Nutrition research paradigm needs to change for nutrigenomics
Related topics: Research
Interview with Jim Kaput, PhD
Director, Division of Personalized Nutrition and Medicine, US Food and Drug Administration
Director, Division of Personalized Nutrition and Medicine, US Food and Drug Administration
At the recent IFT Annual Meeting and Expo, Stephen Daniells talked to Dr Jim Kaput, director of FDA’s Division of Personalized Nutrition and Medicine about the paradigm shift needed to move personalized nutrition forward.
The current research approach of grouping people together is not in-keeping with personalized nutrition, said Dr Kaput.
“You have to think of a new paradigm: How do you conduct the research in order to get to the individual risk factor or the individual benefit factor for blueberries, or blackberries, or whatever food you are looking at.”
The advances in the field of nutrigenomics today do have significant implications for the food industry, said Dr Kaput:
“We need to understand the mechanism by which the nutrients in food can alter health, and from that we can tell the food manufacturers what to put in their products.”
“We need to be more science-based when we talk to the food manufacturers so we can design better foods. We have to be realistic, we definitely need manufactured foods, but we have to manufacture them the right way,” he added.-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wikipedia on - Nutrigenomics is the study of the effects of foods and food constituents on gene expression. It is about how our DNA is transcribed into mRNA and then to proteins and provides a basis for understanding the biological activity of food components. [1] Nutrigenomics has also been described by the influence of genetic variation on nutrition by correlating gene expression or single-nucleotide polymorphisms with a nutrient's absorption, metabolism, elimination or biological effects. By doing so, nutrigenomics aims to develop rational means to optimise nutrition, with respect to the subject's genotype.
