April 2007
Written by Erica Brown

Tags: Health

Your Food, Your Lifestyle and Your Genes
How would you like to have diet and lifestyle advice personally tailored to your genome? Think about it. Wouldn’t it be great to have genetically-based knowledge of the kinds of foods your body (and not just any body) metabolizes best? And wouldn’t it also be great to know what kinds of foods might contribute to diseases your genome (not just anybody’s) indicates you’re susceptible to? Could nutrigenetic testing show you the way?

What is Nutrigenetics, Anyway?
Nutrigenetics is research into the way that your diet, genes and lifestyle interact. It provides the basis for being able to use information from your genetic make-up to provide you with personalized diet and lifestyle advice.

Nutrigenetic Testing on the Internet?
Various companies are currently offering this type of genetic testing (for a fee) over the internet. Nutrigenetic testing says it can find variations in your genes (polymorphisms) that affect how you absorb and metabolize food and nutrients and determine your genetic susceptibility to diet related disease.
These companies suggest that information gained from testing can help you to make the ‘right’ lifestyle choices to prevent multifactorial disorders like heart disease, osteoporosis, cancer, obesity and diabetes.
One internet company tests for polymorphisms in 19 different genes that they say have a clear and defined response to diet and lifestyle choices (3).

Are Commercial Tests Credible?
Not yet. The credibility of the current commercial tests has come under attack, both by the Government Accountability Office in the US who found the tests to be ambiguous and misleading (4) and by the Nuffield Trust and Public Health Genetics Unit in the UK who found no evidence to support clinical applications of nutrigenetics for personalized dietary advice based on genetic testing (2).

Continuing research into nutrigenetics will no doubt be beneficial in increasing the general understanding of how diet influences the development of disease. However, even when the individual testing becomes reliable, it may end up having negative effects. The results could unnecessarily worry people who are currently healthy and who may never end up developing disease. Conversely, test results could falsely reassure people found to have desirable ‘low risk’ polymorphisms and who may then relax their diet and exercise routines (which could negatively affect their health).

More Research Necessary
More research into how our diet interacts with our genes is very important because the understanding is not there yet to reliably personalize a diet and lifestyle regime based on variations in our genes.
So it seems for now that there’s no good excuse to stop eating spinach or cancel your gym subscription…

Interested in learning more about how genetic testing can make predictions about your future health? Click here to read an article about predictive and susceptibility testing for medical conditions.