Neutrigenomics: Future of Health and Disease

Today, the role of food and nutrition in human health and especially prevention of illness is gaining recognition. Micronutrients are essential for optimal human health. Diseases of modern society, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer have shown to be effected by dietary patterns. Nutrition and genetics both play a significant function in human health as well as the development of chronic diseases. The risk of disease is often associated with genetic polymorphisms, but the effect is dependent on dietary intake and nutritional status. In other words, nutrigenomics describes the scientific approach that integrates nutritional sciences and genomics and incorporates the application of other high-throughput ‘omics’ technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics to investigate the effects of nutrition on health. In fact, using the human genome data base as well as that of model organisms, nutrigenomics studies the genomewide effects of food components on gene expression (transcriptomics), the complete collection of proteins at a given nutritional state (proteomics) and the entire metabolite pattern occurring under a defined nutritional condition (metabolomics). Applied wisely, Omics will promote an increased understanding of how nutrition influences metabolic pathways and homeostatic control; how this regulation is disturbed in the early phase of a diet-related disease and to what extent individual sensitizing genotypes contribute to such diseases It is a great potential to improve health by understanding the interaction between nutrients/foods and body physiology, and thus improve dietary prevention and treatment of diseases affecting people in rich as well as poor societies. For the time being, nutrigenomics will definitely discover new, tasty, readily suitable, and more proper foods. There is no doubt that investment in nutrigenomics will advance the role of nutrition in public health.

کلیدواژه ها:

nutrigenomics ، omics ، micronutrients ، nutrition ، genomics