Whats good for you and whats not? High-density cholesterol, low-density cholesterol, saturated fat, poly-unsaturated fat, trans-fat, omega-3 fatty acids, carbohydrates, protein, refined sugar, lactose, vitamin C, vitamin B1, vitamin E almost every chemical component of our food is in question.
And if you read the paper or watch TV, the story of the biochemistry of a healthy diet keeps changing. What is it now that is that you are supposed to eat and what are you supposed to avoid? What causes cancer, heart disease, brain disease? What prevents them? Does being a man or a woman or pregnant affect what is good or bad for you to eat? Does it matter in picking your diet if you are African American, Jewish or Italian? Whats up with all this uncertainty? The reason is that the molecular biology of nutrition is very complex and the science for studying it is still evolving. But two new fields are emerging in health-related bioscience that may help provide some answers: nutrigenomics and metabolomics.
In association with the development of the North Carolina Research Campus, six North Carolina universities are hosting a major symposium featuring the top national researchers in these emerging fields. Entitled "Who We Are and What We Eat: The Role of Metabolomics and Nutrigenomics in Creating Healthier Foods and Healthier Lives," the symposium is scheduled for April 15 to 17 at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte campus.
Nutrigenomics and metabolomics are the latest additions to a growing list of new molecular biosciences that include genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics. Nutrigenomics is the new application of genomic bioscience to nutritional science and it examines the complex interactions between nutrients and the body at the gene, protein, and metabolic levels. A critical part of nurtigenomics and itself a new avenue for biotechnology, metabolomics is the systematic study of the dynamics of specific cellular processes thr
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Contact: James Hathaway
jbhathaw@email.uncc.edu
704-687-6675
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
2-Mar-2007