If you put 'genomics' on the end of a word, you can gain instant credibility, so it makes sense that someone would come up with 'nutrigenomics' and say they can make a diet that corresponds to your genetic profile.

It's tough to know what they mean by 'genetic profile' though obviously some people have a different metabolism than other so they can eat more.   A customized diet consisting of 'eat fewer calories' wouldn't seem to require genomics.   But 'nutrigenomics', they say, is something better because it aims to identify the genetic factors that influence the body's response to diet and studies how the bioactive constituents of food affect gene expression.

Nutrigenomics uses a 'bidirectional' approach, they claim, and so it is useful for investigating how the genetic traits of an individual or population interact with their diet, which could offer possibilities for targeted clinical interventions and preventive medicine. These may include modifying either 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.

What????

In the future, they also say, nutrigenomics may potentially help guide the development of customized diets based on an individual's genetic make-up.

Perhaps this is possible, though we'll have to sequence a lot more genomes before we come up with a gene for 'dieting.'

"In contrast to previous applications of genomics technologies where the goal is to distinguish existing disease from absence of disease, nutrigenomics aims to discern nuanced differences in predisease states such that personalized dietary interventions can be designed to prevent or modify future disease susceptibility," write Guest Editors Béatrice Godard, PhD, and Vural Ozdemir, MD, PhD, from the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Montreal, Québec, Canada.


If you want to know more about whatever that means, the issue of OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology is open access.