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How would you like to take a simple blood test and receive an "intelligent" diet plan tailored to your genetic makeup that could potentially stop chronic diseases long before they ever emerge? Such is the promise behind the Human Genome Project as discussed in the New York Times article "What Your Genes Want You to Eat," by Bruce Grierson.
Scientists are beginning to acknowledge that diet plays a major role in chronic disease, and may even be responsible for one-third of cancers. However, everyone needs a unique diet because its influence depends on an individual's genetic makeup. And, eating a diet that is particularly wrong for your genetic makeup can cause gene expressions that promote chronic illness. On the other hand, eating an "intelligent" diet that balances your system can prevent such illnesses from occurring.
Under this premise, one person may thrive on a diet of primarily salmon, spinach and olive oil while another may do well on red meat, peanut butter and cheeses.
Although researchers suggest that most people's preferred diets will be similar to the basic diet of plenty of fruits and vegetables recommended by the Department of Agriculture, the implications of such individualized diets are many. Lifespan could potentially be lengthened and many chronic illnesses could become a thing of the past.
Several companies are already offering genetics testing, with some charging as much as $1,500 for a "preventive health profile." However, some say that a widespread approach to "eating right for your genotype" may not be available for two or more decades.
Please visit the New York Times Web site to read the actual article. You will need to register on their site (it's free) to view this important article.
New York Times May 2, 2003
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COMMENT BY: William Wolcott
Founder, The Healthexcel System of Metabolic Typing
Author, The Metabolic Typing Diet (Doubleday, 2000) |
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If you've been following the articles posted on www.Mercola.com concerning Metabolic Typing, you're bound to feel excited upon reading this article. For those of you who haven't, you might want to catch up in order to make this commentary meaningful. To do so, see the following on Mercola.com:
Back to the Future
The article, "Eating For Your Genetic Type," by Bruce Grierson, has generated a lot of excitement in the Metabolic Typing community of alternative health practitioners - not so much for the exciting picture it paints for the future, but for the fact that at long last, mainstream scientific researchers are finally turning their attention to what Metabolic Typing researchers have been piecing together over the last 100 years - namely, that the key to a healthy diet is not what some "diet expert" says, or what works for your friend, or what you read about in the "latest and greatest" column of your favorite health and fitness magazine.
Rather, the secret to good health and what constitutes a good diet lies in discovering and defining your own genetically-based biochemical and metabolic individuality and eating accordingly. Let's take a look at what the article's author called his "blue-skying" and compare it to what's available here and now today through Metabolic Typing. (author's text in blue)
"Nobody is eating exactly what you are. Your diet is uniquely tailored. It is determined by the specific demands of your genetic signature, and it perfectly balances your micronutrient and macronutrient needs." Metabolic Typing researchers couldn't agree more. Your nutritional requirements are indeed dictated by your genes, not whim, fancy, theory, belief, wishful thinking, arm-chair nutritionists, popular writers or even so-called expert opinion.
Human beings have inhabited almost every corner of our planet. Except for very recent times, people were born, lived their lives and died in the same locality. Over countless generations, forces of natural selection, genetic mutation, and survival of the fittest assured that inhabitants of a region became perfectly adapted to the foods naturally available in their locality. The kinds of foods available in turn were dictated by geography and climate.
Notably, although the natural diets of indigenous cultures from all over the world varied tremendously, each local population was perfectly healthy. Of greater significance, when people left their indigenous diet and adopted foods from another culture, their natural good health eroded.
Thus, the adage of one man's food being another's poison is literally true. In this sense, there are no good foods, and there are no bad foods, except relative to each person's Metabolic Type. The notion that there is one diet that is right for everyone has neither a logical nor, as the Genome Project is revealing, a scientific basis. Whether it is the Atkins Diet, McDougall Diet, Ornish Diet, Zone Diet or any other diet you can think of, the days of the one-size-fits-all diet are numbered.
"Sick days have become a foggy memory." This is literally the experience today of almost everyone who follows their proper Metabolic Type diet. When the cold and flu season hits, they find that either they don't get sick at all, or if they do come down with something, it is a much milder version that is quickly eliminated.
The reason is simple: the efficiency of your immune system is in large measure dependent on the proper biochemical balance which in turn is dependent on the proper diet. The kicker is that each person is unique and what constitutes a "proper diet" is different for different people, for different Metabolic Types. Drinking orange juice at the onset of a cold might be the last thing you should do if it is contrary for your Metabolic Type!
"If you turn out to be among the population whose cholesterol count doesn't react much to diet, you'll be able to go ahead and eat those bacon sandwiches." Currently, research in Metabolic Typing has already revealed much more than that notion. High cholesterol is due to dysfunctional cholesterol metabolism. Diet always impacts every aspect of metabolism.
