How DNA and Nutrition Work Together
Genetic testing:Your DNA Predicts many Chronic Disease Risk Factors
DNA and nutrition do work together- these are the findings of a study at UC Berkley. The implications are huge! What if you could stop Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses? Well, what if I told you that it’s possible? The results of this study are certainly pointing in that direction.
They have found a very welcome reason to dive into your genetic inheritance: to find the basic genetic flaws that can be fixed with remedies as simple as vitamin or mineral supplements.
Good News in the Human Genome!
“I’m looking for the good news in the human genome,” said Jasper Rine, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology.
“Headlines for the last 20 years have really been about the triumph of biomedical research in finding disease genes, which is biologically interesting, genetically important and frightening to people who get this information,” Rine said. “I became obsessed with trying to decide if there is some other class of information that will make people want to look at their genome sequence.”
They reported in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that there are many genetic differences that make people’s enzymes less efficient than normal, and that simple supplementation with vitamins can often restore some of these deficient enzymes to full working order.
One of the authors, Nicholas Marini- a UC Berkeley research scientist- noted that physicians prescribe vitamins to “cure” many rare and potentially fatal metabolic defects caused by mutations in critical enzymes. But those affected by these metabolic diseases are people with two bad copies- AKA: alleles- of an essential enzyme. Many others may be walking around with only one bad gene, or two copies of slightly defective genes, throwing their enzyme levels off slightly and causing subtle effects that also could be eliminated with vitamin supplements.
A Different Optimal Nutritional Dose Required by Every Individual?
“Our studies have convinced us that there is a lot of variation in the population in these enzymes, and a lot of it affects function, and a lot of it is responsive to vitamins,” Marini said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody is going to require a different optimal dose of vitamins based on their genetic makeup, based upon the kind of variance they are harboring in vitamin-dependent enzymes.”
Your body’s own DNA is a predictor of many chronic disease risk factors, and supplementation might be the simple and relatively inexpensive answer to some of them!
“This genetic testing is a brand new field, nutrigenomics, the link between genes and nutrition,” says David Katz, MD, nutrition expert and founder of the Yale Prevention Center. “It makes sense because our genes control hormone levels, enzyme levels – all the basic levels of metabolism. And how we metabolize food determines what happens to the nutrients and calories we take in.”
This is a major breakthrough, as all these years we have been told we are victims of our genes and that if we are born with certain genes that pre-dispose us to cancer or heart disease or cystic fybrosis (the list goes on and on), we will certainly get those diseases whether we want to or not.
BUT, now we know that we can change our genes and enhance the inheritance our DNA has provided, and be healthy no matter what we were born with- and nutrition is the key. For those who would like to read this scholarly article and understand it for themselves go here.
If you’d like to find out more about exactly how to determine your body’s individual and specific requirements, click on the image below to watch a 8 minute video that explains how Genewize Life Sciences can help you do exactly that:
Click on this image to find out how YOUR DNA and nutrition can work together!
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