General Article What you eat can reprogram your genes – an expert explains the emerging science of nutrigenomics

Topic Selected: Dietary Choices Book Volume: 408

What you eat can reprogram your genes – an expert explains the emerging science of nutrigenomics

Monica Dus, University of Michigan

People typically think of food as calories, energy and sustenance. However, the latest evidence suggests that food also “talks” to our genome, which is the genetic blueprint that directs the way the body functions down to the cellular level.

This communication between food and genes may affect your health, physiology and longevity. The idea that food delivers important messages to an animal’s genome is the focus of a field known as nutrigenomics. This is a discipline still in its infancy, and many questions remain cloaked in mystery. Yet already, we researchers have learned a great deal about how food components affect the genome.

I am a molecular biologist who researches the interactions among food, genes and brains in the effort to better understand how food messages affect our biology. The efforts of scientists to decipher this transmission of infor...

Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?

Sign up now for a no obligation FREE TRIAL and view the entire collection