THE EMERGING FIELD OF NUTRIGENOMICS
Eugene Kolker, Ph.D., chief data officer, Seattle Children’s Hospital, head, bioinformatics and high-throughput analysis laboratory, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Vural Ozdemir, M.D., Ph.D., research assistant professor in bioethics, department of social and preventive medicine, faculty
of medicine, University of Montreal.
GEN Podcast, April 2, 2009.
Nutrigenomics is a rapidly growing discipline that focuses on identifying the genetic factors that influence the body’s response to diet and studies how the bioactive constituents of food affect gene expression. A key goal is the development of personalized diets for disease prevention.
Nutrigenomics’ bidirectional approach to investigating how the genetic traits of an individual or population interact with diet offers many possibilities for targeted clinical interventions and preventive medicine. These may include either modifying diet or the biochemical response to food exposure to prevent disease in individuals shown to be susceptible to the consequences of unfavorable dietary/genomic interactions.