Can You Blame Your Weight On Your Genes?

We’ve heard it all before: if you just eat x and work out by doing x, you’ll lose x amount of weight in x amount of time. But what happens if none of that works for you? More and more people are turning to genetic testing for the answer.

- Charis Torrance

For almost two decades, Dr Yael Joffe has studied the way nutrition and your genes interact – and her message is clear: the diet industry is… an industry. Your genes make you 100 per cent unique, and the concept of one-diet-fits-all simply cannot work. This is why more and more people around the world are turning to nutrigenomics in an effort to become optimally healthy.

Nutrigenomics vs nutrigenetics

‘I’ve done two degrees as a dietician, and we all work on the same equation when dealing with clients: what you eat, what exercise you do and how stressed you are,’ explains Dr Joffe. ‘But I’ve always felt like it was missing something.’ In her twenties she worked as a dietician in a clinic in the UK, but her heart wasn’t in it. Like many young people working abroad, she was there to earn pounds and travel around Europe.

It was 2000, we had all survived Y2K and a new fad called ‘nutrigenomics’ was starting to generate a lot of buzz. ‘I thought it sounded like science fiction,’ says Dr Joffe, ‘this idea that genes played an important role in nutrition.’ When she was approached by a UK startup company doing nutrigenomics, her interest was piqued, even though she knew nothing about genetics. Their reply? ‘Well, no dietician does.’

She’s never looked back. ‘No one ever told me that genetics can influence how we respond to foods, what kind of nutrients we should take, how we respond to exercise, how we lose and gain weight. I realised that that was the part of the equation I was missing – that everyone was missing.’