More than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates wrote: "Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food." Scientists may finally be catching up with the Father of Medicine. One of the newest fields of nutrition science, known as nutritional genomics, is dedicated to understanding the interaction between diet and the genome. The goal is to use food to prevent disease by identifying genetic predispositions for chronic conditions that can be mitigated by the proper dietary intake. Researchers in the field warn that they need to collect much more evidence before nutrigenomic, or nutrigenetic, dieting becomes a reality.
"What we are seeing now is the very, very beginning," says Jose Ordovas at Tufts University, Boston. Ordovas is widely respected by academic and corporate leaders alike as having conducted some of the most elegant gene-diet interaction experiments to date. "Nutrigenomics has established proof of concept, but that's ...
