June 2, 2022 – Every from time to time, the overall opinion about healthy eating changes.
Sometimes the changes are massive, just like the low-fat trend within the Nineties. Other, slower changes have led us to give attention to the weight loss program as a complete slightly than on a single nutrient. But what if the recommendations are always changing because there is no such thing as a one weight loss program that is true for everybody?
The latest research is moving toward precision nutrition—highly personalized diets based in your microbiome, DNA, or other aspects. Some of those are already available, however the science may not match the marketing.
How Precision Nutrition works
The concept seems easy, however it's infinitely complicated. Because no two individuals are exactly alike of their DNA – not even equivalent twins – each of our bodies reacts otherwise to foods and the bacteria that grow in our gut as we digest them. Precision nutrition (sometimes called “personalized nutrition”) uses artificial intelligence and data collected from other people to predict how your body will react to certain foods.
Precision nutrition advocates are working on three essential fronts:
- Nutrigenetics studies how genes affect the best way your body uses the nutrients you eat. This implies that your body may not give you the option to process a specific nutrient properly, even when you eat enough of it.
- Nutrigenomics essentially turns the entire thing around. It looks at how the foods you eat can affect the expression of your genes. “In obesity, you may have a certain set of genes, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're expressing them,” says Dr. James Marcum of Baylor University, creator of a literature review on nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics. “But if you eat foods that express those genes, it will lead to obesity.”
- Microbiome research focuses on how the microbes in your gut affect your health. Since everyone's microbiome is different, the considering goes, everyone's ideal weight loss program can be different. Genes also play a job here, since the composition of your microbiome is influenced to some extent by your genes.
Today’s personalized diets
There are already around 400 corporations offering personalized weight loss program programs. But not all of them are based on solid science. Diets based solely in your DNA, for instance, are usually not yet mature – your body's response to food depends upon way more than simply genetics.
“Each of us is so complex that we've only just scratched the surface,” says Marcum. “There's more we don't know than we know at this stage of the game. We're seeing that the more you realize how complex the system is, the more you realize that it can be difficult to predict how a person will react.”
But since some programs are already in the marketplace, the research results are promising. DayTwo focuses on metabolic health and is geared toward individuals with conditions resembling diabetes and obesity. They analyze your microbiome and other health markers to create a customized nutrition plan and have published research in peer-reviewed journals to back this up. Currently, DayTwo is barely available through medical health insurance and employers.
Another company, Zoeis designed to enhance overall health or help with weight reduction. For $294 plus a monthly membership fee, the corporate creates a customized plan based in your microbiome, blood sugar, and blood fat. Zoe's offerings are based on the continuing Personalized Responses to Dietary Composition Trial (Predict) study.
The “Nutrition for Precision Health” project
The National Institutes of Health has launched a serious research project on precision nutrition. The program, called Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH), is providing $170 million over five years to fund studies at six centers across the country. Researchers are recruiting a various pool of 10,000 people to develop algorithms that may predict how your body will reply to different parts of your weight loss program. They will take a look at the weight loss program, genetics, microbiome, physiology and environment of study participants, amongst other aspects.
“The evidence is still young,” says NPH coordinator Dr. Holly Nicastro. “We don't just want to look at the microbiome, we don't just want to look at the genetics, because we need to look at how all of these things work together. — other systems in the body, psychosocial factors, demographic factors, and other things that have not traditionally been captured in nutritional studies.”
After the five-year studies have collected enough information to develop precise algorithms, the project will spend another five years testing their reliability.
The project aims to help solve a major problem with previous studies: Most of the data collected to develop personalized diets comes from people of European descent. This poses challenges for treating diseases that are common among minorities in the United States, such as diabetes and high blood pressure. But the NPH project hopes to change that. Its researchers have partnered with the All of Us Research Program, the NIH's effort to build a health database of one million people.
“All of Us is all about inclusion,” says Nicastro. “They include many groups of people that have been underrepresented in biomedical research. By partnering with them, now we have the chance to make discoveries in nutrition which can be relevant to many more people.”
Arrival
While precision nutrition is currently only available to people willing to pay a biotechnology company to undergo certain tests, it could sooner or later change the best way we eat.
“If precision nutrition is truly for everyone,” says Nicastro, “we would like to see it open to patients and become standard in clinical practice.”