Nutrition
Tom, Jerry & the Secrets of Our Nutrition
New research reveals: Your genetic fingerprint determines how your body responds to nutrition. That explains why what makes you healthy might make your neighbor sick.
Nutrition
New research reveals: Your genetic fingerprint determines how your body responds to nutrition. That explains why what makes you healthy might make your neighbor sick.
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Most people who regularly follow health news often feel a bit like they're in the Tom and Jerry cartoon.
You know that US animation series where the cat Tom always wants to catch the mouse Jerry – but usually fails. Whenever Tom thinks he finally has his chance, Jerry disappears somewhere into the wall and reappears elsewhere.
We're often like cat Tom too: We think we've understood something, only to realize shortly after that maybe we haven't fully grasped the topic.
The good news: That's completely normal. Even people who've been working with this material for years experience it. The Dunning-Kruger effect illustrates these connections quite well.
The result: The more you know, the more humble you become – in the sense of a deep understanding that most biological and health topics are enormously complex and we might be wrong.
Our misjudgment isn't always a sign of incompetence. Although we can certainly make better decisions and assessments as our knowledge increases, the factor of individuality means that what's right for us might not be right for our neighbor at all.
Researchers at the University of Sydney recently had to realize this once again. They wanted to finally understand the interaction between nutrition and genetics in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes. Why does the muscle become resistant and lose its insulin sensitivity?
For this, they fed five different mouse strains with a conventional diet and an identical high-fat and high-sugar diet, which – as is well known – causes insulin resistance and obesity and, in the long term, type 2 diabetes – even in mice.
With enormous effort, the scientists investigated which proteins – thousands of them! – were activated and deactivated. With the result: "In total, each individual genetic background of the respective mouse strains showed a unique fingerprint of insulin signaling."
Many changes within the muscle were thus dependent on genetics. More than that: In fact, "protein activities between different strains even changed in the opposite direction...".
So: What makes you healthy doesn't necessarily have to be the right path for your neighbor or friend. This research even shows that what makes us healthy could make others sick.
How do we escape this maze? One possibility is to zoom out repeatedly and not lose sight of the bigger picture. Then we might not feel like Tom anymore.
When it comes to nutrition and lifestyle, that's relatively "simple": We should look at how humans lived over the last 2–3 million years to understand their essential nature.
Fortunately, this is very well researched. Also because humans still exist in their natural habitat. That would be the still-living hunter-gatherer populations today, such as the Hadza or Aborigines.
When it comes to insulin action, we could derive, for example:
Just to name a few factors that certainly differ in nutrition and lifestyle between us modern humans and people still living in archaic ways.
The good news then is: Often it's better that we maintain perspective this way. Because we generally tend to get bogged down in detail questions and then create our own truth on that basis.
For this reason, nutritional science is very often a matter of belief – not just on an individual level. In societal debates too, we see that it's virtually never about the bigger picture ("Humans as hunters and gatherers").
It's far too often about... something. This little word can be replaced by many motives. For instance: moral convictions. Based on this romantic worldview, people construct a cocoon of studies that confirm and sustain their own worldview.
There are good reasons why one of the most important maxims in biology is the following sentence:
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
You could say: We can't understand our lives – our biology – without the necessary background knowledge about our own evolutionary history. That's exactly why we never tire of writing about it.
