Nutrigenomics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is missing citations and/or footnotes.

To meet Wikipedia's style guidelines and conform to our policies regarding neutral point of view, original research, and verifiability, please provide appropriate inline citations and/or footnotes.
For guidance in this area, see Wikipedia:Footnotes#How to use.
This article has been tagged since December 2006.


Nutrigenomics is the application of the sciences of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics to human nutrition, especially the relationship between nutrition and health. Nutrition and health research is focused on the prevention of disease by optimizing and maintaining cellular, tissue, organ and whole-body homeostasis . This requires understanding, and ultimately regulating, a multitude of nutrient-related interactions at the gene, protein and metabolic levels. These new disciplines and their attendant technologies are changing the paradigms of health research.

Interindividual differences were recognised early in nutrition research, and phenotypes were described. With the progress in genetics, biochemical disorders with high nutritional relevance were linked to a genetic origin. Genetic disorders with pathological effects were described, e.g. the few genes with pathological obesity. Other gene polymorphisms were described with consequences for human nutrition. The folate metabolism is a good example, where a common polymorphism exists for the gene that encodes the methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR). It was realised however, that many, possibly thousands of other gene polymorphisms might result in minor deviations in nutritional biochemistry, where only marginal or additive effects would result from these deviations. The tools to study the physiological impact were not available at the time and are only now becoming available.

Nutrigenomics is associated with the issue of personalized nutrition, since claims are being made that differences in genotype should result in differences in the diet and health relationship.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

This article or section may contain spam.
Wikipedia spam consists of external links promoting sites which exist primarily to sell goods or services, use objectionable amounts of advertising, or require payment to view the relevant content. If you are familiar with the content of the external links, please help by removing promotional links in accordance with Wikipedia:External links. (You can help!)


This health-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../n/u/t/Nutrigenomics.html"