What do cancer, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, lupus, celiac sprue, depression, cystic fibrosis, and dozens of other conditions have in common? First, they all express genetic predispositions that can be traced within family genealogies. Second, they usually can be positively affected by nutritional measures—measures that are based on an understanding of who is at risk, what dietary and environmental factors are likely to trigger the conditions, and what nutrients can help to fortify the immune system against the onset of disease.

Trace Your Genes to Health offers hope to millions, first through its comprehensive approach to understanding medical genetics, and then through dietary and nutritional protocols that can either prevent common conditions from occurring, or successfully manage them once they appear.

Chris Reading, MD, received his medical degree from Sydney University. First specializing in organic psychiatry, the author

subsequently became interested in researching vitamin and mineral deficiencies, metabolic disorders, food allergies, and the application of genetics to neuropsychiatric disorders.

Introduction

Part One: How Family Trees are Helping People

1. How a Family Tree Solved a Mystery
2. A Crash Course in Genetics
3. When the Diagnosis is in Doubt, Consult Your Family Tree
4. How Your Family Tree Can Suggest the Right Treatment
5. Foretell the Future With Your Family Tree

Part Two: Your Family Tree: How to Compile It and What It Can Tell You

6. How to Draw Up Your Family Tree
7. From Colds to Cancer: New Protection from Your Family Tree
8. Fight Dementia with Your Family Tree
9. Your Family Tree: A New Ally Against Heart Attacks and Strokes
10. Compile Your Family Tree and Stay Sane
11. How to Present Your Family Tree to Your Doctor

Part Three: The Big Mysteries: New Clues from Family Trees
12. Down’s Syndrome and Other Illnesses: Some Significant Family Trees
13. Cures for Incurable Illnesses, Through Family Trees?
14. Help for the Homeless and Hope for the Helpless

General Appendixes
A. Illness, categorized for family trees
B. Symptoms and signs
C. Congenital Defects
D. Phenotype/physical characteristics
E. Sociological/epidemiological data
F. Questionnaire

Dietary Recommendation Appendices
G. Keep smiling—help for your mood, etc.
H. Stay alive—help for the vessels to your brain and heart
I. Don’t seize up—help for your joints and painful limbs
J. Don’t let lupus get you
K. Keep smiling from the wheelchair—Synovitis/rheumatoid arthritis

References
Index

For some years now, I have begun my consultations with new patients by making an unusual request. I have asked them to compile their family trees.

No, I’m not a frustrated genealogist. And I’m not trying to find out whether my patients are descended from royalty, common folk or convicts. My purpose is most definitely a medical one—because I have discovered that a family tree can do very much more for you than just tell you who you are and where you’ve sprung from. It can be a major breakthrough to better health for you and your family. In many cases, it can quite literally make the difference between life and death.

To achieve such a startling result, of course, it has to be a special sort of family tree. It has to contain as much medical information as possible about every person on it. So when I ask people for a family tree, they have to set about speaking to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, to find out as much as they can about the illnesses, aches, pains, symptoms, causes of death, etc., suffered by their relatives and forbearers.

When they can put that kind of data on a family tree, the results are, in most cases, little short of astounding. Such a family tree can reveal the factors that are causing a wide variety of illnesses in your family, and show you how to overcome them. What’s more, it can predict who in your family is at risk for which serious illnesses in the future—and do so in time for life-saving preventative action to be taken.

Perhaps most exciting of all, the study of medically detailed family trees can, I believe, throw new light on the causes of such tragic diseases and conditions as cancer, heart attacks, strokes, schizophrenia, dementia, Down’s Syndrome, muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis. It can even lead to your getting fewer coughs, colds and bouts of flu.

Now, I’m sure that all this sounds, to put it mildly, somewhat controversial. And it is. There are doctors who’ll dismiss it as a load of old cod—just as there are doctors who automatically label any form of alternative therapy as quackery. But there are many more doctors around the world who are seeing real and thrilling possibilities in the family tree approach to health. After all, as you’ll discover from this book, it’s not just a happy little theory I’ve dreamed up. It’s an observation solidly based on the study of actual family trees—more than 2,000 of them, at the time of this writing.

