Carsten Carlberg - Nutrigenomics: How Science Works

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Our daily diet is more than a collection of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins, minerals, and vitamins that provide energy and serve as building blocks of our life. It is also the most dominant environmental signal to which we are exposed from womb to death. The availability of the sequence of the complete human genome and the consequent development of next-generation sequencing technologies have significantly affected nearly all areas of bioscience. This was the starting point for new disciplines, such as genomics and its subdiscipline nutrigenomics. The fascinating area ofnutrigenomics describes the daily communication between dietary molecules, their metabolites, and our genome. Its genomic components comprise not only the variation of the human genome, such as SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms), but also the dynamic packaging of the genome into chromatin, including all information stored in this epigenome. Moreover, this book discusses the proteins that are involved in the signal transduction between dietary molecules and the genome, such as nuclear receptors, chromatin-modifying enzymes, and energy status-sensing kinases, and their mechanism of action.

Most noncommunicable diseases, such as T2D (type 2 diabetes) and CVDs (cardiovascular diseases), are the basis of lifestyle decisions. They have not only a genetic, inherited component, but to some 80%, they are based on epigenetics (meaning above genetics), i.e., on ourlifestyle choices and environmental exposures, such as what we eat. We cannot change the genes that we are born with, but we can take care of the rest being primarily based on our epigenome. This means that the genetic predisposition for a disease can be counterbalanced by an appropriate healthy lifestyle that modulates the epigenome of the affected tissues. It is well known that there is a high level of individual responsibility for staying healthy, but a detailed understanding of epigenetics provides a molecular explanation for this life attitude. This book describes how nutrition shapes human evolution and demonstrates its consequences for our susceptibility to diseases, such as T2D and atherosclerosis, the underlying cause of most CVDs. 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. Thus, this book does not only discuss about a theoretical topic in science, but it especially talks about real life and our lifelong 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 of how our key daily lifestyle decision affects our health.

The purpose of this book is to provide an overview on theprinciples of nutrigenomics and their relation to health and 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 the book is linked to a series of lecture courses in Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Molecular Immunology, Cancer Biology, and Nutrigenomics that are given by one of us (C. Carlberg) in different forms since 2002 at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio. This book represents an updated version of our textbookNutrigenomics(ISBN 978-3-319-30415-1). However, we shortened and simplified the content in order to give also undergraduate students and other people engaged in life sciences an easier start into the topic. This book also relates to our textbooksMechanisms of Gene Regulation(ISBN 978-94-017-7741-4),Human Epigenomics(ISBN 978-981-10-7614-8), andHuman Epigenetics: How Science Works(ISBN 978-3-030-22906-1), the studying of which may be interesting to readers who like to get more detailed information. Following two introductory chapters, the first five chapters of this book will explain the molecular basis of nutrigenomics, while the last three chapters will provide examples for the impact of nutrigenomics on our health and disease. A glossary in the appendix will explain the major specialists terms.

We hope that the readers will enjoy this rather visual book and get as enthusiastic about nutrigenomics as the authors are.

The authors would like to thank Eunike Velleuer, MD, and Andrea Hanel, BSc, for extensive proofreading and constructive criticism.