Personalized Nutrition: Principles and Applications PDF

Preface

The primary role of diet is to provide an individual with optimal levels of nutrients to meet metabolic requirements, and to give the consumer a feeling of satisfaction and well being through the pleasure of eating. In addition, particular diets, foods and food components can provide additional physiological, cognitive and psychological benefits, and result in biological activities beyond their widely accepted nutritional effects. Moreover, diet not only helps to achieve and maintain optimal health and development but can also play an important role in reducing the risk of specific diseases and disorders.

However, a diet that serves the health of one individual does not necessarily work for all individuals due to differences in (genetic) predisposition, and environmental and lifestyle factors. Hence, diagnostic tools that reflect both the overall health status and (genetic) predisposition of a particular person at a given time need to be developed. The knowledge obtained thereby will facilitate appropriate nutritional advice to individuals according to their immediate and long-term health needs and, ultimately, we can foresee the time when nutritional products will be tailored for individual consumers.

The success of the introduction of personalized nutrition in society depends on many factors. The scientific background for this must be established, the regulatory system must be in place, ethical issues need to be addressed, services and products with clear health benefits must be available, and the accompanying communication must be clear.

This textbook has the aim of defining the area of personalized nutrition both from a biomedical and social science perspective. A selected group of leading scientists in the field will comprehensively address the molecular, physiological, epidemiologic, and public health aspects of personalized nutrition, highlighted with examples from major diseases. Another group of well-known social scientists will discuss the behavioral, ethical, and consumer perspectives that will influence a legitimate successful introduction of personalized nutrition.

We expect our book will be useful for the education of students in several disciplines, for example, nutrition, behavioral and communication science. Moreover, stakeholders involved in personalized nutrition in government, health care, and business may use the book as a reference guide.

Our book is divided in three sections: (1) Scientific Principles of Personalized Nutrition, (2) Personalized Nutrition: Consumer and Society, and (3) Future Perspectives on Personalized Nutrition.

In the first section, Scientific Principles of Personalized Nutrition, the state of the art of nutrigenomics technologies, including transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, are discussed. Subsequently, the use of genomics technology for a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in major diet-related chronic disorders — i.e., chronic inflammation, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and obesity — is addressed.

Next, the consequences of metabolic programming during pregnancy and the potential of new molecular biomarkers, as well as the gatekeeper role of taste in personalized nutrition, are covered. In the last chapter in this section, the epidemiologic aspects of genomic testing and the health benefits for the individual vs. the population are described.

Besides providing the most recent knowledge, all authors discuss opportunities and pitfalls of nutrigenomics in the development of personalized nutrition.

The second section, Personalized Nutrition: Consumer and Society, starts with a stakeholder analysis in which five interest groups (scientists, food companies, consumers, competitive athletes, and health-care providers) are compared regarding their practices and opinions of personalized nutrition. Based on behavioral change strategies, the next chapter is focusing on whether and how personalized nutrition will contribute to a healthier dietary pattern.

Two chapters specifically target the consumer perspective. The first reviews the marketing potential of personalized nutrition; in the second, consumer attitudes are discussed. The section is completed with a contribution on ethical issues related to personalized advice on diet and health and the customization of food products.

In the final section, Future Perspectives on Personalized Nutrition, the challenges of nutrigenomics research and its applications are presented in two chapters. One chapter focuses on the need to address the humanitarian issues related to developing countries and issues a call for international efforts to develop best practices, fostering international collaborations and sharing data sets. The final chapter provides an outlook of personalized nutrition in the context of ongoing innovations in food technology, nutrigenomics, and food delivery systems.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy reading this guide to a scientific underpinning of personalized nutrition.