Applying Michael Greger’s Inheritance Theory to Linguistics

© Mint Achanaiyakul — Founder of Crimson Cat Events & Psychomedia

Language nourishes the mind the way food nourishes the body. Applying Michael Greger’s Inheritance Theory to Linguistics connects diet, dialogue, and DNA — revealing how words, like nutrients, shape human biology across generations.

1. From Biological to Linguistic Inheritance

Michael Greger’s nutritional science revolutionized how we think about disease. He showed that most “hereditary” illnesses are not genetically predetermined — they are behaviorally inherited through diet and habit. Families pass down recipes, not mutations. We don’t inherit cancer; we inherit cuisine.

This principle — that patterns of behavior, not DNA, determine destiny — can be applied beyond food. Just as culinary culture transmits health or illness through the body, linguistic culture transmits psychological health or illness through the mind. The result is what I call Linguigenetic Inheritance: the transmission of emotional and cognitive conditioning through words, tone, and narrative structure.

2. The Linguistic Diet

Language is humanity’s most powerful form of nourishment. Every phrase we consume feeds or poisons the psyche. Like food, words contain informational nutrients — proteins of truth, sugars of pleasure, toxins of fear, fats of repetition. A “linguistic diet” rich in compassion, honesty, and coherence builds mental health. One saturated in guilt, shame, and manipulation degrades it.

In families, linguistic habits are served daily. Phrases like “don’t cry,” “be strong,” or “you’re not good enough” are as habitual as the dishes on the table. Over years, these verbal calories alter our neural chemistry just as diets alter cellular metabolism. Greger’s logic of nutritional inheritance becomes a blueprint for understanding emotional inheritance.

3. The Epigenetics of Expression

Greger’s work emphasized that lifestyle choices — not static genes — determine which genes express themselves. In LEIT (the Linguigenetic Inheritance Theory), language functions the same way. Certain words activate specific emotional circuits, which then trigger neurochemical cascades, stress hormones, and eventually epigenetic responses.

Over time, repeated linguistic stress becomes encoded in physiology. Trauma becomes transcription. Just as Greger showed that diet can switch genes on or off, LEIT shows that words can do the same. The linguistic environment — like the dietary one — is an epigenetic environment.

4. From Food Systems to Information Systems

In Greger’s world, the industrial food system perpetuates illness for profit. In Psychomedia, the industrial information system does the same. Both industries manipulate appetite — one for sugar and fat, the other for attention and validation. Both exploit addiction circuitry. Both transform human needs into markets.

The result is the same pattern of learned self-harm: we crave what kills us because it feels familiar. Taste and meaning follow the same law — Conditioned Preference over Biological Truth. Just as processed food hijacks the tongue, processed language hijacks the mind. Healing, therefore, requires not only a plant-based diet, but a truth-based dialogue.

5. Healing Through Linguistic Nutrition

Greger’s cure for chronic disease begins with re-education: teaching people to unlearn the diet of disease and rediscover the taste of health. Linguistic healing works the same way. To reprogram inherited trauma, one must first re-educate the ear and tongue — learning to speak and listen in alignment with emotional truth.

This is the mission of the Language of Liberation (LoL): to teach humanity to eat linguistically clean again. To replace processed narratives with organic truth. To feed consciousness instead of conditioning.

▲ The Language of Liberation 

Psychomedia is the study of how media programs the mind — and how awareness, creativity, and truth can set it free.