The science of nutritional genomics echoes the claim by alternative health practitioners that nutrition, like many other health care interventions, must be individualized.


“Alternative health practitioners point out that for all the technology involved, such individualized diet recommendations have been part of ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. In ayurvedic medicine, practitioners use questionnaires and testing to determine a person’s dosha, or governing principles of the body. From there they prescribe very specific foods to avoid and to seek out. Vasant Lad, an Indian-trained physician who is chairman of the Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque, said there appeared to be many similarities between the principles of ayurveda and nutrigenomics.”
Source: Hilary E. MacGregor, Are the clues to diet success in your genes? LA Times (April 11, 2005)