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Introduction
Welcome to the NCMHD Center of Excellence for Nutritional Genomics - a program dedicated to promoting the new science of nutritional genomics. This website provides news, information, and commentary on current developments and breakthroughs in fields of nutrition, genomics, and health. This website is intended for anyone and everyone who wants to learn more about the way diet and genetics can influence the delicate balance between human health and disease.
Our Mission
The mission of the Center is to reduce and ultimately eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities resulting from environment x gene interactions, particularly those involving dietary, economic, and cultural factors. Our goal is to devise genome-based nutritional interventions to prevent, delay, and treat diseases such asthma, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and prostate cancer. To achieve this goal, the Center is taking a multidisciplinary approach to develop culturally competent methods and novel technologies to elucidate the complex interactions between environmental triggers, genes, and disease.
Center Description
The Center is using a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the influence of diet and individual genetic variation as risk factors for health disparities in racial/ethnic populations in the U.S. Certain genotypes are more severely affected by specific types of dietary factors than other genotypes (although no genotype is completely immune to the deleterious effects of poor diet). We are using genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics to identify and characterize genes regulated by naturally occurring constituents in foods and those gene-subsets that influence the balance between health and disease. Such knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient, to address health disparities among racial/ethnic populations and the poor. Social, economic and cultural factors also come into play when selecting foods and when designing studies to identify causative genes and environmental factors.
The specific objectives of the Center include:
- developing better approaches for human association studies that recognize the importance of population stratification in racially/ethnically mixed populations;
- educating students, health care professionals and biomedical researchers about the non-biologic factors contributing to health disparities and
- establishing community outreach programs to inform racial/ethnic groups and the poor about the importance of good nutrition and its relationship to genetic makeup.
The Center is funded by an award (P60MD0222) from the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) of the NIH.