EXPERT INTERVIEW
Can We Slow Aging at the Cellular Level? An interview with Kara Fitzgerald, ND, IFMCP
Natural Medicine Journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Tina Kaczor, ND, FABNO, recently had the opportunity to sit down with Kara Fitzgerald, ND, IFMCP. Fitzgerald is the coauthor of a peer-reviewed paper on antiaging epigenetic effects of a naturopathic protocol. In this interview, Fitzgerald discusses how epigenetics is involved in cellular aging, details of the protocol used in the study, and talks about where we are headed in the future. This interview was published as a podcast in December 2021 and is being reprised here as a Q&A for our Healthy Aging special issue.
Listen to the full interview here. Approximate listening time: 45 minutes
Tina Kaczor: You’re the lead author of a first-of-its-kind study on a diet and lifestyle intervention that has a measurable effect on the aging process. What was so interesting about the study is that it combined the latest in assessment using DNA, epigenetics, and methylation patterns with what I would call an old-school natural medicine approach. I was excited to see you didn’t use the nutraceuticals. You used basic, good, foundational medicine. How did your background lead you here? Kara Fitzgerald: We’re in a real scientific medical revolution right now. Our technologies are advancing at a breakneck pace. We’re learning, though, that going back to old-school interventions is still the way we’re going to get the best outcomes.
I saw this when I worked at the first clinical lab to release a DNA stool analysis (ie, a PCR stool analysis) during my postdoc training. It was this amazing, stratospheric blast of technology. But the kinds of interventions that were ultimately landed on were chew your food, rest and digest, and eat a whole-food diet. The interventions got simpler and simpler.
Flash forward, and we can now look at DNA methylation, which is one of the main epigenetic markers that determines whether genes are turned on or off. At the time of our study in 2017, it was only available in the research setting, but now slowly labs are making epigenetic testing more broadly available. In our world, we talk about nutrigenomics all the time. We put a lot of attention into assuming that what we’re doing is influencing genetic expression, and rightly so. So I finally started to really tussle with the epigenetic research. It was mostly in cancer, which is where the best science was coming out around 2013. So I was aware of epigenetics and that it was getting big. It really expanded after the genome was fully mapped in the early 2000s and we realized this idea of one gene driving one disease was in fact a misconception. We’ve got 23,000 genes. It’s remarkably simple. Epigenetics, which regulates genetic expression, controlling genes that are on or turning genes off, is as complex as DNA is simple. Mapping the genome wasn’t going to provide the ticket to all the complex diseases we are facing.
I’m somewhat of a geeky, biochemistry-inclined naturopathic physician. I was hoping we would have pinpoint probiotic prescriptions. Not that the complexity would just be so expansive, and that we would see that a whole-foods diet ultimately changed things. 18
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There’s a clear need for abundance of methylation support. It’s happening in every cell of the body, basically all of the time.
