This is a new segment where we reflect and debrief on previous episodes. We had a fantastic response to episode 1, with Dr Kara Fitzgerald. We covered a lot of ground in that episode and a lot of it was quite in-depth into the science, so unsurprisingly there were quite a few questions!

We answer these in this episode and share our own experiences and reflections on the Younger You programme. 

This is a helpful analogy to understand epigenetics and DNA methylation!

• Think of your laptop or device you are reading this on. You could have a really old laptop, but as long as you keep your software up to date and “clean” it runs ok. OR you could have a brand new laptop or phone – but if you run old software on it, or junk it up with badly saved and ordered files/apps – it will slow down and not work so well:
• Think of your genes as the hardware
• Epigenetics is the software that runs on it.
• With well-maintained software, you can keep running an old computer, but if you don’t maintain the software, if it gets full of bugs, if there is too much memory used up on waste….the computer runs slowly and badly
• DNA methylation: is one type of software and perhaps the most important one. We can think of it as the operating system.
• Your genes can’t change, but the way it is expressed can, an expression that is often used – your genes are a loaded gun, but it's your environment that pulls the trigger.