There may be a lot more to it than ‘you are what you eat’.
Newsweek has a story about new research regarding the relationship betwen how genes express themselves, and what you eat.
By all rights, chimps and humans should be a lot more similar than we are, considering that our DNA sequences are just under 99 percent identical….
Curiously, scientists now report, which genes are expressed depends, at least in part, on what you eat.
Researchers… fed laboratory mice different human and chimp diets for two weeks. The mice ate raw fruits and vegetables like chimpanzees in zoos get, or a human diet of food from the Institute cafeteria, or a pure fast food menu from the local McDonald’s.
Result: the different diets led to remarkable changes in which of the mouse genes were turned on, the scientists report this evening in the journal PLoS ONE. There were thousands of differences in the levels at which genes were expressed in the mouse livers but, interestingly, not in the mouse brains.Many of the genes that changed in the mouse livers are known to differ between humans and chimpanzees, suggesting that these differences might be caused by the difference in human and chimpanzee diets. full story here