Gene-Diet Interactions and Cardiovascular Diseases

Poor nutrition is a prominent cause of poor health worldwide. Therefore, optimizing dietary intake is a crucial strategy for health maintenance and disease prevention. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading global cause of death, and dietary recommendations are essential for its prevention and management. However, the current nutritional guidelines have not yielded the expected benefits on CVD prevention and bettering of its related risk factors (i.e., dyslipidemia, diabetes, obesity). These observations highlight the need for more precision nutrition. Therefore, nutrition research has shifted to the identification of the factors underlying the interindividual differences in response to dietary fats and cholesterol, with greater emphasis placed on genetic factors. This work focuses on the current knowledge about the interaction between genetic variants, saturated fatty acid (SFA), monounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA), and cardiovascular risk factors. The current knowledge suggests that, in most cases, dietary SFAs enhance the association of genetic variants predisposing to CVD disease. Conversely, higher intake of MUFAs tends to be associated with the quenching of the main deleterious effects associated with specific genetic variants. However, in order to achieve its objectives, precision nutrition will need to integrate the information of the genome, epigenome, microbiome, and deep phenotyping (i.e., metabolomics) in combination with the exposome.