DNA testing: The Solution to your Weight Loss Problem?

12 Aug 2017

Dieting is not longer about eating less and exercising more. It is about a DNA test; an analysis of your genes which determines your optimal food and exercise plan. People can vouch for the fact that they tried many different diets, stuck to them and that in spite of their hard work, these diets have failed. They might even tell you that they have exercised till they dropped and lived on barely anything and still, the results they achieved had been rather poor. Dieting is indeed frustrating especially when goals are not achieved. But diet DNA testing has today been developed: this is a new, scientific approach to your diet that will treble your chances of successful dieting. The reason is that your genes actually “decide” whether you the diet you are following is suited to you and your very unique genetic makeup.

The answer to your questions

Geneticists, health specialists and nutritionists have for long questioned the reasons why people get such different results when they diet despite following the same diet. Once one excludes certain factors such as age and gender (which obviously impact the rate at which we lose weight) and carries out studies in which dieters are clustered by the following criteria:

• The follow the the exact same diet,
• They  undertake the exact same amount and type of exercise
• They fall within the same age group and are of the same gender

 They still find marked differences in weight loss. Have you not every started a diet with a friend of yours? Then you may relate this scenario: perhaps your friend lost more weight than you did or vice versa.

The genetics of dieting

Our bodies are not the same and we all have differing genetic make ups. Food works with or against our bodies on a genetic level. The number of calories we burn is just what we perceive on the surface of weight loss but beneath there is much, much more.  Different people have different genetic make ups; some foods might be problematic for them because they might not have the genes that synthesize the protein or enzyme to break down that type of food. Diets rich in polyunsaturated fats such as oily fish and olive oils work brilliantly for some but are a totally ineffective for others and may result in a metabolic slump that will make the weight pile on.

Other foods that we often include in our diet such as caffeine, unrefined carbohydrates and so forth could actually be inhibiting you from losing weight because your genetic code does not contain the right genes for that diet.

Nutrigenomics

This is the word that scientists have coined to refer to the way genetics and dieting merge together. The word itself is clearly a conflation of 2 different terms “Nutri” is obviously an abbreviated reference to nutrition whilst genomics is the study of genes and the human genome.