Magazine
Desk
| May 4, 2003, Sunday
What Your
Genes Want You to Eat
By Bruce Grierson (NYT) 1592 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 6 ,
Page 76 , Column 1
LEAD PARAGRAPH
- A trip to the diet doc, circa 2013. You
prick your finger, draw a little blood and
send it, along with a $100 fee, to a
consumer genomics lab in California. There,
it's passed through a mass spectrometer,
where its proteins are analyzed. It is
cross-referenced with your DNA profile. A
few days later, you get an e-mail message
with your recommended diet for the next four
weeks. It doesn't look too bad: lots of
salmon, spinach, selenium supplements, bread
with olive oil. Unsure of just how lucky you
ought to feel, you call up a few friends to
see what their diets look like. There are
plenty of quirks. A Greek co-worker is
getting clams, crab, liver and tofu -- a
bounty of B vitamins to raise her coenzyme
levels. A friend in Chicago, a
second-generation Zambian, has been
prescribed popcorn, kale, peaches in their
own juice and club soda. (This looks a lot
like the hypertension-reducing ''Dash''
diet, which doesn't work for everyone but
apparently works for him.) He is allowed
some chicken, prepared in a saltless
marinade, hold the open flame -- and he gets
extra vitamin D because there's not enough
sunshine for him at his latitude. (His
brother's diet, interestingly enough, is a
fair bit different.) Your boss, who seems to
have won some sort of genetic lottery, gets
to eat plenty of peanut butter, red meat and
boutique cheeses.
Nobody is eating exactly what you are.
Your diet is uniquely tailored. It is
determined by the specific demands of your
genetic signature, and it perfectly balances
your micronutrient and macronutrient needs.
Sick days have become a foggy memory. (Foggy
memory itself is now treated with extracts
of ginkgo biloba and a cocktail of omega-3
fatty acids.)
How multi-packs work: A
multi-pack is an archive package that saves
you money by allowing you to pre-purchase a
set number of articles in bulk at a reduced
price. You can then debit from your
multi-pack and quickly access articles from
the archive at your convenience over the
lifetime of the multi-pack.
Once you purchase an
article, you may view it as often as you
like over the next 90 days. Archive articles
do not include photos, charts or graphics
Click here to purchase article if you
already own an archive article pack. |
