‘Switched On’
Harnessing the Power of Nutrigenomics to Optimise Your Health
Christine Houghton
B.Sc. (Biochem.),Grad.Dip.Hum.Nutr.,R.Nutr.,Ph.D.Cand.
Nutritional Biochemist
This book is dedicated to those seekers of truth who wish to regain control of their own health, allowing modern Nutrigenomic Science to complement the time-honoured principles of Nature.
SPECIAL NOTE TO READERS
The information contained within this book is for education and information purposes. It is not intended to provide diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition, nor is it intended to replace the guidance and personalize treatment provided by a health professional. Any application of the information provided in this book is at the readers’ discretion and sole responsibility.
First Edition | August, 2010
Copyright - INTEGRA PUBLISHING | 2010
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CHAPTER 1. Has Modern Medicine lost its Way?
CHAPTER 2. Why do we get sick?
CHAPTER 3. Looking inside our body’s cells for answers
CHAPTER 4. DNA, genes and chromosomes
CHAPTER 5. Nutrigenomics – a new paradigm in health care
CHAPTER 6. ‘Switches’ that talk to your DNA
CHAPTER 7. Free Radicals & Antioxidants
CHAPTER 8. Detoxification and Cellular Defence
CHAPTER 10.Superoxide dismutase
CHAPTER 11. Putting it all together
It’s likely you are reading this book because you have a genuine interest in your health and ways of enhancing your wellbeing and preventing disease; so you know that your most valuable asset is good health. Many of us fail to appreciate this fact until we become sick. Modern society encourages us to spend much of our time in search of material wealth, yet this is clearly no substitute for good health.
Do you ever feel as though you have little or no control over your health? Do you feel that you develop sickness without ever knowing why? Do you feel helpless in thinking that you are dependent on pharmaceutical medicines and perhaps surgery to stay reasonably well? Do you feel that you are ageing prematurely? If this is how you feel, rest assured, you’re not alone!
This book will help you to regain control of your health by showing you how to use the principles of Nutrigenomics (pr. Nutri-gen-o-mix), a relatively new science which puts the spotlight of health care back on you as an individual and away from helpless dependency on modern medicine. This is not to say that we shouldn’t take advantage of the countless marvels modern medicine has to offer. Many of the sophisticated diagnostic and life-saving techniques of modern medicine are nothing short of brilliant!
What’s worth considering however, is that the ready availability of pharmaceutical medicines for virtually any symptom you can imagine has discouraged us from looking for our own answers in the way that our ancestors did. Every civilisation has its own healing tradition and some of the plant foods and medicines used in these traditions have been the basis from which modern pharmaceuticals have been the basis from which modern pharmaceuticals have been developed. Many of these traditional medicines continue to be used today, not only in the countries of their origin but also globally by individuals looking for ways to improve their health or to prevent illness.
For most of us, every cell of the human body has all the information it needs to remain healthy and this information is coded within the DNA of every gene in every cell. Once we learn how to ‘tap into’ this code and better understand how to send it the signals it needs, all sorts of distressing symptoms may disappear. This may be as simple as feeling less tired, experiencing fewer aches and pains, better digestion, a better mood - sometimes just a sense of ‘feeling better’.
Although Nutrigenomics may also use plants as sources of medicine, it is not a branch of any traditional medicine we have ever known. Instead, Nutrigenomics is firmly anchored in modern science, yet is simple enough that we can all take advantage of its principles. Although it sits on a foundation of Nutrition Science, the real power of Nutrigenomics lies in the identification and application of powerful food-derived biomolecules capable of ‘switching on’ certain genes associated with cellular health.
To learn how this extraordinary new science can give us so much more control over our health and wellbeing, read on……
Has modern Medicine lost its way?
Tools seemingly needed to practice modern medicine have become highly sophisticated but also impossibly expensive. None of them however, has been sufficient to curb the accelerating growth in chronic disease. Populations globally continue to succumb to the ‘Diseases of Civilization’; cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and arthritic conditions to name the most prevalent.
Medicine boasts its ability to transplant organs, reattach severed limbs and replace worn-out joints. Yet, the common ailments which afflict millions the world over continue to defy practitioners of modern Medicine. Whilst pharmaceutical drugs provide relief from the symptoms of many of these day-to-day ailments, they do little if anything to arrest the cause. What’s more, most of these medicines produce adverse effects sometimes more distressing to the individual than the symptoms of the original complaint.
