Stuff You Should Know - Can your grandfather's diet shorten your life?

Episode Date: June 10, 2010

Epigenetics is a fascinating field of genetics that studies how the epigenome and environmental, nutritional and social factors affect gene expression. Josh and Chuck explain how epigenetics works in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey everybody, this episode is supported by Teamistry, an original podcast from Atlassian, makers of collaboration software like Jira, Trello, and Confluence. That's right, and the Teamistry podcast has a brand new season out called Making an Impossible Airplane, the untold story of the Concorde, that supersonic passenger jet that flew faster than the speed of sound.

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untold story of Concorde. Use to Teamistry for their support. If you own a business, it's been quite a bumpy ride from pandemic to inflation, and you could use a break. That's right, but listen to this. If your business has five or more employees and managed to survive COVID, you could be eligible to receive a payroll tax rebate of up to $26,000 per employee. And this isn't alone, it's a refund of your taxes.

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So find out if your business qualifies. Go to GetRefunds.com, click on qualify me, and answer a few questions. This payroll tax refund is only available for a limited time. Don't miss out. Go to GetRefunds.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

And I'm Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And I'm Josh Clark. And that makes this stuff you should know, right? Yeah. I hope so. This is our podcast. We've been doing it for a while. And are you welcoming new listeners?

Yeah, here's another one. Okay. All right. And actually, I'm pretty excited about this one. I've been wanting to do this one for a while. You've been bugging me. Epigenetics, Chuck. Let's do it.

Let's do it. The cutting edge of research, of human, of our understanding of life, not just human, of all life. My mind was blown. It's a pretty big deal. Yeah, real big deal. So, Chuck, you've heard of the genetic revolution, Charles Darwin. He had a long beard.

Yeah. He loved sea turtles. Sure. That kind of thing. He used to vacation in the Galapagos, right? Uh-huh. He wrote on the origin of the species. And it was a pretty groundbreaking book.

I would say so. It was basically what he came up with was we are driven by our genes, right? We have genetic code and our DNA, and that makes us redheaded. It makes us timid. Yeah. It makes us courageous. Prone to cancer. Right.

Exactly. And it makes us thick-tongued, right? Sometimes. Yeah. And we are slaves to these genes, right? There's nothing we can do to alter and we get them from our parents, but if we find out that over time, being thick-tongued is, say, advantageous to human survival, we're all going to talk like me, but millions of years from now, at least hundreds of thousands.

Makes for good podcasting. It definitely does. And I just look for it in the future. Yes. We're running around with robot bodies. Right. There is another guy, and actually Darwin, just to show off once, came across a type of orchid, right?

The moon orchid, I believe is what it's called. Okay. And it had a very, very deep, I guess, pistol or steam, and I can never keep those things apart. And the nectar was down in there. And he looked at that flower and said, you know what, there is an organism out there, probably a flying organism that has a proboscis that fits perfectly into that flower. Was it the hummingbird?

It was a hawk moth. And sure enough, a few years later, some point in time later, they discovered the hawk moth and it was pretty much literally made to fit, right? There's another guy named Jean Baptiste LeMarc, who I know you've heard of as well, right? And all his LeMarcian stuff. Right. He was working about 60 to 80, he was working about 60 or so years before Darwin. Right.

He had his own ideas based on giraffes, right? Yes. He said that giraffe's necks grew to reach the food, but it was just over the course of a few generations, right? Right. And that kind of flies in the face of Darwin, right, who said it takes hundreds of thousands of years. With this stuff called epigenetics that we're about to talk about today, suddenly people

are starting to go back and look at LeMarc, who was kind of dismissed as a quack. And say, you know what, LeMarc may have been right in this one. Yeah. Prepare for your minds to be melted, is all I have to say. Let's talk about epigenetics, Chuck. Okay. And go. Josh, let's first talk about the genome.

Right. I heard a computer reference analogy that I thought was pretty spot on. If you think of the genome as computer hardware, then the epigenome would be the software that tells the computer what to do and when to do it, but in this case, the epigenome tells your cells what to do, what kind of cells to be, when to activate or deactivate. So like, I guess every cell or yeah, the DNA in every cell in the human body has the exact same DNA. Yes.

