Customized foods, personalized nutrition and the ingredients that are recognized as having healthy effects as part of a balanced diet are a response to a consumer trend to make the best of eating resources.

One diet does not have the same effect on all individuals. Genetics can determine how individuals respond to different eating behaviours.

• One of the CTNS research lines focuses on how different genetic polymorphisms affect the gene-diet interaction in an attempt to understand how food components affect different phenotypes.
• In the field of molecular nutrition, it has been determined that nutrients can modulate the expression of genes. In recent years, the research community seems to agree that bioactive ingredients can also act as epigenetic modulators. Epigenetic changes are involved in many disorders and recent studies have shown that the strategy of using diet to design or to stimulate epigenetic changes can be a very powerful tool for preventing illnesses. The CTNS, then, investigates the effect of various bioactive ingredients on the epigenetic mechanisms.