Too often we look in the wrong places to find ways to be healthy – pharmaceutical drugs and surgery should be our very last option, not our first. Mankind has survived on this planet for millions of years, using only what Nature has provided – so, perhaps we don’t need to make day-to-day health care so complicated, nor so impossibly expensive!
The practice of modern Medicine as we know it today is associated with treatments based largely on the prescription of pharmaceutical drugs. When such prescriptions fail, surgery is often the next level of treatment. Such treatments are not without risks.
Barbara Starfield1 a professor in health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland, has published frightening statistics on deaths due to medical error in the United States. Her data show that each year there are around 12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgery, 7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals, 20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals, 106,000 deaths from the adverse effects of medications prescribed in error and 80,000 deaths from infections acquired whilst in hospital. This is a total of 225,000 deaths every year which are due to error or to adverse reactions to prescribed medication.
To put this into a different perspective, medical error, she says, constitutes the third leading cause of death in the U.S. after heart disease and cancer. These data are unlikely to be very much different in other developed countries. In Australia where I live, the data are quite similar when one takes into account the population difference between the two countries.
If we were to look at the causes of death 100 years ago2, we would find that the two leading causes of death were tuberculosis and pneumonia, both infectious diseases. Now that deaths by infections are so much better controlled by improved hygiene and modern medicines, the diseases which plague us today are the chronic degenerative and inflammatory diseases.
The degenerative diseases include the wear and tear diseases such as break down of the joints and clogging of the blood vessels with fatty plaque. The inflammatory diseases include arthritis (pain, redness and swelling) of the joints, asthma (inflammation of the airways) and cardiovascular disease (inflammation of the blood vessels).
Leading the Charge
In recent years, the term Integrative Medicine has been used to describe those conventionally-trained medical practitioners who integrate aspects of non-pharmaceutical medicine into their mainstream practices.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) define Integrative Medicine as "combining mainstream medical therapies and CAM therapies, for which there is some high-quality scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness." To the patient, it may appear as if the particular practitioner is trained as both a medical practitioner and a naturopath. To many consumers, this is considered a great advantage, providing what is seen to be the ‘best of both worlds’.
Because Integrative Medicine stands outside the criteria for medical registration, an Integrative Medicine practitioner, although satisfying the necessary regulatory criteria to practise mainstream medicine, is not required to meet standards in Integrative Medicine. The internal standards which these practitioners have established to train and credential their members are not acknowledged by governing authorities; nor are they known or understood by consumers. As a result, a consumer has no way of knowing how knowledgeable or competent a particular integrative medical practitioner may be.
Regardless of any such current barriers to practice, those forward-thinking Integrative Medicine practitioners who have stepped outside conventional practice to embrace evidence-based alternatives are in huge demand. I personally know many such clinicians to have ‘waiting-list’ practices; surely this illustrates what consumers are really seeking.
Interestingly, medical practitioners in some universities still take the ‘Hippocratic Oath’ before they can practise medicine. Hippocrates was a doctor and teacher of medicine some 2,500 years ago and is referred to as the ‘Father of modern medicine’. He is credited with saying, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Although Hippocrates’ claim that food and medicine are interchangeable seems overly simplistic in the 21st century, there are elements of this philosophy which are still relevant today. This is especially so in the science of Nutrigenomics, as we will see later.
If you’ve only ever enjoyed good health, you may have never given a thought to the question, “Why do some people get sick and yet others remain healthy?” If you are like most of us, from time to time you will have some experience of sickness but as the years advance, you might notice that your health deteriorates inexplicably. You may become more breathless, you may develop recurrent indigestion, perhaps you feel stiff and sore when getting out of bed in the mornings or you may need frequent naps and so on.
All little things in themselves but nevertheless, they are indicators that things are changing on the inside in ways that limit your experience of life. And then to make things worse, a visit to the GP followed by various tests, shows that those little ‘signs’ are actually just the tip of the iceberg. The GP may tell you that you have all sorts of things going wrong. High blood pressure, high blood cholesterol and higher-than-normal blood glucose all point to a high risk of your developing diabetes, heart disease or both! Next thing, you are prescribed pharmaceutical drugs to lower the blood pressure, the cholesterol and the glucose, along with a suggestion to eat a low-fat diet and walk more often. How did this suddenly happen, you wonder. “I eat well”, you say “and I don’t need to do any extra walking – I’m busy all day – I never have a minute to myself.”