You have like half of your mothers and half of your fathers and it comes together and gives you your DNA. Right. Right. And if you look at the DNA in every cell from a, the kind of cell that makes up your fingernail, what would that be, a keratinocyte? Sure. Okay.

To a sperm cell. Right. Very, very specialized type of cell. Yeah. They all have the same DNA. They have the same genes in there, but what makes them different and what makes a keratinocyte and a sperm cell, those things are the tags on those genes. So some are turned off, some are turned on and in a specific combination you have either

a keratinocyte or a sperm cell or a neuron or a cell that makes up your eyeball, all of that stuff. Yeah. So it's essentially, it's a chemical tag that literally changes the physical structure of your genome. Right. It's going to bind tightly, let's say, to an inactive gene and make it unreadable or it'll stretch out an active gene and make it really accessible.

Right. Physically changing it. And epigenetics means above the genome because these tags, they're called methyl tags, which is what, one, hydrogen and two, carbon? Carbon and hydrogen bundles, yeah. Okay. So it's a methyl group, yeah. It's a really simple compound, but they attach to the gene at a place where other proteins

or enzymes normally would attach to activate it. So basically what they do is block the gene from being activated and they consilence them. Yeah. So it's like a light switch. Literally, you can turn off some genes and turn off others. Right. And the honeybee, actually, is a pretty good demonstration of this. Did you read about honeybees?

No. Right. So you've got a worker bee, right? Uh-huh. Which is a sterile, kind of mindless, dumb bee that just does what it's supposed to do. No offense to any worker bees out there. Right. Agreed.

Hey, I'm all down with Mayday. Yeah. All right. And with a queen bee, you have this, first of all, she can reproduce. She goes and kills other rival queens. Right. She does kind of all sorts of other stuff that a worker bee isn't capable of doing. And what they found was a queen bee larvae are raised in this royal jelly, right?

Right. Which worker bees secrete from their heads. Uh-huh. This is nutrient-rich jelly. So the larva grows in it and what they found, yeah, it sounds kind of good, doesn't it? It does. Just because of the jelly part. Yeah, of course.

What they found was that the royal jelly adds a methyl tag to the queen bee larva's DNMT3 gene. Okay. So it's literally the on-off switch. If this gene is on, it goes to the default worker bee, right? Right. If it's off, then all the genes that make a queen bee, a queen bee, are able to be turned on.

Crazy. Isn't it? Yeah. So epigenetics happens in bees as well. Yeah. And mice. Yes, they've done a lot of studies with mice, obviously, in the agudy gene in these mice. And they experiment with these mice, basically turning on and off the epigenetic switch.

So an un-methylated gene would affect the mouse's size and weight and then coat color. Right. It makes them real fat and like yellow. Yeah. Instead of skinny and brown. Have you seen one of these things? Yeah. They're huge.

Yeah. They should all be named Wilbur. The cool thing is though, they showed the difference between the skinny brown one and the fat yellow one. But then they also did experiments where they did half and half, like turned on half of them and turned off half of them. And they literally showed them in a sequence. I don't know if you saw this picture, but they went from fat yellow to skinny brown

and in between they got thinner and with spotted coats along the way. Crazy. Like yellow and brown spotted coats? Yeah. Weird. It's that specific. Yeah. So they have found that they can manipulate these, what is it, agouti?

Yeah. The agouti. The agouti gene and these mice that I guess are bred specifically for this gene to be easily observed or something. Yeah. Manipulate it too. It's through diet. Right.

So they've actually taken agouti gene mice, mothers who are pregnant, fed them a bunch of B vitamins in their diet. Yeah. And soy, right? Yeah. It's an easy grab for B vitamins, I believe, right? Fed these pregnant, big, fat, yellow, ugly mice, B vitamins, and their kids came out that healthy, skinny, brown, right?

