Nutritional genomics is a science studying the relationship between human genome, nutrition and health. It can be divided into two disciplines:
- Nutrigenomics: studies the effect of nutrients on health through altering genome, proteome, metabolome and the resulting changes in physiology.
- Nutrigenetics: studies the effect of genetic variations on the interaction between diet and health with implications to susceptible subgroups. More specifically, nutrigenomics studies how individual differences in genes influence the body's response to diet and nutrition. For example, people with an enzyme deficiency caused by mutations in the enzyme phenylalanine hydroxylase cannot metabolize foods containing the amino acid phenylalanine and must modify their diets to minimize consumption. With modern genomic data, severe gene mutations with less severe effects are being explored to determine whether dietary practices can be more closely personalized to individual genetic profiles. However, there have been few validated studies for these kinds of classical gene mutation effects.
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