Day Seventy-Six: Nature Versus Nurture

"My grandmother had Type 2 Diabetes. My mother had it, and now I've got it..."  How many times have we heard this? It's not often followed with, "My award winning apple cobbler was my mother's recipe...and she got it from her mother..."

The old argument of nature versus nurture...who's the winner? Probably both.

I'm willing to bet that if we were to run an experiment where we took 100 people that all have Type 2 Diabetes and placed them onto a desert island where the only food that they ate was what they could catch, we'd see an enormous drop in the number of those people who still had Type 2 Diabetes a few months later. At the same time, I'd bet if we were to take 100 people from all different genetic backgrounds and feed them nothing but McDonalds for a year, not all of them would develop Type 2 Diabetes. Some of them may not even be overweight at the end of the year.

Luckily, we'll run neither experiment.

Some of us lucked out more than others in the DNA department...no doubt. Others of us have to work at it a little harder. Regardless of what our genetic background is, one thing is certain....it is out of our control.

The other side of that coin is...what was the environment or culture that we were immersed in growing up? Did we eat healthy food as a family and get plenty of physical exercise? Was eating balanced, healthy meals part of our education as children? Or, is it that our family of origin has a predisposition for weight problems, onset diabetes, heart disease....and we never really ate properly growing up?

Its muddy...its really difficult to draw a line between where one ends and the other begins.

The only thing we really can control is what we feed our bodies, what we do for physical exercise, how we cope with stress, how we deal with emotional issues when it comes to food, and how we hydrate ourselves. What we should not do is roll over and act like our situation is solely the fault of our DNA. Instead, we should understand what is within our span of control and surrender to the needs of our body....give it what it is asking for.

I challenge you to listen to yourself when it comes to nature versus nurture. You cannot control nature. What are you doing to nurture yourself?