Live Longer with the DNA Diet

Science has long pondered the relationship between diet and metabolism. Why can some people have high-fat diets yet not develop heart disease? Why do some people on moderate-fat diets develop high cholesterol?

Now, following the work of the human genome project, scientists are equipped with the tools to answer these questions, and the results will have fundamental implications for health.

In fact, the field is so promising that Rutgers University has established an assistant professorship of nutrigenomics. Dr. Mohammed Rafi is currently setting up a laboratory and research team that will look into diet and cancer.

That is a long-term project, but some results from the field will be exploited in the near future.

"I believe in five years a simple blood test will determine an individual's susceptibility to cardiovascular disease," said consultant Nancy Fogg-Johnson, of the Life Sciences Alliance, who, with colleague Alex Meroli, coined the term nutrigenomics.

Palm-sized devices already exist to analyze DNA, which could be used to detect an individual's susceptibility to cardiovascular disease.

More importantly, nutrigenomics will allow this information to be matched up against food, and food components, that have a positive impact on health for that individual, Fogg-Johnson said.

The idea is that negative foods, such as saturated fats, could be replaced by positive ones that promote cholesterol breakdown. Eating oat bran instead of a Philly cheese steak, for example.

That conclusion doesn't take millions of dollars to figure out, but dietary science is still in the dark about how food reacts with the body on a molecular level. Nutrigenomics will turn on the floodlights.

While diets and DNA will initially be matched up in a broad fashion, genetics will play an increasingly precise role in preventative health care.

It will probably take a lifetime, but Fogg-Johnson says that eventually nutrigenomics will be able to discover diets that prevent or retard the onset of the most serious and widespread of today's killer diseases, like cancer, as well as degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

Nutrition tailored both to an individual's genetic make-up and their occupation can also be envisaged, where the diet for, say, an athlete takes into account his or her genetic disposition to maximize its effectiveness.

Strides have already been made in commercializing the potential of nutrigenomic research. One company, Galileo Laboratories, is currently in discussion with food manufacturers to bring their products to market.

Galileo specializes in redox failure, a malfunction in vital cellular energy metabolism which causes illnesses like stroke, heart attack, inflammation and diabetes. The company said it has come up with several compounds that could prevent or retard the onset of these diseases.

"Galileo is basically translating (nutrition research) into more product-based approaches and creating products that prevent (or retard) cardiovascular disease," said Dr. Sekhar Boddupalli, vice president of discovery at Galileo.

Boddupalli also said that nutrigenomics will play an important role in food safety, offering the ability to test the effects of new food components.

"Take trans-fatty acid in food products: 10 or 15 years ago food companies said transfatty acids were not an issue and it has no negative impact on health and wellness," he said. "Now (the risks are) very clear, and the American Heart Association has come up with a paper that transfatty acids should be labeled on food products, because they increase the risk of arterial thickening. Genomics is a powerful technique to understand if there is an impact of these products on human health and wellness."

Ultimately, nutrigenomics is just one of a series of genetic specializations, like proteomics and pharmacogenomics, that have followed the mapping of the human genome. But the interaction of food and gene expression will have a much more profound effect on society: Everybody has to eat.

It's an extremely complex subject, however, and serious issues still need to be resolved.

Insurance will be one of them. Will there be implications for your insurance if you have a susceptibility to heart disease? Will there be implications if you fail to follow a diet to retard the onset of symptoms?

These issues, still uncertain, will undoubtedly get their day in court. Far more certain is that, in the future, your diet will owe more to your genetic soup than to Campbell's, and the apples you need will come in the form of an amino acid.

Source: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,50879,00.html