According to recent data published by the World Health Organization (WHO), overweight and obesity already represent the fifth leading death risk factor worldwide, it is the one that is the worst controlled.
One of the most serious public health problems of the 21st century worldwide is that there are more than 42 million children under five who are overweight. In Spain, the situation is not more hopeful since, according to the latest data from the National Health Survey, almost 30% of the child population is overweight or obese and every time it occurs at earlier ages. Given these figures, the Nutrition education aimed at pregnant mothers since it is during the fetal stage when the risk of obesity begins to develop for the future.
It has been shown that our nutritional habits affect the expression of our genes and the structure of our epigenome, which in turn affects our predisposition to develop some of the most common diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer,) and our natural way of modulating that risk more effectively.
Keeping a good diet is one of the best ways to protect our health, but reality tells us that this is not enough.
Dr. José María Ordovás (who runs the Nutrition and Genetics Laboratory at Tufts University in Boston) states that “Obesity is tremendously complex, before we attributed it to eating too much or moving a little, now we know that it is a much more complicated phenomenon, it is not only about eating too much, but about the constitution of what we eat, when we do it and many other aspects of our environment and behavior ”.
In order to maintain an adequate connection between genome and environment, the Spanish Heart Foundation (FEC) suggests some guidelines that we should follow to improve the current lifestyle: eat in a balanced way, always at the same time and slowly digest food, exercise regularly or sleep eight hours a day, are some examples.
It is scientifically proven that sleeping a few hours, eating quickly or a mismatch in routine meal times, causes an alteration in our biological clock. All this favors the appearance of obesity
A nutritional diet appropriate to the genetic structure of each individual could also facilitate the prevention of some of the most common diseases such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's or some types of cancer. In the not too distant future we may have tools to know the human genome of each individual ... meanwhile we must apply common sense to our diet and that of our children, while we observe how we can modify the environment to improve health.
