DNA, Behavior and Food

Jamais Cascio
We're all familiar with the ways in which the chemicals in food can change our behavior, sometimes dramatically (as anyone who has been around me when I'm having a mid-day low blood sugar crash can tell you). But it turns out that ingested chemicals in the bloodstream can do more than change transient behavior -- they can change the way our DNA is expressed.

That's the finding of Drs. Moshe Szyf, Michael Meaney and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, speaking at this week's Environmental Epigenomics conference. They found that injecting L-methionine, a common amino acid and food supplement, into the brains of lab rats, could turn well-adjusted rats into easily-stressed, shy rats, by causing the same kinds of changes to DNA expression in the brain as result from rats that are not properly groomed and cared for by their mothers: