Word: diet
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...lives and replace it with round-the-clock sitting. Combine sedentary living with cheap food and supersize portions (the U.S. now produces enough food every day for each of us to consume 3,800 calories, never mind that we need only about 2,350 for a healthy diet), and there was no place for the needle on the scale to go but up. Now, according to a study just released by the Journal of the American Medical Association, our long national binge may at last be coming to an end. (See the top 10 new diet books...
This one group of dangerously obese outliers is not the only thing that makes the twin studies something other than unalloyed good news. More worrisome is the possibility that the national weight plateau is not the result of Americans' finally getting the message about diet and fitness but the fact that we've simply reached some kind of obesity saturation point, with nearly all people who are genetically susceptible to gaining too much weight already having done so. If that's true, it could mean that a plateau is the best we can hope for and that the next step...
...cellular material - the epigenome - that sits on top of the genome, just outside it (hence the prefix epi-, which means above). It is these epigenetic "marks" that tell your genes to switch on or off, to speak loudly or whisper. It is through epigenetic marks that environmental factors like diet, stress and prenatal nutrition can make an imprint on genes that is passed from one generation to the next...
...help explain certain scientific mysteries that traditional genetics never could: for instance, why one member of a pair of identical twins can develop bipolar disorder or asthma even though the other is fine. Or why autism strikes boys four times as often as girls. Or why extreme changes in diet over a short period in Norrbotten could lead to extreme changes in longevity. In these cases, the genes may be the same, but their patterns of expression have clearly been tweaked. (See the best pictures...
...postdoctoral students, Robert Waterland, did. That year, they conducted an elegant experiment on mice with a uniquely regulated agouti gene - a gene that gives mice yellow coats and a propensity for obesity and diabetes when expressed continuously. Jirtle's team fed one group of pregnant agouti mice a diet rich in B vitamins (folic acid and vitamin B12). Another group of genetically identical pregnant agouti mice got no such prenatal nutrition...