The right diet - by prescription

" 'My argument, given damage to DNA is such a fundamental pathology, is that it should be examined [for every nutrient]' ... Professor Michael Fenech.


Australian researchers are learning how the chemical properties of food can interact with individuals to keep us healthy or make us sick.


Once a week Professor Michael Fenech sits down to a meal of liver pate. It might not be his first choice but a glass of wine makes it more palatable.


'I found I am particularly susceptible to folate deficiency,' says the stream leader for nutrigenomics, lifestyle and neurodegenerative disease prevention within the CSIRO's food and nutritional sciences division. The vitamin B12 in the pate allows his body to take up the folate. 'I try to get as much as possible from the diet but as insurance I take a supplement once a week,' he says.


Fenech is at the forefront of world research into how individual foods and nutrients affect the integrity of human body cells, and has frequently been his own test subject, putting his blood through tests to establish how his genetic material responds to different nutritional exposures.


He can see the difference in his telomeres – the tip of the chromosome which governs how faithfully it is copied as his cells divide – according to how well he has been eating. 'Sometimes,' he laments, 'the degree of improvement may not be as much as I would like.'


Cells are required to divide and create new copies of themselves about 10,000 trillion times during an average human life, and their ability to do so healthily is fundamental to preventing disease.


Cell division underpins fertility, fetal development and cancer. Increasingly it is recognised as having a role in heart disease and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.


'The question,' Fenech says, 'is whether damage to DNA is itself a disease and whether you can diagnose it. That's the approach I've been promoting.


'Even in young healthy adults, even though they're not deficient in B12 and folate, we still find when we supplement we reduce the level of [DNA] damage. Some people actually need more of these nutrients than others to minimise DNA damage.'  ------------------ 


Eventually, Fenech says, it should be possible to tailor individual diets and supplement regimens to people's genetic strengths and weaknesses, 'to prevent damage to specific regions of the chromosomes'.  ------------------


Fenech's work is only one feature on a landscape of nutrition science that is growing exponentially in sophistication as individual food components are plotted against individual responses to them.  ---------------- "


http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/the-right-diet--by-prescription-20120201-1qt9u.html


tags:
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