DNA diets 营养基因餐

Do you know that we are 99.6% identical to someone besides us, but the 0.4% is enough in differentiating us when it comes to risk of developing chronic diseases?

你知道吗，我们和身边的人有着99.6％的相似度？但谈到患上慢性疾病的风险时，那区区的0.4％已经足够将我们区分。

Nutrigenetics or nutrigenomics, a young and emerging area in the field of nutrition, is an area that explore the association between the nutrient-gene interactions and health maintenance and the risk of developing certain chronic disease. Although some argue that the scope of nutrigenetics should be on promoting healthy eating, improve upon standard guidelines as applied to individual, rather than preventing specific disease or curing disease. 

营养基因学，是一个颇新的营养学领域，探索着基因和健康之间的关系，是否某些基因会增加某些慢性疾病的风险等等的课题。有些人则认为，营养基因学应该用于推广健康饮食，提高个人专属的标准指引，而不是用于防止或治疗疾病。

However there are always exploitation behind everything. There are companies that are trying to cash in via DNA diets. All you need to do is to send your DNA to them, they run the analysis, tell you your genetic variations associated with increased risk of disease A, B, C and advise you on change in diet.

世事总难免被滥用。有些公司正试图利用‘营养基因餐’ 来捞上一笔。你只需要提供你的 DNA，他们将会替你进行​​分析。然后告诉你，你的基因遗传会增加你患上疾病A，B，C的风险，从而建议你改变饮食习惯。

Experts have expressed concern over this commercial interests as they are just staring to learn and know even less about the extent to which we can modify this risk through specific diet interventions. Secondly, you will most probably be getting four different results whereby your 'DNA sample' will be sent to four different DNA-based diet firms for analysis. Most importantly, the tests are not validated, test quality and result becomes a big question mark. If you happened to come across a 'personalized nutrition plan based on your own DNA', think twice.  

专家对这个商业利益表示担忧，因为到目前为止，营养基因学仍然在了解的阶段，针对可否因改善特定的饮食习惯而减少罹患某些疾病风险，仍然不明确。不但如此，这些公司将会把你的DNA样本发送到四间以‘营养基因餐’挂号的公司进行分析，所以你很有可能会得到四个不同的结果。最重要的是，这些测试都没有被验证过，测试结果的可信度更成了最大的问号。如果你碰上了“根据自己DNA量身定造的营养计划”，请三思而后行。