Mostly, we just accept that this is how things are – that this is the hand of cards we were dealt at birth. You might remember that your parents or grandparents suffered from some of these same conditions and that you should probably expect to have inherited the same tendencies to disease. To reassure the patient (and perhaps their own ignorance?), it is not uncommon for GPs to ‘justify’ the presence of a patient’s illness by stating that he or she inherited the disease from one or both parents – and yet this is patently untrue because GPs don’t typically do genetic tests to determine if diseases run in families.
Although it is now possible to obtain such genetic tests, especially if you are prepared to arrange and pay for them yourself, such tests are still largely the domain of research scientists, not clinicians. It might seem a logical assumption but is laying blame on one’s genetic heritage necessarily the correct – or only explanation?
So if the disease is not inherited, why does the same disease appear to run in families? We’ve all seen families where the same disease seems to afflict many of its members. But let’s stop talking about disease and consider how it may be possible for us to take back control of our own health.
Looking inside our body’s cells for answers
Sometimes the concepts we think are the most complicated are really very simple. ‘Healthy cells lead to a healthy body’ is a simple message which tells us that if we know how to take care of each of our 50 trillion cells, our health will look after itself! So if we know how to look after one cell, we know how to care for them all. Probably overly-simplistic but nevertheless, true!
To better understand how we can use Nutrigenomic principles to benefit our own health, let’s take a microscopic journey deep inside a typical human cell. Once we know how a cell works, we can more readily appreciate how things can go wrong – but more importantly what we can do to improve cellular function - so that things go right! What benefits one cell can benefit all our cells. When all our cells function at their peak, we have reached our highest state of good health. And that should be our goal; to achieve our individual highest possible state of cellular function. The key here is that we don’t need to name diagnosed diseases – the principles are the same, regardless.
Now let’s explore some of the marvels of a typical human cell. We’ll start with the membrane which could be likened to the ‘skin’ of the cell.
Cell Membrane- the cell’s ‘skin’.
Each cell is surrounded by a protective membrane which preferentially lets in water, oxygen, food and other molecules. Certain molecules simply ‘flow’ into the cell, whilst others need to be pumped in, using energy the cell has created from food molecules. In the same way, the cell’s membrane has a range of complex mechanisms for pumping waste materials out.
Mitochondria - the cell’s ‘Power Station‘
Inside the cell are tiny specialised bodies called mitochondria (pr. my-toe-kon-dree-a) which are the ‘power stations’, producing the energy the cell needs to perform all its functions. If these mitochondria aren’t functioning properly, they can’t produce sufficient energy.
When your cells are sluggish because of lack of energy production, you will probably feel sluggish too! Sometimes this sluggishness within the cell can be because waste materials aren’t being removed efficiently; sometimes, it is because the cell isn’t receiving the food molecules it needs. This is one of the areas in which we can exert control; the foods we choose to eat have a direct impact on how our cells produce energy. Certain foods will enable the cell to function at its best while over-processed and refined foods which have lost many of their nutrients will deprive the cell of what it needs and lead to abnormal function. Unprocessed or minimally-processed whole foods are essential for optimal energy production.
Nucleus – the cell’s database
Just as important as the mitochondria is the cell’s nucleus, a large sac which holds our genes. Our genes which are made up of long paired strands of DNA, store our unique database of genetic information. This database could be likened to your own personalised Instruction Manual – except that it is more the size of an entire library than an ordinary manual!
As well as housing the database of information about you, the nucleus is responsible for the cell’s reproductive system. Cells are said to replicate by dividing into two new identical cells at intervals. This process is controlled by the DNA.
This is very significant to our health and wellbeing because when healthy cells replicate, two new healthy cells are produced. However, when the DNA has become damaged, the new cells will carry that defect onto the next generation of cells. This sets the scene for ongoing patterns of disease which can be difficult to reverse; in other words, chronic disease.
