Nutrigenomics and Atherosclerosis: The Postprandial and Long-Term Effects of Virgin Olive Oil Ingestion

Epidemiological studies over the past 50 years have revealed numerous risk factors for atherosclerosis. They can be grouped into factors with an important genetic component and environmental factors, particularly diet, which is one of the major, constant environmental factors to which our genes are expose through life. When a gene is activated, or expressed, functionally distinct proteins are produced which can initiate a host of cellular metabolic effects. Gene expression patterns produce a phenotype, which represents the physical characteristics of an organism (e.g., hair color), or the presence or absence of a disease. Nutrition scientists realize more and more that phenotypic treats (health status) are not necessarily produce by genes alone but also by the interaction of bioactive food components on the levels of DNA, RNA, protein and metabolites (Müller & Kersten, 2003). Nutritional genomics came into being at the beginning of the 1990s. There is some confusion about the delimitation of the concept, as often the terms of nutritional genomics, nutrigenetics, and nutrigenomics, are used as synonyms. Nutritional genomics refers to the joint study of nutrition and the genome including all the other omics derived from genomics: transcriptomics (mRNA), proteomics (proteins), and metabolomics (metabolites) (Fig. 1). The terms nutritional genomics would be equivalent to the wide-ranging term of gene-diet interaction. Within the wide framework of the concept of nutritional genomics, we can distinguish 2 subconcepts: nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics. Currently, there is a wide consensus on considering nutrigenetics as the discipline that studies the different phenotypic response to diet depending on the genotype of each individual. The term nutrigenomics is subject to a greater variability in its delimitation, but it seems that there is a certain consensus in considering nutrigenomics as the discipline which studies the molecular mechanisms explaining the different phenotypic responses to diet depending on the genotype, studying how the nutrients regulate gene expression, and how these changes are interrelated with proteomics and metabolomics (Corella & Ordovas, 2009). This interpretation of the nutrigenomics concept is the one that we shall use in this Chapter. Atherosclerosis is a complex, multifactorial disease associated with accumulation of lipids in lesions along blood vessels, leading to the occlusion of blood flow, with oxidative and