Entering the Era of Personalized Nutrition

Do our bodies respond the same way to different foods?

In the current era of enticing headlines, the latest miracle diets dominate the media landscape. Their universal health benefits touted as a holy grail with the antioxidant mood-boosting potential. It’s time to ditch the one-size-fits all diet for personalized nutrition!

Studying Our Metabolic Responses To Food

While hardworking scientists conduct plenty of nutritional experiments, it’s becoming evident that dietary responses are personalized! While we conduct many studies using animal models, it’s significantly more difficult to do with humans. Not only is it hard to attract hundreds of participants and record exactly what they eat, it’s extremely expensive!

Nonetheless, a fascinating personalized nutrition study, conducted on a large sample, was published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine. It marks the conclusion of the first phase of PREDICT, an international scientific collaboration aimed at understanding how food affects our physiology in a precise, individualized manner. Researchers administered identical meals to 1002 healthy individuals (some twins, some unrelated). Their metabolic responses after ingesting this food were measured in the blood, allowing scientists to understand how the same food affects different individuals.

Researchers found striking variation in responses to the same foods and…