The right nutrients can protect your DNA for longer healthier life

Your DNA is an information molecule inside each of your cells that tells your genes what to do. When DNA is replicated as cells divide – and that happens about 50 billion times a day! – the information might not always be copied correctly. And damaged DNA can lead to mutated cells and on to cancer (Ref.)

Moreover, DNA is also under attack from numerous outside sources, including UV radiation, oxidative stress (free radical damage), environmental hazards, and dietary carcinogens (things in your food that cause cancer).

Dietary carcinogens include processed meats (like hot dogs and bacon), raw meats cooked at high temperatures (above 300°C) and acrylamides – formed when sugars and starches are cooked at a high temperature, in for example potato crisps/chips or French fries.

On average, we suffer thousands of hits to our DNA a day! So, some DNA damage is inevitable, but the extent to which DNA damage can be prevented and repaired correlates closely with how long we will live (Ref.).  Mutations resulting from DNA damage that are not repaired are a significant cancer risk.

The good news is that we have effective mechanisms in our bodies that repair DNA. If we didn’t, we would die before 20, because cell turnover and DNA copying is on a huge, continuous scale from birth onwards.

But inevitably these DNA replication errors are not always caught and as a result, genetic damage accumulates, and cells therefore can break down and lose function or even turn cancerous.

So, scientists are working on drugs to improve the mechanism that repairs DNA. And we already know that Vitamin B3 as nicotinamide (Ref.) and certain phyto-nutrients (plant nutrients) can do that, too.

Protecting your DNA with nutrients

Why can phyto-nutrients help? Because plants face even greater risks to their DNA than animals do – since they can’t move to prevent solar or insect damage or to seek shade or water when DNA-threatening environmental stress sets in.

So, many plants are naturally rich in biochemical DNA-protective compounds. We inherit these benefits when we eat the plants – and these phyto-compounds seem to work as well in our cells as they do in theirs (Ref.).

Phyto-nutrients in berry fruits like resveratrol in blueberries and bilberries and fisetin in strawberries are powerful DNA protectors (Ref.)  and also assist repair.

Supplements that support DNA protection include grapeseed extract (Ref.), bilberry extract (Ref.) and curcumin (Ref.)

So do quercetin (apples, onions) and chlorophyllin, which is found in green vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, kale and especially in watercress (Ref.) .

Lemons contain several phyto-nutrients, including hesperidin, which are strong DNA protectors. Indeed, in a trial, lemon juice cut DNA damage by a third (Ref.) and a sub-test showed it was not the vitamin C that had the effect.

Curcumin from turmeric – and its cousin ginger – are particularly powerful protectors of DNA (Ref.)  BBC’s Dr Michael Mosely recently teamed up with the Universities of Newcastle and University College London to test the effect of turmeric (Ref.), which contains curcumin. They found that turmeric helped modify the way that certain genes worked, resulting in improved DNA protection.

Curcumin helps protect DNA in a second way. It stimulates the body’s own production of a protein called glutathione (Ref.). Glutathione is a highly potent antioxidant and used by cells and DNA in their defence against oxidative stress – free radical damage.

You should note that turmeric typically contains only about 3% curcumin and even that is poorly absorbed, whereas a good curcumin supplement will be 98% curcumin.

Other nutrients that support glutathione production – which otherwise declines with age – are sulphur (found in green vegetables like kale, Brussels sprouts, watercress and in onions and garlic) and selenium (high in Brazil nuts, fish and seafood).

Other DNA protective compounds include vitamin C, and the herbs parsley (Ref.), rosemary (Ref.) and thyme.