supplements discussed in this book are for adults only. Always discuss your plan for supplemental nutrition with your physician before beginning any new regime.

The patients featured in this book have consented to the use of their clinical vignettes. To protect their privacy, their names have been changed.

Foreword

INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE IS progressively sweeping across the nation’s medical schools, hospitals, and clinics. Academic and residency programs are helping to prepare young physicians to challenge the status quo by thinking beyond the borders of how we’ve been treating patients in Western society for seventy-five years. Integrative medicine is really about treating the entire patient.

During my time as a medical student, the education was very traditional in the sense that students were taught to view the mind and the body separately. And a lot of this educational approach is reflected in the way medicine is practiced today, especially as we are faced with growing specialties and diminishing primary care practices. By the time I completed my training, the dogma of medical practice focused on treating the body and its organs as separate entities. I was primed to pursue a career doing the same. But life whispers to us periodically, and the wisdom of forward-thinking physicians—including my father-in-law, the pioneering heart surgeon Gerald Lemole—shook me out of this rut and opened my mind to unconventional healing approaches. I began to push against the grain of conventional medicine in order to uncover ways of treating patients that weren’t taught to me in medical school. Now don’t get me wrong—I wholeheartedly believe in the power of science. But I’ve been in practice long enough and have come across many patients from all walks of life with different healing beliefs to appreciate the treasure of integrative medicine.

Fundamentally, I have been taught the importance of including the latest in cutting-edge ideas to help my patients, no matter what the source. As head of the Heart Institute at New York–Presbyterian Hospital, this includes developing the most innovative heart valve replacement approaches. As the director of the hospital’s Complementary Medicine Program, I supported the integration of Eastern medical practices such as yoga and meditation. Stretching the spectrum of potential tools also demands that we obtain a complete clinical picture so we are able to prescribe medicines or procedures as well as relaxation techniques, exercises, and even foods that can help prevent and treat health problems.

The Gene Therapy Plan educates both patients and healers to accomplish this comprehensive goal. Dr. Mitchell Gaynor focuses on how we can use food to promote health. But more than just being about eating foods that are healthy for us, this book is about harnessing the power hidden in foods to change our genetic predisposition for disease, drawing from a branch of genetic study called ecogenetics. Ecogenetics is a growing field that applies the philosophy of personalized medicine by using specific substances to target a patient’s genetic profile for developing diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. By focusing on bioactive nutrients such as apigenin in pomegranates, EGCG in green tea, and curcumin in curry, physicians will be able to prescribe foods that operate at the level of your DNA to promote health. What’s interesting is that once you put into practice consuming foods that target your gene expression, you progressively begin to lose those cravings for foods that are bad for you—such as highly refined carbohydrates.

I met Dr. Gaynor years ago, when a patient of his approached me about a heart operation. I was confused by the request since the chart clearly outlined metastatic cancer that would kill him within months. The patient smiled and asked me to check the date in the chart again. The cancer diagnosis was over five years old! I found out that my patient had been cured by Dr. Gaynor, and I have been sending him challenging cases ever since, including friends and family. Mitch is the founder and president of Gaynor Integrative Oncology, and he serves as a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. As a renowned specialist in the field of oncology and integrative medicine, he has dedicated his career to combining medicinal practices with proven complementary therapies to treat his cancer patients, which makes him well positioned to write this book on the nutritional aspects of disease prevention.

Part of Dr. Gaynor’s success as a well-respected cancer specialist is his ability to treat the entire person through a combination of allopathic approaches and alternative therapies. The Gene Therapy Plan offers practical advice as well as supplemental and juicing recipes that are easy to incorporate into your life. This book provides insight into the evolution of medicine by showing how ecogenetic food changes your genetic blueprint. The book provides scientific data to support age-old practices and alternative therapies, which is an important component to bridging the divide between Eastern and Western medicine. This is a key stepping point toward the globalization of medicine using conventional Western and unconventional alternative treatments with proven results together to treat the whole patient.

Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.

Vice Chair and Professor of Surgery, NYP–Columbia University

Coauthor, You: The Owner’s Manual health book series

Introduction

“YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT,” my mother always told me. But it wasn’t until after I’d finished my medical training and become a cancer specialist that I learned just how profoundly right she was.

My mother started teaching me about food and health when I was six. She had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and she wanted me to be able to look after myself. Like most parents, she was concerned that I not load up on Cheetos and potato chips, but, more than that, her diagnosis had brought her into the movement toward unprocessed foods and vitamin supplements launched by Adelle Davis. So she taught me how to make nutritious snacks, and how to blend fruit and vegetable juices to achieve the most healthful effects with a taste I’d like. She also taught me how to prepare nutritious meals, and when she had to be in the hospital for long periods I’d be the one to make dinner for my father and older brother.

Unfortunately, our lessons in nutrition were cut short by my mother’s death when I was nine. Her conversion to wholesome foods and supplements may have been too little, too late, but the odds were stacked heavily against her: during her pregnancy with my brother twelve years earlier, she had been treated with DES, a synthetic form of estrogen that we now know is associated with a much greater risk of breast cancer.

