Why Your Diet Isn’t Working
Posted May 12, 2010 1:40 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Few physicians have the cachet or the captive audience of Dr. Mehmet Oz. He’s written half a dozen books, and has been on the The Oprah Winfrey Show no less than 55 times. She nicknamed him “America’s doctor,” and every weekday he hosts his own radio and television talk shows. So, last month, when a segment of Dr. Oz was devoted to “exploring the perfect diet for your genes,” the nascent field of “nutrigenomics” was catapulted into pop science stardom.
“It’s totally sexy,” says Christopher Gardner, a Stanford University researcher who co-authored the study featured on Dr. Oz, which had not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal as of late April. The study suggests that a simple genetic test (a mouth swab) may pinpoint for individuals exactly what kind of diet they should be on—low-fat, low-carb or balanced—to drop the maximum number of pounds. “Lots of people know they should go on a diet. Lots of people are pissed because they went on the same diet that their friend went on and their friend lost more weight than they did,” muses Gardner, who is also a professor at Stanford’s medical school. Hopefully, this study, he says, “will explain part of that.”
Understanding the relationship between our DNA, dietary preferences and the impact that food has on us is at the core of nutrigenomics. “We study how our individual genetic differences—the variations and the sequence of a particular gene—can explain why some people respond differently than others,” says Ahmed El-Sohemy, the Canada Research Chair in Nutrigenomics, and a professor at the University of Toronto. “Ultimately, the goal is to develop better, personalized dietary advice for the individual. Because we know that the one-size-fits-all model is not the most effective.”
To read the rest of the Maclean’s article, click here.
