The fascinating area of Nutrigenomics describes this daily communication
between diet, food and nutrients, their metabolites and our genome. This
book describes how nutrition shapes human evolution and demonstrates its
consequences for our susceptibility to diseases, such as diabetes and
atherosclerosis. Inappropriate diet can yield stress for our cells,
tissues and organs and then it is often associated with low-grade
chronic inflammation. Overnutrition paired with physical inactivity
leads to overweight and obesity and results in increased burden for a
body that originally was adapted for a life in the savannas of East
Africa. Therefore, this textbook does not discuss a theoretical topic in
science, but it talks about real life, and our life-long "chat" with
diet. We are all food consumers, thus each of us is concerned by the
topic of this book and should be aware of its mechanisms.
The purpose of this book is to provide an overview on the principles of
nutrigenomics and their relation to health or disease. We are not aiming
to compete with more comprehensive textbooks on molecular nutrition,
evolutionary biology, genomics, gene regulation or metabolic diseases,
but rather will focus on the essentials and will combine, in a compact
form, elements from different disciplines. In order to facilitate the
latter, we favor a high figure-to-text ratio following the rule "a
picture tells more than thousand words".
The content of this book is based on the lecture course "Nutrigenomics",
which is held since 2003 once per year by Prof. Carlberg at the
University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio. The book is subdivided into
three sections and twelve chapters. Following the "Introduction" there
are sections on the "Molecular genetic basis" and the "Links to
disease", which take a view on nutrigenomics from the perspective of
molecular mechanisms or from the causes of metabolic diseases,
respectively.
Besides its value as a textbook, Nutrigenomics will be a usefull
reference for individuals working in biomedicine.
