The genes are not the blame - July 2018
Individualized dietary recommendations based on genetic information are currently a popular trend. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has systematically analyzed scientific articles and reached the following conclusion: There is no clear evidence for the effect of genetic factors on the consumption of total calories, carbohydrates, and fat. According to the current state of knowledge, the expedience of gene-based dietary recommendations has yet to be proven. read more
TUM celebrates ten years of success for the Else Kröner Fresenius Center for Nutritional Medicine, Nutrition at the heart of medical research - July 2016
The Else Kröner Fresenius Center for Nutritional Medicine (EKFZ), which has been part of the Technical University of Munich for the past ten years, has played a major role in transforming nutritional sciences in Germany: the combination of the bio-scientific discipline with medicine was a trailblazing approach in the German university landscape in the year the Center was founded. Since then, numerous pioneering studies have been carried out on the topics of fetal programming, genetic diseases of the digestive tract and brown fat cells. read more
Study on preventative weight management during fetal development
Fish oil during pregnancy offers no protection for Children against obesity - June 2016
In Europe, almost one in three schoolchildren under the age of ten is overweight, if not obese. In the search for the cause of this phenomenon, fetal programming inside a mother’s womb was put under scrutiny as a potential culprit for this “heavy issue”. The hypothesis that the mother’s diet might have some sort of influence could not be confirmed in a long-term study: administering a special diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids and low in arachidonic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid, to pregnant women neither resulted in children being slimmer nor fatter than their counterparts from the control group whose mothers had enjoyed a normal diet. read more
Research-Highlight 2014
Chair of nutrition medicine publishes paper in Cell!
Risk of type 2 diabetes explained through new concept of disease genetics
Click here for the press release.
Claussnitzer M, Dankel SN, Klocke B, Grallert H, Glunk V, Berulava T, Lee H,..., Skurk T, ..., Hauner H, Laumen H. Leveraging Cross-Species Transcription Factor Binding Site Patterns: From Diabetes Risk Loci to Disease Mechanisms. Cell. 2014, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.10.058 pubmed
So far the research focus is on the development and validation of new methods to detect functional gene variants. The novel computational methodology called "phylogenetic module complexity analysis" (PMCA) allows the analysis of complex modules of transcription factor binding sites to identify cis-regulatory gene segments, which influence the gene regulation and thereby the development for a diseases ("regulatory genomics").