Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Review Article

The Importance of Dietary Behavior to the Health of Monozygotic Twins

Division of Aquaculture and Upgrading, Department of Sea and Marine Resources, Portuguese Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere, Portugal

*Corresponding Author:

Carlos Cardoso
Division of Aquaculture and Upgrading, Department of Sea and Marine Resources
Portuguese Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere–IPMA, Avenida Brasília
1449 006, Lisbon, Portugal
Tel: 00351 21 302 7034
Fax: 00351 21 301 5948
E-mail: carlos.cardoso@ipma.pt

Received date: May 08, 2017; Accepted date: June 01, 2017; Published date: June 12, 2017

Citation: Cardoso C, Afonso C, Bandarra NM (2017) The Importance of Dietary Behavior to the Health of Monozygotic Twins. J Community Med Health Educ 7:526. doi:10.4172/2161-0711.1000526

Copyright: © 2017 Cardoso C, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The development, health, and phenotype of monozygotic twins can be decisively affected by dietary behaviour. Several channels of biochemical, microbiological, and physiological differentiation between twins are affected by the particular traits of any given diet and are to be evaluated under a new perspective and point of view. The nutritional factors have a more direct impact in the gut flora, obesity and its associated health problems. Diabetes and cardiovascular diseases show a strong dependency on the dietary options often trumping the genetic aspects may be affected leading to the metabolic syndrome and other diseases. Other systems such as the endocrine and the immune systems also give further examples of the differentiation of health outcomes as a result of dietary patterns. Moreover, cancer frequency, onset, and development are partially related to food constituents, especially in the case of cancer diseases arising in the gastrointestinal tract. The epigenetic changes that occur during lifetime be partially due to nutrition and may contribute to the pathogenesis of cancer. Indeed, some evidence ascribes phenotypic discordance between monozygotic twins partially to epigenetic factors. However, the role of diet in the development, ageing, and health status of monozygotic twins is still not fully understood and warrants further study. It is possible that over the next decade a full characterization of human genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic data will be within the reach of most researchers and shed much light onto the interplay of genetic determined processes and nutrition effects.

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