'Omics' Data Reveals Impact of Olive Oil on Human Gene Expression

Olive oil a monoun­sat­u­rated fat, is the main source of fat in the Mediterranean diet (MedDiet), one of the world’s health­i­est dietary pat­terns. Consumption of olive oil and fol­low­ing a MedDiet have been stud­ied exten­sively in hun­dreds of stud­ies and shown to pro­vide ben­e­fits for many chronic health con­di­tions such as can­cer, car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­or­ders and the meta­bolic syn­drome.
See Also:Olive Oil Health Benefits
While these health ben­e­fits are well estab­lished, sci­ence has not had the tools to iden­tify the mech­a­nisms behind such pos­i­tive responses. Now, a break­through in mod­ern med­i­cine and nutri­tion called omics tech­nolo­gies — tran­scrip­tomics, pro­teomics, metabolomics, inter­ac­tomics and flux­omics — pro­vides a way to char­ac­ter­ize the mol­e­c­u­lar mark­ers and mech­a­nisms behind the health ben­e­fits of nutraceu­ti­cals such as olive oil and the MedDiet pat­tern.

A recent review pub­lished in Biofactors, reveals that the early evi­dence com­ing out of omics tech­nolo­gies con­firms that olive oil and the MedDiet do in fact exert effects on mol­e­cules in the body that alter human gene expres­sion and meta­bolic func­tion.

Some of the spe­cific effects of olive oil bisphe­nols on dis­ease mech­a­nisms include: ​“effects on recep­tors, sig­nal­ing kinases and tran­scrip­tion fac­tors asso­ci­ated with cel­lu­lar stress and inflam­ma­tion, lipopro­tein metab­o­lism and dam­age, and endothe­lial func­tion and more in gen­eral with path­ways respon­si­ble for cell cycle reg­u­la­tion and metab­o­lism that include mito­chon­dr­ial func­tion and sig­nal­ing, ER stress, DNA dam­age, and the response to growth fac­tors, cytokines and hor­mones.”

Omics data also show that olive oil phe­nols have a bal­anc­ing func­tion (home­o­sta­tic) on the gas­troin­testi­nal tract — stom­ach, liver, and pan­creas — as well as influ­enc­ing inflam­ma­tory and vas­cu­lar cells at the cel­lu­lar, sys­temic level of the body. The data con­firms the pow­er­ful role olive oil plays in human gene expres­sion, as anti-inflam­ma­tory and immune mod­u­lat­ing agent and in influ­enc­ing antiox­i­dant and detox­i­fi­ca­tion genes in the body.

This really is a break­through in nutri­tional sci­ence and med­i­cine, because now, what can be under­stood by these new omic tech­nolo­gies, is the bioac­tive tar­gets that spe­cific com­po­nents of olive oil have on the body.

For instance, before this new sci­ence, research has clearly shown olive oil has health ben­e­fits for car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, but no known mech­a­nisms. With this new sci­ence, it can now be seen that olive oil influ­ences genes such as MCP, IL7R, IFNc, TNFa, and the b‑adrenergic recep­tor B2. MCP1, for exam­ple, ​“is a cru­cial chemokine respon­si­ble for the recruit­ment of mono­cytes to inflam­ma­tory lesions in the vas­cu­la­ture.”

This pro­vides pow­er­ful infor­ma­tion to sci­en­tists about how foods influ­ence dis­eases, both in their devel­op­ment, pro­gres­sion and heal­ing. This new sci­ence also pro­vides another level of exper­i­men­tal val­i­da­tion and promise for reveal­ing ways cer­tain nutri­tional foods such as olive oil may be used in clin­i­cal appli­ca­tions for even greater ben­e­fits.

The world of omics tech­nolo­gies is still in its infancy, there­fore there is still much to be dis­cov­ered. However, the authors sug­gest that in the near future, omics tech­nol­ogy will make it pos­si­ble to pre­dict and assess gene response in rela­tion to nutraceu­ti­cals such as olive oil, which could lead the way to the pro­vi­sion of per­son­al­ized nutri­tion and med­i­cine that could reverse dis­ease.

• Biofactors