| Rationale for Program: The literature for Nutraceuticals, functional foods and super foods for the treatment and prevention of digestive disease is rapidly expanding. The goal is to provide participants with the latest available evidence for the care of their digestive disease patients.
The program will highlight the results of: 1). Herbal products (licorice root, peppermint oil, polyphenols), 2). Functional Foods (Prebiotics: soluble fiber, whole grains, etc, probiotics, fish oils, isothiocyanates, etc), Super foods (wild salmon, citrus, oats, bananas, broccoli family, extra-virgin olive oil, yogurt-kefir etc, 3) Nutritional genomics-aims at understanding how nutrition influences metabolic pathways and homeostatic control and how this regulation is disturbed in the early phase of a diet-related disease (i.e. colon and gastric cancer). For example, the N-Acetyltransferase (NAT) gene is a phase II metabolism enzyme that exists in two forms: NAT1 and NAT2. Several polymorphisms exist in NAT1 and NAT2, some of which have been associated with NAT capabilities of slow, intermediate or fast acetylations. NAT is involved in acetylation of heterocyclic aromatic amines found in heated products especially well cooked red meat. During cooking of muscle meat at high temperature, some amino acids may react with creatine to give heterocyclic aromatic amines HAA). HAA can be activated through acetylation to reactive metabolites which bind DNA and cause cancers. Only NAT2 fast acetylators can perform this acetylation. Studies have shown that the NAT2 fast acetylator genotype had a higher risk of developing colon cancer in people who consumed relatively large quantities of red meat. The metabolic pathway for this and other nutrient-gene interactions in producing digestive cancer will be elucidated. |