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. 2013 Dec;2(4):10.1007/s13668-013-0052-4.
doi: 10.1007/s13668-013-0052-4.

Systems Epidemiology: A New Direction in Nutrition and Metabolic Disease Research

Marilyn C Cornelis  1 , Frank B Hu
Affiliations

Systems Epidemiology: A New Direction in Nutrition and Metabolic Disease Research

Marilyn C Cornelis et al. Curr Nutr Rep. 2013 Dec.

Abstract

Systems epidemiology applied to the field of nutrition has potential to provide new insight into underlying mechanisms and ways to study the health effects of specific foods more comprehensively. Human intervention and population-based studies have identified i) common genetic factors associated with several nutrition-related traits and ii) dietary factors altering the expression of genes and levels of proteins and metabolites related to inflammation, lipid metabolism and/or gut microbial metabolism, results of high relevance to metabolic disease. System-level tools applied type 2 diabetes and related conditions have revealed new pathways that are potentially modified by diet and thus offer additional opportunities for nutritional investigations. Moving forward, harnessing the resources of existing large prospective studies within which biological samples have been archived and diet and lifestyle have been measured repeatedly within individual will enable systems-level data to be integrated, the outcome of which will be improved personalized optimal nutrition for prevention and treatment of disease.

Keywords: diet; epidemiology; genomics; metabolic disease; metabolomics; network; nutrigenetics; nutrigenomics; nutrition; obesity; populations; proteomics; systems; transcriptomics; type 2 diabetes.

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Conflict of interest statement

Compliance with Ethics Guidelines

Conflict of Interest

Marilyn C. Cornelis declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Frank B. Hu has received compensation for serving as a consultant from Bunge Ltd. and Novo Nordisk, and he is supported by grants from Merck and the California Walnut Commission.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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