When Charlotte Benkner died last year at age 114, a dining hall in Ohio was named in her honor. Benkner, briefly acclaimed as the world’s oldest living person, was known for eating a lot; one obituary listed her appetite as “voracious.” It’s enough to make the average person bitter: How could Benkner survive to truly old age on pork chops and cake when the rest of us may not make it to 70 without three servings of broccoli a day?
The answer lies in the fledgling science of nutritional genomics, the study of how our genes interact with the nutrients in the foods we eat. While a handful of food-gene interactions have been studied before—lactose intolerance, for instance, is known to be caused by a variation in the lactase gene—most are only now being charted.
“What constitutes good nutrition is actually a very individual prescription, depending on your particular set ...
