Industry and bad genes

One of the central messages I want to communicate with - Why only glucose? - blog is that it is practically impossible to understand how a human body works within the context of a modern civilization. If we are unable to understand the normal function of our body, can we then understand it when it gets sick? Can we make the right diagnosis, design preventive measures or focus industry to develop medication?

Today we eat too much, too often and move too little. Our bodies are therefore rather saturated with food, compared to being depleted when we get lost in the wilderness. Finding food in an untamed nature is an extremely hard job and from our standpoint one needs to be a trained expert to survive. Such individuals can nowadays make money with their survival shows on popular TV channels. In the far past everybody had to be an expert to stay alive. And many did not! In those days meals were far from regular. What adaptations would be beneficial to a human organism in such conditions? For example, everything that could keep the glucose high enough to maintain the brain function would help a lot. In addition, the ability to accumulate as much food in as possible in the cellular stores after a sporadic meal would be highly appreciated. At this point it is again worth mentioning that we do not eat and deliver food to our cells to be immediately converted to energy, but rather to fill the cellular stores for later use. Advantageous adaptations would likely be related to changes in some key proteins in our cells, like enzymes, ion channels, transporters to name a few…It is now popular to say these changes in proteins originate from mutations in some genes. These changes can be later inherited through the generations. It is not my intention to discuss details about the genes in this blog, since biological concepts of how we understand them, are currently changing. My favorite metaphor for them is beautifully described in Denis Noble’s bestseller “The music of life”. But keeping in mind the beneficial adaptations mentioned above, is it then correct to realize that changes in proteins (or genes) that aided blood glucose rise and faster fat accumulation were of an advantage to a Paleolithic human? Would such changed genes be defining survivors, favoring their children? Those of us who carry those genes should know that they were the best genes we could have to survive.

What about those genes today? What do they mean to a modern human enjoying the benefits of a modern civilization? Sure enough we do not call them the best genes any longer. We rather call them bad or even the worse genes. We tend to dig them out within the studies on large and progressively larger populations. Then we correlate polymorphisms with statistical risks and attract investors and industry with putative drug targets. We certainly want to knock them out in the near future. It is too easy to blame genes for being obese, diabetic… I believe that better understanding of how our bodies work offers much less sophisticated solutions for most metabolic diseases.