Always a Good Excuse

Studying pea plants during the years around 1860, Gregor Mendel, a scientist and Augustinian friar at St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, suggested the presence of discrete inheritable units in nature. He studied inheritance patterns in 8000 varieties, tracking the transfer of identifiable physical characteristics passed down from the parent plants to next generations. Almost 50 years later Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term “gene.” After almost another 50 years Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins use X-ray crystallography to try to detect these inheritable units, leading to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-stranded helix DNA molecule.

Today we hear references to genes every day, but the science is still developing. Regardless of that, many people know just enough about genetics and inherited traits to use it as an easy excuse for any fault they don’t want to correct. Genes represent the hand nature has dealt us, and there is nothing we can do to change them – no diet, no exercise, no vitamin, nothing.

This point was made in a book I recently read, The Cure for Everything by Timothy Caulfield. In the introduction to the chapter about genes as health factors, he lists several headlines telling not of the scientific advances in the field, but of how the field has become popularized by promising cures for these immutable factors through some type of gene technology. (These are another variant of the news philosophy that I described back in early March when I wrote Stoking the Fear.)

His list of popular headlines included:

• Is Laziness Gene to Blame for Couch Potatoes?
• The God Gene, Does Our DNA Compel Us to Seek a Higher Power?
• Always Lost? : It May Be in Your Genes
• Party Animal: It May Be in Your Genes
• Marriage Problems?: Husband’s Genes May Be the Problem
• Genes May Affect Popularity, Researchers Say.

Since the book was published in 2012, I thought I could go on line and add to the list of handy  excuses:

• Pity the poor murderer, his genes made him do it
• "Mom gene" discovered in mice: Do you have it?
• "Binge-drinking gene" discovered
• Intelligence genes discovered by scientists
• Sweet-tooth Gene Discovered
• Obesity gene Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments
• Anxiety, Aggression Gene Discovered

So if you are not too bright, overweight due to your sweet tooth, tend to binge drink, are lazy, unfaithful to your spouse, a bad parent, unpopular and may be prone to anxiety or aggression or even more brutal forms of violence, not to worry. It's not your fault; you're not responsible. You can blame it all on your genes, sit back and wait for science to fix you! Of course if the headline, “First 'placebo gene' discovered” applies to you, you don’t even have to wait. With your increased susceptibility to the placebo effect, you can look up the first charlatan or natural medicine guru selling a sham treatment or a miracle cure and talk your self into getting better.

Gene research is important and may lead to some significant progress toward real cures, but so far all these somewhat outrageous health-related headlines are just a distraction. Responsible people don’t go looking for easy excuses.

Irresponsibility: Finding Excuses

Last time I was very pleased to find an example of strong behavior in the dimension of responsibility. The woman attacked by the jaguar at the zoo admitted her part in the incident and hoped that others would learn from her mistake. 

When someone is in the wrong, the common reaction seems to be denial or making excuses. The news lately is filled with celebrities, politicians and their defenders quick to deny a charge, downplay the seriousness of a charge or call attention to all the celebrities or politicians in the past who did the same or worse without ramifications. So it’s OK?

Making excuses covers a multitude of sins, and it serves as a convenient, and often accepted, way  if covering up for behavioral slip-ups in any of the five key dimensions.

One area where this comes into play is when weak behavior in the area of discipline leads to unwanted consequences, for example, lung cancer from smoking, retirement insecurity from failure to save during the working years or obesity.

Along the lines of the latter I found this article on line: “10 Reasons Why Obesity Is NOT About Gluttony and Sloth.” First, the author obviously used the most provocative words possible to describe a situation characterized by a simple lack of discipline, too little exercise or too large portion sizes. Use of the terms gluttony and sloth, boarders on name-calling; they arouse a sense of resentment to prepare the reader to be receptive to a litany of ready-made excuses.

