먹는 것과 머리카락의 관계

 your hair is building a record of your diet. As hair strands are built from amino acids that come from your food, they preserve the chemical traces of the protein in that food. It's a strong enough record to show whether you prefer veggie burgers or double bacon cheeseburgers.

Beginning in the 1990s, Ehleringer, distinguished professors Denise Dearing and Thure Cerling and colleagues started looking into the ways that traces of mammal diets could be reflected in their hair. Different food sources have different ratios of stable isotopes, or atoms of the same element with slightly different weights. As food breaks down into amino acids, the isotopes present in our food, including those of carbon and nitrogen, find their way into all parts of our bodies—including our hair.

For livestock raised in concentrated animal feeding operations, the corn that they eat is incorporated into their tissues. Corn is in a group of plants called C4 plants, which include sugarcane, and photosynthesizes differently than C3 plants, a group that includes legumes and vegetables.

So if you eat protein that ate corn, the amino acids that comprise your hair will have isotope ratios more like corn. If your protein comes more from plant sources or from animals who ate C3 plants, your hair will have an isotope signature more like C3 plants.

With an eye toward diet, the authors found corn-like isotope signatures more predominant among lower SES areas, and that the predominantly meat-eaters in the samples got their protein from cornfed animals, likely from concentrated animal feeding operations.

They went a step further. Using driver's license data to calculate trends in body mass index for particular ZIP codes, the authors found that the isotope ratios also correlated with obesity rates. This, they write, draws potential connections between diet, SES and health.

 

우리가 먹는 것이 우리의 몸을 이룬다. 가축을 기를 때 옥수수로 만든 사료를 먹인다.

옥수수를 이루는 탄소에는 여러 isotope이 있다. 옥수수는 C4 plant라고 한다.

이 고기를 많이 먹은 사람의 머리카락에는 C4가 많이 함유되어있었다고 한다. 

 

 

reference

James R. Ehleringer el al., "Stable isotopes in hair reveal dietary protein sources with links to socioeconomic status and health," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1914087117