What You Eat When You Are Pregnant Matters!

Nutrigenomics is a branch of nutritional genomics and is the study of the effects of foods and food constituents on gene expression. Nutrigenomics focuses on identifying and understanding molecular-level interaction between nutrients and DNA. The nutrients we extract from food enter metabolic pathways where they are manipulated, modified, and molded into molecules the body can use.

Lifestyle and environmental factors can expose a person to chemical tags that change the epigenome. In other words, your epigenome may change based on what you eat and drink, whether you smoke, what medicines you take, what pollutants you encounter and even how quickly your body ages. Most epigenomic changes are probably harmless, but some changes may trigger or increase the severity of disease. Researchers already have linked changes in the epigenome to various cancers, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and mental illnesses. There is also some evidence from animal and human studies that indicates that what a female eats and drinks during pregnancy may change the epigenome of her offspring.

Experiments in mice show just how important a mother’s diet is in shaping the epigenome of her offspring. All mammals have a gene called agouti. When a mouse’s agouti gene is completely unmethylated, its coat is yellow and it is obese and prone diabetes and cancer. When the agouti gene is methylated (as it is in normal mice), the coat color is brown and the mouse has a low disease risk. Fat yellow mice and skinny brown mice are genetically identical. The fat yellow mice are different because they have an epigenetic “mutation.”

When researchers fed pregnant yellow mice a methyl-rich diet, most of her pups were brown and stayed healthy for life. These results show that the environment in the womb influences adult health. In other words, our health is not only determined by what we eat, but also what our parents ate.

To read more about epigenetics and nutrition go to http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/nutrition/

What You Eat When You Are Pregnant Matters!