Genomics era in the nutrition field

Abstract

Nutritional deficiencies or the imbalance between food ingestion and physical inactivity correlated with a genetic susceptibility are the main cause for disease development. This review discusses the basic concepts of nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics and offers a few examples of genes polymorphisms in relation with human predisposition to disease according to its diet. These two new ‘omic’ technologies use complex sources of investigation in order to develop mechanisms through it would be easy to explain the genetic basis of interindividual differences in response to the same nutrient. Moreover, there are presented the anticarcinogenic and antioxidative activities of some biologically active compounds and the used mechanisms for maintaining cell homeostasis.

Keywords

• genes polymorphisms
• nutrigenomics
• metabolic syndrome
• cancer
• biologically active compounds