Greens + Genes: Your Diet and Disease Risk

I’m going to get a little science-y today with one of my absolute favorite subject areas in my field. It’s truly mind blowing and underscores the power that whole-food nutrition has to change your life. Ready?

Nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics.

Stay with me.

Nutrigenetics is pretty straightforward – it refers to the way your genes affect how you respond to a certain food. One simple example is lactose intolerance. The connection is clear – you eat a dairy product that has lactose in it, and have intestinal symptoms because you lack the enzyme needed to digest it. That’s your genes talking. Some of it you simply can’t control. 

Then there’s nutrigenomics. And this is where things get really exciting. 

In the case of your health and disease risk, your genes alone are not all that matters. More important is your gene expression. To oversimplify – that’s how genes get turned on in your cells, resulting in observable traits or, in some cases, disease.

Nutrigenomics refers to the way nutrition actually alters gene expression.

Think about that for a minute.

The food you eat can either turn on or turn off certain genes. So your diet has a direct effect on whether or not some of your disease-promoting genes are activated.

Does that make you feel powerful? It should! 

Before I get to some examples, it’s important to note that there are some complex genetic disorders that don’t fall into this category, so I’m not suggesting that diet will prevent all illness and disease.

What I am saying is that your risk of developing some of our most common conditions – heart disease, type 2 diabetes, many cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and even obesity  – can be significantly amped up or tamped down by diet and lifestyle.

I’ll use my family to illustrate. On my father’s side, I’ve got a predisposition to heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke. On my mother’s side, there’s stroke again, certain cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease. A concerning genetic pool for sure. But not a foregone conclusion. I know – and research proves – that my diet can actually counteract my genetic risk of following in my parents’ footsteps. Has that informed how I eat?

Hell yes.

Some of this may sound a little “Captain Obvious.” After all, we’ve heard for years about the heart-healthy diet, eating to reduce cholesterol, or balancing blood sugar to prevent type 2 diabetes, right? There’s some level of common knowledge that food affects your health for good or for bad. 

But nutrigenomics goes way beyond that to look at how what you eat can actually reprogram some of your genes. And that’s where real disease prevention is going to happen.

A couple of small examples…. Resveratrol found in berries and grapes stimulates a gene that protects the body from free radical damage, which reduces the risk of cancer. Polyphenols found in fruits, veggies, tea, and dark chocolate (yay!) do a similar thing. And there are so many more examples where these came from.

Mind blown yet? Just wait.

For all you young parents or would-be parents…. The food you eat doesn’t only affect your genetic blueprint, it also has the power to change the genes of your kids and grandkids, too.  🤯

This is still an emerging science, but it seems to happen in two ways. Research is starting to show that if you change what genes you’re turning on and off, over time it will alter the genes that are passed on to your children. For those of you who already have children, modeling healthy eating and providing them with the right diet can alter their genes in positive ways that will be handed down to their children, and so on….

I hope I've given you a glimpse at the power you have to change your health by changing your diet.

If you’d like to learn what you can do about your specific risks, click below and book a free session. We’ll talk about what you want to achieve and how I can help.