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Diet is evolving from nourishing populations via providing essential nutrients to improving health of individuals through nutrition. Modern nutritional research focuses on health promotion and disease prevention, on protection against toxicity and stress, and on performance improvement. The concept of developing nutritionally enhanced or functional food requires:(1) the understanding of the mechanisms of prevention and protection;(2) the identification of the biologically active molecules, and (3) the demonstrated efficacy of these molecules.

As a consequence of these ambitious objectives, the disciplines ‘nutrigenetics’ and ‘nutrigenomics’ have evolved. Nutrigenetics asks how individual genetic disposition, manifesting as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, copynumber polymorphisms and epigenetic phenomena, affects susceptibility to diet. Nutrigenomics addresses the inverse relationship, ie how diet influences gene transcription, protein expression and metabolism. The mid-term objective of nutrigenomics is integrating genomics (gene analysis), transcriptomics (gene expression analysis), proteomics (global protein analysis) and metabolomics (metabolite profiling) to define a ‘healthy’phenotype. The long-term deliverability of nutrigenomics is personalized nutrition for maintenance of individual health and prevention of disease. The major challenges for-omics in nutrition and health still lie ahead of us, some of which apply to-omic disciplines in general while others are specific