Congratulations! You have a newborn baby. She has plump cheeks, a round little belly, and the right number of fingers and toes. Everything seems just dandy. But unbeknownst to you, a risk is hiding in her DNA: some percent chance that later in life she’ll develop high cholesterol and have a heart attack in her 40s. Maybe it’s a 5 percent chance. Maybe it’s 80.
Would you want to know?
Robert Green would. Green is the director of Genomes2People, a research program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Broad Institute, and Harvard Medical School that explores the impacts of using genomic information in medicine and in society at large.
Until genomic sequencing, Green said, the possibility of moving beyond treating sick patients and toward precision and preventative medicine was largely impossible.
“Genomics is sort of the tip of the spear, because you can actually profile some of the vulnerabilities that a child will have for their entire lifetime at the moment of birth through their DNA,” he said. “You’re not going to capture every illness; you’re certainly not going to capture illnesses that might have more environmental or lifestyle causes. DNA isn’t a crystal ball for every kind of illness by any means, but there’s a surprisingly large amount of human health that we can now probabilistically look at in the DNA of a newborn child or really a child at any age.”
Green’s team found that about 12 percent of babies carry a disease-associated genetic mutation. Some of them are considered rare diseases, but in the aggregate, they’re not rare at all.
Just having the mutation doesn’t guarantee a baby will get the disease, and many conditions can vary greatly in their severity. But, Green said, early detection means you can screen regularly, start diet or lifestyle choices early, or even benefit from clinical trials or novel cell therapies that weren’t available a few years ago.
The cost, he says, is not zero. There’s the cost of genomic testing itself, which can range from $200-$600. And then there’s the cost of preventing, managing, or treating what is discovered.
Get your kids out and enjoying regular exercise when they are young so the develop a healthy interest in it… a new study:
Early-life exercise extends healthspan but not lifespan
It is well-known that physical activity exerts health benefits, yet the potential impacts of early-life regular exercise on later-life health and lifespan remains poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate that 3 months of early-life exercise in mice results in lasting health benefits, extending healthspan, but not lifespan. C57BL/6J mice underwent swimming exercise from 1 to 4 months of age, followed by detraining for the remainder of their lives. While early-life exercise did not extend the overall lifespan, it significantly improved healthspan in both male and female mice, as evidenced by enhanced systemic metabolism, cardiovascular function, and muscle strength, as well as reduced systemic inflammation and frailty in aged mice. Multiple-organ transcriptome analyses identified enhanced fatty acid metabolism in skeletal muscles as a major feature in aged mice that underwent early-life exercise. These findings reveal the enduring long-term health benefits of early-life exercise, highlighting its pivotal role in improving healthspan.
Emerging evidence supports that early-life experiences and fitness affect long-term health outcomes10. Recent epidemiological studies highlight a positive correlation between higher levels of physical activity in childhood and enhanced aerobic fitness, elevated bone mineral density (BMD) and reduced risks of metabolic diseases, including obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and cardiac disease later in life11,12,13. We recently reported that early-life exercise enhances anti-inflammatory immunity in middle-aged male mice14. These findings suggest the enduring potential of early-life physical activity to positively impact human health over time. However, the precise influence of early-life exercise on adult health remains uncertain, given that individuals with higher physical activity during childhood tend to sustain elevated activity levels into adulthood15. In addition, due to the relatively short follow-up periods in human studies, it is unknown whether early-life exercise confers lifelong benefits. In this study, we investigated the impact of early-life exercise alone on overall health in later life in mice and found that 3-month exercise during early-life exerts significant long-term health benefits, improving healthspan in both male and female mice.
Childhood Trauma Predicts Poor Mental Health in Adults
A study showed that increased exposure to childhood trauma was associated with poor mental health outcomes, increased stress, and higher risks for suicideamong adults. Stress appraisals and perceived stress mediated this association.
METHODOLOGY:
In this prospective study, 273 adults (mean age, 38 years; 48.4% men; 85% White) completed online questionnaires in two sessions.
Researchers assessed the potential associations between childhood trauma (including emotional/physical/sexual abuse and emotional/physical neglect) and outcomes in adulthood related to mental health, suicide risk factors, and stress.
Session 1 included the collection of data on demographics, history of childhood trauma, perceived social support, subjective socioeconomic status, and suicide-related experiences.
After 1 week, session 2 included the collection of data on daily stress appraisals; severity of depression and anxiety; and perceived stress, defeat, and entrapment.
Thank you @RapAdmin for posting these really cool studies. The early life exercise one is brilliant.
And yes, I’d also read news articles about the research into childhood trauma and how many negative effects carry on into adulthood. It did make me wonder how many people experience trauma, especially when parenting has generally been pretty bad for the last couple generations.
