Nutrigenomics developing personalized diets for disease prevention

The emerging field of nutrigenomics, which aims to identify the genetic factors that influence the body’s response to diet and studies how the bioactive constituents of food affect gene expression, is explored in a series of provocative, interdisciplinary reports and analyses in the December 2008 Special Issue (Volume 12, number 4) of OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com/omi).
This compendium of papers describing the innovative new area of study encompassed by nutrigenomics research is Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 will be published in Spring 2009.
Nutrigenomic’s bidirectional approach to investigating how the genetic traits of an individual or population interact with their diet offers many possibilities for targeted clinical interventions and preventive medicine. These may include modifying either diet or the biochemical response to food exposure to prevent disease in individuals shown to be susceptible to the consequences of unfavorable dietary/genomic interactions. In the future, nutrigenomics may potentially help guide the development of customized diets based on an individual’s genetic make-up.
“In contrast to previous applications of genomics technologies where the goal is to distinguish existing disease from absence of disease, nutrigenomics aims to discern nuanced differences in predisease states such that personalized dietary interventions can be designed to prevent or modify future disease susceptibility,” write Guest Editors Béatrice Godard, PhD, and Vural Ozdemir, MD, PhD, from the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Montreal, Québec, Canada.
“Nutrigenomics opens new and amazing frontiers in 21st century biomedical and clinical research,” says Eugene Kolker, PhD, Executive Editor of OMICS and Chief Data Officer at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Seattle, Washington.

Unrestricted Low-Carb Diet Wins Hands Down

The New England Journal of Medicine has just come out with perhaps the most definitive comparison of low-fat, Mediterranean and low-carb diets ever, and the findings dovetail very nicely with what we’ve been discussing here recently about the merits of the Primal Blueprint. I think it also addresses some of the concerns shared about the so-called “restrictiveness” of my PB plan.
This low-fat, Mediterranean and low-carb diet comparison study looked at over 300 people who followed their assigned diets strictly for two years, making this one of the longest diet studies in recent history. The bottom line was that the low-carb diet was hands-down the most impressive at improving health in all areas. Those on the low-carb plan lost more weight, experienced a greater reduction in the dangerous C-reactive protein, lowered their triglycerides, raised their HDL cholesterol and dropped their A1C more than those on either the Mediterranean or the low-fat diets, although the Mediterranean was a close second most of the time.
For those who read MDA religiously, you’ll be interested to hear that the low-fat diet was “restricted” to only 1500 calories per day for women and 1800 for men, as was the Mediterranean diet, but the low-carb diet was “unrestricted”, meaning those participants could eat all they wanted of non-carb foods (fat and protein, people). They started out at only 20 grams carbs a day for two months, then eased up to 120 grams a day maintenance at the end. Compliance was fairly high, too: of the 109 people assigned to the low-carb plan, 85 finished the entire two years.
For those of you asking for more “evidence” that the way Grok ate was healthful, I can now add this study to the ever-increasing body of work. Of course, we here at MDA can speculate (and do we ever) on why carbs are not-so-great from purely a gene-expression POV, on why fats are our “healthy friends” from an evolutionary biology perspective and why proteins should form the basis of a fat-burning, muscle-building Primal eating program. But it sure helps that a study like this – with zero attachment to any evolutionary rationale – comes up with a parallel conclusion. This quote is taken from the paper:
The similar caloric deficit achieved in all diet groups suggests that a low-carbohydrate, non–restricted-calorie diet may be optimal for those who will not follow a restricted-calorie dietary regimen.
When will guys like Dean Ornish and John MacDougal realize they have gone way too far down the wrong low-fat path?