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My first attempt to write this blog was in 2009. I was passionate about science and wanted to share insights on the relationship between nutrition and health. What I could not figure out back then was specifically what to write about. There’s a bulk of information on the subject that seems to overwhelm all of us. Just adding more to the pile won’t help much. To make matters worse, messages are not consistent and contradictions abound. One day soy is good for you, the next day it’s not so hot anymore. Fatty fish are a great source of omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA), but only if caught in the wild. Vegetarians and vegans rely on flaxseeds and walnuts as a source of omega-3 fatty acids, but they are of the short-chain kind (ALA) and therefore do not have the same anti-inflammatory properties of long-chain omega-3s. Some say cholesterol in seafood should be avoided, while others say it has little effect on blood cholesterol in most people; saturated fats and trans fatty acids are the real villains. The list goes on.

In my first post I mentioned I was searching for answers on whether we can “unravel the complexity of our body systems and the interactions between those systems and the food we eat.” Along that line, my goal has been to find the common ground in the chaos of information out there, i.e. to identify the key components of a healthful diet on which physicians, other health-related practitioners, and researchers seem to agree. The idea is to start with the simple and build on that foundation to tackle the complex. The search for answers is still on, and the path has been quite exciting. It is now time to get to work and pass the information on to you.

Stay tuned!

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?

Science fascinates me.  I love the excitement of making discoveries, breaking old concepts and creating new paradigms.  I have been a life scientist for almost 15 years and, through a variety of research interests I pursued, one single truth remained – a biological system is not simply a sum of its parts, but rather it is how the parts interact with each other and the environment.

Let me explain what I mean by this.  In biology’s genomic era we now know that it is not the number of genes that determines the complexity of an organism, but rather the interactions between those genes in multiple networks.  The same holds true in ecology, where the balance of a given ecosystem cannot be understood through the observation of a single species, or in nutrition, where the study of nutrients in isolation does not advance our comprehension about the role of foods in sustaining a healthy body.

In the fascinating book Nexus – small worlds and the groundbreaking science of networks, Mark Buchanan discusses the collective dynamics of the small worlds networks first described in 1998 by the mathematicians Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.  Their theory, largely based on Stanley Milgram’s web of interpersonal connections – the so-called ‘six degrees of separation’, shows that the social world is simpler than it appears and that you and I are connected through no more than six handshakes.  Anyone with a Facebook account can attest the veracity of the theory, since the evidence is right there – as your network of friends grows, so does the number of people whom you can reach with fewer connections.

More interestingly, as substantiated by some of your highly-connected friends, there are some people who are connected to many networks. Indeed, Watts and Strogatz noted the existence of central hubs that tend to dominate networks.  Such hubs are found in social, information and biological networks.

We are what we eat.  Nobody seems to question that.  However, can we ultimately apply the small-world idea and unravel the complexity of our body systems and the interactions between those systems and the food we eat?  If we learn how to find the central hubs and to connect the right dots, can we prevent and/or successfully treat cancer and other chronic diseases?  Is it possible to find the simplicity behind the apparent complexity of those networks?  Those are the answers I am after, and searching for those answers is a journey worth taking.

Are you with me?