Researchers learned that disease isn’t hardwired into your DNA but is much more malleable, a result of complex interactions involving your DNA, your lifestyle, and your environment.

The truth is that around 90% of the signs of ageing and disease are caused by lifestyle (and the environment created by your lifestyle), not genes. Disease results from too much or too little of anything in life. Essentially, you have the power to reconfigure the way your DNA talks to your body, a process known as gene expression.

SAUNA RESET DNA

Sauna is a heat stressor, a form of hormesis that resets the body, including the DNA.

A sauna activates the longevity gene FOXO3, which turns on genes for stress resilience, production of disease-fighting antioxidants, maintenance of proteins (to keep muscles strong), DNA repair (prevents mutations) and tumour killing. Regular sessions in a sauna give the body a shock of heat, which appears to help reset its fine-tuning mechanisms, including DNA.

So, using a sauna is handy as we get older because it seems to boost exactly the genes that become less effective with age. In addition to turning on other important genes, FOXO3 helps you make something called ‘heat-shock proteins’.

These work to ensure proteins in your body are folded like a fitted sheet, not bunched up and wrinkled. Poorly folded proteins clump together and cause damage in the form of furred-up arteries, heart failure and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Heat-shock proteins also work to counteract ‘oxidative stress’ — the natural rusting process that happens to the body over time. Studies show when you make more FOXO3 (because you are genetically predisposed to do so or because you enjoy a regular session in the sauna), you triple your chance of living to 100. Even if you have a sauna only once every couple of months your heart will benefit.

The infrared sauna heats you from the inside out using infrared waves that penetrate about 5 cm deeper than Finnish saunas, allowing water molecules (about 70% of your body) to vibrate and raise your core body temperature so that you sweat.

If you are not yet convinced that you need to schedule in the sauna this week to sweat away your toxins, here are other proven benefits:

• Improves athletic performance
• Enhances heart rate variability and balance in the nervous system
• Increases insulin sensitivity (more glucose receptors on muscle cells), resulting in a striking reduction of 1% unit in the glycated haemoglobin, fasting glucose, and body weight in people with diabetes.
• Generates “runner’s high” and boosts growth hormone and testosterone.
• May correct your lipids.
• Increases capacity for stress tolerance by reducing the sympathetic nervous system, as measured by reduced adrenaline and cortisol in just 7 days.

Source: Younger by Sara Gottfried, M.D