Potential of nutrigenetics in the treatment of metabolic disorders

Nutrigenetics is a genotype-based medical concept used in pursuit of individualized or personalized nutrition programs. That is, nutrigenetics is the study of what the effect of an individual's genetic make-up is on their response to diet or specific nutrients. Furthermore, the concept is that if an individual is genotyped at various genes for disease-associated risk alleles, a genotype-based diet or nutritional supplement regimen may be useful to overcome the genetic variation and reduce risk or prevent the disease altogether. The metabolic diseases considered in this article include obesity-related diseases and cardiovascular disease. The thesis of this article is that nutrigenetics, although an intuitively attractive approach to individualized nutrition, is not yet fully developed for evidence-based medical practice and is inappropriate as direct-to-the-consumer genetic testing. Although the genetic variations associated with disease risk can be determined, presently, relevant loci are too few in number, have modest effects at most, add little to the overall disease-risk prediction and any nutritional therapy based on genotype must be tested in case-control clinical trials.