Sports performance of an individual is greatly impacted by its dietary nutrition strategies. This is true for all ages, ethnicity & levels of skill regardless of whether your fitness goals is to maintain a healthy & fit physique or train for high performance sport. Whatever your objective is, a curated nutrition & supplement plan is the key to achieve that objective. American College of Sports Medicine, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and Dietitians of Canada jointly states that “Nutrition plans need to be personalized to the individual athlete and take into account specificity and uniqueness of responses to various strategies.”
These strategies include overall dietary patterns, macronutrient ratios, micronutrient requirements, eating behaviours, good sensitivities & intolerances & impact of consuming various supplements & ergogenic acids . A paradigm shift from standard, one size fits all to a curated nutrition & workout & focus on an individual’s specific need is what we are trying to address through genomics based online program.
It is all about Genes!
Personalised nutrition based on an individual’s genetic code is not a new concept & there are examples of common genetic disorders such as celiac disease, lactose intolerance & gluten intolerance where specific dietary recommendations are advised & implemented to overcome metabolic deficiencies. For such common seen conditions, avoiding dairy & gluten consumption are part of dietary recommendations. In case of consumption of Java(coffee), your genetic code &/or variation may define whether you embrace it or avoid it. Many athletes are not aware if caffeine consumption is harmful for them or not. Genetic testing for the rate of caffeine metabolism may help to motivate them to experiment to do workout with or without caffeine rather than assuming it works or never trying it out of suspicion & missing benefits out of it. Although Genetic testing is a well established clinical assessment to help manage disease & conditions, it has created enormous opportunities to improve health, wellness & sports performance in athletes through nutrition focussed genetic testing. As the sporting world battles with risky supplements, the sport science community is embracing new ways to help athletes safely reach their peak performance.
While it has been longly suspected that genetics plays an important role in determining how we respond to food & nutrients & how we sweat, the rise in genomics search has proven it scientifically. Our genetic coding determines how we absorb, metabolize & utilize nutrients & these genes by diet interactions determine the difference in sports nutrition & performance in individuals. Use of personal genomic testing that will provide recommendations on nutrition that will be beneficial at an individual level than the current standard nutrition advice. It is important to understand that the standard advice as endorsed by various government & health/fitness bodies are for active population & you are an individual & not “ population”.
How drives Caffeine consumption?
In Genomics, caffeine is the well studied compound that experiments & investigates direct impact of gene-nutrient interaction on athletic performance. Caffeine has a widespread use in athletics in the form of coffee, tablets, gels, chews, energy drinks & pre-workouts with the belief that athletes & fitness folks can train better & more effectively after having caffeine. It is important to note that caffeine does not benefit all athletes equally & in fact impair performance of some of them. In the past there have been lot of studies that investigated the effect of caffeine consumption of exercise performance however found variability in magnitude of impact on individuals. Some of the individual variations was due to genes such as CYP1A2 which is associated with caffeine metabolism & response.
Over 95% of caffeine is metabolized by the CYP1A2 enzyme, which is encoded by a gene of the same name: the CYP1A2 gene. A genetic variation in this gene has been shown to alter CYP1A2 enzyme activity & has been used to differentiate between fast & slow metabolizers of caffeine. Individuals with AC or CC genotype (slow metabolizers) have higher risk of hypertension with high caffeine consumption while those with AA genotype have no such risk.
Regular physical activity appears to reduce the impact of increase in blood pressure induced by caffeine ingestion in individuals with AA genotype, providing evidence that genetics act as a confounding variable when trying to establish the effects of caffeine across entire populations.
Genetic variations can cause us to have different responses to certain components of food. Symptoms felt by certain individuals who react to caffeine & lactose in their diet are caused by genetic variations. While following general dietary advice is the easiest thing to do, one size fits all approach will not enable individuals to realize their genetic potential. Nutrigenomics testing include several micro-nutrients that have modified requirements due to genetic variations.
It is becoming increasingly clear that our genes determine our unique nutritional requirements when we talk of health & performance.Providing fitness folks & athletes with personalized nutrition, workout & other performance related information based on their unique DNA would help us in providing a perfect building block & level playing field to realize their full genetic potential through implementation of nutrition & exercise performance strategies that are aligned to their genome.Our collaboration with Mapmygenome is a perfect solution to use genetic testing to provide personalized fitness solution for individuals.
