Textbook explains nutrigenomics to undergraduates
A topical textbook targeted especially at undergraduates provides an overview of nutrigenomics and its role in health and disease. The revised and extended second edition of the Springer textbook "Nutrigenomics: How Science Works" is based on Professor Carsten Carlberg's popular lectures at the University of Eastern Finland.
Our daily diet is more than just a mix of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, minerals and vitamins that provide energy and serve as building blocks for our bodies. It is also the most significant environmental signal to which we are exposed from the womb to death.
The availability of the sequence of the complete human genome and the subsequent development of next-generation sequencing technologies have significantly impacted nearly all areas of bioscience.
This was the starting point for new disciplines, such as genomics and its subdiscipline nutrigenomics, which investigates the daily interactions between dietary molecules, their metabolites, and our genome.
The textbook explains how nutrition has shaped human evolution and its consequences for our susceptibility to diseases like diabetes and atherosclerosis. An inappropriate diet can cause stress on our cells, tissues and organs, often leading to low-grade chronic inflammation.
Overnutrition paired with physical inactivity leads to overweight and obesity, placing increased stress on a body originally adapted for life in the savannas of East Africa. Therefore, the book is not just about a theoretical topic in science, but discusses real life and our life-long "conversation" with diet.
Written in an accessible style, the 11 chapters cover a wide range of topics, beginning with an overview of the role of nutrients in health and disease, basic mechanisms of nutrient sensing and nuclear receptors, and the impact of epigenetic regulation on health.
Readers will discover how chromatin-modifying enzymes and energy status-sensing kinases play critical roles in signaling pathways between diet and the genome. The book also explores the influence of diet on cancer prevention, the importance of the microbiome, and low-grade chronic inflammation and aging.
The book serves as background literature for the Nutrigenomics lecture course given yearly by Professor Carlberg at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio.
Carsten Carlberg is Professor of Biochemistry at the Institute of Biomedicine at the University of Eastern Finland. His work focuses on mechanisms of gene regulation by vitamin D, in particular on epigenome-wide effects of vitamin D on the human immune system in healthy and diseased individuals.
The book was co-authored by Dr. Ferdinand Molnár, Associate Professor of Biology at the Department of Biology at the Nazarbayev University in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan. His main research interests are integrative structural biology and bioinformatics, eukaryotic transcriptional regulation in health and disease, and recombinant protein production.
More information:
Nutrigenomics: How Science Works. Springer 2025. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85881-9
Provided by University of Eastern Finland
