Jeffrey Bland explains how plant microRNAs in food survive digestion, enter your bloodstream, and change how your genes work. Eating plants sends informational signals that affect fat metabolism and other processes, not just calories and nutrients.
Well, sometimes we ask the question, is there anything new under the sun? And in this day and age, the answer always has to be yes. Information is changing in this field of healthcare and nutrition so rapidly. So what's the big news for the day this November 2011 period? I think it has to be this recent report that within foods there are substances call small inhibitory RNAs. This is something that cells make on a regular basis, that plants, like animals, make these in their cells. And These small inhibitory RNAs, so called micrornas, then have effects in the cell by blocking the expression of certain types of genetic information. So that changes the way that our book of life is being read, or the way that a plant cell's book of life, its genome, is being read. So it changes the actual way that the cell functions. Well, this is not new, what I just told you. That's been known in the area of molecular biology for some time. But what is new, and this is the aha, is the recognition that these micrornas in a plant like rice, when consumed by animals, will be found in the blood of animals, meaning it's transferred from the plant into the blood of the person, or in this case, organism that ate it, and that that then can actually bind in that organism that's eaten that rice to certain receptors that modulates how things like fatty acids are metabolized or how fats are processed by the body. What this means is that there are multiple ways upon which food can serve as information to the consumer in terms of their biological information, how they're actually translating their genes into their function. This is a tremendously dynamic, revolutionary breakthrough in understanding, because what it says is not only do we eat vitamins and minerals and eat proteins, carbohydrates and fat, but we're eating information both in the forms of phytochemicals, things like resveratrol or curcumin or epigallocatechin, gallate from green tea, or glucosinolates from cruciferous vegetables. But we're also consuming potentially these micrornas from plant foods that can modulate the way that our genes are expressed epigenetically above the genome. And it's very interesting, isn't it, that Atlantic magazine, one of the really great pieces of literature, has an article just this month on how health and lifestyle choices can change our genetic makeup, that is epigenetics, how our diet actually can influence epigenetically above the genome in the way that our genes are expressed and ultimately translate into our health and disease patterns. So Atlantic, Time magazine cover epigenetics. We're really witnessing a true paradigm shift in which genes in and of themselves, don't determine our health. It's the interaction of our lifestyle, our environment with our genes, how we eat, how we think, how we move that ultimately gives rise to the expression of our patterns over years of living that becomes our outcome, called our health and disease. This is a remarkably exciting transition because it gives us a lot more flexibility in understanding how we want our life to proceed as we grow older.
