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- Type of diabetes
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- Diet only
I have no idea how this will copy, as it's from The Times, yesterday. The article isn't anything to do with diabetes. Clearly there's no consideration of blood glucose levels in the face of the "experiment", but a very basic view to read.
I may do this, alongside my OH (who is non-diabetic with a low natural HbA1c), just for a bit of fun.
Our genes may decide how well we cope with a carb-heavy diet
Most people who lose weight by dieting do not keep the weight off over the long term. They try the latest fad diet, stick to it for a few weeks or months and drop some pounds, but sooner or later they return to their old eating habits. They regain the weight — possibly adding on even more — and when the next “miracle” diet comes along they try the whole disheartening process again.
Most diets fail because of two important flaws, says Dr Sharon Moalem, a leading geneticist based in the United States. “The first is simply a mind-numbing, restrictive lack of variety in the food that you are allowed to eat, making it impossible to stick to the diet in the long term,” he says in his book The DNA Restart. “The second and most important reason is that, until now, there hasn’t been a single diet that is designed with every single person on the planet in mind.”
There is no one-size-fits-all diet, he says, because people are wonderfully different. Some thrive on carbs while others have genes that mean that they should restrict them. It may go some way towards explaining why some people can lose weight only on a high-fat, high-protein diet, while others find that a calorie-restricted diet that includes all the food groups is the only weight-loss programme for them. “On a genetic level, although you may be very similar to other people, there’s no one else exactly like you. It’s not even close,” he says. We require different diets tailored to our own genes, he says.
Dr Moalem claims that he can set us on the path to our ideal weight and to optimal health by telling us how to unlock our personal genetic code and how to eat according to our DNA. In the process we can lose weight and reverse some of the signs of ageing. “Until now, we have been eating blind, without any personalised genetic wisdom to guide us,” he says.
We meet for breakfast in a fashionable Manhattan restaurant. The 42-year-old Canadian-born scientist has an informal and enthusiastic approach that makes his work — a melding of evolution, genetics, biology and medicine — easier for the layman to understand.
Genetics has been his lifelong passion, he says. He has founded two biotechnology companies, holds 25 patents worldwide for inventions in the fields of biotechnology and human health, and has helped in the discovery of new antibiotics.
This is his fourth book, and Dr Moalem explains that each of us is born with an “instruction manual”, a three-billion-letter genetic code full of individualised wisdom collected and annotated over millennia. “Every nutritional adaptation that allowed your genetic ancestor to survive long enough to pass on to his or her own children is in there — a veritable genetic tapestry gifted to you from every direct genetic ancestor you have ever had,” he writes in the book.
We also have two genomes — one from our mother and one from our father. Within our genomes we have about 20,000 genes that regulate and maintain our body, keep our heart beating, build bones and so on.
We require different diets tailored to our own genes. Until now we have been eating blindDr Sharon Moalem
“The old way of thinking was that we inherited one gene from each parent, so it was thought that you had two copies of every gene. But now we know that there is something called copy number variations, or CNVs, and in the important places in the genome where we need more horsepower, those genes duplicate,” says Dr Moalem. Instead of two copies of a gene, some people might have inherited a dozen or more.
“Does it really matter? Absolutely,” he says. “Many of these CNVs passed on from your ancestors can be an advantage when eating certain things.”
For some people carbs are beneficial, he says, because they come from ancestors who relied heavily on starches, farmers who grew and consumed cereal grains. They have inherited multiple copies of the gene that the body uses to make the protein amylase, called AMY1. Some people have as many as 20 copies of amylase and can digest a lot of starch, while others have fewer copies or even none and will have problems digesting it.
“It’s an amazing enzyme because it has the ability, within seconds, to start breaking down starch,” says Dr Moalem. “It’s like a giant pair of shearing scissors that can cut apart big and bulky starch molecules into simpler sugars. The faster it cuts up the starch into simpler sugars like maltose, the more your body can handle carbohydrates internally.
“So if you have individuals eating the same western, carbohydrate-heavy diet, the more of these genes they have, the less likely they are to be obese and diabetic. If you think about it, these are like cylinders in an engine. Some people have a high-powered engine that can power up a hill, and some people have a lawn-mower engine that’s puttering and shaking.”
This metabolic strain on the body can lead to conditions such as type 2 diabetes, as well as shortening life expectancy.
Around us, people are tucking into eggs benedict and stacks of pancakes loaded with maple syrup, and Dr Moalem produces a box of plain and unsalted crackers and puts three of them on my plate. Thankfully, this isn’t breakfast on his new diet — it is a genetic self-test that will help people to eat the correct amount of carbohydrates for their genetic make-up.
