Imagine a diet specifically designed for you. It has all of the nutrients you need and all of the foods you love. But it doesn’t end there. The nutrients in this diet are at an optimal level, so their interactions with your genes result in positive health outcomes, providing the opportunity for a healthier lifestyle. The foods are unique to you—your favourite tastes based on your unique genetic makeup. This diet may not be as far off as it sounds.
Dr. Ahmed El-Sohemy, an associate professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Canada Research Chair in Nutrigenomics, studies how diet interacts with genetics to produce health outcomes. He is also the project leader of the Toronto Nutrigenomics and Health Study, which involves the construction of a database of individuals and their diet and genotype information. Despite being one of the leading nutrigenomics researchers in the world, El-Sohemy has a background that most life science students can identify with. The Varsity sat down with Dr. El-Sohemy to discuss his educational experiences, and why he loves what he does.
The Varsity: Can you tell us about your background and how you became interested in research?
Dr. El-Sohemy: I did an undergraduate degree in nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto. At the time I thought I wanted to go to medical school, along with just about everybody else in the program and in the life sciences. I did some summer research, as a way to improve my application to medical school and [it] turns out I was really fascinated by research.
TV: What was fascinating about it?
D E-S: Just the idea that we were working on a problem and addressing it in a way that no one else anywhere in the world was. The opportunity to provide new knowledge—rather than applying information from a textbook, we would be creating the knowledge that would go into future textbooks. From there I decided to go to graduate school and I made some very interesting, yet unexpected, observations in the area of cholesterol and cancer that resulted in a couple of publications for me in the first year of graduate school, which again heightened my enthusiasm even more for research. So I switched from the Master’s program, reclassified straight into the PhD program. From there I became interested in how genetic variations could affect our response to different dietary factors. It was kind of an observation we’d made using animal models, but I wanted to study it in humans. So I went to Harvard for a post-doc, where I worked with a group there that was one of the few labs in the world that was exploring human genetic variation in response to diet.
TV: What would you say is the most rewarding part of being a scientist?
D E-S: Certainly the opportunity to create new knowledge that improves our understanding of how the foods and beverages that we consume effect our health is very rewarding. Making discoveries that no one else has ever made, that ultimately will improve the health of individuals and populations. There are other rewarding aspects. The research community is very global, and so there are many opportunities to meet other very interesting scientists from all over the world. I am collaborating with researchers from Costa Rica, Korea, the U.S., and Europe, and I have been invited to so many countries that I’ve lost count.
TV: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in your career?
D E-S: One challenge from a research perspective is moving from being trained in basic research towards epidemiology, and to establish recognition in that area. I think a challenge was getting new ideas accepted in terms of getting grants funded. My first grant was not funded, I think in part because the idea was very novel and not widely accepted. But eventually, it did get funded and we published some very exciting results. It was a bit discouraging to have some reviewers of my grant say that this avenue of research was not worth exploring. So I basically ignored that advice and proved them wrong.
TV: Was there ever a person or situation that was particularly inspirational for you, or had some impact on you that led to you becoming a scientist?
D E-S: There was my PhD mentor Dr. Archer, chair of our department, who gave me the freedom to explore by letting me have a major say in the direction of the research. You start off working in the lab, working on a problem that’s assigned to you as a graduate student, but then depending on the lab and I think your supervisor, some may be more limited in terms of the opportunities to explore different ideas that were not originally part of the grant. He really gave me the freedom to do that, and provided a very supportive research environment.
TV: What are you currently working on in your lab?
D E-S: We’re working on a number of different problems, but all of them centre around understanding how common genetic variations influence the foods that we select, as well as our response to those foods. So with that we’ve developed the Toronto Nutrigenomics and Health Study, which currently has data on over 1,300 individuals, and we’ve collected a variety of information on dietary habits, food preferences, as well as genetic variation. My grad students are all working on very different problems. Because this area of research is so fertile, there’s so much that hasn’t been explored, so many interesting problems that we can address, in a way that has never been possible before. Because the integration of genomics into nutrition research is so new, there are very few people doing that, and this gives us an opportunity to be the first to make many important contributions to science.
TV: Can you tell us a little more about nutrigenomics?
D E-S: Nutrigenomics is a science that deals with the interaction between nutrients and food bioactives with the human genome. It enables us to understand why some people respond differently than others to the same dietary factors, and also to understand how genes influence, or explain our likes and dislikes of certain foods.
TV: Can you give us some examples?
D E-S: Well, one example is sensitivity to caffeine. For some people, a small amount—just a few sips of a caffeinated beverage—will make them very nervous and anxious. So they limit their consumption. Others can drink several cups a day and not have a problem falling asleep within an hour. Another is metabolism of vitamin C. If you give two individuals the same amount of vitamin C, one person’s blood levels will shoot up, and another’s will barely go up.
TV: Is there any advice you can give to aspiring researchers?
D E-S: Research can be very rewarding. I think it’s very exciting to have the opportunity to solve an important biological problem, or address an important health issue. But it involves a different way of thinking from what you might be used to as an undergrad. I think the only way to know whether research is for you is to give it a try. But also recognize that there are very different kinds of research going on in different labs across campus. If your first research experience is not particularly fulfilling, you may want to give another lab a try because the experience might be very different. I was very fortunate that in all of the labs I’ve worked in have been very rewarding experiences.
