Nutritional genomics, also known as nutrigenomics, studies the relationship between human genome, human nutrition and health.
Promotes an understanding of how the whole body responds to a food via systems biology, as well as single gene/single food compound relationships.
Nutritional science studies effects of lacking nutrients and diseases closely related to diet.
Nutritional science focuses on preventative measure, identifying what nutrients or foods will raise or lower risks of diseases and damage to the human body.
Certain disorders may be linked to certain single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or other localized patterns.
Variation within a population may yield many more polymorphisms.
With nutritional genomics personalized assessment of diabetes, and metabolic syndrome can be achieved.
Nutrigenomics can help assess individuals and make specific nutritional recommendations.
Nutrigenomics focus is in the prevention and the correction of specific genetic disorders: obesity, coronary heart disease (CHD), hypertension and diabetes mellitus type 1.
With proper nutritional intake genetic disorders can often be prevented by proper nutritional intake: spina bifida, alcoholism and phenylketouria.
Coronary heart disease
There is a relationship between the disease and the presence of two gene alleles found at E and B apolipoprotein loci that are tied to nutrition.
These loci result in individualized reactions to the consumption of lipids.
Some people experience increased weight gain and greater risk of CHD whereas others with different loci do not.
There is a direct correlation between the decrease risk of CHD and the decrease consumption of lipids across all populations.
By exploring the interaction between dietary pattern and genetic factors, nutritional genomics aims to suggest dietary changes that could prevent or reduce obesity: some SNPs that make it more likely that a person will gain weight from a high fat diet; for people with AA genotype in the FTO gene showed a higher BMI compared those with TT genotype when having high fat or low carbohydrate dietary intake.
Phenylketonuria, an uncommon autosomal recessive metabolic disorder that takes effect postpartum but the debilitating symptoms can be reversed with nutritional intervention.