If you can consume dairy products as an adult, you are actually a genetic mutantDr Sharon Moalem
The test, which Dr Moalem calls groundbreaking, will indicate how much amylase you have in your saliva. Knowing how much amylase is in your saliva is a powerful way of getting a person to eat the right amount of carbohydrates.
I chew the crackers and he asks me to say when I notice a change from bland to sweet. The change is slight and occurs at 27 seconds, meaning I should eat carbohydrates in moderation. When he did the test, Dr Moalem noted a change at ten seconds and can eat more carbohydrates than I can (see panel for how to do the test).
Another interesting self-test — for which you need only a cotton bud — will tell you your optimal weekly alcohol intake for health and weight loss. People with wet and brownish ear wax can handle more alcohol in the course of a week than people with dry, flakey, lighter coloured earwax. Men should have two alcoholic drinks a day and women should have one, if that’s what their genes allow.
We move on to talk about dairy. “If you can consume dairy products as an adult, you are actually a genetic mutant,” he says. “That means one of your ancestors kept animals for their milk and one of those ancestors was lucky enough to inherit that mutation and then passed it on to everyone else.”
Most people in the world — about two thirds of the adult population — cannot digest the sugar lactose found in milk and experience gas and bloating. “If you do have the genes to eat dairy, you should continue to do so — the idea is to come into line with what your ancestors were eating,” he says.
Most of us are getting too much iron from our diets, he says. Hereditary hemochromatosis is a genetic condition passed on from your parents. “We all need iron, but some people’s bodies work like giant magnets, pulling out and absorbing iron from what they’re eating every day,” explains Dr Moalem.
“So if you have those genes and you have an iron-rich diet, iron builds up in your body over your lifetime. If you are male, it will eventually rust out your liver — it’s a risk factor for liver cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and we also think its involved in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. For women it’s a benefit because it prevents them from being anaemic when they have their periods and when they have children, but it become problematic once they hit menopause. Then, the iron doesn’t leave their bodies and they’re at the same risk as men for the same conditions.”
In his book, Dr Moalem has several suggestions for living in harmony with your DNA. Most importantly, you need to eat for your genes — by which he means finding out if your body can handle full, moderate or restricted carbohydrate intake.
Everyone should imit red meat to two servings a week — although a great source of protein, red meat can increase your odds of getting cancer or heart disease. Do not consume processed meats and ban soft drinks. Get emulsifiers, which are in everything from toothpaste to supermarket baked goods, out of your diet. “Emulsifiers are used within processed foods to make them shelf-stable or keep ingredients from separating,” says Dr Moalem. “We simply do not have the DNA to eat detergent, which is what emulsifiers are.”
Drink two to three cups of oolong tea a day. Unlike green or black tea, oolong is easy on the stomach. It specifically targets belly fat and is good for your gut microbiome. Oolong protects your DNA from oxidative stress.
Dr Moalem says he believes that the wisdom of our DNA’s dietary rules are locked away in our bodies, but can be made available to us. He used it himself three years ago when he was 30lb overweight, thanks to eating from vending machines when he was an on-call doctor.
“We’ve been blaming people for obesity instead of taking into account that they may not have the genetic machinery to deal with the modern diet — but I’ve brought myself back to an ideal state of genetic health and you can too,” he says.
The DNA Restart by Dr Sharon Moalem is published on October 6 (Rodale Books, £19.99)
Dr Moalem’s three-minute cracker test: what’s your carbs limit?
What you will need: an unsalted cracker such as a cream cracker or water biscuit and a timer
The goal of this test is to find out which of the three carbohydrate consumption categories you fall into: Full, Moderate or Restricted. You will get this information by the amount of time it takes for a change in taste from bland to sweet to occur when you’re chewing the cracker. If you never detect a change in taste, that’s normal — and significant — too.
Place the cracker in your mouth and start timing and chewing. You will need to pay close attention, as the starch in the cracker may already be starting to be digested by amylase in your saliva. Don’t swallow. As soon as you detect a change in taste — it can be quite subtle — or if you reach 30 seconds while timing, stop chewing and note the time. Rerun the test twice more for accuracy. Take an average so you can get your carb type.
The number of seconds it takes for the taste to change dictates your carb type:
0-14 seconds
Your carb type is Full. You naturally thrive on carbs. This means you can have up to 50 per cent of your calories coming from carbs, 20 per cent from protein and 30 per cent from fats.
15-30 seconds
Your carb type is Moderate. Your body finds carbs harder to process. This means you can have up to 35 per cent of your calories coming from carbs, 30 per cent from protein and 35 per cent from fats.
