The European Union is funding a project – entitled Food4Me – to investigate the potential of nutrigenomics, or personalized nutrition.
The four-year study, to be led by Mike Gibney of University College Dublin, will examine the possibility of using a person’s genetic make-up to design a better, healthier and more individual diet.
It will consider all aspects of personalized nutrition, including consumer understanding of the concept, production of technologies for implementation, and the investigation of gene expression in response to different diets.
The focal point of the Food4Me project will be a large multi-center human intervention study involving more than 1,000 subjects from eight EU countries. Participants will be offered dietary advice tailored to their individual physical characteristics and individual genetic make-up, as well as advice with no personalization.
Gibney said: “In employing this holistic approach we hope to draw together cutting-edge research and instigate a significant step forward in the field of personalized nutrition.”
There is growing interest in nutrigenomics worldwide. In June, Nestlé’s nutrition science arm, the Nestlé Research Center, announced it was to collaborate with King’s College London on a six-month joint research project to examine interactions between genes and food ingredients and their impact on human health.