Predictors of obesity: the "power" of the omics

During the entire 20th Century, nutrition research experienced and amazing interest and development fueled by the initial success on the fields of malnutrition and the discovery of vitamins and other essential nutrients. During the second part of the Century, it was realized that most common diseases (i.e., cardiovascular diseases, cancer and obesity) had a strong nutritional component. However, from the public health perspective as well as from the point of view of the individual recommendations, current recommendations for healthy nutrition resemble those provided over one hundred years ago. Therefore, modern nutritional research has a great potential of still contributing to improved health for future generations, assuming that the new developments in research and technologies are applied to nutritional problems. Nutrition research must embrace state of the art epidemiology, objective food assessment tools, genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, advanced biostatistics, imaging, challenge tests, and integration of all data by bioinformatics, under the umbrella of molecular nutrition research. The ultimate goals of future nutritional research are to understand the detailed mechanisms of action for how nutrients/foods interact with the body and with the individual genomes to further the advance of nutrigenomics, thereby providing new tools for disease prevention and treatment.