The loss was devastating, of course, but it also gave me a clear purpose in life. When my mother died, I made up my mind that I was going to find out why people’s cells turned against them, as hers had, to cause debilitating, even fatal diseases. I also determined that I was going to do something about it.

I went to medical school, then took specialized training in hematology, the study of blood, and in oncology, the study of cancer, which included doing research at Rockefeller University to study molecular biology. This is a relatively new field that explores the fundamental building blocks of life at the physical and chemical level, especially the processes of genetic control. What I learned from Rockefeller’s cutting-edge researchers gave me an entirely new perspective on the role of genes in determining health outcomes across the life span. And this new view of how genes function showed me that my mother’s emphasis on the role of nutrition in health was absolutely on target.

Genes, the microscopic bundles of DNA that reside in the nucleus of each cell, control all cellular processes, including cell division. (Cancer, perhaps the most feared disease of all, develops when normal cell division—the process that allows children to grow bigger and healthy tissues to renew themselves—goes haywire.)

We inherit our genes from our parents and—according to what I’d learned in medical school—each person’s genetic endowment was pretty much determined at the moment of conception and then remained stable throughout life. If the DNA you inherited from your parents made you robust and healthy, then—according to this theory—you were all set. If your genes made you susceptible to cancer, or obesity, or arthritis . . . well, that was just your fate. In this old way of thinking, health was largely the result of a genetic lottery, and there was nothing you could do to change the odds.

By the time I got to Rockefeller, though, advances in molecular biology had turned this static and predetermined view of health on its head. The new research showed that illness or health was not solely a matter of a “genetic destiny” coming from “good genes” or “bad genes” passed along from Mom or Dad. The picture that emerged was actually much more subtle and complex, and it gave each of us a much more active role to play in directing our own health outcomes through our nutritional and lifestyle choices.

Molecular biology teaches us that the individual’s entire complement of more than twenty thousand genes—called his or her “genome”—contains myriad bits of information that instruct the cells to carry out essential functions. But not all of these genes are active all the time. Many are dormant, and the question of whether or not they become active and begin to influence our biology—either by making us more robust or by making us ill—is called “gene expression.” The primary influence on gene expression is the environment in which we live, which is where our opportunity to exert a positive influence through nutrition enters in.

In the twenty-first century, our environment bombards us every day with an onslaught of pesticide residues, carcinogenic chemicals, large quantities of foodlike substances, which include refined sugar and dangerous fats. These substances in our food, in our air, and in our water interact with the genes in our cells, turning some on and some off. The worst of these chemicals can transform healthy cells into tumors, which is in large part why one in three Americans will develop cancer. In fact, 90 to 95 percent of cancers are linked to environmental toxicants.1 But it is not just cancer that is caused by this chemical stew in which we live. Today we have an epidemic of thyroid disease, especially among middle-aged women, which almost always originates as an autoimmune condition triggered by environmental toxins. Nearly 20 percent of our children have a learning, emotional, or developmental disability, and the incidences of diabetes and asthma are skyrocketing. The environment’s effect on our genes is implicated in all of these conditions as well.

But this dark cloud also contains a silver lining. We may have limited control over the level of toxins in our external environment, but each of us can exercise enormous control over what we introduce into our internal environment—which is to say, what we eat. By being more thoughtful and deliberate about our nutritional choices, we can not only reduce or eliminate many of the toxic influences interacting with our genes to cause disease, we can influence our genetic expression to activate the enzymes that can neutralize or remove toxic substances from our tissues, to stimulate cellular processes to boost our immune system, and to reverse the progression of disease, including cancer.

Using nutrients in this strategic way to combat disease and promote good health is called “nutrigenetics,” and it is the core principle of the Gene Therapy Plan. Nutrigenetics is actually a subset of a broader approach called “ecogenetics,” which is focused more broadly on how we live in our environment and how the environment as a whole interacts with the individual’s genome to produce either health or disease. Our level of physical activity, for instance, may encourage (or discourage) the production of more inflammation-suppressing enzymes. Meanwhile, whether we are fat or lean affects whether we send out weaker (if we are lean) or stronger (if we are obese) signals to suppress cancer-killing substances.

The Gene Therapy Plan takes all these interactions into account. It is designed to help you combat the most prevalent and troubling diseases of our time, and it does so in the context of promoting overall health and well-being through weight control, stress reduction, and exercise.

I’ve based the recommendations of the Gene Therapy Plan on my nearly thirty years of broad clinical experience. After my fellowships in hematology and oncology, I became director of medical oncology at the Strang Cancer Prevention Center, where I continued the study of nutrient-gene interactions I’d begun at Rockefeller. I also continued my exploration of toxicogenomics, the study of how environmental toxins affect gene expression. What I found was that many of the same underlying cellular functions that play a role in cancer—inflammation, signaling proteins, transcription factors, hormone regulation, toxin metabolism, the immune response—were factors in a wide sp...