Outsmarting Your Genetic Legacy

Fat Is Not Your Fate
by Susan Mitchell, Ph.D., R.D., Catherine Christie, Ph.D.

What Type Are You?

• Do you crave foods such as chocolate and feel you can't stop eating them? (Phenotype A = Addictive)

• Does high blood pressure run in your family? (Phenotype B = Blood pressure)

• Do you have a strong family history of heart disease? (Phenotype C = Cardiovascular)

• Do you have an apple- instead of a pear-shaped body? (Phenotype D = Diabetic)

• Do you find that food calms you down? (Phenotype E = Emotional)

• Do you suffer monthly from PMS bloat, have leftover pregnancy pounds, or a menopause tummy? (Phenotype H = Hormonal)

Take the phenotype quiz and learn how to manage your weight based on your individual type!

Your Personal Blueprint For Permanent Weight Loss

Have you tried diet after diet only to lose weight and then gain it right back? It's easy to blame yourself for this yo-yo dieting, but the truth is that no diet works the same way for everyone. Scientists have now discovered that your genes may be making you fat! What you really need to battle the bulge is an eating plan specifically tailored to the needs of your genetic blueprint.

Dr. Susan Mitchell and Dr. Catherine Christie, using cutting-edge genetic research, have created diet plans that have helped scores of clients lose weight and keep it off. In Fat Is Not Your Fate, they give you the tools you need to outsmart your own genes.

An in-depth questionnaire will help you identify which of the six gene-based phenotypes best applies to you.

A = Addictive
B = Blood pressure
C = Cardiovascular
D = Diabetic
E = Emotional
H = Hormonal

From there you'll be able to follow your own personal nutrition plan designed to satisfy your physical and emotional needs. The program can be put to work immediately and includes:

• Menu plans for when you have a lot of time and when you don't
• Your optimum caloric intake
• Your optimum fat-protein-carb balance
• Which supplements to take for best results

Your plan will also detail when you should eat, which food combinations work best, how to avoid dieting pitfalls and handle relapses, how to manage environmental triggers, and the most effective ways to exercise.

Having put this diet to work with scores of clients (whose testimonials appear throughout the book), Drs. Mitchell and Christie have refined a scientifically based plan that really achieves weight loss. This diet will not only get the weight off but will also improve your health, lower your risk of disease, and help you feel great. Fat Is Not Your Fate is the only book tailored to your genes and the last diet book you will ever need.

Chapter 1

Why a Phenotype-Based Diet?
The Link Between Genetics and Weight

Though weight problems may be hereditary, they need not be a life-long affliction. Our experience as nutrition professionals upholds this, and emerging genomic data demonstrates why. You can stop thinking of your genes as a curse. This book will show how your genes can work for you, instead of against you. The right foods in the right proportions with the right supplements, tied specifically to your genetic profile, will produce genetic equilibrium and the weight loss you want. Within days, you will feel healthier and more satiated. This weight loss can work, for a lifetime, because the diet is exactly tailored to your body and health concerns, as portrayed in the physical expression of your DNA called your phenotype.

The logic behind our new individualized phenotypal approach is evident in a truism that anyone who has ever dieted knows firsthand — that the diet that works great for some people is for others an exercise in futility. Diets are almost as diverse as people — low-calorie diets, high-protein diets, low-fat diets, grapefruit diets, cabbage soup diets, vinegar diets...the list goes on and on. Diet effectiveness is inconsistent because the dietary chemicals within food act at a molecular level on specific genes, and no two people's genes are the same. Added to the problem of not knowing which diet will work for you is the fact that most trendy diets are unhealthy. Even if they result in weight loss, they work against long-term well-being and may actually do irreversible damage, especially as dieters keep trying new ones to counteract recurring weight gain.

The good news is that the uncertainty is over and that these unhealthy diets are no longer necessary! With the help of science, we can now characterize more than ever before the molecular activity of dietary chemicals. We can explain why diets don't come in one-size-fits-all. This has taken the guesswork out of dieting and revolutionized weight loss. It has also made weight loss far more healthy.

Unlike gimmick dieting, gene-based nutrition diminishes the likelihood of weight-related maladies such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. In fact, this program is entirely unique because it provides an individualized diet, guaranteed to succeed, that will alleviate the weight-related malady to which you're most vulnerable. You'll lose weight and feel better on a phenotype diet because the foods are compatible with you, on a cellular level.

Even though our program is structured around micromechanisms, you needn't visit a clinic or register for a program. You needn't spend a lot of money on gene profiling. Everyone can match him- or herself to one of our diets right away, using this book as a guide.

We have confidence in your ability to make the most of your genetic inheritance, because this program has helped hundreds of our patients and clients synchronize their foods and eating habits with their genes. Consistently, good health and weight loss flowed from their efforts. One patient, a cardiologist who had just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, came to us because she was not getting results from the high-carbohydrate, heart-healthy diet recommended at the time. Whenever she ate a plateful of pasta, her blood sugar rocketed. A glucose receptor problem related to her genes and extra weight barricaded her cells against blood sugar. Glucose accumulated in her bloodstream. We knew she needed a diet personalized to her genetic risk for diabetes, not the general recommendation. A lower-total-carb diet, combined with high-fiber carbohydrates and protein, worked better. When we customized her diet, she lost weight and kept it off.

