Nutrition and Dietetics

Nutrigenomics

Nutrigenomics initially referred to the study of the effects of nutrients on the expression of an individual’s genetic makeup. Recently, this definition has been broadened to encompass nutritional factors that protect the genome from damage. Thus, nutrigenomics is concerned with the impact of dietary components on the genome, the proteome, and the metabolome. As in pharmacogenomics, where a drug will have diverse effects on different segments of the population, researchers recognize that only a portion of the population will respond positively to specific nutritional interventions, while others will be unresponsive, and still other could even be adversely affected.