A new textbook targeted especially at undergraduates provides an overview of nutrigenomics and its role in health and disease. 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 a collection of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, minerals and vitamins that provide energy and serve as building blocks of our life. It is also the most dominant environmental signal to which we are exposed from womb to death. The availability of the sequence of the complete human genome and the consequent development of next-generation sequencing technologies have significantly affected nearly all areas of bioscience. This was the starting point for new disciplines, such as genomics and its subdiscipline nutrigenomics, which focuses on the communication between dietary molecules, their metabolites and our genome.
The new textbook describes how nutrition shapes human evolution and demonstrates its consequences for our susceptibility to diseases, such as diabetes and atherosclerosis. Inappropriate diet can yield stress for our cells, tissues and organs and is often associated with low-grade chronic inflammation. Overnutrition paired with physical inactivity leads to overweight and obesity and results in increased burden for a body that originally was adapted for a life in the savannahs of East Africa. Therefore, the book does not discuss a theoretical topic in science, but it talks about real life and our life-long “chat” with diet.
“We are all food consumers; thus, each of us is concerned by the topic of this book and should be aware of the mechanisms through which our key daily lifestyle decisions affect our health,” says Professor Carsten Carlberg who authored the book together with Associate Professors Stine Marie Ulven and Ferdinand Molnár.
The contents of the book are linked to a series of lecture courses in Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Molecular Immunology, Cancer Biology, and Nutrigenomics that have been given yearly in different forms since 2002 by Professor Carsten Carlberg at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio. The book represents an updated but simplified version of the authors’ earlier textbook, Nutrigenomics. It also relates to their other textbooks, Human Epigenomics, Human Epigenetics: How Science Works, and Mechanisms of Gene Regulation.
Besides its value as a textbook, Nutrigenomics: How Science Works will be a useful reference for individuals working in biomedicine. With a high figure-to-text ratio, the topics of the ten chapters range from nutrient-sensing mechanisms to interference of the human genome with nutrients, nutritional epigenetics, chronic inflammation and metabolic stress, nutritional signalling and aging, and more.
Carsten Carlberg is Professor of Biochemistry at the Institute of Biomedicine at the University of Eastern Finland. His main research interests are (epi)genomics of nuclear receptors and their ligands, with special focus on vitamin D. Stine Marie Ulven is Associate Professor at the Department of Nutrition at the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on human dietary interventions and diet-gene interactions, especially the role of dietary fat in prevention of chronic diseases. Ferdinand Molnár got his PhD at the University of Kuopio and is now 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.
For further information, please contact:
Professor Carsten Carlberg, carsten.carlberg (a) uef.fi, +358 403553062
Carlberg, Carsten, Ulven, Stine Marie & Molnár, Ferdinand. Nutrigenomics: How Science Works. Springer 2020. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030369477