Genetics
Tom, Jerry & the Secrets of Our Nutrition
Your genetics determine how your body responds to nutrition. What makes you healthy doesn't necessarily work for your neighbor.
Genetics
Your genetics determine how your body responds to nutrition. What makes you healthy doesn't necessarily work for your neighbor.
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Most people who regularly follow health news feel a bit like they're in Tom and Jerry.
That was the American cartoon series where the cat Tom constantly tries to catch the mouse Jerry – which usually doesn't work. Because whenever Tom thinks he's finally got her, the mouse Jerry disappears somewhere in the wall and reappears elsewhere.
We're often the cat Tom too: We think we've understood something, only to realize a short time later that we may not have fully grasped the topic after all.
The good news: That's completely normal. Even people who have dealt with the subject for years experience this. The Dunning-Kruger effect illustrates these connections quite well.
The result: The more we know, the more humble we become, in the sense of a deep understanding that most biological and health topics are extremely complex and we might be wrong.
Our misestimation isn't always a sign of incompetence. Because although we can certainly make better decisions and assessments with increasing knowledge, the factor of individuality means that what's right for us doesn't have to be right for our neighbor.
This is something researchers at the University of Sydney recently had to acknowledge. They wanted to finally understand the interaction between nutrition and genetics in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes. Why does the muscle "close up" and become insulin resistant?
To do this, they fed five different mouse strains a conventional diet and an identical high-fat and high-sugar diet, which, as is known, causes insulin resistance, obesity, and therefore long-term type 2 diabetes – in mice as well.
With extreme effort, the scientists examined which proteins – thousands of them! – were activated and deactivated. The result: "Overall, 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 your friend. This research even shows that what makes us healthy could make others sick.
How do we escape this maze? One possibility is to repeatedly zoom out and keep the bigger picture in view. That way, we might not feel like Tom anymore.
When it comes to nutrition and lifestyle, that's relatively "simple": We should look at how humans have lived over the last 2–3 million years to understand our intrinsic nature.
Fortunately, this is very well researched. Also because humans still exist in their natural habitat. These would be still-living hunter-gatherer populations today, such as the Hadza or Aboriginal peoples.
Regarding insulin function, we could derive, for example:
Just to mention a few factors that clearly differ in terms of nutrition and lifestyle between us modern humans and people still living in an archaic way.
The good news then: Often it's better if we keep an overview this way. Because we generally tend to get bogged down in details and then create our own truth based on that.
For this reason, nutritional science is frequently a matter of belief, not only on an individual basis. We can also see in public debates that it's virtually never about the bigger picture ("Humans as hunter-gatherers").
It's far too often... about something. This little word can be replaced by many motives. For example: moral convictions. Based on this romantic worldview, we build a cocoon of studies that confirm and maintain our own worldview.
There's good reason why one of the most important principles in biology is the following sentence:
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution"
You could say: Our life – our biology – we cannot understand without the necessary background knowledge about our own evolutionary history. That's exactly why we never tire of writing about it.