In another example, an overweight and hypertensive police officer couldn't meet his department's rigorous fitness requirements. With his excess weight and high blood pressure, this client was a heart attack waiting to happen as he rolled through the city on his motorcycle. He needed a personalized diet to tame his sodium-sensitive genes into directing the hormones that control blood pressure more effectively. We loaded his cycle saddlebags with dried fruit and restricted his trips to sodium-loaded fast-food joints. He lost weight and decreased his blood pressure.

The secret to both these patients' successes wasn't the diet trend of the week. It was in their genes.

Gene Discoveries Revolutionize Dieting

For more than ten years, we developed individualized dieting programs like these, based on empirical evidence. At the same time, researchers were striving to understand the genetic basis of weight. Then, in 1994, a Rockefeller University team, under Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, identified the first "obesity gene." The discovery of one of the obesity genes shouldn't have been so amazing, since everyone had always taken the hereditary nature of obesity for granted. But in a popular, trend-driven field such as weight control, it was a watershed for researchers and practitioners alike.

If science could explain how obesity occurred, it might also explain how to undo it. That was the hope. Researchers continue to move between models and microscopes, hastening to expose other obesity genes. Concurrent with the well-publicized race to create a comprehensive Human Genome Map, the Human Obesity Genome Map was launched at the 1994 International Congress on Obesity, using research from all over the world. In it, data from published reviews is extensively cross-referenced, then linked to databanks internationally. Scientists found, importantly, that specific genes or gene mutations mismanage the body's ability to utilize nutrients, including protein, fats, and carbohydrates. Over seventy genes are now on the Human Obesity Genome Map. Tellingly, common obesity genome sequences often contain genes that increase the likelihood of disease. Only infrequently do mutations in one gene cause trouble. More often, illness and weight problems stem from complex interactions between numerous genes and other stimuli. This fact mirrored conditions we had witnessed in our patients and clients.

Optimistic about the ramifications of the burgeoning obesity genome, a growing number of people are jumping on a revolutionary new bandwagon called nutritional genomics or "nutrigenomics." The University of California at Davis is leading the way with its new Center of Excellence for Nutritional Genomics. Duke University is partnering with the Center for the Advancement of Genomics on the Genomic-Based Prospective Medicine Project to develop a truly modern and individual-based form of healthcare. The European Union has launched NuGO, a network for integrating this new branch of research.

Like most scientists, nutritional scientists had always turned to nature and nurture for explanation. Nutrigenomics connects nature and nurture, putting them on the same two-way street. Just as nature (i.e., genes) affects nurture (i.e., environmental influences such as foods, stress, and habits), nurture also affects nature. Nutrigenomics shows that nutrition can actually alter an individual's "nature," i.e., their genetic expression.

Nutrigenomic scientists scrutinize this nature-nurture interaction through a fine lens. Doctors and dietitians continue to assess concentrations of nutrients found in the urine, blood, and body tissue. With the help of technology, scientists are beginning to ascertain the actual molecules that food contains and how cells use those molecules to maintain or disrupt well being. As an example, naturally occurring phytochemicals such as the flavonoids in red grapes and berries slow the onset of heart disease. In another example of nutrigenomic research in practice, people with an explicit genetic profile may have a risk of heart disease due to the high levels of amino acid homocysteine. Increasing the B vitamin, folate, in their diet diminishes homocysteine in their blood. Foods high in antioxidants, such as fresh produce, protect the cells' ability to function normally, which is particularly important for diabetics and people with metabolic syndrome. These examples are germane because heart disease and diabetes often accompany weight problems.

In sum, we are what are genes tell us to be and we are what we eat, too, right down to the distinct chemical constituents of any given food product. The interface is nutrigenomics, a field almost unknown as recently as five years ago. In the future, the nutrition-gene link will use data from personalized gene testing to assemble even more personalized food prescriptions for health.

Inexpensive, applicable gene profiling is still years off, but our practice was already changing people's lives with diets based on their specific relationship of family history (i.e., genetics), weight, and diet. Immediately, incontrovertible scientific evidence of the hereditary character of weight problems validated the approach we had developed over the years. It verified the logic of our applied nutrition techniques, right down to their impact on individual receptors on cell surfaces. Our methodology, we learned, was based on phenotypes.

Copyright © 2005 by Dr. Susan Mitchell and Dr. Catherine Christie

About the Author

Dr. Susan Mitchell is a Registered Dietitian, Certified Nutrition Specialist, and Fellow of the American Dietetic Association. A nationally recognized authority on nutrition and stress, she is the nutrition expert for ThirdAge.com and a consultant to the Produce for Better Health Foundation's 5 A Day the Color Way program.

Dr. Catherine Christie is the Director of Nutrition Programs at the University of North Florida. A Registered Dietitian, Certified Nutrition Specialist, and Fellow of the American Dietetic Association, she is President-Elect of the Florida Dietetic Association and a former Chairman of the Dietetics and Nutrition Council, which regulates the nutrition profession in Florida. Mitchell and Christie are the coauthors of I'd Kill for a Cookie and Eat to Stay Young.