We are talking 10 years out. Personalized "precision" nutrition. Probably come with an App for that.
The future of nutrition advice
Most of us know we should eat more fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
So why would the National Institutes of Health spend $150 million to answer questions such as "What and when should we eat?" and "How can we improve the use of food as medicine?"
The answer may be precision nutrition, which aims to understand the health effects of the complex interplay among genetics, our microbiome (the bacteria living in our gut), our diet and level of physical activity, and other social and behavioral characteristics.
That means that everyone could have their own unique set of nutritional requirements.Dr. Frank Hu: The idea of precision nutrition is to have the right food, at the right amount, for the right person. Instead of providing general dietary recommendations for everyone, this precision approach tailors nutrition recommendations to individual characteristics, including one's genetic background, microbiome, social and environmental factors, and more. This can help achieve better health outcomes.
CNN: Why is there no one-size-fits-all prescription when it comes to what we should be eating?
Hu: Not everyone responds to the same diet in the same way. For example, given the same weight-loss diet, some people can lose a lot of weight; other people may gain weight. A recent study in JAMA randomized a few hundred overweight individuals to a healthy low-carb or low-fat diet. After one year, there was almost an identical amount of weight loss for the two groups, but there was a huge variation between individuals within each group -- some lost 20 pounds. Others gained 10 pounds.CNN: How much of a role do our individual genes play in our risk of disease? And can our behavior mitigate our disease risk?
Hu: Our health is affected by both genes and diets, which constantly interact with each other because certain dietary factors can turn on or off some disease-related genes. We published research showing that reducing consumption of sugary beverages can offset the negative effects of obesity genes. That's really good news. Our genes are not our destiny.CNN: How will nutrition advice be different 10 years from now?
Poole: I think you will receive a custom-tailored grocery list on an app -- foods that you want to buy and foods that you want to avoid, based on your blood sugar responses to foods, your level of physical activity and more.
Hu: We will have more and better biomarkers and more affordable and accurate nutrigenomics and microbiome tests as well as better computer algorithms that predict your response to food intakes.
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