Human Health
Apr 19th, 2011 by admin
Connecting Nutrigenomics to Human Health Nutrigenomics has significantly changed the way we view our genetic inheritance. As individuals, we are a combination of the DNA we inherit from both our mothers and our fathers. Some genes are said to be more dominant and others are said to be recessive, so that if onen parent has blak hair and the other parent has fair hair, the child is more likely to express the dominant (black in this case) gene and have black hair.
Early geneticists thought that the genetic blueprint we acquire at conception is fixed. The implications of this are that if you should inherit a particular disease risk from one or both parents, then it is inevitable that you too will express that disease. It is quite common to see diseases run in families. If all the men in a family develop heart disease in middle age, it might be assumed that they all inherited the genes which give them this predisposition.
But there is another possible explanation; it is possible that all the men in that family acquired (not inherited) the same lifestyle habits. That message includes the types of foods one chooses. If the men in that family all ate a diet known to promote heart disease, their risk may have nothing to do with the genes they inherited from their parents. Acquired lifestyle habits are learned, not inherited. And this is really the message of Nutrigenomics. Every morsel of food we consume has the potential to alter the way our genes are expressed, switching on some genes and switching off others.
Knowledge of the foods which enable health-promoting genes to be expressed and disease-promoting genes to remain inactive gives us a measure of control over our own health and well-being.
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