Feed Your Genome?

As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome, an ambitious international collaboration project that started a decade earlier and officially “ended” on June 26th, 2000, I stop to wonder when the scientific community will be ready to deliver on some of its promises.

As a recent article published in The Economist pointed out, the completion of the book of life was not the finish line of a sprint between the consortia led by Dr J. Craig Venter and Dr. Francis Collins, but rather the starting line of a marathon that would lead us to a post-genomic era, or as they called it Biology 2.0.

I have no doubt we came a long way in this new era of biology, but the marathon is far from over.  The genomic revolution made possible by a new generation of faster, cheaper DNA sequencing and computing technologies has brought us closer to understanding how a cell works and species evolve and diverge, and provided us with new insights on the genetics of diseases.  Nonetheless, the area of nutritional genomics seems to lag behind.

Nutrigenomics is the study of the interaction between nutrition and (human) genome, or in other words, how diet can affect the regulation of gene expression and disturb physiological processes resulting in diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.

Research studies published in the past 20 years show evidence for both the genetic and dietary components in health and disease, but many of these studies focused on single genes or single nutrients in the context of complex diseases.  The same way we can’t understand how a cell works or what makes us humans solely by looking at our genome, we can’t understand obesity and cancer without understanding the effects of food compounds on the regulation of gene networks and metabolic pathways.  What seems to be missing is a systems approach in which a comprehensive nutritional database is coupled with the high-throughput genomic tools enabled by Biology 2.0.

Personalized nutrition may not appear a tangible reality, but the future is promising.  Pioneer work on the relationship between nutrition and disease was done by Dr. Denis Burkitt who proposed that colorectal cancers are largely the result of low fiber intake.   Drs. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. and Dean Ornish were able to revert heart disease in their patients through a diet free of added fat and almost all animal products. Dr. T. Colin Campbell showed that the onset and/or progression of various common cancers, diabetes and obesity relate to the amount of animal fat and protein intake (reviewed in The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health).  All of them built the foundation for what is about to come when genomics tools are used to understand the underlying effect of food on our genes.

In a recent presentation at the TED conference, Dr. William Li convincing argued that we can eat to starve cancer, obesity and any other disease that advances through angiogenesis (i.e. growth of new capillary blood vessels from pre-existing vessels).  Dr. Li and his team suggests that we can add to our diet foods that are naturally anti-angiogenic, which can boost the body’s defense system and beat back those blood vessels that are feeding cancer.  Their approach includes looking for biomarkers expressed in blood that could shed some light on which genes and biological pathways are being regulated by different types of foods.

More importantly, Dr. Li highlights the importance of empowering ourselves to do the things doctors can’t do for us, which is to use the knowledge already here and take action.

I’m 100% with him.  What about you?