Recent nutrition research aims to understand the best diet that suits your guts and genes

Feb, 2021 - By WMR

There is no regular diet. If you don't want to raise your blood sugar level with a snack, however, a banana is considered an ideal choice than sugary cookies. But few individuals in a 2015 study of 800 Israeli volunteers got their highest blood sugar from bread or banana instead of sugary baked food. According to Elizabeth Parks a nutrition scientist at the University of Missouri, Columbia, state that “We all know individuals who lose weight easily, and others who don’t.”

To understand this difference the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is taking initiatives. The authority what it calls the largest study to analyze precision nutrition: a $156 million, five years effort to evaluate how 10,000 Americans process foods by gathering information, ranging from blood sugar levels to microbes in an individual. This study has various potential to transform the field of nutrition science and may create new method and tool to boost the discovery of science in the near future, says Griffin Rodgers, director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Diabetes. Ultimately this projects allow nutritionists to create diets for a person's genes and microbiome.

In May 2020, Francis Collins director at NIH published the first 10 years nutritional science strategic plan, indicating the importance of nutrition in chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. This strategy aims to reveal basic study of the role of nutrition over the lifespan which is called as neurobiology. This explains how food can play a crucial role in medicine and enhance precision nutrition. This study basically define how the body react to food depend on different factors ranging from genetic to sleeping habits. For instance, the Israeli study found the microbiome was largely responsible in individuals to sugar versus fruits.

Around 10,000 all American participants who join the nutrition study have to wear various monitors in order to track the blood sugar, physical activity, and many more to record what they eat and need to visit a clinic to consume a meal and undergo tests. And 500 to 1000 volunteers will have to stay at the clinical center for around 2-3 weeks while eating three tightly balanced diets. Recently, NIH has conducted some study in its clinical center to understand, the effects of ultra-processed foods, but only on 20 people.

By gathering various personal data, from participants’ DNA makeup to their ZIP code, they are removing a lot of that ‘noise’ that we had for years, generated by the various different factors that we were not thinking of before,” stated Tufts University nutrition scientist José Ordovás. After this, the artificial intelligence researchers will use the extracted data to develop models that forecast the best diet for an individual—an move established by the Israeli study, which created a company that developed a tool to produce diets for people who are trying to lose weight or suffering with diabetes.

Now NIH is inviting proposals for study components such as a data center, clinical centers, and a microbiome center. The objective of this move is to enroll volunteers by January 2023. “There is so much enthusiasm about the study, says Parks.