Nutrition and dietary habits are investigated as environmental factors in
cancer development and a strong relationship has been found between diet and cancer.
Nutrients affect gene expression, gene regulation and eventually individuals’ genome.
Genes related to carcinogen metabolism, steroid hormone metabolism and DNA repair
are involved in cancer progress. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the factors
affecting the change in cancer-related genes. Nutrigenomics is a new multidisciplinary
field, investigating the effect of nutrients on genome and its expression through
molecular techniques. Nutrigenomics enables to unveil how nutrients regulate cellular
metabolism via gene and protein expressions and provide information on the functions
of genome. The resulting differences or similarities in gene expressions as response to
diets, will enable to understand diet-gene interactions at personalized levels that will
implement the concept of personalized nutrition. The genetic variations among
individuals will explain the health and disease status of human to be used to determine
the cancer risk of individuals. In this chapter, it is aimed to review nutrient-cancer
interaction, nutrigenomics approaches and patents related to the implications of
nutrigenomics in cancer treatments.
Keywords: Bioenergetic capacity, cancer, cancer prevention, diagnostics, diet,
epigenetics, food components, genome stability, metabolic syndrome, metabolism,
nutraceuticals, nutrients, nutrigenomics, nutrition, patent, personalized
nutrition, predictive markers, single nucleotide polymorphism, well-being.
