Web-Enabled and Improved Software Tools and Data Are Needed to Measure Nutrient Intakes and Physical Activity for Personalized

Abstract Food intake, physical activity (PA), and genetic makeup each affect health and each factor influences the impact of theother 2 factors. Nutrigenomics describes interactions between genes and environment. Knowledge about the interplaybetween environment and genetics would be improved if experimental designs included measures of nutrient intake andPA. Lack of familiarity about how to analyze environmental variables and ease of access to tools and measurementinstruments are 2 deterrents to these combined studies. This article describes the state of the art for measuring foodintake and PA to encourage researchers to make their tools better known and more available to workers in other fields.InformationpresentedwasdiscussedduringaworkshoponthistopicsponsoredbytheUSDA,NIH,andFDAinthespringof 2009. J. Nutr. doi: 10.3945/jn.110.128371. Introduction Omics technologies open new avenues to produce discipline-specific research knowledge that is transforming biomedicalresearch. Omics are generally defined as any high-informationcontentanalysesof a large numberof analytical targets belongingtoorganizationalsubclassessuchasgenes,metabolites,proteins,and transcripts. Combining results from several omic technolo-gies in 1 study to more fully characterize and quantify physiolo-gical processesandgeneticmakeupisfundamentaltothepromiseof creating science-based, personalized nutrition, medicine, andhealthcare.The breadth of a population’s response to normal andstressful environmental exposures is defined by the extent ofindividual responses within that population, with geneticvariation being a major contributor to this variance. Thus, theintegration of datasets from deep phenotyping (1) and geno-typing is necessary, but likely insufficient, to develop theknowledge base for personalized healthcare. Metabolic phe-notypes, whether healthy or diseased, result from complexinteractions between an individual’s genetic makeup and hisor her environment. Because food is required for survival,nutrients and other bioactive compounds are among the mostimportant environmental factors to alter the expression ofgenetic information [reviewed in (2,3)]. However, manygenomic and omic studies fail to account for not only theenergy intake but also the types and amounts of nutrientsconsumed (4). Moreover, the fate of consumed energy isdetermined by combining the energy expenditure and meta-bolic efficiency in fuel use of an individual, which also isaffected by genetic makeup. Thus, the quality and quantity ofthe diet, in conjunction with energetic demand and fitness ofthe individual, are critical variables affecting health mainte-nance. The dramatic rise in obesity and nutrition-relatedchronic diseases in the past;25 y confirms the importance ofenergy balance in maintaining health (5).The “silo” nature of biomedical research (most advancesdevelop vertically within the discipline rather than horizontallybetween and among multiple fields) is often blamed for the