More than 30 seconds
Your carb type is Restricted. Your body finds carbs hard to process. This means you should have no more than 25 per cent of your calories coming from carbs, 35 per cent from protein and 40 per cent from fats.
I may do this, alongside my OH (who is non-diabetic with a low natural HbA1c), just for a bit of fun.
Our genes may decide how well we cope with a carb-heavy diet
Most people who lose weight by dieting do not keep the weight off over the long term. They try the latest fad diet, stick to it for a few weeks or months and drop some pounds, but sooner or later they return to their old eating habits. They regain the weight — possibly adding on even more — and when the next “miracle” diet comes along they try the whole disheartening process again.
Most diets fail because of two important flaws, says Dr Sharon Moalem, a leading geneticist based in the United States. “The first is simply a mind-numbing, restrictive lack of variety in the food that you are allowed to eat, making it impossible to stick to the diet in the long term,” he says in his book The DNA Restart. “The second and most important reason is that, until now, there hasn’t been a single diet that is designed with every single person on the planet in mind.”
There is no one-size-fits-all diet, he says, because people are wonderfully different. Some thrive on carbs while others have genes that mean that they should restrict them. It may go some way towards explaining why some people can lose weight only on a high-fat, high-protein diet, while others find that a calorie-restricted diet that includes all the food groups is the only weight-loss programme for them. “On a genetic level, although you may be very similar to other people, there’s no one else exactly like you. It’s not even close,” he says. We require different diets tailored to our own genes, he says.
Dr Moalem claims that he can set us on the path to our ideal weight and to optimal health by telling us how to unlock our personal genetic code and how to eat according to our DNA. In the process we can lose weight and reverse some of the signs of ageing. “Until now, we have been eating blind, without any personalised genetic wisdom to guide us,” he says.
We meet for breakfast in a fashionable Manhattan restaurant. The 42-year-old Canadian-born scientist has an informal and enthusiastic approach that makes his work — a melding of evolution, genetics, biology and medicine — easier for the layman to understand.
Genetics has been his lifelong passion, he says. He has founded two biotechnology companies, holds 25 patents worldwide for inventions in the fields of biotechnology and human health, and has helped in the discovery of new antibiotics.
This is his fourth book, and Dr Moalem explains that each of us is born with an “instruction manual”, a three-billion-letter genetic code full of individualised wisdom collected and annotated over millennia. “Every nutritional adaptation that allowed your genetic ancestor to survive long enough to pass on to his or her own children is in there — a veritable genetic tapestry gifted to you from every direct genetic ancestor you have ever had,” he writes in the book.
We also have two genomes — one from our mother and one from our father. Within our genomes we have about 20,000 genes that regulate and maintain our body, keep our heart beating, build bones and so on.
We require different diets tailored to our own genes. Until now we have been eating blindDr Sharon Moalem
“The old way of thinking was that we inherited one gene from each parent, so it was thought that you had two copies of every gene. But now we know that there is something called copy number variations, or CNVs, and in the important places in the genome where we need more horsepower, those genes duplicate,” says Dr Moalem. Instead of two copies of a gene, some people might have inherited a dozen or more.
“Does it really matter? Absolutely,” he says. “Many of these CNVs passed on from your ancestors can be an advantage when eating certain things.”
For some people carbs are beneficial, he says, because they come from ancestors who relied heavily on starches, farmers who grew and consumed cereal grains. They have inherited multiple copies of the gene that the body uses to make the protein amylase, called AMY1. Some people have as many as 20 copies of amylase and can digest a lot of starch, while others have fewer copies or even none and will have problems digesting it.
“It’s an amazing enzyme because it has the ability, within seconds, to start breaking down starch,” says Dr Moalem. “It’s like a giant pair of shearing scissors that can cut apart big and bulky starch molecules into simpler sugars. The faster it cuts up the starch into simpler sugars like maltose, the more your body can handle carbohydrates internally.
“So if you have individuals eating the same western, carbohydrate-heavy diet, the more of these genes they have, the less likely they are to be obese and diabetic. If you think about it, these are like cylinders in an engine. Some people have a high-powered engine that can power up a hill, and some people have a lawn-mower engine that’s puttering and shaking.”
This metabolic strain on the body can lead to conditions such as type 2 diabetes, as well as shortening life expectancy.
Around us, people are tucking into eggs benedict and stacks of pancakes loaded with maple syrup, and Dr Moalem produces a box of plain and unsalted crackers and puts three of them on my plate. Thankfully, this isn’t breakfast on his new diet — it is a genetic self-test that will help people to eat the correct amount of carbohydrates for their genetic make-up.