So the only question is: Are you eating rightly or wrongly for your Metabolic Type? If you have an Eskimo-like metabolism that thrives on high quantities of meat and fat and you eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables and grains, you'll likely disrupt your cholesterol metabolism, and many other metabolisms to boot, and you'll see your cholesterol soar. In your case, eating a high fat diet, because it meets your genetically-based nutritional requirements, can actually lower cholesterol, not raise it.
On the other hand, if you have the genes for a more vegetarian-type metabolism and you try to eat a diet high in meat and fat, you're definitely heading for trouble. If you eat right for your Metabolic Type, you'll be healthy - and maybe even wealthy and wise - no matter what the foods turn out to be.
"You'll no longer be spending money on vitamin supplements that aren't doing anything for you; you'll take only the vitamins you need, in precisely the right doses." What was said about foods also applies to supplements or nutrients: There are no good nutrients, there are no bad nutrients, except relative to each person's Metabolic Type. We all need all the known nutrients in nutritional dosages, but not necessarily in therapeutic dosages.
Every nutrient has specific stimulatory and inhibitory effects on the body's regulatory control systems. If nutrition has the power to heal, it also has the power to do harm if used improperly. A nutrient that can rid one person of a health problem can actually cause it in another person of a different Metabolic Type.
" ... diet is a big factor in chronic disease, responsible, some say, for a third of most types of cancer. Dietary chemicals change the expression of one's genes and even the genome itself. And -- here's the key -- the influence of diet on health depends on an individual's genetic makeup. ... A diet that's particularly out of balance, nutritional-genomics scientists say, will cause gene expressions that nudge us toward chronic illness -- unless a precisely tailored ''intelligent diet'' is employed to restore the equilibrium.
" ... Take genestein, a chemical in soy, which attaches to estrogen receptors and starts regulating genes. Different individuals may have estrogen receptors that react to genestein differently. Genetic variations like that one, some scientists say, help explain why two people can eat exactly the same diet and respond very differently to it -- one maintaining his weight, for example, and the other ballooning."
Current Metabolic Typing research has revealed a lot more to this story than is suggested here. Through Metabolic Typing, we have learned that any given nutrient actually behaves differently in different Metabolic Types. This means that ultimately the effect of a nutrient on someone has more to do with the type of metabolism a person has than with the inherent qualities of the nutrient itself.
For example, in one Metabolic Type, calcium will have a stimulatory, acidifying effect, while in a different Metabolic Type, the same calcium will have a sedating, alkalinizing effect. We now know that fruits and vegetables, long believed to have an alkaline impact on the body, will actually acidify certain Metabolic Types, and that meat will alkalinize instead of acidify certain Metabolic Types. This discovery changes everything and shatters many of the traditional, allopathic ways of practicing nutritional science.
In order to be successful, you must treat the person who has the disease, the Metabolic Type, before you treat the disease that has the person. More importantly, you must know your Metabolic Type before you can know how nutrients behave in your metabolism as compared to someone else's.
" ... since many people have ancestors from different continents -- making them a genetic admixture -- the data are rarely clean-cut. In other words, ethnicity is relevant to nutritional genomics, but only as a starting point. Which is why the idea of sorting ourselves by race and pursuing a diet consistent with the original continental diet isn't going to be very helpful. And why, in fact, the customized diets of most people's perfect genomic future will probably not be all that different from one another. Kaput estimates that the middle 60 percent of the bell curve are probably not going to need to deviate too much from the basic fruit-and-vegetable-heavy diet recommended by the Department of Agriculture."
Knowing your family tree is not that helpful. Each of us carries genetic influences from countless ancestors from time immemorial. What genes come to the fore in an individual is really a matter of a kind of genetic roulette.
We see routinely that even within the same family, there can be dramatic variations of the Metabolic Type requirements between siblings. If one child tends to be lean, energetic and thriving while the other child tends to be overweight, slow and failing, the chances are very high that the diet is right for the first child's Metabolic Type but very wrong for the second child's Metabolic Type.
As a workable concept, ''eat right for your genotype'' may be a decade or two -- or more -- down the road.
If that's a definition of the future, then the future is now! Metabolic Typing analyses are currently available that can precisely determine the proper diet and supplementation for each person's Metabolic Type. There is no need to wait 10 years to obtain that kind of information.
Bottom line: you can eat the best organic foods, drink plenty of purified water, get sufficient rest, exercise until you're "blue in the face," and take the finest supplements money can buy, but if you don't eat right for your Metabolic Type and take supplements accordingly, you're only wasting your time and money. And as the genome research is revealing, you might even be doing yourself some harm.
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