HOW well is your diet working for you? When you're not shedding pounds on your latest magazine diet, it's easy to assume that it's either a fad designed to empty your pockets or that you're secretly plunging your head into the fridge at 3am.
But there’s also the chance that the diet’s not right for you because you’re you.
“If you put a million people on a certain diet, it’s probably the correct diet for half of them,” says Carolyn Horrocks.
Horrocks developed a company called MyGenomics through the Newcastle Science City Innovation Machine programme. It launched quietly earlier this year, offering people the chance to find out how their body’s DNA influences how they absorb fat and respond to exercise.
The Centre for Life-based company offers a weight-loss programme that takes advantage of advice from a qualified dietician and sports scientist, but the process all starts with a swab.
Customers are sent a DNA swab kit in the post, which they use to take a sample from the inside of their mouth and send back to the Bioscience Centre for testing.
The results are then posted securely online within four weeks. Users are offered a tailored diet plan and can have online sessions with the dietician and personal trainer, depending on their plan.
Horrocks has explored stem cell science and the body’s immune system during spells with major pharmaceutical companies, and is a director of a Durham firm called ClarinnisBio that looks at the potential use of cells from hair follicles for wound healing. She is also a qualified yoga teacher.
She said: “This approach takes the guessing and trial and error out of the process. People ask if genetics or environment are the answer, but actually it’s a combination.”
The MyGenomics approach to weight loss is to look at eight selected genes that affect weight. Three of these are looking at the responsiveness of the adrenalin receptors, which respond to calls for the body to start burning fat.
The test also looks at a marker which determines the amount of fast and slow twitch muscles in the body, which indicates whether the body is better suited to power or endurance.
Another looks at the rate of blood-flow through muscles, which determines how well a body can build strength. It also looks at genes linked to increased fat absorption, fat cell formation and food intake.
Horrocks said: “It’s about how you absorb and metabolise fat, carbohydrate and protein. Included in that are a couple of markers relating to how your muscles use macronutrients.
“You end up with a diet programme looking at whether you should maintain low-fat, low-carb, low-GI or just a balanced diet. It’s the difference between buying a suit from Primark which sort of fits and buying a tailored suit from Saville Row which fits you exactly.
“The report you get interprets that DNA data for you, telling you if you have a variant which means you absorb more fat or that your muscles respond better to higher intensity exercise.
“The genes we’ve chosen are based on variants you usually find in the Northern European population. It’s not the effect of the variant that changes, it’s just the proportion of people with that variant.
“A really good example is that a large majority of Northern Europeans can drink milk when they’re adults, but the percentage is much lower in parts of Asia. Northern Europeans have variants in the lactase gene, which is meant to be switched off after you’ve weaned, but the development of dairy farming in Northern Europe was an evolutionary pressure because there’s a lot of milk around.
“In parts of Asia where that pressure doesn’t exist there is no need for that variant.
“Also, some of the genes that are strongly linked to obesity are common in the Pima Indians, but very few other people have these variants.”
