This is the FDA's food pyramid.
For decades, the predominant thought was that
if you follow it, you would be, quote unquote, "healthy".
But does that pyramid really apply to everyone?
Nutrition is not a one-size-fits- all approach.
Neither is weight loss. Neither is prevention
of chronic conditions.
And that's because we are all so different.
Eating is one of the most complex social behaviors that we have.
We have to do it.
We love to do it.
It's in our genes to want to eat.
What we eat is extremely important for our wellness, for our well-being.
For our longevity, and not just ours, but those of our families, too.
And so we want to make sure that the food choices that we make
every day support health rather than put
us on a path to disease.
There are hundreds of diets
to choose from from Atkins to Keto to Paleo.
But the burgeoning field of Nutrogenomics and personalized nutrition
throws the idea of a diet working for anyone out the window.
Scientifically, there is really nothing more intimate
that our connection with food and how it can affect our genes
The idea of personalized nutrition
is that we can discover
what diet works best for our genes.
I often tell my patients that your genes
are not your destiny, but they are your predisposition.
Now we're delving a little further and looking at our actual genetics.
What were we born with?
What are the genes we were born with?
What are the genes we want to turn off?
What are the ones we want to turn on?
How do we become a place where we know our kids are going to grow up
and have an easier time knowing how to structure their lifestyle?
Prescription to match longevity.
Nutrigenomics really looks at us as the individual.
At the heart of Nutrigenomics and precision nutrition --
is understanding the human genome.
Genetically speaking, we are very similar.
But if we look at those little outliers outside of where we are similar,
we have so many things that make us different.
Depending on which variants we carry.
Of those genes, what flavors of the genes we carry that may affect the way
our brain, our body, our cells interact with different nutrients.
And those nutrients we consume can switch certain genes on or off.
So we have about 25,000 genes, but in our brain cells,
a set of genes are on and a set of genes are off.
The genome, and looking at our DNA is really kind of
what puts us aside from someone else
and says, gosh, I'm more at risk for this, or I would do better
lifting weights than I would running a marathon.
So that's where our DNA plays a role.
So the genetic switches
are very similar to the switches of light in your room.
That can control how much light you have,
whether it's on or off or whether it's dial up or down.
Nutrients essentially help the molecular machinery
that can make these genetic switches easier
or harder to turn on or off.
And is there a possibility say,
of giving people foods that are going to
affect those favorably.
One of the most striking
examples of how food can drive biological
processes by interacting with the genome
can be found, of all places, in a beehive.
When we usually think of food,
we think mostly about its calories and nutrient content.
But there is this whole other side of food
that is much more intimately connected with our biology,
and that is the ability of nutrients to essentially inform and shape
our genome, the blueprint that drives all life.
There are two kinds of bees...
queen bees and worker bees.
Queen bees give rise to the entire colony.
Queen bees are fertile.
They give rise to every other bee in the colony.
And they live for years.
On the other hand, worker bees are sterile.
They don't have any offspring, and they only live for a few weeks.
What you might not know is that actually worker bees
and the queen bee are genetically identical organisms.
What shapes them into these two completely different life forms
is actually the food they eat.
The queen bee, when she's a larva,
she feeds on this food called Royal Jelly.
On the other hand, the worker bees mostly eat pollen...
and this food that they get when they're developing determines their physiology.
And their anatomy for the rest of their lives.
Obviously, humans are not bees.
But the amino acid methionene influences
genetic dials in humans and mice
Just like royal jelly does with bees.
Methionine can be used to add a little tag
to the genetic switches or even to the genetic blueprint.
And what this tag does, essentially it makes it harder
for the genes to be turned on and harder for the genetic switches to be accessed.
And so it's very important to have a diet
where we have a balanced level on methionine
so that the genetic switches that are to be off remain off.
Ultimately, this information hinges on dietitians
and doctors applying this information to the real world.
I never want my patients to look at a gene
and say, "Well, I have the gene, so I might as well just enjoy life."
Instead, I want them to look at it and say, I have the gene.
What can I know from a Nutrigenomics perspective to alter my lifestyle
so that this gene doesn't rear its ugly head?
In terms of prevention, of chronic conditions, in terms of weight management,
it's really taking our general sense and knowledge of the evidence
based approaches to provide a diet that makes sense.
Some individuals have genetics
that make them more prone to be deficient in folate or in B12.
So we have to really focus on those two
When we're sitting face to face with a client or a patient and saying,
OK, listen, I don't think you're getting enough folate and you are
genetically predisposed to not being able to absorb enough of it.
So let's talk about how we get that in our diet.
And diets based off genetic information.
Could lead to disease prevention that we haven't seen before.
We know that people that have a type of untreatable epilepsy
can actually live relatively good life
by eating a ketogenic diet.
This idea that we can couple a certain diet to treat a disease
is now one of the main avenue of investigation for the treatment of cancer.
There are many cancers that are caused by diet right.
For example, for colon cancer,
scientists know that amino acid serine is very important.
And so in addition, to treating the cancer with the kind of therapeutics
that are used for that cancers, the idea is like, what if now
we can deprive people of these amino acids
in ways that essentially make the cancer cells more vulnerable?
Take two cod fillets.
Drizzled of olive oil, jerk seasoning,
give it wrap, and that right there is lean in 15
Nutrigenomics and precision nutrition is one of those rare scientific fields
that overlaps with the Instagram friendly wellness industry.
There is a lot of interest in this idea of personalized nutrition
and especially how accessible it is to the public.
You can go on Google and type 'personalized nutrition'
or diet and genes, and you will find
dozens of different companies that offer this
nutrition precision tests.
One of those companies is Rootine.
founded to get customers to take vitamins more efficiently.
I'm Rachel Sanders.
I'm CEO and co-founder of Rootine.
Rootine is a company that focuses on optimizing
health and human performance with precision nutrition.
Our members come to us because they're looking for really focusing on
total body health and improving in areas more common health conditions.
Like stress, fatigue, brain fog, immune health support, need balance and more.
And they really come to us because we have a tailored approach
and we create tailored
products specific to their individual needs and individual biology.
While many studies
have found vitamins and supplements don't do much to improve overall health
Rootine claims that they're personalized tests stemming from sciences
like Nutrigenomics make their supplements different.
The supplement industry in general has a lot of skeptics.
We don't use kind of new ingredients with very little research behind them.
Trying to make claims or have specific results
based on specific interventions is definitely difficult.
But Rootine claims their personalized tests see positive results.
Over 80% of our members see improvement in at least one health metric...
Things like improvement in energy levels, lower stress,
as well as not immune immune sleep.
But even with the claims from Rootine as well as dozens of other personalized
nutrition companies, the science still has a long way to go.
The thing about longevity is that it takes a long time to study.
That's why we call longevity.
When it comes to Nutrigenomics, we are learning every day.
When we started doing Nutrigenomics, we had about seven genes
that we were going over with with patients.
Now we have about 70.
Well, some people really believe that once
we can map the entirety of food nutrient interactions
and map them in a way that's inclusive of different sexes,
ethnicities, lifestyles
than we can arrive to this personalized, precise nutrition.
But on the other hand, this question is so complicated
that it might take a very long time for us to get the answer.
But ultimately Nutrigenomics isn't going anywhere,
and it may be the way forward with how we think about the food we eat.
People are no longer interested in diets.
They're interested in dietary patterns that speak more to who they are
and embrace who they are personally and genetically sociologically.
It's hard to argue against our own genetics
in terms of determining what's the best dietary approach for us.
People are looking for what works.
They want to live longer, but people don't want to just live longer anymore.
They want to live better.