They had identical moms with the same, like agouti gene, same upbringing, same everything. Just fed them the normal mouse diet without vitamin B and they had the big, fat, yellow kids. Right. So diet is a really big factor in epigenetic changes. Let's think about this for a second, okay? What Chuck and I are talking about right now is that science has found evidence that you can change the genetics of your children by eating B vitamins or by being abused when

you're pregnant. Well, see, that's what gets me. Some of the diet like makes a little bit of sense, but the fact that an environmental stimulus placed on your mom or even your grandparents can affect your children or grandchildren, something you didn't even experience at all. Right. It's kind of unfair. And actually I have to tell you the more I study this, the more worried I am for my

own child or children. Like really, what they're finding is the decisions that you make, especially at a youngest age, are going to affect several generations because what you're doing is adding methyl tags. What we're talking about is pretty much the definitive answer to the nature and nurture debate. And what we're finding is both. You have nature, which is your genes, and they're very much active, but you have nurture, which is the environment, whether it's diet, whether it's stress, whether it's lack of

exercise, your body responds to these changes by saying, okay, all right, well then we need to, if you're going to lay around and be fat, then we have to, we have to deactivate this gene. We'll punish your grandkids. And your grandkids who are trying to be normal are going to be fat little kids that live, you know, shortened lives. And this is where it came from, right? Chuck, wasn't there, there was a study in Sweden that kind of broke this ground?

Yeah. Didn't they find that it was a very isolated group of people in Sweden? And at the time they were very isolated at least where they couldn't get help from the outside world very, very readily. And I think they studied that the famine, isn't that right? Well, they, they, how the famine affected the generations afterward. Well, they had like feast or famine, it was like an agricultural town and they looked at these agricultural records that this town kept for some reason, like really detailed

records for throughout the 19th century. And some years there was nothing in people's starved death. The next year there was everything and they found that the grandparents, the grandfathers who feasted and starved within a year of one another, their grandkids lived an average of 32 years shorter or less than the grandkids of the same people who didn't have that kind of feast or famine experience in the same town, around with the same socioeconomic conditions. So yeah, that's three generations right there, right? Yeah.

Did you hear about the Angelman syndrome and the Pradavati syndrome? No, don't lean on me. They, I saw, actually it was a PBS documentary, the, it's called The Ghost in Your Jeans. Did you watch that? Uh-uh. It's on YouTube, it's in five, I think five or six sections of ten minutes apiece, it's a full show, mind-blowing. They found that there's these two different syndromes and I won't get too deep into what

they are, but Angelman syndrome and Pradavilli syndrome is what it's called. And they found- This sounds Italian. Pradavilli. Yeah. Sorry. Dropped the ball there. Basically what causes each of these is a missing piece of DNA and it can cause two different

disease, well they found it and caused these two different diseases that are completely unrelated depending on which parent it came from. Really? Which missing part of the gene it came from. So basically it's as if the gene knew where it was coming from, like gene imprinting. The gene had a memory that, oh, it came from the father so you're going to have Angelman syndrome or it came from the mother so you're going to have Pradavilli. Right.

And this is a relatively recent discovery. We were talking about them looking at agricultural records of the 19th century in Sweden. That was a doctor named Dr. Lars Olof Bygren, but he was working in the mid-80s and he didn't really start to lay the foundation of epigenetic research until the mid to late 90s. So this is a very new field. But what they're finding and what Chuck was just saying is that your parents can pass on these epigenetic changes that happen within themselves and your grandparents can too. This isn't supposed to happen.

What happens when an egg and a sperm meet and it's like, hey, here's my DNA, here's my DNA and they get together. There is actually a process where these specialized cells go through and basically clean the DNA of methyl tags, but they found that not all methyl tags get cleaned off. So diet can affect certain genes. These methyl tags can be passed down and with abuse as well. Have you heard about PTSD? Yeah.

Passed down? Yeah. They covered that in that special as well. They did a test with pregnant women who were in New York the time of 9-11. Did you hear about this one? Yeah. This is a really recent study, right? Yeah.

And they basically found that pregnant women, the experience that were pregnant at the time the towers came down and experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, they found that their babies had lower levels of cortisol, just like their moms did, which helps you deal with stress, helps you how you deal with stress. So these little babies inherited, basically inherited post-traumatic stress disorder from their mothers in the womb, in utero. And cortisol is a hormone and it would be produced by a gene or expressed by a gene and how much or how little is expressed depends on whether that gene is silenced, whether

it's altered. And that alteration comes from methyl tags, which can be passed down. So PTSD can be passed down, right? Yeah. And they're speculating now that, and this is obviously speculation because these kids are still young, but they're speculating that it's going to happen to their kids as well. And that's going to be the real gold nugget. Right.

