Skip to main content

Teaching Nutritional Genomics? Here are some Resources!

The Dietitians of Canada's Practice-Based Evidence in Nutrition recently posted a blog titled "Nutritional Genomics in the Dietetics Curriculum - How Far Have We Come?". The post summed up some recent research suggesting that dietetics professionals and students don't feel confident that they have a strong knowledge base regarding nutritional genomics, but are eager to learn more! This finding comes at a time when the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics has released their draft Future Education Model Accreditation Standards, highlighting the need for an understanding of the basic concepts of nutritional genomics. As the field moves forward and needs to teach nutritional genomics/critically evaluate the field, it's important to have relevant resources to understand the basics. Below are a few resources which might help! If you have any questions about nutritional genomics or topics in molecular nutrition, feel free to contact me in the comments or on twitter (@nutrevolve) and I'd be happy to chat further! This list will likely evolve (but hopefully stay concise!)


The American Heart Association recently released a scientific statement of nutritional genomics:
http://circgenetics.ahajournals.org/content/early/2016/04/19/HCG.0000000000000030

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has a practice paper on the topic:
http://www.eatrightpro.org/resource/practice/position-and-practice-papers/position-papers/nutritional-genomics

Wiley offers access to a popular textbook, Nutritional Genomics: Discovering the Path to Personalized Nutrition here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.library.cornell.edu/book/10.1002/0471781797

A series from Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science has one of the best series on the topic titled 'Recent Advances in Nutrigenetics and Nutrigenomics':
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/bookseries/18771173/108

The journal 'Frontiers' has a subsection for Nutrigenomics with a number of useful articles:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/journal/all/section/nutrigenomics

 The first four chapters of the textbook, 'Present Knowledge in Nutrition', have a nice introduction to systems biology, -omics technologies, and the study of nutrition:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781119946045

For any who like media or take a flipped classroom approach, Steven Zeisel, MD, PhD gave a great talk on the topic for ILSI North America:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKEYWhpEQVU

In addition to Dr. Zeisel's talk, I curate a playlist of videos on youtube related to molecular metabolism that have a number of topics related to the field that may also be great for flipped classroom discussions:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBKzfLstm42f5MoxdNJ8pSKoSKxf0ZbWT

When delving into this topic, it's important to check enthusiasm with discussions about the levels of evidence utilized in the field, the limitations of nutritional genomics, and ethical considerations that the field opens up - below are a few articles that are a bit more critical:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3689893/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-nutrition-society/article/promoting-healthy-dietary-behaviour-through-personalised-nutrition-technology-push-or-technology-pull/B6E52E3943B7B6D58AD3BF9A945D83F9

http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i1102

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/171/11/1225

And lastly, a few organizations to be aware of:

The International Society of Nutrigenetics and Nutrigenomics

NuGo 

Food4Me Project

PennState's Center for Excellence in Nutrigenomics 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beware the Meta-Analysis: Fat, Guidelines, and Biases

Headlines were abuzz this week, reporting that a new review of randomized controlled trials at the time of the low-fat guidelines didn't support their institution. Time , Business Insider , and The Verge all covered the topic with sensationalist headlines (e.g. 'We should never have told people to stop eating fat' #weneverdid). I won't spend every part of this blog picking apart the entire meta-analysis; you can read it over at the open access journal, BMJ Open Heart (1) -- (note, for myself, i'm adding an extra level of skepticism for anything that gets published in this journal). I'm also not going to defend low-fat diets either, but rather, use this meta-analysis to point out some critical shortcomings in nutritional sciences research, and note that we should be wary of meta-analyses when it comes to diet trials. First off, let's discuss randomized controlled trials (RCTs). They are considered the gold standard in biomedical research; in the hierarc...
21 comments
Read more

On PURE

The PURE macronutrients studies were published in the Lancet journals today and the headlines / commentaries are reminding us that everything we thought we think we were told we knew about nutrition is wrong/misguided, etc. Below is my non-epidemiologist's run down of what happened in PURE. A couple papers came out related to PURE, but the one causing the most buzz is the relationship of the macronutrients to mortality. With a median follow up of 7.4 years, 5796 people died and 4784 had a major cardiovascular event (stroke, MCI). The paper modeled the impacts of self reported dietary carbohydrate, total fat, protein, monounsaturated (MUFA), saturated (SFA), and polyunsaturated (PUFA) fatty acid intakes on cardiovascular (CVD), non-CVD and total mortality; all macros were represented as a percentage of total self reported energy intakes and reported/analyzed in quintiles (energy intakes between 500-5000kcals/day were considered plausible..). All dietary data was determined by a ...
10 comments
Read more

The Singling Out of Golden Rice

I saw earlier today that  Steven Novella, MD, over at Neurlogica blog  covered some controversy surrounding Golden Rice and it reminded me I had some thoughts to throw down about the GR issue. Dr Novella's post was in response to some of the claims made in a comment written on his post about a recent Nature Biotechnology paper on crop biofortification .  This is an area I've seen a lot of commentary on, no doubt because Golden Rice is a transgenic crop. Dr Novella makes some good commentary in his post and I suggest reading it ( here ) before the rest of this post - it will contain some additional thoughts to Dr Novella's. Dr Novella did a great job fielding the opposition to Golden Rice, which is something I've always found rather odd - I guess if you're vehemently opposed to a technology that represents a diverse array of methods (there's not one way to genetically engineer a plant) and innumerable potential outcomes (plants can be engineered for any number ...
8 comments
Read more