Success in first of seven Winter School seminars
The first of seven Winter School seminars - Seminar 1: Individual Health & Nutrition: Status & Perspectives - was held October 5. It addressed the influence of “citizen science” and the increasing demand for tailored, genetically-based dietary advice.
Will tomorrow’s dietary advice be tailored to individual genotypes?
“Nobody is the same – everybody is different” is how Ben van Ommen started his speech Tuesday, October 5 at KU-LIFE. “Nutrition is not meant to cure disease. It is meant to optimize health and it may also prevent disease.”
Research on mice shows, that when treated with an anti-inflammatory diet, there is no health change seen in either the placebo group or the treated group. But when exposed to inflammation, the treated group exhibits a greater capacity for combatting disease. In other words, if you are already leading a healthy life, it may be difficult to show how a healthy diet increases your health. But if you are exposed to disease, you may better cope with the disease and getting back on the right track than your smoking, pizza-engulfing neighbor. Nutrition is what oils the machine. This could mean that the next step in tailored dietary advice is anti-oxidation, anti-metabolic, and anti-inflammatory diets.
Nutritypes and genetic basis
Dietary advice based on genetics is in its spring in the US. For 200 dollars you can get your genotype mapped and the company 23andMe will provide you daily advice on diet do’s and don’ts. Through this company people with the same genotypes can find each other on Facebook and do tests on themselves. This phenomenon is called “citizen science.”
If this continues, we will see a major change food companies in the future. Their main income will come from service – they will becomelife style companies, giving individual recommendations and selling products based on special genotypes.
Google Health is another blooming aspect of the ever-online consumer’s life in the US. Diagnosis companies upload things to your profile, based on your individual health and genotype. The information goes straight to your iPhone and you can instantly check a restaurant menu to see if all of the ingredients work with your health.
Public health
If people increasingly take responsibility for their own health, we will without doubt also see a determination of genomic information translated into dietary advice.
But will this be relevant from a public health perspective or only for the rich and well educated? Quite often, what starts as trendy for the few rapidly becomes requisite for the many. The development of genetically-based dietary advice depends on development, public private partnerships and our own perspective on public service.
Register for the next Winter School seminar, Seminar 2: Diet-Gene interactions: Nutri-omics, taking place November 9, 2010. The remaining seminars are scheduled through March.