And they do go away eventually, they think, methyl tags. Well they have in like fruit flies. With fruit flies, it's like 400 generations. But fruit flies have a generation every like five minutes, you know? And then I think with mice, it's like 40 generations or something like that. And with humans, they expect it to be somewhere around three, maybe a few more. Oh, really? And then, yeah, because what's happening is our bodies are responding to environmental

cues to change, and then after those environmental cues go away, the body's like, oh, okay, well we can go back to normal now and get rid of this methyl tag. So we've got nutrition, right? You are what you eat, you are what your parents ate, you are what your grandparents ate. And then there's things like stress. Yeah. Parenting. Right.

And yeah, I think they found with mice mothers that didn't nurture their kids or nurse their kids. They raised kids, produced kids that were kind of jumpy, and I guess had the mice version of PTSD, and they theorized that the body had undergone an epigenetic change to prepare these mice for a stressful life, a stressful life that they need to be on guard, you know? Right. Exactly. Which, if you think about it, Chuck, I wrote a blog post about this, it's possible what

we call PTSD is an epigenetic change that says you live in an environment where you can't just, you can't relax. Right. So we're going to make you jumpy. You're going to be edgy and you're going to have flashbacks so that you're always, you know, on point. And it's the result of an epigenetic change from a stressful event. Yeah.

And the same, I think you mentioned abuse earlier. They found that one out of every five suicide victims was a victim of child abuse as well. Yeah. So they're still kind of theorizing now, but they think there's a positive correlation there between, like you said, stressful upbringing and an epigenetic change. Right. So what else? Well, I mean, we're going to talk about the good, what could be good about this potentially?

Yes. Because it could be really good. We're talking about, and it's still early going, we're talking about potentially curing things like Alzheimer's, cancer, mental disorders, multiple sclerosis. You name it. Thick-tonguedness. Yeah. And potentially being able to cure this because you can't, they found that it's really hard

to fix like a cancer cell. And so what the doctors are thinking now is it's really hard to fix a cancer cell, but it's a whole lot easier to turn these epigenetic switches on and off, which may in turn help defeat cancer. Right. Like you want to get a tumor suppressing gene going. Yeah. And then, but you want to get a cellular growth gene turned down a little bit.

Right. Like that. And that you just cured cancer. Yeah. This one doctor put it like this. He said that it's almost like a diplomacy instead of a war. Like you'll go tell the cell, hey, you're a good human cell. You don't need to behave this way.

You should not be behaving this way. Yes. It's called as a cytidine. That's good to me. As a cytidine, it was originally marketed for something else entirely, probably Alzheimer's, everything was, and then they come up with, they figure out that it's actually turning down these growth cells or these growth genes and they say, hey, how about we use this for leukemia?

Right. But a boom, but a bang. There you go. Yeah. People all of a sudden in remission where they hadn't been before. Right. So it's pretty startling. Yeah.

It's still in the early stages though. Right. The other thing too is you can, it's easier to fix the epigenome. That's the good news as we move forward. It's also a lot easier to mess up your own epigenome, diet and smoking and things like that. Yeah. There was a guy who is studying Sweden hooked up with a guy who proposed the entire field

of epigenetics in 1996 and then they got together with another researcher who was running that, you remember the Framinghamton? Farmington. Is it? Farmingham. Framingham. Framingham. The Massachusetts study, the heart study.

Yeah. It's like 40 years long or something. Right. Remember Great Britain's version of it? It's like the Avon longitudinal study. Yeah. Okay. So this guy had a friend who had access to these files and what they found was that

166 fathers in the study started smoking around age 11 and so they started looking at these guys and found that their kids were shorter and fatter and just generally unhealthier than other kids even controlling for other factors as well. Wow. So smoking is a problem. Drugs are a problem. Cocaine addicted mice pass memory problems on to three generations of their offspring. Yeah.

And that cocaine especially triggers epigenic changes that affect like hundreds of genes at the same time. Yeah. This is because memory is just such a complex process. Yeah. So don't do cocaine. No. And don't smoke.

It's just a bad idea, especially at a young age. And Chuck, there's a project underway, you don't remember the human genome project completed in March of 2000. Yeah. Which is now that they're kind of like pfft. Exactly. Did you read this time article? No.

