Epinutrients – The Secret Ingredient That Makes Food Your Medicine

What Are Epinutrients?

By this point, you may be wondering exactly what these so-called epinutrients are. Putting it simply, epinutrients are those nutrients found in whole foods that have an epigenetic effect, such as folate and quercetin. As my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Lucia Aronica, said in one of my podcasts, epinutrients are our royal jelly. Just like eating royal jelly can make the epigenetic difference between a queen bee and a worker bee, epinutrients work through an epigenetic mechanism to turn on processes that benefit our health and lifespans.

This epigenetic mechanism switches genes on and off via several processes, one of which is called DNA methylation. By adding or removing methyl groups, epinutrients turn on the genes that make us stronger and younger and turn off bad genes that accelerate aging. Balance is key here – we don’t want too much or too little methylation going on, but just the right amount.

We can think of epinutrients as molecules that regulate gene expression by providing the building blocks for and directing methylation processes. Essentially, they are doing the heavy lifting at the level of the epigenome, modulating our DNA methylation patterns and creating all these positive downstream effects such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, detoxification-supporting benefits.

As I write in my Younger You book: “When viewed through the lens of how they impact DNA methylation, you can see the awesome power of the things you eat, drink, and do to nourish your genetic expression and make you biologically younger (and if you plan to have children, to improve their epigenetic inheritance, too).”

It’s clear that food is so much more than calories – it’s medicine, it’s information, it’s a code that can downgrade or upgrade our DNA software literally with every bite. And that’s precisely what we discovered in our groundbreaking study – we don’t need expensive drugs or extreme interventions such as 22-hour fasts. Instead, just by eating more whole foods, exercising a little, sleeping better, and taking much-needed rest, we can reverse biological age.

It’s simple and yet truly remarkable – when you give your body what it needs, without beating it over the head with pharmaceuticals and synthetic hormones, you empower your body’s own innate wisdom to lead the way.

Whole foods are the centerpiece of our approach because they contain these beautiful compounds that have time immemorial use histories, like the catechins in green tea, curcumin, luteolin, resveratrol or quercetin, and that appear to direct methylation traffic.

And so we designed this very polyphenol-dense, methylation-supporting diet, picking certain foods that have very particular compounds in them, including methyl donors like choline & betaine, but also these phytochemicals or methylation adaptogens that also regulate our genes, enzymes, and biology. This is why the Younger You food plan was more successful – it specifically prioritizes foods that modulate DNA methylation patterns to change the expression of your genes. Simply put, the diet aims to turn off bad genes (like genes associated with cancer or even inflammation) and turn on good ones.

All of these compounds that we know and love and eat and prescribe are the epinutrients, the methylation adaptogens and methyl donors, which are our golden ticket to reversing aging and achieving optimal health.

How Do Epinutrients Work?

As I’ve hinted above, there are two main categories of epinutrients – methyl donors and methylation adaptogens. The former provide the primary ingredients necessary for methylation reactions, including DNA methylation, while the latter direct those ingredients in the right places.

Methyl donors are the foods that the body uses to create methyl groups – the molecules used in the biochemical process of methylation which is needed for many bodily functions, as outlined in a previous blog, and also for optimal gene expression (i.e. DNA methylation). The most important methyl donors are folate (not synthetic folic acid) and vitamin B12 because they are the primary components the body uses to produce S-adenosylmethionine (SAMe), a key player in the methylation cycle. Other supporting methyl donors include betaine and choline, as well as several minerals, vitamins, amino and fatty acids. Having the right amount of methyl donors is crucial for balanced DNA methylation – we have about 20 million DNA methylation sites in every cell that need constant replenishment! And eating whole foods is the best way to ensure you hit the sweet spot of methyl donor intake and not get too much by over-relying on high dose supplements or inadvertently taking in too much through fortified foods.

Methylation adaptogens are those foods that provide the molecules that direct DNA methylation and ensure the methyl donors are used in the right amounts and in the right places. They make sure that the genes we don’t want turned on get methylated (and, thus, are inhibited) and the genes we do want turned on don’t get methylated (and thus, are expressed). They can do this by either supporting the active removal of methyl groups from genes or by passively inhibiting methyl groups from being added to genes. The end result is balanced DNA methylation that happens in just the right amount and in just the right places and methylation patterns that support youthful gene expression and inhibit pro-aging genes.

You may be familiar with many of the DNA methylation adaptogens I’m about to list. They are foods that have been used in many traditional cultures around the globe for their health-giving properties, including turmeric, green tea, cruciferous vegetables, and soy. They fall largely into two groups – flavonoids (part of the polyphenol family) and nutrients. Members of the flavonoid team include curcumin (found in turmeric), EGCG (green tea), rosmarinic acid (rosemary), and many more; whereas in the nutrients group we have vitamins A, C, and D3, and alpha-ketoglutarate. The flavonoid adaptogens work by primarily inhibiting the hypermethylation of DNA, while the nutrients help actively remove unfavorable methylation marks.

The most fascinating part is that these DNA methylation adaptogens appear to be selective in their influence. They harness the body’s wisdom to remove methyl groups where they are causing harm and leave them where they are doing good. Whether that’s due to the low-dose combination of many different flavonoids found in whole foods or some other mechanism, such as their senolytic properties, is yet to be discovered. And in case you were wondering, many of the flavonoid epinutrients are also senolytics. This means that they inhibit the accumulation of senescent cells (a sort of dying cell that doesn’t get cleared away, a zombie of the cellular world) and thus slow down the inflammatory damage caused by these cells and the aging process itself. Natural senolytics include curcumin, EGCG, quercetin, resveratrol and many more.

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