And here they come, all the reasons an unmotivated person can fall back on:

• Obesogenic Environment: where living in an area without sidewalks or safe walking routes coupled with a lack of accessibility to fresh fruits and vegetables along with other environmental factors may add challenges. (People would be thin as rails if only they had sidewalks.)
• Culture of Beauty: drives people toward an unattainable standard, encouraging “self-starvation, exercise abuse, and other eating disorders. It really only serves those who make money off of it.” (This stems from a perspective problem, being manipulated by external values.)
• Mental Health problems “from depression and anxiety to chronic stress and past trauma” can become an issue. “Weight gain can be the result of emotional eating as a way to cope or a result of medications.” (See addiction below for the same excuse in different words.)
• Genetics: While genetics does not predict obesity, over time the combination with other factors may predispose individuals to have obesity issues (though that doesn’t explain why it would suddenly become a factor in the last 50 years.)
• Social Networks: Social influences “play a role in our health behaviors including eating, exercise, weight loss or gain.” (Blame it on your friends.)
• Food Addiction: works like other addictions as “a way to cope with uncomfortable feelings and situations in life.” (Is it realistic to expect life to be comfortable all the time? How easy to forget that life in this century is more comfortable than at any other time in history.)
• Lack of Awareness: too many confusing “messages about what to eat, how to exercise, and ways to lose fat” leave “most of us…scratching our heads.” (But most of these confusing messages come from the purveyors of easy solutions, miracle diet plans and magic answers or from scientists trying to secure funding.)
• Family Income: “Soda is less expensive than water…” (Last I checked water is so inexpensive that I take a shower in it! It falls from the sky! Unless you live in a place like Flint, MI, this argument is as bogus as they come! See here for more about the expensive healthy food myth.)
• Environmental Chemicals in lab experiments alter the metabolism and increasing “the size and number of fat cells in animal exposed to chemicals.” (Blame it on the chemicals, while ignoring the difference between lab experiments and reality.)
• Fat Shame: causes the internalization of society’s fat phobia…creating the most harm. (But change is hard; it doesn’t happen without some discomfort as a motivation. If anything, society has become overly sensitive to the idea of fat shaming and many other attitudes labeled as intolerant.)

So there they are, ready-made excuses to maintain an unhealthy lifestyle. Just spouting off one or two of these (and ignoring the comments in parentheses) is a lot easier than taking responsibility for lapses in discipline.

Living Longer (continued) – How About My Good Genes?

How often have you heard people talking about a grandparent or great grandparent living to be over 100 years old?  It seems almost like a badge of honor to have a relative who passed that hurdle, although in many cases they were alive but no longer had their wits about them. 

Not only is it a matter of pride, it also seems to be somewhat reassuring, especially in the cases where the relative smoked or drank throughout his or her life. People figure that if Aunt Polly lived to 102, it was good news for them.

For a while the nature-or-nurture question was considered a toss up. Do we live longer because of our habits, because of our genes, or is it some combination of the two? Several sets of studies on twins raised in different households tried to find out.

Results from hundreds of individual studies have been published since the early-1980’s showing that genetics, rather than upbringing held sway for many characteristics. “Minnesota researchers found that about 70 percent of IQ variation across the twin population was due to genetic differences.” In other studies genes played a larger role than environment on personality, sexual orientation as an adult, religiosity and social attitudes. 

One of the earliest and most widely publicized stories of identical twins came from a study by Lewis and Springer. One pair of twins separated just four weeks after birth and reunited  39 years later was found to have remarkable similarities. “They both had childhood dogs named Toy, married and divorced women named Linda and then married women named Betty, drove Chevys, had nearly identical smoking brands and drinking patterns, and chewed their fingernails.” Physically, they had similar problems with headaches, and they chose the same Florida beach for vacations.

Soon many people were convinced that nature, that is genes, was a driving force and could be credited or blamed for any number of good and bad outcomes. But not so fast! Leave it to science to mess up a good story.

A study specifically looking into the link with longevity published in Nature several years ago has come back into the spotlight recently. Their primary conclusion was that “genetic differences account for about a quarter of the variance in adult human lifespan.” The advantage they had in studying longevity as oppose to other traits was that they could look at the records of twins over the last 100 years with no need for observation or interviews.

Harvard conducted another study on longevity with 268 students (not twins) beginning in 1938. With almost 80 years of data available, they concluded that “how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health,” more powerful than genes alone.

So whether a grandmother or a great aunt lived beyond the normal lifespan seems to have much less effect on individual longevity than previously thought.  (That’s good news for a couple of men I know who have already lived past the age when their fathers died, and are very grateful – that’s perspective.) 

Having ruled out yet another potential factor in the search for long life, where does it leave us? More on this next time.