Nutritional Phenotype Databases and Integrated Nutrition: From Molecules to Populations¹,²,³

+Author Affiliations

⁴Institute of Food and Health, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland; and
⁵School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Ulster, Ulster, Northern Ireland

↵*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mike.gibney@ucd.ie.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a great expansion in the nature of new technologies for the study of all biologic subjects at the molecular and genomic level and these have been applied to the field of human nutrition. The latter has traditionally relied on a mix of epidemiologic studies to generate hypotheses, dietary intervention studies to test these hypotheses, and a variety of experimental approaches to understand the underlying explanatory mechanisms. Both the novel and traditional approaches have begun to carve out separate identities vís-a-vís their own journals, their own international societies, and their own national and international symposia. The present review draws on the advent of large national nutritional phenotype databases and related technological developments to argue the case that there needs to be far more integration of molecular and public health nutrition. This is required to address new joint approaches to such areas as the measurement of food intake, biomarker discovery, and the genetic determinants of nutrient-sensitive genotypes and other areas such as personalized nutrition and the use of new technologies with mass application, such as in dried blood spots to replace venipuncture or portable electronic devices to monitor food intake and phenotype. Future development requires the full integration of these 2 disciplines, which will provide a challenge to both funding agencies and to university training of nutritionists.

Footnotes

↵1 Published in a supplement to Advances in Nutrition. Presented at the International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS) 20th International Congress of Nutrition (ICN) held in Granada, Spain, September 15–20, 2013. The IUNS and the 20th ICN wish to thank the California Walnut Commission and Mead Johnson Nutrition for generously providing educational grants to support the publication and distribution of proceedings from the 20th ICN. The contents of this supplement are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent official views of the IUNS. The supplement coordinators were Angel Gil, Ibrahim Elmadfa, and Alfredo Martinez. The supplement coordinators had no conflicts of interest to disclose.
↵2 B.A.M. is funded by the Irish Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine and The Health Research Board under their joint Food for Health Research Initiative (2007–2013) under the project National Food Consumption Databases for Food Safety and Nutrition (project FHRIUCC2). M.F.R. is funded by the Irish Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and The Health Research Board under their joint Food for Health Research Initiative (2007–2013) under the project National Nutritional Phenotype Databases (project 07FHRIUCD1). M.C.W. is funded by the European Union FP7 project Food4Me (contract KBBE.2010.2.3-02, project 265494).
↵3 Author disclosures: M. J. Gibney, B. A. McNulty, M. F. Ryan, and M. C. Walsh, no conflicts of interest.