ABSTRACT
People throughout the world are increasingly questioning their diets in terms of quality and safety and of its overall inuence on their health. This interest stems from mounting evidence indicating that numerous bioactive food components inuence the ability to achieve one’s genetic potential, inuence our quality of life in terms of both physical and cognitive performance, and modify the risk and/or severity of a variety of diseases in each individual. A wealth of evidence points to the association of dietary habits with premature death and with many diseases, for example, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, diabetes, liver disease, and certain cancers (Gonzalez and Riboli, 2010; Tourlouki et al., 2009). Nevertheless, a considerable individual variability exists in the response to foods and their components. This variability is due to individual differences in the genetic and epigenetic regulation of cellular events critical for shifting from health to disease (Burdge et al., 2007; Burdge and Lillycrop, 2010; Jackson et al., 2010; Lillycrop and Burdge, 2011b). This interrelationship between foods and their components with an individual’s genome is briey reviewed.
