JUST AS NEW Labour throws all its energy into making us more responsible about our eating and drinking, along comes science to throw a spanner in the works.

Still in its infancy, the new science of “nutrigenomics” is the latest buzzword at the lucrative intersection between pharmaceuticals, health and simple vanity. The application of genomics to our diets, its aim is to figure how each of us really responds to different foods.

Whatever government says about eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, the problem is that choosing the most effective diet has always been a shot in the dark. One man’s elixir, after all, can be another man’s poison. Much of it, like the tendency to gain weight, depends not on what we consume but on mysterious goings on within our genetic inheritance. But as we slowly decipher the structure of that inheritance by sequencing the human genome, the medical and health industries are rapidly taking note.

By tailoring our diets to our genetic make-up, the idea behind nutrigenomics is to offer dietary advice specific to particular gene types. If it works, it will become the holy grail of the diet world — and will make simple nutritionists look like rank amateurs.

Nutrigenomics, for example, might explain why some of us can walk home sober at the end of a bibulous evening while others fall over and pass out after just a few drinks. The more decadent among us will see it as an opportunity to wallow in those pleasures that sit most comfortably with our DNA — and then proceed to fill our boots.

At its most noble, on the other hand, nutrigenomics can help us understand how diseases like cancer can be affected or alleviated with food. It will make it possible, for example, to create a diet that knows about and is sensitive to your family history of cardiovascular disease or bowel cancer.

But it will not be quick. Only in about five years do scientists expect that we will have the information to make gene-based diet recommendations. And only at that point will we begin to see foods in our supermarkets targeted at specific gene types. While we wait, the label of nutrigenomics will remain the province of quack doctors and nutritionists, and will join macrobiotic and biodynamic diets as just another unfathomable diet fad. The idea of a “DNA diet”, it is instructive to learn, has already been trademarked by one nutritionist in the US.

The label will also prove invaluable to snake-oil marketing salesmen, who will, no doubt, shortly be using it to sell us “nutrigenomic” cereals, chocolate bars and kebabs. Those with nothing to say at parties, having thrown off their once-fashionable gluten allergies, will soon be talking about how sandwiches like that don’t agree with people with genes like theirs.

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