If you can consume dairy products as an adult, you are actually a genetic mutantDr Sharon Moalem
The test, which Dr Moalem calls groundbreaking, will indicate how much amylase you have in your saliva. Knowing how much amylase is in your saliva is a powerful way of getting a person to eat the right amount of carbohydrates.
I chew the crackers and he asks me to say when I notice a change from bland to sweet. The change is slight and occurs at 27 seconds, meaning I should eat carbohydrates in moderation. When he did the test, Dr Moalem noted a change at ten seconds and can eat more carbohydrates than I can (see panel for how to do the test).
Another interesting self-test — for which you need only a cotton bud — will tell you your optimal weekly alcohol intake for health and weight loss. People with wet and brownish ear wax can handle more alcohol in the course of a week than people with dry, flakey, lighter coloured earwax. Men should have two alcoholic drinks a day and women should have one, if that’s what their genes allow.
We move on to talk about dairy. “If you can consume dairy products as an adult, you are actually a genetic mutant,” he says. “That means one of your ancestors kept animals for their milk and one of those ancestors was lucky enough to inherit that mutation and then passed it on to everyone else.”
Most people in the world — about two thirds of the adult population — cannot digest the sugar lactose found in milk and experience gas and bloating. “If you do have the genes to eat dairy, you should continue to do so — the idea is to come into line with what your ancestors were eating,” he says.
Most of us are getting too much iron from our diets, he says. Hereditary hemochromatosis is a genetic condition passed on from your parents. “We all need iron, but some people’s bodies work like giant magnets, pulling out and absorbing iron from what they’re eating every day,” explains Dr Moalem.
“So if you have those genes and you have an iron-rich diet, iron builds up in your body over your lifetime. If you are male, it will eventually rust out your liver — it’s a risk factor for liver cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and we also think its involved in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. For women it’s a benefit because it prevents them from being anaemic when they have their periods and when they have children, but it become problematic once they hit menopause. Then, the iron doesn’t leave their bodies and they’re at the same risk as men for the same conditions.”
In his book, Dr Moalem has several suggestions for living in harmony with your DNA. Most importantly, you need to eat for your genes — by which he means finding out if your body can handle full, moderate or restricted carbohydrate intake.
Everyone should imit red meat to two servings a week — although a great source of protein, red meat can increase your odds of getting cancer or heart disease. Do not consume processed meats and ban soft drinks. Get emulsifiers, which are in everything from toothpaste to supermarket baked goods, out of your diet. “Emulsifiers are used within processed foods to make them shelf-stable or keep ingredients from separating,” says Dr Moalem. “We simply do not have the DNA to eat detergent, which is what emulsifiers are.”
Drink two to three cups of oolong tea a day. Unlike green or black tea, oolong is easy on the stomach. It specifically targets belly fat and is good for your gut microbiome. Oolong protects your DNA from oxidative stress.
Dr Moalem says he believes that the wisdom of our DNA’s dietary rules are locked away in our bodies, but can be made available to us. He used it himself three years ago when he was 30lb overweight, thanks to eating from vending machines when he was an on-call doctor.
“We’ve been blaming people for obesity instead of taking into account that they may not have the genetic machinery to deal with the modern diet — but I’ve brought myself back to an ideal state of genetic health and you can too,” he says.
The DNA Restart by Dr Sharon Moalem is published on October 6 (Rodale Books, £19.99)
Dr Moalem’s three-minute cracker test: what’s your carbs limit?
What you will need: an unsalted cracker such as a cream cracker or water biscuit and a timer
The goal of this test is to find out which of the three carbohydrate consumption categories you fall into: Full, Moderate or Restricted. You will get this information by the amount of time it takes for a change in taste from bland to sweet to occur when you’re chewing the cracker. If you never detect a change in taste, that’s normal — and significant — too.
Place the cracker in your mouth and start timing and chewing. You will need to pay close attention, as the starch in the cracker may already be starting to be digested by amylase in your saliva. Don’t swallow. As soon as you detect a change in taste — it can be quite subtle — or if you reach 30 seconds while timing, stop chewing and note the time. Rerun the test twice more for accuracy. Take an average so you can get your carb type.
The number of seconds it takes for the taste to change dictates your carb type:
0-14 seconds
Your carb type is Full. You naturally thrive on carbs. This means you can have up to 50 per cent of your calories coming from carbs, 20 per cent from protein and 30 per cent from fats.
15-30 seconds
Your carb type is Moderate. Your body finds carbs harder to process. This means you can have up to 35 per cent of your calories coming from carbs, 30 per cent from protein and 35 per cent from fats.
More than 30 seconds
Your carb type is Restricted. Your body finds carbs hard to process. This means you should have no more than 25 per cent of your calories coming from carbs, 35 per cent from protein and 40 per cent from fats.
