Everyday Epigenetics

Inheritance was once thought to only concern our genes.  And we thought those genes were the blueprint of everything.  The way we look, the diseases we would encounter, our likes and dislikes, all coded into genes that we’re born with. The codes were supposedly locked into our bodies, unchanging and passed onto our children. As the Human Genome Project evolved, we found that humans only have about 30,000 genes, not enough to map each disease to a gene as we had originally hoped. The genome isn’t enough to explain everything.

This understanding of inheritance began to be questioned as scientist linking diseases to genetic defects found identical defects being expressed as completely different diseases in children.  Identical sequences of DNA were being switched on or off. Studies of famine and longevity lead to a more studies in epigenetics.  How is information being passed between generations?

We now know that lifestyle choices like what we eat, how we sleep, exercise and stress affect how our genes are expressed. Epigenetics attempts to find those relationships and reveal the links.  The problem is it’s extremely hard to study lifestyle habits of humans.  Out of all the things we can track, food seems to be the easiest because we can measure it, yet the results we’re able to show draw broad relationships rather than pinpointing dosages of nutrients to switching our genes on or off.  We extract nutrients from the food we eat.  These nutrients are then modified by our body into molecules that we can use.  Some of what we eat is manipulated into methyl groups, which are important for epigenetic tags that silence genes in our DNA. We have some ideas of which nutrients help our body generate key molecules that help DNA methylation. And we have a broad list of foods that contain those nutrients, but the list isn’t very helpful.  http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/nutrition/table.html
Epigenetics is relatively new science, so as more research is conducted, the more we’ll be able to pinpoint DNA methylations to diseases and other life altering conditions.  Recent studies show links between green tea, folic acid, and alcohol to DNA methylation of genes involved in particular kinds of cancer. It might be a matter of time before we discover how we can prevent undesirable genes from switching on through specific changes to our diet. But, we’re not quite there yet. For now, eat your greens, don’t smoke and drink moderately.

There’s conclusive evidence that you are what you eat and your children and your grandchildren are what you eat, so you can’t live care-free as if your well-being has no consequence on your children.  The same goes with stress and exercise.

http://epigenome.eu/en/2,48,875
http://advances.nutrition.org/content/1/1/8.full
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toRIkRa1fYU