Nutrigenomics

Nutrigenomics is a branch of nutritional genomics and is the study of the effects of foods and food constituents on gene expression. This means that nutrigenomics is research focusing on identifying and understanding molecular-level interaction between nutrients and other dietary bioactives with the genome. Nutrigenomics has also been described by the influence of genetic variation on nutrition, by correlating gene expression or SNPs with a nutrient's absorption, metabolism, elimination or biological effects. By doing so, nutrigenomics aims to develop rational means to optimise nutrition with respect to the subject's genotype.

By determining the mechanism of the effects of nutrients or the effects of a nutritional regime, nutrigenomics tries to define the causality or relationship between these specific nutrients and specific nutrient regimes (diets) on human health. Nutrigenomics has been associated with the idea of personalized nutrition based on genotype. While there is hope that nutrigenomics will ultimately enable such personalised dietary advice, it is a science still in its infancy and its contribution to public health over the next decade is thought to be major. Whilst nutrigenomics is aimed at developing an understanding of how the whole body responds to a food via systems biology, research into the effect of a single gene/single food compound relationships is known as nutrigenetics.

Nutrigenomics has been defined as the application of high-throughput genomic tools in nutrition studies and research. It can also be seen as research to provide people with methods and tools who are looking for disease preventing and health promoting foods that match their lifestyles, cultures and genetics.

The term "high throughput tools" in nutrigenomics refers to genetic tools that enable millions of genetic screening tests to be conducted at a single time. When such high throughput screening is applied in nutrition research, it allows the examination of how nutrients affect the thousands of genes present in the human genome. Nutrigenomics involves the characterization of gene products and the physiological function and interactions of these products. This includes how nutrients impact the production and action of specific gene products and how these proteins in turn affect the response to nutrients.

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