Taking your vitamins and eating a variety of fruits and vegetables – such as raspberries and spinach – can make up for your not-so-healthy genes.
That's according to a new book, Feed Your Genes Right (John Wiley & Sons, March 2005).
Your genes, which you inherited from your parents, contain the biological programs that control your health. But you don't have to be at their mercy.
Best-selling nutrition and health author Jack Challem points out that certain vitamins and foods enable your genes to function at their best.
For example, at least one-third of Americans have a variation in the gene that reduces activity of folic acid, a B vitamin. As a result, they are more likely to heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease. A woman with this defect is more likely also to have a baby with birth defects.
You can't change the gene, but taking a daily multivitamin and eating certain fruits and vegetables help that gene to work better, Challem says.
"Our bodies need B vitamins and other nutrients to make, repair, and regulate our DNA and genes," Challem says. "In a sense, vitamins are inexpensive gene therapy to help our genes function at their best."
The B-vitamins are involved in what biochemists call "one-carbon metabolism." The process donates molecules needed to make the nucleotides that form DNA and genes.
Challem's advice includes these suggestions:
- Take a moderately high-potency daily multivitamin, which includes the B vitamins. Several of these vitamins help suppress cancer-promoting genes.
- Eat spinach salads. Spinach is rich in folic acid, a B vitamin needed to make and repair genes.
- Eat berries. Raspberries and blueberries are loaded with antioxidants, which protect genes from damage.
- Drink green tea. It protects genes from the cancer-promoting effects of dioxin and other pollutants.
- Go easy on foods high in refined carbs and sugars. They boost levels of insulin, a hormone that turns on fat-storage genes.
"The biochemical basis of our genetics comes back to nutrition," Challem says. "Nutrients provide the biochemical building blocks for our DNA and genes."
Excerpts from the book are available at www.feedyourgenesright.com.
Jack Challem is a leading nutrition and health writer and the author of the best-selling "Syndrome X" and "The Inflammation Syndrome" books. He writes regularly for Alternative Medicine, Body & Soul, and other health magazines. His scientific articles have been published in Free Radical Biology & Medicine, Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Medical Hypotheses, and other journals.
Feed Your Genes Right
By Jack Challem
John Wiley & Sons/$24.95
ISBN: 0-471-47986-1
On Sale March 2005