[Nutritional genomics: toward a personalized diet]

Nutrigenomics is the application of high-throughput genomics tools to the study of diet-gene interactions in order to identify dietetic components having beneficial or detrimental health effects. Nutrition becomes indeed one of the environmental factors influencing gene expression. We can consider nutrigenomics as a multidisciplinary science that comes after the human genome characterization and that put the genomic techniques besides the biochemical and epidemiological aspects, with the aim to understand the etiologic aspects of chronic diseases such as cancer, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), obesity, cardiovascular diseases (CVD), metabolic syndrome, etc. Nutrigenomics is linked to nutrigenetics, which studies the genetic basis of the different individual response to the same nutritional stimulus. This phenomenon arises from gene polymorphism. As a consequence genes are important in determining a function, but nutrition is able to modify the degree of gene expression. These are however theories only at an early stage, but a perspective in the change of dietetic intervention is emerging. A really personalized diet will be a diet considering the nutritional status, the nutritional needs based on age, body composition, work and physical activities, but also considering the genotype. The integration of all these information and in particular the ones arising from genomic, proteomic and metabolomic analyses will be useful to define the "nutritional phenotype".