Beej Shudhi@360

You are what you eat

Ayurved says that One of the best ways to achieve a healthier life is through good nutrition. Food can fight off depression, boost your mood and even help prevent cancer and other illnesses. Food is medicine, and when you use food this way, you’re committing to a beneficial lifestyle change.

New research is changing the game

Nutrigenomics: Harnessing the power of food to change your gene expression. Each day brings new evidence that how you live affects you right down to your genetic level. Your stress levels, social surroundings, physical activity and overall lifestyle all contribute to your gene expression – or how your cells respond to their changing environment.

What you eat is no exception. The nutrients in your food interact with your genes. The study of this interaction is known as nutrigenomics. The ability to use nutrition to affect our genes means that we’re no longer at the mercy of our DNA. This is especially exciting when it comes to fighting and preventing disease.

You are not your genes.

Nutrigenomics is creating a power shift, putting some newfound power into your hands. What does this mean? Think about inherited diseases like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s.

If these, or other inherited diseases, run in your family, you’re not doomed to suffer. The fate of your health is not set in stone. If your mother is a diabetic, it’s not a given that you’ll eventually become a diabetic.

Again, we don’t have absolute control. If that were the case, we’d all eat healthily and never get sick. However, what you choose to eat can significantly increase or reduce your risk for future illness.

Nutriepigenomics is the study of food nutrients and their effects on human health through epigenetic modifications. There is now considerable evidence that nutritional imbalances during gestation and lactation are linked to non-communicable diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, and cancer. If metabolic disturbances occur during critical time windows of development, the resulting epigenetic alterations can lead to permanent changes in tissue and organ structure or function and predispose individuals to disease.

The period of development in which the nutritional imbalance occurs is very important in determining which disease-related genes will be affected. Different organs have critical developmental stages, and the time point at which they are compromised will predispose individuals to specific diseases. Epigenetic modifications that occur during development may not be expressed until later in life depending on the function of the gene. While the majority of studies implicate prenatal and perinatal periods as critical time windows, some research has shown that nutritional intake during adulthood can also affect the epigenome.

Prenatal

Developmental plasticity is the process in which fetuses adapt to their environment. Environmental cues, including dietary components, present in the in utero environment can induce significant changes in the expression of the genome through epigenetic modifications. Fetal developmental plastic responses can cause changes in lean body mass, endocrinology, blood flow and vascular loading, and lead to increased risk of various diseases in adulthood.

Perinatal

Another critical developmental time window is the perinatal period, the time period immediately before and after birth. It has been shown that maternal diet in late pregnancy and an infant's diet in the beginning weeks can all have significant impacts on gene expression. Therefore, perinatal nutrition is both late-stage in utero nutrition and lactation.