Nutrigenetics

This product was added biology to improve the basis of formal and / or substantive deficiencies in quality assurance. This is done to bring the quality of biology articles to an acceptable level. Please help to improve this article! Products are not significantly improved, may optionally be deleted.

Read also the more detailed information in the minimum requirements in biology articles.

Nutrigenetics belongs next to the Nutrigenomics to nutritional research and studied as a science, the relationship between diet and genetics. In particular, analyzes how nutrition ( with ) -related diseases and other processes in the organism by the genetic variance can be influenced.

The scientific basis

Although people are identical in their DNA to about 99.9 %, there are around 10 million genetic variants that by so-called SNPs ( " single nucleotide polymorphism " ) arise. This heterogeneity is due to the evolution, as the manner how food components were recorded and stored by our ancestors, is an important selection criterion.

Overall, the biological activity of the food components having a variety of physiological processes, such as the consumption of nutrients or transport is associated. These processes are in turn built on a plurality of different genes having specific properties and polymorphisms.

SNPs and the resulting adaptation mechanisms are always inherited. This led for example to the fact that people over time could utilize lactose from cow's milk.

Analysis

The genotyping is usually done through an analysis of blood or buccal cells, which can run using different methods and sequencing techniques.

Analyzing the thus obtained genetic information, there is first the so-called " candidate gene approach". This is a potential risk gene is determined based on biochemical or physiological hypotheses. In laboratory tests on animals, or cell cultures, the relevance of this gene is verified. Should be made ​​in the course of the experiment, a positive correlation between diet and this candidate gene that results in human studies can be confirmed.

Furthermore, can be used a genome-wide association study ( GWAS ). Finally, it should be identified gene variants that increase the risk of diseases such as obesity, diabetes or hypertension in conjunction with the diet.

In particular, the effect of food components in the genome, proteome and transcriptome metabolome is examined.

Objectives

In the long term it should be possible to express individual dietary recommendations based on the Nutrigenetics. In this way, preventive medicine and the treatment of certain diseases should be optimized.

It is also important to examine the efficiency nutrigenetischer analyzes by scientific studies. In Germany, the Sport University Cologne laid the foundation with a study that compares the success of nutrigenetischen analysis Metacheck in nutrition counseling with a conventional diet advice.

Challenges

First, it is important to establish by valid scientific studies a clear and undoubted connection between the respective genes and the dietary nutrients. This is a problem that results are slightly overvalued. So might merely mean an absolute increase of 0.01 to 0.02 points relative risk increased risk for diet-related disease by 100 %.

In addition, it is difficult to convince people of an individual diet. In addition to the cost issue, which will always bring a nutrigenetische analysis with it, very few are willing to adhere to certain dietary recommendations.