Luck of the draw....genetically speaking.

My last blog recommended an individual approach to weight loss, and now I just want to reiterate why the belief that there is a one-fits-all approach is so flawed (despite desperate attempts by glossy-covered diet books to make us believe otherwise)!

As I flicked through old copies of my Environmental Nutrition newsletters, I came accross a lengthy article detailing the 'Nutrition-Gene Connection' in the November 2009 issue. This describes the reason why the same food can act as a medicine in one person but wreak havoc in another. In short, each person's unique genetic makeup determines how their cells respond to what they eat. In fact, if every human ate and drank the same foods every day, there would still be a variety of health outcomes due to differences in our genome.

So sadly, no matter how many times you lament the injustice of the fact that your best friend can drink numerous steaming cups of hot chocolate and whipped cream during the course of a day without adding an inch of flesh to her bones, when you only have to look at one to feel the pounds creep on to your hips, the reality is that she just 'got lucky' in the gene pool!

And before any of you throw up your hands and claim despair, this nutrient-genome connection is not some excuse to give up your hard work and nutritional goals! Instead, it is an exciting discovery which explains more clearly the different reactions we all have to the same foods. This is just a scientific explanation for what we have been idly discussing over coffee for years! Furthermore, it makes the quest to find what foods best work for YOU, an even more important journey, and could potentially allow for some short-cuts, if you have a particularly nutrition-intuitive parent or sibling ...?!

While we wait for genetic profiling to become the norm, the best method is to be your own detective and listen to your body's reaction to different foods. Then trust it. You know it best.