Toxic foods, food as medicine, epigenetics makes sense of nutritional triggers on health

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, beefs 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 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 Life Stage Environmental Exposures and Disease Center 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. More on the study.


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."


Michigan Minds is produced by Greta Guest and hosted by Michigan News staff. Jeremy Marble is the audio engineer and Hans Anderson provides social media animations. Listen to all episodes of the podcast.