Nutrigenomics: Emerging Science in Health and Nutrition Abrol Ghan Shyam*, Sharma Surabhi, Kumar Sanjeev Dept. of Food Science and Technology, Uttarakhand University of Horticulture and Forestry, Bharsar, Pauri Garhwal, Uttrakhand (246 123), India *Correspondence to E-mail: ghanshyamabrol@gmail.com
Online published on 2 December, 2014. Abstract Food has played a significant role in maintaining human health and improving the quality of human life for thousands of years. In traditional foods and herbs, a wide variety of active phytochemicals which have been reported and found to possess important actions in health promotion and diseases elimination, as turmeric found to increase detoxifying enzymes, prevent DNA damage, improve DNA repair, decrease mutation and tumor formation. Study of these nutrients on health through altering genome, proteome, metabolome and the resulting changes in physiology leads to the science of nutrigenomics. With the advent of genomics; an understanding of scientific information about the composition and functions of genomes, has created unprecedented opportunities for increasing our understanding of how nutrients modulate gene and protein expression and ultimately influence cellular and organismal metabolism. As All humans are 99.9% identical at the gene sequence level. Nutrigenomics is a multidisciplinary science that aims to understand the etiologic aspects of chronic diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases (CVD), type 2 diabetes mellitus, obesity, metabolic syndrome, etc. Nutrigenomics is linked to nutrigenetics, which studies the genetic basis of the different individual response to the same nutritional stimulus. There is now good evidence that nutrition has significant influences on the expression of genes, and, likewise, genetic variation can have a significant effect on food intake, metabolic response to food, individual nutrient requirements, food safety, and the efficacy of disease-protective dietary factors. Thus, human diets of plant origin contain many hundreds of compounds which cannot be considered as nutrients, but appear to play a role in the maintenance of health. Top Keywords Nutrigenomics, health, nutrition, metablome, transcriptomics, proteomics, system biology. Top |