When you’ve seen some of the evidence, I think you’ll share my excitement at the healing potential that family trees contain. In this book, we’ll see that potential fully realized in many sick peoples’ lives. We’ll see how their breakthrough to health came from their family trees—sometimes through diagnosis, sometimes through an indicated line of treatment, sometimes through prediction and prevention.

Invariably, the family tree breakthrough came after all conventional medical approaches had failed. After we’ve digested those thought-provoking cases, I’ll show you how to compile your own family tree and fill it with relevant medical information. And to help you interpret it, we’ll brush up on some basic genetics.

Then we’ll discuss the practical part: how to use your family tree to reduce your risks for a whole host of illnesses, ranging from colds to cancer, heart disease, strokes, psychoses (mental illness) and dementia. We’ll also look at the best way of presenting your family tree to your doctor, to help him or her do a far better job of caring for you and your family.

Lastly, we’ll examine some exciting family trees that might well be shedding new light on supposedly incurable illnesses. And all the way through, we’ll see some fascinating family-tree-based evidence suggesting that allergies, especially to grains, may be the basis of many more illnesses than has previously been realized.

We’ll see, too, how family trees bring together a lot of the work now being done in various branches of alternative medicine—how they integrate genetics, nutrition, allergies and environmental factors into a unified approach to health and wholeness.

Many of the family trees in this book have real and urgent implications for medical research. When you compile yours, you may well suspect that it does, too. If so, you’ll find an address in Chapter 11 where you can send it—so that, ultimately, thousands of other people may benefit from it as well.

Tracing the family tree has become an absorbing hobby, with a vast number of adherents. Now the family tree approach to health gives it significance beyond the thrill of discovering the family’s origins. It turns it into an intensely practical venture that not only gives you a sense of identity, but the best possible chance for healing now and ensuring a healthier future.

It could, in fact, save your life.

How did I stumble upon the family tree approach to health? Almost by accident.

About four years ago, a lady we’ll call Joanne Woodbridge came to see me. Her problem was manic-depressive illness, and it wasn’t hers alone. No fewer than five generations of her family had suffered from it, starting with her great-grandfather and running through to her nephew.

That just had to be more than coincidence. What on earth, I wondered, could produce such a picture? Was there anything else running in her family that might cause it? Suddenly, I thought of asking her to draw up a family tree. She did so. And the mystery was solved.

What did we discover in the Woodbridge family tree? You’ll find out in Chapter 4.

Two results flowed from the solution to the Woodbridge mystery. Joanne and her relatives were freed from manic-depressive illness. And I was launched into the investigation of a powerful new tool for diagnosis, treatment and prevention: the family tree.

Since writing the first edition of this book, I have studied many thousands more health family trees. There have been new and exciting developments confirming what I predicted in 1984. For instance, it is now an established fact that cancer cells can and do have receptors not only for hormones in certain cancers but also for food fractions (lectins) literally “feeding the cancer,” and these should certainly be removed from the diet of patients with cancer.

This new updated edition discusses some of these new developments in the likely causation of Multiple Sclerosis, Motor Neuron disease, cancer, coronary artery disease, and arthritis such as osteoarthritis, SLE (lupus), scleroderma, Sjogren’s Syndrome, synovitis/rheumatoid arthritis, etc.

It also includes additional new appendices listing tests that can be done to help your family doctor to diagnose the causes of hereditary illnesses, thus helping save the lives of your relatives and friends as well as yourself. These appendices contain information useful both to yourself, your relatives, and your family doctor and should open up whole new avenues of research into the better diagnosis and treatment of many serious chronic and degenerative diseases, thereby offering new hope for prevention and correction.

Now, read on to see what I’ve discovered in family trees during the past 20 years—and to see what your family tree can do for you.