Royal Jelly and healthy living

Do you know much about honey bees?  Here is a quick lesson.  Only one bee in the hive lays eggs.  That's the queen.  Her lifespan is around 5 years, as compared with the lifespan of all the other bees, which is measured in weeks.  Not only does the queen live longer, but she is also bigger.  Her only job is to lay eggs, which at the height of the season can be around 2,000 per day.

Though both the worker and the queen are quite different, they start out the same.  The young queen larva develops differently because it is more heavily fed royal jelly, a protein-rich secretion from glands on the heads of young workers. All honey bee larvae are fed some royal jelly for the first few days after hatching but only queen larvae are fed on it exclusively. As a result of the difference in diet, the queen will develop into a sexually mature female, unlike the worker bees.

In 2008, Professor Ryszard Maleszka and his colleagues from the Australian National University worked out how royal jelly turns a regular egg into a queen bee.  It turns out that it changes how the body reads the DNA.  It's as simple as that.  For more depth on the story, here's the link.
Go here.

****************
 So let's look at prostate cancer, and the effect of a healthy lifestyle on human DNA.
The prostate is a gland that in men is wrapped around the urethra. It used to be thought that only some men got cancer of the prostate.  But today, science thinks that virtually all the men that reach their 80s will have some kind of prostate cancer. But, in the vast majority of cases, the cancer will not bother them, and will not shorten their lives. Something else will get them.

One study showed that a healthy lifestyle could act on the DNA in the prostate cancer and trigger genetic changes. In other words, information could flow from outside the cell (good diet and exercise) and modify the DNA to slow down the prostate cancer.

This small study followed 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer. There was no need for them to have any medical treatment such as surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy.  These men then underwent major lifestyle changes. They started eating a diet rich in healthy foods, such as fruit, vegetables, legumes, soy products, whole grains and so on.  They also started spending half an hour each day doing moderate exercise. And finally, they spent as much as an hour each day on stress management methods such as meditation.

After three months, there were obvious changes. They lost weight, had lower blood pressure, felt better, had more energy and so on.

But the DNA in their prostate cancer had also been changed!

The environment external to the prostate gland (that is, what they ate, how they handled stress and their new exercise regime) changed how the DNA in their cancer was now being read.

So today we know that it's not just the DNA that you got from your parents that controls what happens to you. It's also about you, and how you interact with your environment.

Charles Swindoll said: "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it"

Here is the rest of that story.

Now you've heard something interesting.