Diet and environmental conditions affect our genes

In a recent interview published in the weekly magazine Donna di Repubblica, Prof. David Charles Baulcombe, plant geneticist at Cambridge and president of the Royal Society, once again repeated what he has been asserting for years following his studies on plants, which have earned him numerous awards and a nomination for the Nobel Prize in medicine in 200: "we are what we live", which translated into more scientific terms means that our genetic heritage (DNA) is not an absolutely immutable structure, but is affected by external influences, by something that attaches itself to our genes, other cells. This is what is known as EPIGENETICS.

An example of this claim can be found in the reproductive moment in the human species: epigenetics explains that in reproduction the parents' DNA is "copied" and recombined into the child's DNA, but along with the "genetic code", a series of additional molecules that have "bound" themselves to the parent's DNA can also be passed on to the children, and these may reveal surprising or unexpected changes in the generation coming into the world.

Focusing attention on diet, we can cite the example given by Prof. Baulcombe, concerning the effects of a very severe famine on a population, which translated into a reduction in the height of the offspring, transmitted genetically through the male line.