A nutrition specifically designed based upon an individual’s genotypic and phenotypic features thus serving a precisely tailored diet plan that can help individuals on large scale manage and ameliorate their health.
Nutrition and Health is that one thing which none of us would dare to brush aside, given current health scenarios that we are surviving through. The ever-growing concern towards optimizing health has caused people to become much more aware than ever before of what they eat and how their bodies react to it. Our genes have a major role to play while figuring out what our diet should look like. This may seem intriguing to some as to what role genes can play in one’s diet? That is what Nutrigenetics is all about and it helps one to understand the need as well as importance of Personalized Nutrition.
A nutrition specifically designed based upon an individual’s genotypic and phenotypic features thus serving a precisely tailored diet plan that can help individuals on large scale manage and ameliorate their health. Personalized Nutrition can be of great significance for patients recovering from major illness or injuries, helping mitigate the time of recovery. Current statistics suggest that nearly a billion people go to bed with an empty stomach while nearly half a billion people are patients of Obesity. The inculcation of Personalized Nutrition is the need of the hour.
To follow and practice personalized nutrition, one does not necessarily mean the current Nutrition and diet practices are to be curbed, nor does it intend to completely restrict the consumption and incorporation of specific food types into one’s diet. Rather it focuses on inculcating a lasting behavior of healthy eating aimed to change the individual’s health for good, in the long run. Personalized Nutrition, in an attempt to provide a rather more individualized approach towards obtaining complete nourishment from food, takes into account the ‘omics’ which includes Metabolomics, Transcriptomics, Genomics etc. As we dive into scientific insights, the role of omics would be better understood as the foundational strategy for Personalized Nutrition.
Personalized nutrition certainly has a promising future with advancement of technologies and with enhanced economy and can be expected to be a part of every household’s routine 20 years down the line.
The omics contribute to the hefty research done before devising a quintessential plan of diet and nutrition to an individual by gathering information related to the individual’s medical history, predisposition and the ADME status. In addition to omics, Nutrigenetics and Nutrigenomics are also the key players in the whole idea of Personalized Nutrition which critically analyses the interaction between one’s genes and the food they eat.
Despite being introduced years ago, the concept of Personalized Nutrition still stands obscure among common people. The cost factor being the major roadblock in its large-scale implementation. Though Personalized Nutrition based services and products are largely practiced today, a huge section of society still can’t afford it despite being in actual need of it. The majority of malnourishment cases are of those lying below the poverty line. Also, at present it may not even seem feasible to achieve individual genome mapping analysis at such a large scale.
However, Personalized nutrition certainly has a promising future with advancement of technologies and with enhanced economy and can be expected to be a part of every household’s routine 20 years down the line. But by that time, the government does need to assess the public health situation and take certain significant decisions in favor of the large section of society that finds difficulty in even having their stomach satiated on a daily basis. Nutrition is both a necessity and a right for each individual and should be taken as first priority while paving the way to develop a healthy and powerful nation.
References
- Michael Gibney, Jo Goosens, Marianne Walsh; Personalized Nutrition: Paving the way to better population health; Chapter 5.1; online article, Karger Publishers https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/452389
Composed by: “Aakriti Sharma is an aspiring Biotechnologist from Delhi, India. She is an avid reader and often pen down her thoughts on interesting scientific concepts.”
