Diet change Improving your health is nothing new: people with diabetes, obesity, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, food allergies, and many other conditions have been doing so for a long time as part of their treatment. But new and sophisticated knowledge about biochemistry, nutrition and artificial intelligence has provided people with more tools to figure out what to eat to be in good health, which has caused a boom in the field of personalized nutrition.
Personalized nutrition, often used interchangeably with the terms precision nutrition or individualized nutrition is an emerging branch of science that uses machine learning and “omics” technologies (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) to analyze what people eat and predict how they respond to it. Scientists, nutritionists, and health professionals take the data, analyze it, and use it for a variety of purposes, including identifying dietary and lifestyle interventions to treat disease, promote health, and improve performance in elite athletes.
Increasingly, companies are adopting to sell products and services such as nutritional supplements, applications that use machine learning to provide a nutritional analysis of a food based on a photograph, and testing stool samples whose results are used. to create personalized dietary tips that promise to fight bloating, brain fog and a myriad of other ailments.
“Nutrition is the most powerful lever for our health,” says Mike Stroka, CEO of the American Nutrition Association, the professional organization whose mandate is to certify nutritionists and educate the public about science-based nutrition for the practice of health. “Personalized nutrition will be even greater.”
In 2019, according to ResearchandMarkets.Com, personalized nutrition was a $ 3.7 billion industry. In 2027, a value of $ 16.6 billion is expected. Factors driving this growth include consumer demand, falling cost of new technologies, a greater ability to provide information, and increasing evidence that there is no one-size-fits-all diet.
Sequencing the human genome, which began in 1990 and ended 13 years later, paved the way for scientists to find connections between diet and genetics more easily and accurately.
When the term “personalized nutrition” first appeared in the scientific literature, in 1999 it focused on the use of computers to help educate people about their dietary needs. It wasn’t until 2004 that scientists began to think about how genes affect how and what we eat and how our bodies respond. Drink coffee, for example: Some people metabolize caffeine and other nutrients in coffee in a productive and healthy way. Others do not. The camp you are in depends on many factors, such as your genetics, age, environment, gender, and lifestyle.
More recently, researchers have studied the connections between the health of the intestinal microbiome and conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and depression. The intestinal microbiome, the least known organ in the body, consists of more than 1000 species of bacteria and other microbes. Weighing nearly a pound, it produces hormones, digests food that the stomach can’t, and sends thousands of diet-derived chemicals that run through our bodies every day. In many ways, the microbiome is key to understanding nutrition and is the basis for the growth of personalized nutrition.
Blood, urine, DNA, and feces tests are part of the set of personalized nutrition tools that researchers, nutritionists, and health professionals use to measure the gut microbiome and the chemicals (known as metabolites) it produces. They use this data, sometimes in conjunction with self-reported data collected through surveys or interviews, as a basis for nutritional advice.