At the end of it, the author is talking about the epigenome project. That's the big daddy. Right. And he was saying that the human epigenome project is going to make the human genome project look like the homework that 16th century school kids did on their abacuses. So think about this. What they found in the human genome project is 27,000 genes that were mapped, right? Right.

It's just fiddling with these combinations, increases the map that needs to be created exponentially. Right. Like Domino's Pizza has 27 ingredients that produces, they do, I won't count it, it produces 88 million different combinations from 27. Wow. Imagine 27,000 ingredients. How many different combinations does that produce?

Sure. This is the scope of the human epigenome project that's underway now. Wow. What about pizza hut with all their stuff crust and eat it backwards and the ingredients are underneath your pizza? Probably even more. Stuff. Yeah, but I think Domino's has more pizza because they've got like the Philly cheesesteak

one and they have like the cheeseburger, the bacon cheeseburger, which is really good. They just put it sandwiched. Yeah, they do like the Reuben sandwich pizza. That would be very good. That would be good. Yeah. So epigenetics is changing everything. I think at its core, it's going to, it's going to point out that all of our understanding

of medicine is just an odd way of describing an epigenetic change. Yeah. You know, like psychology, psychiatry, I predict that our future and complete understanding of humanity is going to be a combination of sociology and epigenetics. So we thought we were on to something with mirror neurons, but forget what we said. Yeah. Just kidding, actually. Yeah, I think that you could probably explain that epigenetically and with sociology as

well. Have you heard of this guy, Dr. Bruce Lipton? No. He is, he's got a documentary out called the living matrix. And at first I was reading and I was like, wow, this guy's really on to something. But then I started reading other people saying, this guy's a quack. Oh yeah. Yeah.

He basically, he's a big epigenetics guy, but he thinks that your brain can essentially change your genetic expression by manipulating the epigenome. It's concentrating. He thinks the placebo effect could potentially be explained by this and like spontaneous remission and cancer. Spontaneous combustion. Spontaneous remission, obviously, is when you go into remission with no known cause. Right.

Not from, you know, any treatment. Right. And he says, this is explained because you're, you have a profound change in your perception of your life and what life is all about. And that can potentially alter the epigenome. Well, you could also make a case that this guy, what this guy is talking about is decreasing stress, which stresses wreaks havoc on us and could create methyl tags and alter gene expression.

So maybe he's just using a quacky way of describing, lowering your own stress levels by increasing self-confidence. Yes. Interesting. When you see these people though and you watch a YouTube video and you think, wow, my gosh, that's the secret to the future. Right. And you see these other people go, that guy is such a quack.

Yeah. But at the same time, you could, you could say, well, maybe those other people are unimaginative. Yeah. Good point. Hey, everybody, this episode is supported by Team History, an original podcast from Atlassian, makers of collaboration software like Jira, Trello, and Confluence. That's right. And the Team History podcast has a brand new season out called Making an Impossible Airplane,

the untold story of the Concorde, that supersonic passenger jet that flew faster than the speed of sound. A plane so fast, you could fly from New York to Paris in half the time it takes today. That's right. Host Nostron Tavakoli-Farr and lead producer Pedro Mendes traveled to the UK and France to interview the engineers who actually built the Concorde. In six parts, Team History does a deep dive into this phenomenal airplane that was an engineering marvel, a pop culture icon, a target of Soviet espionage, and a political

balancing act between two countries. And it answers one big question. Why did Concorde disappear from the skies forever? Search for Team History in your podcast player to hear Making an Impossible Airplane, the untold story of Concorde. Thanks to Team History for their support. If you own a business, it's been quite a bumpy ride from pandemic to inflation and you could use a break.

That's right. But listen to this. If your business has five or more employees and managed to survive COVID, you could be eligible to receive a payroll tax rebate of up to $26,000 per employee. And this isn't alone. It's a refund of your taxes. Yep. The challenge is getting your hands on it.

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Go to GetRefunds.com, click on qualify me, and answer a few questions. This payroll tax refund is only available for a limited time. To miss out, go to GetRefunds.com. So if you want to learn more about epigenetics, I strongly recommend the University of Utah's website. Have you been on it, Chuck? Yeah. Why didn't you recommend that to me?

It did. Did you see it? I don't think so. I did. I did. Oh, there's like a month ago when we... Yeah. Yeah.

