Genetics and microbiome affect individualized responses to a variety of foods | Elissa Epel
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It's no surprise that eating high carbohydrate foods, especially those that are low in fiber and high in simple sugars, can raise blood glucose levels. What might be a surprise is that the body's response to carbohydrate and other components of the diet is highly personal – influenced by not only a person's metabolic profile, but also their gut microbiome. In this clip, Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Dr. Elissa Epel describe the factors that influence how we respond to diet.
Rhonda: There is definitely a very personalized response to a variety of different foods. There was this study, I think the Weizmann Institute, I forgot his name but senior author on it. But this was published a couple years ago in cell metabolism where he took 800 people and he put a continuous glucose monitor on them. And then he gave them...there was a variety of foods that these people were given. So they are given simple, you know, sugars, they were given complex carbohydrates, bananas, and they were given like foods that were high in fat.
And then a variety of different genetic variations were looked at. So they looked at a variety of single nucleotide polymorphisms, also microbiome data. And what they found looking at people's glucose response was that people had vastly different blood glucose responses according to their genetics and microbiome.
Elissa: So, important.
Rhonda: So some people, most people had a higher elevated blood glucose level when you're giving them carbohydrates, particularly simple ones, simple sugars, of course. That seems very obvious, right? But there was a subset of people that had elevated blood glucose levels to fat. And that seemed to correlate with various, you know, single nucleotide polymorphisms.
Elissa: And this is a company too, right?
Rhonda: They did start some company I believe. I don't remember what the company was.
Elissa: Yeah, what I've heard is it's probably one of the most sophisticated models out there for this glucose monitoring, but it was developed on Israeli, so it might be really specific to them.
Rhonda: Right? Yeah. And the microbiome also seemed to play a role. And the one thing that was consistent for the blood glucose response was fiber. The more fiber, the lower the glucose response because it slows the metabolism and everything. You're not getting a big bolus. Like you mentioned earlier in the podcast these sugar-sweetened beverages everything hits all at once. I mean, it's like, you know, you're getting a big bolus of glucose and that affects the gut, and you release inflammatory things like, you know, lipopolysaccharide.
Elissa: Right. And so, you know, we've known about fiber, we know how important that is. And the biggest thing we have going against us in terms of what, you know, the public is eating is that that goes against the reward response, right? So all the quicker the brain can get the hit of sugar, the faster it's going to be pleasurable and addictive.
Complex carbohydrate foods provide vitamins, minerals, and fiber that are important to the health of an individual. As opposed to simple or refined sugars, which do not have the vitamins, minerals, and fiber found in complex and natural carbohydrates. Simple sugars are often called "empty calories" because they have little to no nutritional value.
The thousands of biochemical processes that run all of the various cellular processes that produce energy. Since energy generation is so fundamental to all other processes, in some cases the word metabolism may refer more broadly to the sum of all chemical reactions in the cell.
The collection of genomes of the microorganisms in a given niche. The human microbiome plays key roles in development, immunity, and nutrition. Microbiome dysfunction is associated with the pathology of several conditions, including obesity, depression, and autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia.
One of four nitrogen-containing molecules that comprise DNA. A nucleotide consists of one of four chemicals, called a “base,” plus one molecule of sugar and one molecule of phosphoric acid. Nucleotides are typically identified by the first letter of their base names: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). They form specific pairs (A with T, and G with C), and their bonds provide the helical structure of the DNA strand.
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