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Your Environment. Your Health.

Diet, Nutrition, and Environmental Public Health

Partnerships for Environmental Public Health (PEPH)

May 28, 2015

PEPH Webinar: Diet, Nutrition, and Environmental Public Health

Research indicates that the interplay between dietary factors and environmental exposures may influence – positively and negatively – disease onset and trajectory. For example, poor diets related to low consumption of antioxidants and/or high consumption of dietary fat and sugar have been shown to increase the negative effects of polluted air on asthma symptoms. These risks have been shown to be ameliorated with proper antioxidant or vitamin D supplementation. Genetic variation represents another important facet of the diet-toxicant-disease paradigm. Nutrition studies are exploring joint effects of genes and diet on various health outcomes, including diabetes and obesity. Recent findings in the area of epigenetics and epigenomics provide intriguing examples by which environmental chemicals and nutrition can influence gene expression through epigenetic mechanisms. In this webinar, we heard from two researchers who have been examining the interplay between diet and environmental exposures and how that may influence health outcomes.

Presentations

Experts

Dana Dolinoy Ph.D.

Dana Dolinoy has a Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics, as well as Integrated Toxicology & Environmental Health, from Duke University, and she is currently an Associate Professor of Environmental Health and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Michigan. She also leads the Environmental Epigenetics and Nutrition Laboratory at U. Michigan’s School of Public Health; the lab investigates how nutritional and environmental factors interact with epigenetic gene regulation to shape health and disease. In 2015, she is serving as Chair of the Gordon Research Conference in Molecular & Cellular Mechanisms of Toxicity.

Rosalind Wright, M.D., M.P.H.

Rosalind Wright, M.D., M.P.H., is the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor of Children’s Health Research and Vice Chair for Clinical & Translational Research in the Department of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is a transdisciplinary developmental epidemiologist with a primary interest in prenatal and early childhood predictors of developmental disorders, including asthma, obesity, neurobehavioral outcomes, and cardiometabolic disorders. She has expertise in genetics, environmental health, and nutritional epidemiology, as well as stress research. A particular focus is the implementation of studies examining the importance of specific micronutrients in prenatal programming of long-term health and how various dietary components may mitigate or enhance the impact of chemical and non-chemical stressors during early development.

We want your feedback!

Send comments, questions, and suggestions for future webinar topics to peph@niehs.nih.gov.

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