You can turn up Gene, expression, turn it down. There's like a lot of foods that you should eat if you want to alter yourself epigenetically, especially if you're pregnant. Or go to YouTube and watch The Ghost in Your Jeans from PBS. It is literally mind-blowing. Well, not literally. People obviously literally. It's figuratively mind-blowing.

You might just explode. Talk about changing your genetic expression. And if you want to read some very beautiful prose on epigenetics, shock full of flight simulator references, read How Epigenetics Works by typing epigenetics in the handysearchbar at HowStuffWorks.com, which means it's time for Listener Mail. Yes, indeed, Josh. Josh, you remember Sarah, the amazing 11-year-old fan? It's not 11 anymore.

Who captured our hearts when she first emailed early on in the days of podcasting? Yes, I do. Like she was one of the first fans, actually. Yeah. The amazing 11-year-old fan is now Sarah, the amazing 13-year-old fan. Gosh. I know. I feel so old now.

We've been doing this a while. Well, yeah. And we should keep, like once a year, we should update people on Sarah's age. And then when she grads, if we're still doing this in five years, when she graduates college, we should go like, or high school. Yeah. We should go to her graduation or something. We should give the commencement speech.

We should. I call valedictorian. Well, yeah. And the principal would be like, who are you guys? Can we get security in here? We'll say, I'm the valedictorian. He's a salutatorian. What do you mean?

So this comes from Sarah. She checks someone this from time to time, and she's still just as cute at 13. She's not all bratty now that she's a teenager. Hello to some of my favorite people. Today I earned some strange looks from people about my knowledge of Legos, or Lego bricks. I also tried making a sphere of Lego, but I couldn't figure it out. Also today's my birthday. I'm really excited that I'm finally a teen, Yahoo.

Do you remember what I asked for, and what she asked for? She's got a blog now, and she asked if one of us could comment on her blog, and I went to her blog and commented, and her blog is basically her and her little friend talking back and forth to each other about stuff. Oh, how cute. They've got their eyes with hearts. No, well, I don't think you can do that, but it is really, really cute. And I'm actually going to encourage people to go to her blog.

I hope she gets mad traffic. Her blog, Josh, is sarahlovesaustraliancommercials.webs.com, and here's the clincher. It is sarah. There's no w-w-w, right? No, and she misspells Australian. All over the place. All over her blog. Which makes it even cuter.

She spells it a-u-s-t-r-a-i-l-i-a-n. So it's like o-s-t-r-a-l-i-n. A-i-a-n. Right. So spell the whole URL. H-t-t-p, colon slash slash s-a-r-a-h-l-o-v-e-s-a-u-s-t-r-a-i-l-i-a-n-c-o-m-m-e-r-c-i-a-l-s.webs-w-e-b-s.com. And I hope people go by there and check it out. I hope so, too.

So she turned 13, she says, by the way, can you please not tell Kristen, Molly, or Katie that I think you guys are better than them. I think that would be kind of like bragging. It would be kind of like bragging, which is why we would never do it. We would never tell them, and they- I'm sure they don't listen to our show, so they'll never know. And then she closes, and this is Emily, just thought this was the cutest thing ever. Well, so long, farewell, our Alveeter saying goodbye, adieu adieu to you and you and you.

And then in front of the seat, she says, in case you didn't know, that was from the sound of music. Yeah. So long, farewell. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of Emily's favorites. Well, you should sing the rest of it, too, adieu adieu to you and you and you.

So Sarah, happy birthday. You're awesome. You're a dedicated fan. Clearly she is. We just think you're super cool. And good luck with the blog. If you do learn how to dot eyes with heart, we want to know, Sarah, happy birthday to you.

If you want to become a fan who's captured our hearts, send us something interesting. We want to, we want another super fan. And be a cute little kid, otherwise you're not going to capture our hearts. That helps as well. Broken English doesn't hurt, too. True. You can send an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

For more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? You're ready to travel in 2023. And since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours and European river cruises.

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Packed my car with hiking boots, a camera, and my dog, Randy. I don't know what I was searching for. Maybe it was something new with adventure. Maybe it was the idea of vacation I would never expect. Filled with wildlife, national parks, rivers, whatever it was I set out to find, it was all there and more. Because there's so much South Dakota, so little time.