Kevin asked the following question in the comments of my “soy makes monkeys agro” post”
Thoughts on this for the future of optimizing diets?
That link goes to this paper:
This is an interesting step forward as it represents a fairly complete genome of an individual. Previous “Human Genome Projects” were largely an aggregate process. Since the early 2000’s the promise of all kinds of customized medicine has been (seemingly) waiting on the horizon, but we really have not garnered much benefit. At best what we seem to find is certain potentialities. For example the knowledge that one has the APOE4 genotype might inform one that they have higher POTENTIAL of both neurodegenerative disease and cardiovascular disease, but it’s by no means a guaranteed thing. As has been said many times “genetics loads the gun, epigenetics fires it” which brings us (kinda) to Kevin’s question: will this type of individual genomic screening provide deep insight into optimal diet?
Maybe
I think for specific disease states such as celiac, this type of screening can be super helpful, but to know optimum protein, carb, fats, amounts etc, IDK that we will be better informed than some much more rudimentary tinkering. I think all this gets remarkably complex, and in a hurry as it’s not simply THE GENES, it’s how they are turned on and off, how they interact with one another, how they are influenced by diet, exercise, microbiome…. So, for that we almost need deep knowledge of the proteome, which is the ultimate manifestation of genetic expression. Folsk are certainly digging into this via metabolomics and proteomics, but we start adding many orders of magnitude of complexity at each layer of this story.
Then, we need to factor in the microbiome! The microbiome appears to dramatically alter genetic expression…for example (and this is a really simple example) someone with celiac GENE potential may never develop the clinical manifestation of celiac disease if they have gut bacteria that produce the endopeptidases which degrade gluten like proteins. I suspect there will be so many examples like this it makes my head spin. Advances in big data processing (AI) might be able to keep track of all that, but we still have exercise, circadian biology and god knows what else to add to this mix.
So, my sense is at best we might get a nudge one way or another (knowing our individual genome) as to what to do with diet, but even that is going to be a dodgy proposition given the scio-political climate which has taken over medicine and science.
What do I mean by that? I want to look at two examples of “genetic diseases” that appear to have some kind of epigenetic trigger. The first is Ehlers Danlos Syndrome:
The second is Porphyria Cutanea Tarda. Both of these are considered by the “accepted science” to be genetic in origin, and generally it is thought that diet will have no impact on their etiology. Ok, but we have interesting anecdotes of folks dramatically reducing symptoms and in some cases completely halting the disease process, all due to dietary change. In the case of PCT I’d suspected some kind of tissue transglutaminasse activity.
I’ll promise you not everyone with these conditions will benefit from dietary change (and in both EDS and PCT, there are many variants, seemingly based on genetics) but there is clearly something interesting and worthwhile to look at here, which brings us to the rub of this situation: If we are going to get some kind of a big data/AI type of process to ferret out the details, we need folks who are savvy to the potential there is a link here. Few are even aware there might be something worth looking at, but given how low carb, carnivore, keto is seen as ”bad for the environment” “elitists” etc, it’s going to be a big lift to get folks looking at this. It might happen, hopefully it does, but on top of all the other complexities, we will also face the problem that even asking these questions is now not scientific inquiry, it is climate change denialism, bigotry, hatespeech and mis-dis/mal information.
With a truly free scientific process, it will be a lot of work to make somethign useful come of this. So much so that I’m not sure that it will ver be much more than providing some guidelines, which are unlikely to be much better than what we have within the Ancestral framework. Add in the existential cock-blocking of activist ideology and we have something that ironically looks like The HandMaids Tale.
Thanks for your insight. My feeling that such detailed personal info in our present climat of disrespect of data is asking for trouble
Writing my book taught me that there is a deep ideological/spiritual battle underlying everything that we think is political. You wouldn't think that would extend to diet, but it absolutely does. This might sound crazy, but underneath all this are two sides: a pro-human side which believes that people are worth helping, and an anti-human (or transhuman) side which believes human being is essentially evil and that people are not worth helping, that human existence itself must be transcended or escaped from. These ideas and world views can be traced back to Plato, or even further. If you boil that down, you get this foundational world view that humanity's existence is a net negative. This creates a false dialectic which pits humankind against "nature." That's where you see the Earth-worshippy stuff come in (environmentalist/vegan extremism). You can see this in the writings of most of the elites of the 20th century- Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, the Huxley's, Margaret Sanger, etc. The intellectual elite of today have this same world view. So sadly, I think you're right. We can find solutions for human suffering and death, but to get there we will be fighting against a worldview which says the only good people are dead ones- unless you are part of their elite circle.