Why what your grandmother ate while pregnant with your mother might affect
your children's health, and other findings from the growing field of nutrigenomics.
By KATE TRAVIS
Jose M. Ordovas has been studying the role of lipoproteins in heart disease for decades. His laboratory and others have tried to tease out how these proteins factor into why some people can eat an unhealthy diet - that is, lots of dietary fat - and still have high levels of what is often referred to as good high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. The senior scientist and director of the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory at Tufts University in Boston honed in on APOA1, which encodes the HDL component apolipoprotein (apo) A-I. A specific SNP in its promoter region (APOA1 - 75G/A) was first identified in the early 1980s, and studies in the decade following scrutinized the association between the G and A alleles and ...
