Nucleotides: The Forgotten Nutrients? Part 1

Real Health +

Niche Radio — Today’s episode is part 1 of a two-part interview with Swiss doctor and researcher Dr Peter Koeppel & Nutritional Pharmacist Jane Mackenzie. It’s all about an exciting area in nutrition that has been neglected or even forgotten: nucleotides and restoring the human genome. Yes, it sounds very scientific but allow me to break it down for you. Humans are multi-cellular organisms, our bodies are made up of trillions of cells. These cells divide constantly to make new cells in order to maintain life. Think of a car or a house: you clean certain parts every day, others every week, other parts must be replaced every month or couple of months and so forth. So, every day we have the opportunity to change our body because certain cells have certain lifespans: for example, our stomach lining cells divide or replace themselves every two days, our red blood cells every four months, the cells of our pancreas take about a year and our bones about 25 – 30 years. In each of these cells in our body is a nucleus, it’s like the cell’s head office or command centre issuing instructions for the cell and in this nucleus is our DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid. Our DNA holds our hereditary or genetic information: that is, info that has been passed down and will be passed on when the cell replicates. Nearly every cell in your body has the same DNA. Now not all the DNA in our bodies are found in the nucleus but that’s a topic for another day… many DNA make up genes and many genes make up chromosomes. So ultimately DNA, is like a blueprint and RNA, or ribonucleic acid, helps carry out this blueprint's guideline. I won’t go into the exact structure of DNA however, the building blocks of DNA are called nucleotides and A complete set of genetic material within a cell is known as the genome! Easy enough?! Armed with this understanding, you'll soon see why this is all so exciting!