Nutrigenetics/Nutrigenomics

Abstract

All diseases have a genetic predisposition. Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) by large international consortia are discovering genetic variants that contribute to complex diseases. However, nutrient information is missing, which is essential for the development of dietary advice for prevention and management of disease. Nutrigenetics/nutrigenomics studies provide data on mechanisms of nutrient and gene interactions in health and disease needed for personalized nutrition. A process will be needed to define when gene-nutrient-disease associations are ready to be evaluated as potential tools to improve public health.

Brazilian Society for Food and Nutrition position statement: nutrigenetic tests

“…About 20 years after PKU discovery, it was found that the patients affected responded to dietary phenylalanine restriction [10]. This was, therefore, the first inborn metabolism error caused by changes in a single gene that responded to a nutrigenetic intervention [11]. However, considering that everyone who carries mutations in PHA will manifest some degree of PKU phenotype, this condition is considered monogenic and of high penetrance.…”

From Epidemiology to Epigenetics: Evidence for the Importance of Nutrition to Optimal Health Development Across the Life Course

“…However, defining "the" ideal food pattern is challenging for a number of reasons including the difficulty in determining the required quantity of a particular food or nutrient to bring about the desired response as well as a host of nutrientnutrient and nutrient-gene interactions that can occur (Milner 2008;Mariman 2008;Ferguson 2009;Ahmed et al 2009;Simopoulos 2010). Even though there is not sufficient information to formulate the "ideal diet," there is sufficient knowledge to justify a call for future food-oriented health research (Milner 2008).…”

Epigenetics: Understanding How our Choices Lead to our Diseases

“…These identical twin studies have demonstrated a correlation between phenotypic differences such as disease with changes in DNA methylation patterns [65]. Similar to nutrition during pregnancy, nutrition during adult development is a key environmental signal that can be integrated into the genome and can cause changes in gene expression of health and disease phenotypes [66,67]. This dynamic relationship between nutrition and genes throughout an organism's lifetime has now been recognized as a subfield called Nutritional Epigenomics or 'Nutrigenomics' and provides promising insight for how to target disease from a nutritional standpoint [68].…”