Every year, 98 percent of you is totally replaced

Question: What do your cells and avocados have in common? Answer: The way they ripen depends on the environment.

I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but I was inspired to write about cells and avocados because of an encounter I had in the supermarket last week. I was standing at the avocado bin, staring at the vibrant green, unripe avocados, now and then picking one up to try a squeeze, even though I knew it would be rock hard.

A woman approached me and said, “Put it in a brown paper bag with a banana, and it will ripen just right.”

Now, every green avocado I’d brought home to ripen in my kitchen had turned rotten, not ripe. But I decided to try her method, and when I got home I put two avocados and two bananas in a brown paper bag. It worked! Two days later, the avocados had turned dark brown. I caressed each one — they were firm yet slightly yielding. Clearly, it was the environment that made the difference.

That’s when Dr. Bruce Lipton popped into my mind. In his books, “Biology of Belief” and “Spontaneous Evolution,” this renowned cell biologist tells us that the environment determines what happens to our cells. How our cells change as we age is not pre-determined by our genes, as we’ve heard. The environment will determine if the cells ripen beautifully, or well… sort of rot as our body gets older.

Actually your body is no more than seven years old at the most. In less than one year, 98 percent of your body’s cells are replaced with new ones. There are approximately 50 trillion cells in your body and they are busy! Science has proven that you make new skin about once a month, a new intestinal lining every five to 30 days, a new skeleton every three to eight months. And a year from now, you won’t even have the same brain.

Since it’s a new brain and new body, then why do you remember incidents from many years ago, and why is that scar from childhood still on your forehead? Although we don’t yet have a definitive answer, one theory — the one that feels right to me — is that it’s cellular memory.

At the subatomic level, you are made up of energy and information, and all your conscious and unconscious behavioral patterns are stored in your cellular memory. You perceive and behave in a certain way based on the thoughts, feelings and beliefs programmed into your cellular memory.

This is good news. When you realize that your body is constantly renewing itself and that every year, 98 percent of you is totally replaced, you have to conclude that you have options. You can choose to change your cellular memory and replace old cells with new healthier, stronger cells. The key is to change the environment of your cells. The environment creating the cellular memory is produced by your perceptions, beliefs and actions — things you can change.

Easier said than done, of course. It’s those unconscious beliefs — the ones that operate below the radar of our conscious mind — that heavily influence our perceptions. But we have to start somewhere, and that’s with the patterns that are conscious.

Once we are aware, we can make conscious decisions about how to react and what to do. Most of the time we react to stimuli without consciously choosing how we want to react. Our emotions take over, often based on past experience and behavioral patterns, rather than on what’s happening at the moment. That’s why our body doesn’t seem fresh and new, even though a year has gone by and 98 percent of our cells have been replaced. The old patterns are still there.

However, we can become more aware of what we’re feeling, thinking and saying, of what our body is telling us. We can choose what foods and drinks we put into our body; the exercise (or lack thereof) and sensible sun we get; how much fresh air, playfulness and stress-free time we allow ourselves.

Awareness and positive choices create a good environment for our cells — just as a brown paper bag and bananas create the right conditions for beautifully ripened avocados.