Dietary genomics is the application of high-throughput functional genomic technologies in nutrition research, which examines the mechanisms by which nutrients or dietary patterns and the genome interact with each other (Elliott and Ong, 200). Nutritional genomics is concerned with nutrition and its relationship to the genome. Fenech explains: “In the near future, doctors could be trained to diagnose and treat genome damage and abnormal gene expression instead of diagnosing and treating diseases, diagnosing genomic damage and altered gene expression, and preventing or even reversing genomic damage and altered gene expression. Genetic variations are known to affect the food tolerances of human subpopulations and may also influence dietary requirements and open up the opportunity to individualize dietary intake based on the individual genome for optimal health and disease prevention
.
Paul Soloway, nutrition professor at Cornell University, points out that characterizing diets or specific nutrients as genome-damaging or genome-protecting based on in vitro studies overlooks the differences in benefits that exist over the course of life, particularly with regard to the timing of the disease outbreak. Although it is tempting to focus on single-nutrient effects such as the folate example mentioned above, nutrigenomics researchers believe that the real focus should be on the effects of multiple nutrient imbalances (both excess and deficiency) on the genome. One such endeavor is nutrigenomics, the integration of genomic research with diet and, when possible, with other lifestyle variables such as cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption. As mentioned above, nutritional status influences genome stability, and deficiencies in certain micronutrients
can lead to critical damage to the genome.
Much remains to be discovered and determined in bringing together the science of bioinformatics, nutrition, epidemiology, molecular biology, and genomics, but future nutrigenomics research will undoubtedly provide further fascinating insights into both nutritional science and the human genome. Nutrigenomics will help initiate the development of new functional foods and genome health supplements that can be mixed and matched so that total nutrient intake is adequately tailored to a person’s genotype and genome status. Nutritional genomics studies the interaction between nutrients, metabolic intermediates, and the mammalian genome. Fenech developed the concept of “Genome Health Nutrigenomics,” a science that investigates how a lack or excess of nutrients can cause genome mutations at the base sequence or chromosome
level.
Nutritional Genomics focuses on the interaction between bioactive food ingredients and the genome, which includes nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics. Nutrigenomics also describes the use of functional genomic tools to study a biological system to understand how nutrient molecules affect metabolic pathways and homeostatic control. With the increasing burden of diet-related noncommunicable diseases worldwide, nutrigenomics could help develop more sustainable approaches to promote dietary changes at the population level, although the lack of experimental studies involving humans remains an impediment to translating research into policy and practice. On the question of personalized nutrition and the question of whether nutrigenomics can contribute to sustainable individual diet and lifestyle changes, the multi-center Food4Me study recently financed by the EU tried to
to answer these questions.
There is increasing evidence that genome instability in the absence of open exposure to genotoxins is itself a sensitive marker of nutrient deficiencies. For Fenech, one of the most important social goals of nutrigenomics is to individually diagnose DNA damage and prevent
it nutritionally
.