Word: diet
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...molecular biologists is starting to give that old adage a decidedly high-tech twist. By combining the latest discoveries in human genetics with a deeper understanding of the hundreds of compounds found in food, investigators have begun to tease apart some of the more complex interactions between your diet and your DNA. In the process, they hope eventually to give consumers more personalized advice about what to eat and drink to stave off heart disease, cancer and other chronic conditions of aging. "We are trying to put more science behind the nutrition," says Jose Ordovas, a geneticist at the Friedman...
Would a high-fat diet be particularly damaging to your health, given your genetic makeup? About 15% of folks are born with a form of a liver enzyme that causes their HDL, or good cholesterol, level to go down in response to dietary fat. In most people the HDL level goes up, counterbalancing some of the bad effects of dietary fat on LDL--the dangerous cholesterol...
...what if you can't wait until the science is settled? Well, you could always turn to one of the start-up biotech firms that are providing limited genetic testing for about $250. "We have 19 genes we've identified that have a clear and defined response to diet and environmental or lifestyle choices," says Rosalynn Gill-Garrison, a molecular biologist who helped found the Sciona company in 2000. Worried about that caffeine-calcium link? Sciona tests for that, as well as genetic variants that affect insulin sensitivity, cholesterol levels and more...
...test, which is sold online and at some drugstores, is simple. You use a special stick to swab the inside of your cheek, then send the sample off, along with a questionnaire about your diet and lifestyle, to Sciona's laboratories in New Haven, Conn. Within three weeks, Sciona sends back a standard computerized analysis of your survey answers, with a few highlights from or red flags about the genetic-test results. For example, Gill-Garrison says, the company estimates from the questionnaire the amount of folic acid in your system. Then it tells you what level you should...
...Angeles chef Goin doesn't quite have De Laurentiis' effortless star power. She is 39 but talks like a teenager: in the course of a two-hour interview, she used like more than 200 times, as in, "I think all the diet stuff is, like, crazy." But Goin has roused the L.A. food scene with her restaurants Lucques and A.O.C. (which stands for appellation d'origine contrôlée, a French guarantee that a product was made in a certain area). Last month Goin was named best chef in California by the distinguished James Beard Foundation, which also named...