UNITED STATES, March 30, 2016 (Washington Post): Why is it that some people can stay healthy only by sticking to a strict vegetarian diet? Why is it that others can eat a steak a day, remain slim, avoid heart disease and feel like a million dollars? The answers may lie in your heritage. Cornell University researchers have found a fascinating genetic variation that they said appears to have evolved in populations that favored vegetarian diets over hundreds of generations. The geography of the vegetarian allele is vast and includes people from India, Africa and parts of East Asia who are known to have green diets even today.
Researcher Kaixiong Ye said that the vegetarian adaptation allows people to “efficiently process omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids and convert them into compounds essential for early brain development.” Nutritionists believe that getting a good balance of these two types of fatty acids in the diet is essential to staying healthy. The body can’t produce these substances naturally, so it must get them from food.
Studies have suggested that humans evolved on a diet with a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 essential fatty acids of 1:1. But this new study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shows that different people may need radically different ratios of the substances in their diet depending on their genes, and it supports the growing evidence against a one-size-fits-all approach to nutrition and for highly personalized advice. The existence of the vegetarian allele implies that, for people with this variation, straying from that diet — by eating a lot of red meat, for example — may make them more susceptible to inflammation, because their bodies were optimized for a different mix of inputs.
More of this interesting research recently published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution at “source.”