Theme: Personalised Foods
Personalised foods, integrating genomics, nutrition, health and food science, is emerging as an exciting new area for science, with strong prospects for a wide range of future products and services from the food industry. Rapid expansion of our understanding of the human genome and developments in the technologies for analysing nucleic acids and metabolites opens up the potential for studying the relationship between genotype and response to foods. The knowledge generated in this area will lead to food tailored to an individual’s genotype, enabling detailed management of health risks and health conditions through diet design. Research initiatives in this area are exemplified by the EC funded NuGo network of excellence and the collaborative research project Nutrigenomics New Zealand (NuNZ, www.nutrigenomics.org.nz), led by University of Auckland (NZ). NuNZ is a research partnership involving Auckland University, AgResearch, Crop & Food Research and HortResearch. It is studying the relationship between diet and gene expression in people with inflammatory bowel disease.
