The Science of DNA Dieting and How It’s the Key to Personalized Healthcare

What should I eat to lose weight? It's an answer that everyone — from medical professionals to best-selling authors to your cousin — seems to have: you should eat Keto, or Paleo, or go vegetarian or vegan, or simply reduce your calories, or eat whatever you want, just be sure to do hours of HIIT. But anyone who's tried these types of diets may wonder why they work for other people, but not for them?

The truth is that there is no one-size-fits-all diet that works for everyone — and you need to stop believing that there is. It’s not that there’s no solution to weight loss, it’s that the solution is tailored to you. It's easy to find out how your body functions, and how your body will lose weight so you can gain the health you're looking for.

This kind of personalization is the future of dieting, and can be created through a better understanding of how your genes work, called DNA dieting.?

What is DNA dieting?

DNA dieting is not another fancy fad diet. It's based on how your body scientifically functions best, starting at the cellular level. We know that DNA forms the building blocks of who we are, and that our genes determine all of our different traits. But our genes don’t just determine our eye color or height. They impact our bodily systems in many different ways, and genetic variants can show us where human bodies differ in their functionality. We're then able to understand the significant differences in how each one of us consumes calories, burns fat, or craves food, which can influence how we lose and gain weight. This means that not everyone loses and gains weight in the same way.

For example, if someone’s genes impact how efficiently their bodies detoxify, then they can increase their intake of detoxifying foods for better health. If someone’s genes impact how they store or don’t store certain vitamins, they can take more targeted supplements.

This tailored nature to dieting sounds like a great new approach, but how does it work in the first place??

What’s the science behind it?

In order to understand how this works, we have to start with how DNA works.

DNA resides in the form of chromosomes in every one of our cells, which form every part of our body. DNA doesn’t just contain the formula for how our body is built, but its coding influences how our various systems function on a daily basis, every minute of every day. Sections of DNA called genes are responsible for impacting certain systems throughout our body, like our cellular, nervous, and cardiovascular systems. Genes also have an impact on how we eat, store calories, and burn fat.

For example, our genes impact our hunger, as well as our eating behaviors, like whether we like to snack or if we binge eat. They also impact how easily we will feel full after eating, or our satiation. Our genes can also impact how our body stores the calories that we consume. One person's body may hold on tightly to these calories and pack them away in fat stores for future use while another person's body may easily burn them up as energy. Our genes also impact how easily we burn up those calories that we consume as well by affecting how efficient we are at this process, both when we are resting and when we are exercising. Our genes also impact inflammation in our fat stores. Someone susceptible to inflammation will find it harder to lose weight if they are in a chronic state of inflammation.

Knowing these insights — which come from a genetic test and analysis — mean that practitioners can then make tailored recommendations around health, nutrition and weight management, based specifically on a person’s genetic makeup. Studies over the past decade have also shown this to be true.

One study’s hypothesis suggested that those who carry a variant of a gene that impacts obesity would lose weight and improve body composition on a high-protein diet — and they found that to be true.

Another study tested a genetic-based diet against traditional dietary recommendations, and found that “weight management interventions guided by nutrigenomics can motivate long-term improvements in dietary fat intake above and beyond gold-standard population-based interventions.”

Yet another study found that those who were instructed to change their diet based on recommendations that aligned with their genes were more likely to make the changes, and that “disclosing genetic information for personalized nutrition results in greater changes in intake for some dietary components compared to general population-based dietary advice.”

This means that how we gain and lose weight, and what our weight range will likely be, is not only determined by the food we eat and the exercise we do, but also by our genes. This is bad news for fad diets that hope you'll buy their products, and great news for individuals, because it means no more trial and error, and being able to know what foods and exercise are right for how your individual body works.?

Is genetic testing really the future?

More and more studies are showing that not only are dietary recommendations that are informed by someone’s DNA working better than generalized recommendations. They also show another key difference: Dietary recommendations given based on DNA, create more buy-in from the patient. In other words, if they can tie their recommendations to their DNA, and see the reason why those recommendations are being given, they’re more likely to follow them. This very well could lead to the future of personalized healthcare that individuals and practitioners are seeking.

So what should you eat to lose weight? The answer depends on your genes.