Parsley Tonic

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Parsley Tonic JoAnn Guest May 18, 2003 14:34 PDT

 

PARSLEY TONIC-

 

This is a popular tonic regularly taken in Morocco for

its revitalising and energy boosting properties. Fresh herbs such as

parsley contain high levels of both iron and vitamin C which some

studies show can boost the body's intake of vitamin C and iron by 60

per cent.

 

Parsley is an effective breath freshener because

vitamin C helps to keep the mouth clean by acting on the mucous

membranes of our mouth.

 

Parsley also contains the active chemicals apiol and

myristicin known for their diuretic and mild laxative effects. This

helps to reduce water retention, a common complaint by women which

can cause bloatedness.

 

How to make it: The traditional Moroccan way to take

parsley is to stir a handful into a pasta or salad. Alternatively,

add a teaspoon of dried parsley to a cup of hot water and drink on a

daily basis when your energy stores are low.

 

 

 

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,955706,00.html

Eat right for your genotype

 

First it was smart drugs. Now it's smart diets. Bruce Grierson on what your

genes want you to eat

 

Thursday May 15, 2003

The Guardian

 

A trip to the diet doc, circa 2013. You prick your finger, draw a little blood

and send it, with $100, to a consumer genomics lab in California. There, it's

passed through a mass spectrometer for protein analysis and cross-referenced to

your DNA profile. A few days later, you get an email 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.

Your diet is uniquely tailored. It is determined by the specific demands of

your genetic signature and perfectly balances your micro- and macro-nutrient

needs. Sick days are a foggy memory. (Foggy memory itself is now treated with

extracts of ginkgo biloba and a cocktail of omega-3 fatty acids.)

 

The appeal of this kind of laser-targeted diet intervention is hard to miss.

If you turn out to be among the population whose cholesterol count doesn't react

much to diet, you'll be able to go ahead and eat those bacon sandwiches. You'll

no longer be spending money on vitamin supplements that do nothing for you;

you'll take only the vitamins you need, in precisely the right doses. There's a

real chance of extending your life - by postponing the onset of diseases to

which you're naturally susceptible - without having to buy even a single book by

Deepak Chopra.

 

This is the promise - and the hype - of nutritional genomics, the second wave

of personalised medicine to come rolling out of the Human Genome Project (after

pharmacogenomics, or designer drugs). The premise is simple: diet is a big

factor in chronic disease, responsible, some say, for a third of most types of

cancer. Dietary chemicals change the expression of one's genes and even the

genome itself. And - here's the key - the influence of diet on health depends on

an individual's genetic makeup.

 

How does that work? Consider what happens, biologically, when we eat a meal.

Until quite recently, most scientists thought food had basically one job: it was

metabolised to provide energy for the cell. Indeed, that is what happens to most

dietary chemicals - but not all. Some don't get metabolised at all; instead, the

moment they're ingested, they peel off and become ligands - molecules that bind

to proteins involved in " turning on " certain genes to one degree or another. A

diet that's particularly out of balance, nutritional-genomics scientists say,

will cause gene expressions that nudge us toward chronic illness unless a

precisely-tailored " intelligent diet " is employed to restore the equilibrium.

 

Take genestein, a chemical in soy which attaches to oestrogen receptors and

regulates genes. Individuals may have oestrogen receptors that react to

genestein differently, helping to explain why two people eating the same diet

can respond very differently - one maintaining weight, for example, and the

other ballooning.

 

There is a buzz around nutritional genomics at the moment, which is partly a

matter of timing. A sea change is underway in the approach scientists are taking

to disease - they're looking less to nature or nurture alone for answers, and

more to the interactive symphony of " systems biology " that nutrigenomics

epitomises.

 

Chatter around this new science has been amplified by a controversy. The

assumption of genetic markers that distinguish one ethnic group from another is

at the philosophical heart of nutrigenomics. The idea of the biological

relevance of race - even its very existence - is hotly debated.

 

Here's the most familiar example: If you're of northern European ancestry, you

can probably digest milk, and if you're south-east Asian, you probably can't. In

most mammals the gene for lactose tolerance switches off once an animal is

weaned. Humans shared that fate until a mutation in the DNA of an isolated

population of northern Europeans around 10,000 years ago introduced an adaptive

tolerance for nutrient-rich milk. The likelihood that you tolerate milk depends

on the degree to which you have northern European blood. " That, essentially, is

the model - a very dramatic one, " says Jim Kaput, founder of NutraGenomics, a

biotechnology company.

 

" As humans evolved, and as our bodies interacted with foods on each of the

continents, we sort of self-selected for these naturally occurring variants. And

certain populations have variants that, when presented with western-type food,

which is usually fatty and overprocessed and high in calories, pushes them

toward disease rather than health. "

 

Plenty of examples bear out this ill fit between certain cultures and certain

diets - suggesting, if not quite proving, some interplay of genes and nutrition:

Japanese who relocated to the United States after the second world war soon saw

their cholesterol levels soar. The Alaskan Inuit, whose metabolism was suited to

moving around all day, looking for high-fat food, were saddled with an

evolutionary disadvantage when they began living in heated homes and travelling

on snowmobiles. They now show high levels of obesity, diabetes and

cardiovascular disease. The Masai of East Africa have developed new health

problems since abandoning their traditional meat, blood and milk diet for corn

and beans.

 

T he cradle of nutrigenomics is the cradle of humankind itself: the original

migration out of Africa created widely separated subpopulations with distinct

collections of gene variants. Members of each subpopulation tend to respond

similarly to diet and environmental conditions. But the genetics of race is an

inexact science. Since many people have ancestors from different continents data

is rarely clean-cut. In other words, ethnicity is relevant to nutritional

genomics but only as a starting point. Which is why the idea of sorting

ourselves by race and pursuing a diet consistent with the original continental

diet isn't going to be very helpful. And why, in fact, the customised diets of

most people's perfect genomic future will probably not be all that different

from one another.

 

Kaput estimates that the middle 60% of the bell curve are probably not going

to need to deviate too much from the basic fruit and vegetable heavy diet

recommended by the US department of agriculture.

 

The people who will benefit from customised nutritional packets will be the

20% at either end: those at the top who don't have to worry much about what they

eat and at the bottom, who respond disastrously to conventional diets and will

discover that they need to follow special diets or eat specific supplements. The

problem for everyone will be figuring out where they fall on the curve of each

disease profile.

 

How far in the future are we projecting? The staggering complexity of

interactions among genes, and between genes and the environment, will be a real

challenge to solve. " Eat right for your genotype " may be a decade or two - or

more - down the road.

 

" Right now, no one in their right mind would offer genetic testing, " says Dr

Muin Khoury, director of the office of genomics and disease prevention at the US

Centres for Disease Control.

 

But a handful of companies is already offering genomics profiles and

nutritional supplements to early adopters. One company in America already offers

a genetics testing service. Clients pay up to $1,500 (£933) for a preventive

health profile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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