Prescribing personalized nutrition for cardiovascular health: are we ready?

Abstract

Of all chronic metabolic diseases, cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. Most research over the past 100 years show a link between CVD and lifestyle, including diet; thus, public health messages have focused on modifications of the diet to better manage this disease. Despite this effort, the CVD mortality rate continues to rise. Therefore, is it possible that this failure may be due to individual variability in response to dietary recommendations? The elucidation of the structure of the human genome combined with the knowledge that nutrients are capable of modifying gene expression and genetic variability regulates how individuals respond to a diet have led to the possibility of personalized nutrition for disease prevention. While this possibility is real for the future, our current understanding of nutrient-gene interactions for CVD is limited, making personalized nutrition therapy difficult at this time. With advances in nutritional genomics, in the near future, dietitians and nutritionists will be able to give personalized nutritional advice based on a combination of lifestyle factors and genetics.