Nutrigenetics: the interaction between diet habits and the individual genetic profile

Abstract

Diseases as atherosclerosis, diabetes, obesity and cancer are big public health problems, to which diet has a strong influence. However, recent studies show that people do not answer in the same way to a food habit. Nutrigenetics is based in observations of the individual answers to dietary interventions, and also in hipotesis that this diferences are associated to presence or absence of specific biological markers. Although the birth of this field has been ocurred with the studies of mutations causing monogenic disorders, currently the focus is on genetic polymorphisms that could predict the individual answer to diet. So, the field of nutrigenetics of multifactorial characteristics is on large expansion, with a big number of published articles by several research groups in the world. With the aim of presenting this research field to those working with nutrition and public health, and enable the knowledge of the most recent published data on international literature, this article reviews available results about nutrigenetics and its influence on the lipid profile, weight loss, type 2 diabetes mellitus and cancer.