A Nutrigenomics Study of Post-prandial Metabolic Responses in Individuals of Varying Body Weight: An Assessment of the Body's Response to Meals Containing Different Levels of Fat and Carbohydrate

The most recent statistics from the Department of Health in Ireland (2005) indicate that the leading causes of death are those in which nutrition can play a key preventative role. The proposed study will provide information on the metabolic stress from varying body weight overlaid by the additional metabolic stress of a test-meal challenge, in this case being delivered in the form of an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) and oral lipid tolerance test (OLTT), standard metabolic challenges in post-prandial research. Previous studies assessing metabolic risk factors associated with a disease have typically focused on information collected from individuals in a fasting state only. However, it is equally important to assess how the body responds when stressed. Employing an acute high fat or carbohydrate intake is sufficient to induce a mild stress in which time an individual's unique post-prandial response can be monitored. This study will combine traditional markers (dietary, anthropometric, lifestyle, clinical and physical activity) with nutrigenomics, a tool that attempts to describe the genome-wide influences of nutrition by examining the impact of diet on genes (genomics), mRNA (transcriptomics), proteins (proteomics) and metabolites (metabolomics).