Individualized Nutrition

Imagine a world where once you are born your DNA is analyzed and used to produce a personalized, nutritionally-detailed menu. This prescribed diet optimizes your health by considering the mechanisms in which food born substances alter and effect your specific genetic expressions and transcriptions. In other words, your diet changes your genes and then your genes influence your health risks.

This rapidly growing field is called nutrigenomics. It stems from another discipline, nutrigenetics, that purports that a person’s given genotype moderates the relationship of nutrition and health risks. Though there is great reason to believe that the discoveries in nutrigenetics is influential on health, there is new evidence demonstrating that food also has an effect on the genes themselves. Recently developed technologies are enabling researchers to examine the influence diet has on “gene transcription, proteomics, and metabolism” [1].

The common understanding of food is that its purpose is to be metabolized to provide energy for the cells of the body. Recent research has demonstrated, however, that some of it becomes ligands, “molecules that bind to proteins involved in “turning on” certain genes to one degree or another” [2]. Nutrigenomics estimates that certain unhealthy diets may cause gene expressions leading to a variety of negative health impacts. The idea is that if these mechanisms can be identified, the health risks can either be prevented or reversed by using a particular algorithm of diet.

There are many obstacles that face this emerging discipline. The first, is the incredibly complicated study design necessary to accurately understand the inter-working relationships of cell metabolism, genetic transcription, nutritional input and health outcomes (both short-term and long-term). This issue is not insurmountable but it relies upon the collaboration of nutritionists, geneticists, molecular biologists and bioinformaticians. Assuming that the science can produce accurate and repeatable results, the remaining barriers relate to the practicality of implementing such interventions; the high costs involved in analyzing the DNA of every individual and the possibility of low adherence to the defined diet.

The field of nutrigenomics offers the possibility of a world where certain health risks can be averted or minimized by understanding the effect of diet on the individual’s genetic structure. Though this discipline is promising, the people who will be most affected by it will be the people whose genetics are highly influenced by diet or highly unresponsive to diet. The vast majority of the population will experience average effects and may ultimately benefit from the general state-of-the-art nutritional guidelines: “balance calories with physical activity; consume more of certain foods and nutrients such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fat-free and low-fat diary products, and seafood; consume fewer foods with sodium, saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, added sugars and refined grains” [3]. Until the science is there to substantiate the field of nutrigenomics, we must continuously act upon the latest and most robust findings in nutritional science to improve population health.

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[1] Arab, Lenore. “Individualized nutritional recommendations: do we have the measurements needed to assess risk and make dietary recommendations?.” Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 63.01 (2004): 167-172.

[2] Grierson, Bruce. “What Your Genes Want You to Eat”. The New York Times. May 4, 2003.

[3] “Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010″. United States Department of Agriculture: Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. January 31, 2011.