Weight Maven

When I did my review of the 4 Hour Body diet, I wrote this cautionary note re the concept of the 4HB cheat day:

However, I think there’s a difference between trying to regulate hormones by overfeeding periodically and eating crap just because you can (Ferriss says his breakfast on his “cheat” days often includes multiple chocolate croissants and bear claws). I recall Art DeVany doing a post last year around the holidays that talked about what a bad strategy it was to binge periodically (I believe it related to nutrigenomics), but alas, can’t find the link.

Well, I’m catching up on Jimmy Moore’s paleo week podcasts and in the one with Art DeVany, this concept came up again. Art briefly spoke about the implication of the dietary choices around a Christmas binge and how this was problematic from an epigenetics and gene expression perspective.

A guick Google turned up this on evfit.com:

Epigenetics refers to heritable changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by changes to the operation of DNA—but not to the underlying DNA sequence - the genotype (hence the name epi—”in addition to”—genetics). These changes are like ‘on’ and ‘off’ switches; they either turn on or turn off a given gene. These switches (actually networks or arrays of switches) are critical to our health and longevity and we can turn on or turn off genes depending on what we do (diet, stress, exercise etc.) … Epigenetics explains how a single ‘binge’ or giving a child (whose forming metabolism may, at any particular stage, be relatively sensitive) a certain critical food or exposure to an environmental hazard just once can flip the genetic switch—or switches—for some time.

Food for thought (pun intended)!