Understand the composition of your genes.
If you could peer into any one of your body's 50 trillion cells, you'd find a fantastically complex and busy world. At the center of this world you'd find a nucleus containing 46 molecules called chromosomes—23 from each parent. These chromosomes form the blueprint for who you are.
Look more closely at the chromosomes and you'd see that each is made of bundles of looping coils called deoxyribonucleic acid–more commonly known as DNA. A DNA molecule is a twisted ladder-like stack of building blocks called nucleotides. These two long stacks of building blocks fit together like two sides of zipper and each rung in the DNA ladder is a pair of nucleotides.
Discover the role genes play in your health.
There are four types of DNA nucleotides—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—or A, C, G, and T, for short. And usually, A only binds with T and C with G. When they don't, you get a mutation that can affect your health. Salugen measures these types of mutations and develops a customized nutritional response to help repair or compensate for the mutation.
In each of your cells you have six billion pairs of nucleotides that house roughly 30,000 genes. A gene is a distinct stretch of DNA that determines something specific about who you are. Biologists use two fancy words to describe the relationship between your genes and your physical traits: genotype and phenotype. Genotype is the genes for a given trait. In most cases, you have two copies of a gene—one from your mother and one from your father. Yet as different as people can be, we are more alike than we realize. Compare any two people and you'll find that 99.9% of their DNA is the same!
Phenotype determines what you actually turn out to be, or the way these genes get expressed. Biologists often say: "Genotype determines phenotype." Take eyelashes, for example. There are 2 kinds of eyelashes in people—long and short. You can have a short lashes version of a gene from your father, and a long lashes version of a gene from your mother. That's your genotype. But what length of lashes you actually have is your phenotype. The eyelash example makes an important point. Some genes are dominant, and others are recessive. When you have two different genes for the same trait, and one is dominant (long lashes) while the other is recessive (short lashes), it's the dominant trait that wins out in the phenotype.
But not all genes follow this dominant/recessive model, nor are all human traits based upon one gene. In fact, other human traits are polygenic, which means that multiple genes control or influence the trait or disease. Skin color is believed to be polygenic. Scientists also think that polygenic inheritance is responsible for inherited predispositions to certain health issues, such as heart, coronary, and immune-related health problems. That's why Salugen measures multiple genes in our GenoScore index so we can account for the polygenic causes of many common healthcare concerns.
Understand the connection between genes and nutrition.
CHONDROITIN
Chondroitin sulfate is part of a large protein molecule that helps give elasticity to cartilage. The adjacent chart demonstrates the importance of genetic factors in determining the progression of some forms of age-onset osteoarthritis.
FOLIC ACID
A substantial body of scientific evidence supports the importance of folic acid, genes associated with folic acid, genes associated with anti-folate therapeutics, and thereby a convergence in nutritional genetics or nutrigenetics.
Dr. Kenneth Blum, our Chief Scientific Officer, was on the forefront of these discoveries more than 15 years ago when he first published a correlation between a dopamine receptor gene mutation and many reward deficiency behaviors, including alcoholism. That research has continued across many different healthcare concerns and the expertise gained through those studies are now available to consumers through Salugen's DNA-customized nutritional supplements.
For a full list of Dr. Blum's scientific research, along with detailed references and publications over the past thirty years, visit Researcher Profiles.
