Nutritional therapy is the application of nutrition and lifestyle medicine sciences in the promotion of health, peak performance and individual care.
Personalised nutrition is a field that leverages human individuality to drive nutrition strategies that prevent, manage, and treat disease and optimise health.
Bush, Blumberg, El-Sohemy, Minich, Ordovas, Reed, Behm, 2019
Nutrition and Health
Nutrients and other food components influence the body's function, protect against disease, restore health, and determine people’s response to environmental change.
As defined by WHO and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) in Guidelines on Nutrition Labelling.
Nutrient means any substance normally consumed as a constituent of food:
Under certain circumstances and in some individuals, diet can be a serious risk factor for a number of diseases. Common dietary chemicals can act on the human genome, either directly or indirectly, to alter gene expression or structure.
The degree to which diet influences the balance between healthy and disease states may depend on an individual’s genetic makeup. Some diet-regulated genes (and their normal, common variants) are likely to play a role in the onset, incidence, progression, and/or severity of chronic diseases. Dietary intervention based on knowledge of nutritional requirements, nutritional status, and genotype (i.e. “personalised nutrition”) can be used to prevent, mitigate or cure chronic disease
Nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics heralds a new era in the contribution of personal nutrition advice to promote and maintain optimal health through all life stages.
Professional dietary and nutritional advice tailored to individual genotype – where complex interactions between diet, nutrition and other lifestyle practices, as well as age, gender and current health status, are translated into protocols – may be termed ‘Nutrigenetic Counselling’.
Nutrigenomics is a study of the effects of food and food constituents on gene expression, and how genetic variations affect the nutritional environment.
The new paradigm of personalised precision nutrition with use of nutrigenomics data is emerging. Precision nutrition evaluates one’s DNA along with microbiome and metabolic responses to specific foods and dietary patterns to allow practitioner to recommend the most effective dietary choices for each individual.
Nutritional Therapy Education Commission
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