Unraveling Our Nutrigenomic Future

The healthful aspects of food--and the inverse of that equation--tend to make more headlines these days, particularly in the case of the latter. Nutritional, science-based breakthroughs often take a back seat to the latest report that (gasp!) a steady diet of all things fried and a sedentary lifestyle might cause obesity, which can then lead to type 2 diabetes.

Discounting extreme examples, an intriguing argument circling these days centers on the question of whether or not it really matters all that much what we eat--that our genetic makeup has such an overriding influence on our relative health that diet has only a distant secondary effect on our well being. However, logic dictates that we should combine these two concepts and state that, in light of an individual's genetic makeup, it doesn't matter that they eat X amount of X, but they most certainly should eat plenty of X and should steer clear of X at all cost.

This individualized approach to nutrition management is known as nutritional genomics, or "nutrigenomics" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrigenomics). This still-emerging approach to nutrition has great potential to help nutritionists develop more-accurate guidelines for people with specific phenotypes, and researchers are actively looking into this concept in great depth (see http://nutrigenomics.ucdavis.edu/).

Although the details surrounding the molecular-level interaction of nutrients our bodies is enormously complex, a recent study shows that people are generally interested in the prospects of personalized nutritional programs (see http://www.ific.org/foodinsight/2006/jf/genesfi106.cfm). The trick will largely center on how to make genetic testing affordable--not to mention the act of sifting through the myriad different phenotypes created as a result of genetic polymorphism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphism_%28biology%29). In short, if we can learn what conditions, diseases, etc. that our genetic blueprint says we are prone to, we can take active nutritional steps to prevent or delay the onset of those potentially problematic conditions.

Although the wider range of functional foods and the increased attention to fortify an increasing range of everyday food products with healthful ingredients are pointing us in the right direction, as is the Japanese concept of FOSHU (see http://www.jafra.gr.jp/eng/nakagawa.html), the potential for designing foods and beverages for people with a generalized phenotypic makeup could help the food industry legitimately take a step over that firmly FDA-regulated line that separates food and medicine.

Considering the increasing attention on health, such preventative medicine would likely find a healthy market for growth.