Nutrigenomics: A Possible Road to Personalized Nutrition

Environmental factors such as nutrition and genetics are both involved in the etiology of chronic diseases such as cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Nutrigenomics is the application of high-throughput 'omics' technologies such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics to investigate the effects of nutrition on health. Although these different experimental approaches can be used to improve our understanding of how nutrition affects various health outcomes, the current trends in personalized nutrition have focused on the role of genetic variation to understand why some individuals respond differently from others to the same nutrients consumed. Nutrigenetics is a term that is sometimes used to describe the effects of human genetic variation on the response to nutrients or food bioactives. The purpose of this article is to use specific examples of nutrigenomic research to describe the current state of knowledge and assess the potential role of nutrigenomics in developing personalized dietary advice tailored to an individual's unique genetic profile.