A new JAMA Network Open study found that from 2010–2023, children’s cereals crept up in sugar, salt, and fat, and slid down in protein and fiber [the study]. One bowl can now hit 45% of a child’s daily added sugar limit. Brands hide it behind “whole grain” claims and vitamin sprinkles. Our take: Big Cereal spends 27¢ of every $1 you spend on marketing… and just 4¢ on ingredients. After having my baby I decided to take Stanford’s free child nutrition course so I’d never get fooled by the box [the course]. Best lesson? Ignore the front. Read the label.
That’s what people want to eat though, or they’re probably A/B testing changes and seeing how sales change.
The McDonald’s CEO have said if people bought salads they would have it on the menu (at the same time they are advertising people to get to their establishment), basically he said the menu is darwinian, what works is what sticks on it.
Yes, absolutely. That’s how it works, but it’s not how it should work. This is where government should be stepping in and regulating this. I believe in personal freedom, but this is blatantly exploitative behaviour targeting children. Parents can only do so much. Kids have peer pressure. Other kids and parents give them stuff. The marketing is targeted towards kids, and the product is designed to be addictive. Governments need to step up, stop being so afraid of corporations, and protect their citizens. It’s also self-serving/self-preservation because this stuff is becoming a national crisis - you’ve got a huge number of chronically sick people, and a lot of that starts in childhood.
For example, 71% of the young adult population wouldn’t be eligible to serve in the military (Unfit to Serve | Physical Activity | CDC) This is actually becoming a national security issue too.
It’s a mess, but I don’t see why big pharma couldn’t come and clean it with GLP-1 agonists, it could lead to an arm’s race between Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Tech, but pharma has an upper hand as there’s a limit how much you can optimize with food rather than small molecules. Unless Big Food and Tech tackle it in a different way like a large scale information campaign, anti-GLP-1 agonists additives, etc. Tech is on a different evolution tree though than the target of GLP-1 agonists as far as I know.
Is it really that expensive though in Europe, feel like people will save money on fast food when they’re taking it as well. If people are using 1.5 mg wegovy a week.
But, to me, this is part of the problem. So there’s a competition between food/media/advertising industry vs the pharma industry. But what they’re competing over is who can profit the most from my money, and they’re using my health as the leverage.
So the food companies research how to make things tastier, more addictive, and spend a fortune on advertising it to our kids. Then, when we’re all fat and stupid, pharma will take more of your money to help you fix it and the medical industry will take your money to deal with all the chronic diseases.
It seems like a lose-lose to me. The fact there is an entire weight-loss industry is a bad sign, because it’s a solving a problem that shouldn’t even exist. The only winners are the few wealthy people controlling or who are major shareholders in those companies.
It’s not a lose-lose, it’s a lose-win. You lose by environment, pollution, etc, you win with good pharma. Either way in your optimal scenario, there’s a limit of what you can do with lifestyle, maybe 10-15 years of healthy life, so pharma is both necessary and good.
I have absolutely no problem with using pharma products (I take many!), and I think they’re hugely beneficial in many situations.
However, from the perspective of raising children with a longevity mindset, I believe the ideal situation is that they won’t ever actually need the GLP1RA in the first place.
@DeStrider and others… Check your kid’s blood pressure:
Higher blood pressure (BP) at age 7 years is associated with an increased risk for premature cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, according to a study published online Sept. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association to coincide with the American Heart Association Hypertension 2025 Scientific Sessions, held from Sept. 4 to 7 in Baltimore.
Alexa A. Freedman, Ph.D., from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues analyzed data from a prospective cohort of children born to women enrolled in the U.S. Collaborative Perinatal Project between 1959 and 1965 at 12 sites to examine the association between BP at age 7 years and CVD mortality.
Infection connections: Researchers are discovering that acute infections early in life, like Epstein-Barr virus, can lead to neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis in later years and are investigating how this happens.
A taste of health: A collection of stories about the food-health connection — from research into how our diet affects our physical and mental health to factoring nutrition into medical education and patient care.
“Cumulative social advantage is really about the depth and breadth of your social connections over a lifetime,” Ong said. “We looked at four key areas: the warmth and support you received from your parents growing up, how connected you feel to your community and neighborhood, your involvement in religious or faith-based communities, and the ongoing emotional support from friends and family.”
This definitely makes sense. But I also reckon a large part of it is how you handle stress. I see this in university students - some will rise to the challenge, and the stress is a motivating force. But other kinda get crushed under any sort of pressure.
Scientists studying tiny roundworms have uncovered how the secrets of a long life can be passed from parents to their offspring — without changing DNA. The discovery shows that when certain cellular structures called lysosomes change in ways that promote longevity, those benefits can travel from body cells to reproductive cells. This information is carried by histones, special proteins that help organize DNA, allowing the “memory” of those changes to be inherited.
Kids’ cereal is getting worse.