In my previous post I mentioned that during my son's chemo it hit me that if a little pill or bag of fluids could make my son so painfully sick and strip his immune system, the food he put in his body had to be doing something more than just providing energy. It seemed only logical that part of sustaining a healthy life requires good calories.
NOTE: Chronic disease refers to the following: obesity, cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, diabetes mellitus. There are other chronic diseases such as different types of arthritis, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, even some mental disorders that are thought to have a diet/lifestyle connection.
According The World Health Organization (WHO) report of Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Disease, "79% of all deaths worldwide that are attributable to chronic disease are already occurring in developing countries." (WHO 4) WHO also projects that by 2020 "The number of people in the developing world with diabetes will increase more than 2.5-fold, from 84 million in 1995 to 228 in 2025." (WHO 5).
Most experts agree that chronic disease is largely preventable (WHO 5). "Modern dietary patterns and physical activity patterns are risk behaviors that travel across countries and are transferable from one population to another like an infectious disease, affecting disease patterns globally." (WHO 5)
(Elliot and Ong 1439)
Nutrition research is difficult because "Humans live all sorts of different ways, have different genetic backgrounds and eat all sorts of different foods…Perhaps most importantly, food, lifestyle and health interact through such complex multifaceted systems that establishing proof for any one factor and any one disease is nearly impossible" (Campbell and Campbell 38). But what is understood is that "... diet is a key environmental factor affecting the incidence of many chronic diseases is overwhelming. The precise extent of this contribution is difficult to judge, but a reduction of 35% in the age standardised incidence of cancer in the United States has been proposed to be achievable via "practicable dietary means" (Elliot and Ong 1429). It seems it has become clear to nutrition and health researchers the impact diet has on gene expression. A person can carry the gene for a certain disease and never have that gene turned on through environmental factors helping to regulate the genes expression.
(Elliot and Ong 1439)
The schematic demonstrates the proposed ability for diet to have an effect on gene expression. It demonstrates that the food comprised of all the protein, carbohydrates, antioxidants, and minerals can perpetuate a gene to go 'bad' thus causing disease. Nutrition Researcher and Professor Dr. Campbell mentions in The China Study, "Animal-based foods lack antioxidant shields and tend to activate free radical production and cell damage, while plant-based foods, with their abundant antioxidants, tend to prevent such damage" (Campbell & Campbell 219).Genetic factors can increase the risk level "but environmental factors also play a key role, most probably the dominate one." Gene expression, what expresses the physical and mental challenges we will face throughout life proves the old saying, 'you are what you eat'.
This is just my simplistic understanding of what happens to our bodies as the food is processed and how it maybe correlated, along with other environmental factors (such as stress and exercise), with the diseases we may or may not face.
Reference:
Cannon, Geoffrey et al. "The New Nutrition Science Project." Public Health Nutrition 8.6a (2005). 2005. Web. 28 Mar. 2010.
Elliott, Ruan, and Jin Ong. "Science, Medicine and the Future Nutrional Genomic." BMJ 324 (2002). 15 June 2002. Web. 2 Apr. 2010.
World Health Organization. Diet , Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases. Rep. The World Health Organization, 2003. Web. 5 Apr. 2010.
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