The DNA has remarkable ability to repair such damage – to a point – but a lifetime of accumulated damage can sometimes overwhelm the cell’s natural repair processes. This is where powerful nutrigenomic compounds as well as nutrients like folic acid and Vitamin B12 found in certain foods can help the DNA to protect and repair itself.
The Human Cell and its Organelles
The Cytoplasm - The cytoplasm is a bit like the ‘soup’ in which the various cellular structures are suspended. However, this ‘soup’ is more than just part of the cell’s structure; it is a rich source of thousands of essential chemical substances, all playing their own indispensable roles in maintaining normal cell function.
Now before we explore the really exciting concepts that you can directly relate to your own health, let’s zoom into the nucleus and take a closer look at the structures there. Sometimes, the terms DNA, genes and chromosomes are used interchangeably but they are in fact quite distinct entities. As a scientist, I find the intricacies of human cells absolutely fascinating. If you’re not familiar with these concepts, I hope you enjoy this brief glimpse.
The DNA
The cell’s database which contains the code for absolutely everything about you starts with just four molecules, called base pairs, abbreviated as A, T, C and G. These base pairs are arranged like the steps in a spiral staircase with the hand-railing coiled in long strands. This cabled structure is known as DNA and has been described as ‘the double helix’ because of its characteristic helical shape.
E
ach
person’s DNA is unique to that individual. One strand of DNA is
inherited from the mother and the other from the father. These are
the complex molecules which determine everything we inherit – the
colour of our eyes, our adult height, whether we can run fast, all of
our strengths and weaknesses. In fact, everything we inherit is coded
here.
Of course, some of these factors such as eye colour and facial bone structure can’t be readily changed because these genes are permanently ‘switched off’ after birth. But of course these genes can be inherited by the offspring, confirming what we readily observe when we see children who look like their parents.
Scientists are now learning that we do have control over many of our very important genes and the way they can be expressed Learning how to send the right messages to our genes is an important theme of this book. Equally important is the need to ensure that we don’t send the wrong messages to our genes.
The Chromosomes
The 25,000 or so human genes are contained in 23 pairs of non-identical chromosomes. The coiled DNA double helix is clearly seen within the chromosome in the illustration above.
The Genes
Even though the double helix is a continuous structure within each chromosome, at various intervals, a section of the DNA code contains a ‘stop’, signaling the end of the section of code for one gene and the start of the code for another. Each of these separate sections is a single gene and each contains the code to tell the cell to make just one specific protein. So when the gene is ‘switched on’, the code can be read and the cell makes a quantity of that particular protein; when the cell registers that it has made enough of the protein, the gene is then switched to the ‘off’ position.
The glucose-regulating substance insulin is a good example of how this switching works. After a meal, when we have increasing amounts of glucose in the bloodstream, the cells of the pancreas detect this increase and switch the insulin gene to the ‘ON’ position. When the right level of glucose occurs, the insulin gene is switched off.
When a gene is ‘expressed’, this describes what happens when a gene is ‘switched on’. Switching on a gene activates mechanisms which enable a specific protein to be produced. The gene contains the exact code for that protein – a bit like a recipe to tell the cell’s ‘machinery’ the ingredients and the method to make it correctly
The diagram which
follows shows how chromosomes contain long strands of DNA and
how DNA is made up of genes. A gene which has been irreversibly
damaged is said to contain a mutation. Mutations are often the
fore-runner to the development of serious diseases such as cancer.
However, not all mutations are harmful and are often Nature’s way
of allowing us to adapt over generations to changes in our
environment.
Nutrigenomics – a new paradigm in health care
Scientists who completed the mapping of the human genome in around 2003 (the Human Genome Project) identified around 25,000 genes which contain the individual genetic code for each of us. This turned out to be surprisingly few genes, given the apparent sophistication of humans compared to many simpler animal species.
It then became apparent that there was another layer of complexity, the Epigenome, which provided a form of modifiable chemical code within the cell’s genetic material. Epigenetics http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3411/02.html) is a ‘sister’ discipline to Nutrigenomics and later we will explore some of the fascinating aspects of this emerging discipline. Following the completion of the Human Genome Project, research into these relatively new scientific disciplines has become very relevant to human health. Epigenetic changes to the DNA are a bit like adding detachable paper clips here and there, making subtle but heritable changes to gene expression.