{"id":165440,"date":"2024-10-15T15:06:41","date_gmt":"2024-10-15T21:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tecscience.tec.mx\/en\/?p=165440"},"modified":"2024-11-22T11:15:43","modified_gmt":"2024-11-22T17:15:43","slug":"floyd-chilton-personalized-diets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tecscience.tec.mx\/en\/human-social\/floyd-chilton-personalized-diets\/","title":{"rendered":"When Genetics Dictates Diet: The Future of Personalized Health"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Floyd Chilton<\/strong><\/a> sees his career as nothing short of a miracle. Growing up on a small tobacco farm in the Appalachian Mountains, he never imagined his career would unfold the way it has. Chilton, who now introduces himself as Ski<\/strong>, tells the story of how his parents scraped their money for a year to buy him a telescope. He would spend his days on his family\u2019s farm looking up at Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. \u201cEven from humble beginnings, there was this intense curiosity about nature<\/strong>,\u201d he says sitting in Tec de Monterrey\u2019s campus<\/strong>, where he is part of the Faculty of Excellence<\/a><\/em> initiative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those humble beginnings weren\u2019t Chilton\u2019s only obstacle. He was also severely dyslexic and graduated high school without being able to read properly. He made it to college by playing sports, realizing halfway through his college years that he was skilled in the sciences<\/strong>, particularly biology<\/strong> and chemistry<\/strong>. After getting his six-year PhD in three years from Wake Forest University, he was recruited to Johns Hopkins University as a young assistant professor. Eventually he made his way to the University of Arizona where he now runs the Center for Precision Nutrition and Wellness<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First of all, can you explain what precision nutrition means for people who may not be familiar with the concept?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution<\/strong> and it started in cancer<\/a><\/strong>. It used to be we treated cancer with chemotherapy or we treated it with radiation, but they were really broad treatments and they were really quite ineffective at treating the most serious types of cancer. We then began to understand that even within a cancer like a lung cancer, there were 20 or 30 different types of cancer or causes of the cancer and then we began to create therapeutics, immunotherapies for the specific cancers<\/strong>. So it moved from a one size fits all to very individualized. That was the emergence of precision<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But precision<\/strong> has now dramatically increased. It’s increased in all parts of medicine. It’s increased to nutrition. It’s increased to wellness. But primarily, it’s the capacity to take immense amounts of data<\/strong> \u2014genomic, metabolomic, clinical\u2014 and take many, many millions of inputs and feed it into machine learning<\/a> algorithms or A.I. algorithms<\/a>, and then be able to individualize health<\/strong> care<\/strong> for the individual. Because one size doesn’t fit all <\/strong>and in fact, in some cases, the one size that is therapeutic for one population is actually causing destruction for another population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of this precision<\/strong> in humans is built on early evolution<\/strong>. What was happening 200,000 years ago in the savannas of Africa was dramatically different from what was happening 40,000 years ago out of African populations in Europe. That was dramatically different from 30,000 years ago in Asia, and 25,000 years ago, as you’re moving up Siberia across the Bering Strait and Beringin and 15,000 years ago in North and South America. Diets were different, pathogens were different, temperatures were different, everything was different. Evolution did its job in each case. But we carry that ancestral genetics<\/strong> into modern populations. And then we feed people with a modern Western diet and it devastates certain populations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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