News, advice and research about what we eat and drink-and how it influences our health-is inescapable.
What we hear less about is exactly what's taking place inside the body when nutrition is considered bad or toxic, say ultraprocessed foods like our favorite packaged cookies, chips or frozen pizza, or good and healthy, those whole, methyl-donor-rich leafy veggies, beef and eggs.
If you want a deeper understanding, ask Dana Dolinoy. The answers are in epigenetics, her specialty.
As a nutritional and environmental scientist and professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, she studies the changes that take place in response to nutrients. Her work digs deep down to the genes and DNA, at the epigenome, where the controls that turn genes on and off are located.
Dolinoy is also director of the NIH-supported Michigan Center on Lifestage Environmental Exposures and Disease and Michigan Medicine's Epigenomics Core, teams that advance research and understanding of the environmental causes of chronic diseases and conditions. She is also on the team that launched MI-CARES, the Michigan Cancer and Research on the Environment Study, which is recruiting 100,000 Michigan residents to find causes of and solutions to disease.
As Dolinoy discusses in this episode of Michigan Minds, epigenetics, "is actually a relatively new science. The term was first coined in the 1950s as a way to talk about the intersections of our genes in the environment."
Transcript
Kim Shine:
Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan. I'm Kim Shine, a senior public relations representative for the Michigan News Office.
I want to welcome Dana Dolinoy, professor of environmental health sciences and nutritional sciences at the School of Public Health. Dana's research in the field of epigenetics, which we'll learn a lot more about, explains the effects of toxic or beneficial exposures to food, drink, and chemicals on our health. As director of the Michigan Life Stage Environmental Exposures and Disease Center and Michigan Medicine's Epigenomics Core, she leads a team that advances research and understanding of the environmental causes of chronic diseases and conditions. And in light of recent changes to America's nutrition guidelines, her expertise is ripe for discussion, all the way to our epigenome and our DNA to make sense of how what we eat and drink can trigger or prevent disease.
Welcome, Dana.
Dana Dolinoy:
Thanks, Kim, for initiating this conversation. I'm excited to be here.
Kim Shine:
Of course. So I want to start with the new federal dietary guidelines, the updated pyramid. There's lots of opinions about how it's been switched up. What are your takeaways?
Dana Dolinoy:
Wow. The food pyramid is a really timely place to start, as we're seeing a massive shift in the conversation. So my biggest takeaway over the last couple of weeks is the shift in the conversation towards food quality and food processing. And I've been viewing this through the lens of nutrient-toxicant interactions. For example, when we consume ultra-processed foods, which have been in the news a lot, we're not only getting less nutrition, but we're also inadvertently exposing ourselves to toxic chemicals. For example, there are these chemicals called plasticizers; they're used to make plastic soft and flexible, and they're found in lots of products including food packaging. And when they're in food packaging that is in processed foods, fatty foods, they leach into the food that we consume. So you're not only getting the nutrition, but also those chemicals as well.
Kim Shine:
So information about nutrition and health is everywhere in our culture, and what your research into dietary toxicants and epigenetics does is explain how nutrition interacts with our genes, correct?
Dana Dolinoy:
Okay, so to understand your question, we should go back and define that term. You said dietary toxicants or food toxicants. When most of us think about toxins in our food, we think about natural poisons, like cyanide that's in apple seed, or something called aflatoxin that is a mold that's grown on corn and contaminates lots of tortilla and tortilla chips. But in the field of environmental health sciences, there's a whole second set of chemicals, manmade chemicals, that we also worry about, and these are important because they can hitch a ride with the food and then end up in our body. So these are things like Bisphenol A, or BPA, that's in plastic, pesticide residues that are on fruits and vegetables, and additives that are introduced to food during processing.
Kim Shine:
Is nutrition and what we put in our bodies something that you look back across a lifetime?
Dana Dolinoy:
