Human population genomics approach in food metabolism

Abstract

Changes in the environment and demography have been a defining factor throughout humans’ evolutionary history, reflected by noticeable changes in dietary habits. It can be seen in the shift from foraging-based eating and cooking to the domestication of animals and plants. Such environmental and dietary transitions led selective pressures are believed to have impacted human genome variation and associated traits. Genome variations caused by genetic adaptations to specific dietary components might have played a substantial role in diet-linked phenotypic differences among modern humans and their health conditions. Thus, a better-suited dietary behavior may help reduce the human health burden and shape the future of food. Advancing genome technologies have led to a tremendous expansion in the number of genome sequences from different modern and ancient human populations, that spread to broader geographical regions and adapted locally, leading to the era of population genomics. These developments have facilitated the path to detect and precisely map different locally adapted genetic variants, particular to the population of a region that was exposed to a specific environment and diet. These finely mapped genetic variants have varying impacts on food metabolism and can be used in the budding field of nutritional genomics to understand gene-diet-health interactions at the individual level, leading to the dietary choice based on individual health. This chapter briefly discusses how combination of population genetics and nutritional genomics can help in managing human health in the modern-day urban society. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.