What Your Genes Want You to Eat

NY Times Sunday Mag ^ | May 4, 2003 | BRUCE GRIERSON

[Pharmboy]

As with drug therapy tailored to your genes (pharmacogenomics) this is the future folks.

[AntiGuv]

Fascinating!

[discostu]

Blood-type diets have bee naround for a while. All the people I know that are into it are freaks, I judge it by the company it keeps. I eat what I like and like what I eat, having long ago come to grips with the eventuality of my demise I've decided I'd rather enjoy the trip than foolishly try to make it last forever.

[Riley]

Hopefully, it'll tell me to pour myself a scotch and put my feet up. :-)

[Pharmboy]

This is so FAR beyond blood type diets it's not in the same solar system. The elucidation of the human genome changes everything.

It's what the vacuum tube was to the silicon chip.

[The Hon. Galahad Threepwood]

I hate the future.

[Pharmboy]

No matter what the genes say, we can still have a MacCallan 18 together some day...

[Pharmboy]

LOL!

[Pure Country]

My "genes" tell me what to eat too. If they are tight, they're telling me to eat less......when they are loose, they're telling me to pig out. Don't have to give no blood either!

[PLMerite]

Man I got a funny feeling mine wouldn't let me eat Ledo's pizza...

[liberalnot]

i saw this article in today's print version.

i had mixed feelings about it. on the one hand, it's in the genre of medical literature that, "gee, ain't the future of medicine and health going to be great!".

on the other hand, we never get to that goal. why?

pharmaceutical corporations make their money off of ill health, as do doctors, hmo's etc.

they spend their research money on pills that will make them wealthy.

they are not looking for medical solutions.

since ww2 billions have been spent on medical research, but people are getting fatter and fatter and fatter. some folks may need to be brought into supermarkets by means of forklifts.

the international agribusinesses are partly to blame: they've destroyed much of the indigenous agriculture in developing countries. and at the same time they've almost driven the american family farmer out of business. the europeans are acutely aware of this and are resisting.

meanwhile, agribusinesses have substituted high fructose corn syrup for sugar in most products. hfcs was discovered by a japanese scientist in the early 70's. the research is not in as to whether hfcs is metabolized the same way as sugars. meanwhile, the sugar beet and cane sugar farmers have really taken a beating. the government of mexico is at this minute attempting to renegotiate an aspect of nafta concerning white corn, which mexicans eat a lot of.

in sum, all of my life i've watched articles like this come and go, but americans are probably in some respects healthier, but in other respects, especially in the matter of obesity, less healthy. and hfcs is the culprit.

[discostu]

The ellucidation of the human genome hasn't changed one important thing: diet still confuses out medical professionals. They've spent the last 30 years trying to decide if cholesterol is good or bad and even cheating and dividing cholesterol into two different categories has helped as now they're thinking bad cholesterol isn't as bad as they thought and good cholesterol isn't as good as they thought. Now they want to figure it out on a person by person basis... right.

One of the things I have learned looking at the blood type diet stuff is that most (but not all) of the stuff on my "good" list was food I liked and most (but not all) of the stuff on my "bad" list was food I didn't like. Your body knows what you need, people just have to listen to it, anyone that's had an "odd" craving and later looked of the nutritional info of what they craved knows this.

[ALS]

can we get that in a Swatch?

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[tubebender]

Marking for my wife to read.

[pollwatcher]

Yep. I'm one of those blood-type diet "freaks." :-) Actually, I can't stick to it very well, as dairy and flour are in virtually every American snack and pre-made meal (and I haven't the time or patience to always specially prepare food). So, I take supplements to deflect the bad influences.

But, it is superficial to diet to postpone your "demise." It's a quality of life issue: corn vs. insulin resistance, coffee vs. arthritis, flour vs. allergy symptoms, sweets vs. digestive tract diseases, hydrogenated fats vs. bad cholesterol.

Everyone can do their own cost/benefit analysis. What we tell ourselves is "living life" may merely satisfying a gnawing addiction. There's a lot of tasty foods out there that didn't arrive until relatively recently in human history, and not everyone's system is optimized to digest and assimulate them properly.

[discostu]

Most of the "vs" are things still being argued about in food science circles, which is a large part of why I don't trust these things. One week coffee gives you brain tumors the next week it decreases chances of heart attacks, should you drink it or not. I think your body knows and tells you if you just listen to it, unfortunately self knowledge isn't a highly respected trait in western culture so many people don't know how to listen.

[POGIFFMOO]

Today menu: Kick back, have a smoke, a martini. Order take-out from the chinese restaurant. This came from my computer....how smart.

[eddie willers]

Bump

[pollwatcher]

It's not THAT far from the Blood Type diets. Some key human neurotransmitter and other genetic factors are normally parked right next to the blood-type determiners. In animals, like pigs, the genes for hair color ride along with the animal blood-type factors. It's all pieces of the puzzle.