Diet and Gene Interactions
Life used to be simple: either you had good genes or bad genes. The good news for everybody who thinks they have bad genes is: its not that simple anymore. The scientific field of nutrigenomics is concerned with the influence that food has on genes and genetic expressions. Some companies have already started selling tests for genes that influence metabolism of certain nutrients and suggest diet modification based on this. However, changing your eating habits based on a small subset of known genes may be not appropriate and have unintended consequences. That does not mean that is not worthwhile following the news in this fascinating research area and incorporating some findings.
Dietary chemicals can alter gene expression. Dr Juleen Zierath from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues reported in the September issue of Cell Metabolism, that the PGC-1 alpha gene exhibited chemical marks not found in the sampels taken from people who respond normally to rising blood sugar levels.This gene is involved in the development of mitochondria, components of a cell that are involved in extracting fuel from glucose. The researchers used 17 samples from healthy people and 17 samples from people with Type-2 diabetes. To find out, how the extra epigenetic marks got there, the team bathed the cells in glucose and fat and cytokines (inflammation producing proteins) to simulate a bad diet. it turned out that both fat and cytokines caused PGC-1 alpha to be methylated.
The researchers said that further studies are needed, but maybe this is a good enough reason to change your diet especially if you think that you have a genetic pre-disposition to diabetes.
Barrès R, Osler ME, Yan J, Rune A, Fritz T, Caidahl K, et al. Non-CpG methylation of the PGC-1alpha promoter through DNMT3B controls mitochondrial density. Cell metabolism. 2009 Sep;10(3):189-98.
Other Gene-related Reading:
http://nutrigenomics.ucdavis.edu/nutrigenomics/index.cfm
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