Nutrition is very important in determining various states of health. The field of nutrigenomics is based on the idea that everything ingested into a person's body affects the genome of the individual. This may be through either upregulating or downregulating the expression of certain genes or by a number of other methods. While the field is quite young there are a number of companies that market directly to the public and promote the issue under the guise of public health. Yet many of these companies claim to benefit the consumer, the tests performed are either not applicable or often result in common sense recommendations. Such companies promote public distrust towards future medical tests that may test more appropriate and applicable agents.