Platform for Clinical Trials in Nutrition and Health

Despite the known link between dietary patterns and disease, it has been observed that the specific response of each individual to dietary components highly varied, and this may limit the impact of the nutritional interventions to improve public health. These observations provided the basis to the development of the Nutritional Genomics at the beginning of the 90s, which main goal was to study the interaction between dietary factors and the genome that modulate phenotypic expression. From this idea, in the recent years, Precision Nutrition has been emerged as a therapeutic approach that takes into account all individual's characteristics to develop targeted nutritional advices. The main goal of Precision Nutrition is to maintain or improve health by using genetics, phenotypic, clinical, dietary and other information to provide more precise and more efficacious personalized healthy eating advice and to motivate appropriate dietary changes. However, all the genotype-dependent advice must be based on scientific evidence. Most of the available evidence in support of personalized nutrition has come from observational studies with risk factors as outcomes, and it was needed randomized controlled trials using clinical endpoints to ratify these results. The main objective of the Platform for Clinical Trials in Nutrition and Health (GENYAL) is to contribute to Precision Nutrition Research by the construction, for the first time, of a human gene and phenotype database to be used in: 1) The evaluation of the efficacy of different foods, functional foods and bioactive compounds capsules on general population and by genotypes and 2) The performance of nutritional genetics and nutrigenomics studies. For that purposes, GENYAL has a permanent recruitment of volunteers, which are phenotypically and genotypically characterized, and give consent to be contacted to perform clinical trials and nutritional intervention studies. Therefore, GENYAL may help to increase the existing knowled