Translating Nutrigenomics Research Into Practice: The Example Of Soy Protein

Nutrigenomics - or 'nutritional genomics' - is the study of all the genetic factors that influence the biological response to diet and the impact diet has on gene expression. A review of published dietary intervention studies on the effects of soy protein on serum cholesterol reveals that nutrition researchers have, in many cases, overlooked many of the basic tenets of nutrigenomics thereby propagating a collection of inconsistent reports that raise questions about the cholesterol-lowering activity of soy protein. Had these studies been conducted with well-characterized soy proteins in carefully defined study populations, it is likely that a more consistent picture and more interpretable results would have emerged. The situation with soy protein is not uncommon in nutrition research and underscores the need for a nutrigenomics checklist to enable clearer interpretation, replication and comparisons of nutrition experiments; such a checklist would also facilitate indexing and mining of related studies in electronic databases.