JANUARY 2023

BY VERNE MAREE

Functional Medicine practitioner DRMENKAGUPTA explains howDNA testing, gut microbiome testing and nutraceutical supplementation are paving the way for an era of truly personalised medicine. It’s been two years since I first interviewed former gynaecologist Dr Menka Gupta about her move to Functional Medicine (FM) and her growing Orchard Roadpractice. (Youcan read that storyby searching for “Root CauseMedicine” at expatliving.sg.) As I’mabout to find out, she’s been extremely busy since then! # DNA Testing From an FM perspective, says Menka, knowing your genetic makeup can be amazingly useful in preventing chronic disease. That’s because the future of individualised health care lies in nutrigenomics – how our nutrition affects our genes – and it all starts with DNA testing.

What are your most popular and useful test panels? Our NutraNourish Health panel. It’s designed to optimise wellbeing by personalising lifestyle and diet choices – and, where necessary, supplements tailored to offset any particular nutritional deficit based on specific SNPs. For one patient with troublesome cholesterol levels, it revealed various SNPs related to his dyslipidaemia. After adding certain nutrients to his diet, along with supplements based onhis genetic profile, his lipidmarkers normalised, to the delight of everyone – himself, his doctor and me. Can you help with our common bugbear – overweight? Yes, we have a panel for that: NutraNourish Diet! It’s now understood that maintaining a healthy weight is based on muchmore thanthesimplecalories in, caloriesout equation. In fact, It was just recently shown that 40 to 80 percent of body weight variance in the population is due to genetic factors. Some good news is that nutrigenetically tailored diets result in better compliance, longer-term fat loss and improved blood glucose levels.

WhichDNA test do you use? I chose the European lab test and its various panels for their practical usefulness, and because the gene variants or SNPs they analysed are selectedaccording to rigorous scientific standards. Unlike some other tests, they don’t merely present a list of risk genes. Importantly, they also give actionable r e c omme nd a t i on s f o r nutrition, supplements and other lifestyle factors. Our NutraNourish DNA testing panels include: NutraNourish Health, NutraNourish Mind, NutraNourish Oestrogen, NutraNourish Methylation, and many others.

Glossary Nutrigenomics: The study of how our genes and nutrition interact, andhow the foodwe eat affects our genes by either expressing themor suppressingthem. SNP: Pronounced “snip”, SNP stands for “single nucleotidepolymorphism”. SNPs arecommongenetic variations. Their practical relevance is that they may act as biological markers, as they can relate to the genes associated with all sorts of diseases.

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