It is added that foods may turn up to be healthy in one person but it may be unhealthy for another.
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You and a friend decide to lose weight as a team even though you eat exactly the same healthy meals – you gain weight, your friend loses weight.
“After seeing this data, I think about the possibility that maybe we’re really conceptually wrong in our thinking about the obesity and diabetes epidemic”, said Eran Segal, of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Participants were asked to log every bite, sip, exercise session, bowel movement and sleep session on a phone app. Their blood sugar levels were measured every five minutes by a device attached to their bodies, and they turned in stool samples for gut bacteria analysis.
According to one of the researchers, Eran Segal, this is a “really big hole in literature” that each individual body reacts differently to this degree.
And at the press conference, the scientists described a woman whose blood sugar spiked in response to a food considered laudable by current dietary guidelines: tomatoes.
Using all that data, Elinav and Segal mapped out which foods affected participants’ blood sugar the most.
The researchers found that each person had a different response to the same food.
Indeed, the way to go seems to be personalisation: finding out what works and what doesn’t for each person; however, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe that “healthy foods” aren’t healthy for us – there’s still a very good chance that they are, but it would definitely help to see how it works for us, personally.
Their work foreshadows a new era of personalized nutrition for optimal weight and maximum health: the iDiet.
The investigators also suggested that carefully tailoring diets to meet individuals’ blood sugar tendencies could be the wave of the future. Chronic high sugar levels can lead to metabolic problems like obesity and diabetes. But, Segal said, “we are now embarking on a series of follow-up studies that aim to unravel the long-term effects of the personalized diet on diabetes, weight management, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease”. By making 26 additional volunteers a set of personalised meal plans, the team were able to reduce post-meal blood sugar levels and alter gut microbiata. The goal was to have a better understanding as to what happens to the postprandial blood glucose after each meal and for each participant and see if and how the levels varied.
For decades, doctors and nutrition experts have used the glycemic index to help them rank foods based on how they affect blood sugar levels. It is important to note that no one had diabetes but they were obese with a pre-diabetes condition.
Last month, a group of 48 scientists from 50 USA institutions called for more ambitious research into these tiny microorganisms, as part of a 10-year effort known as the Unified Microbiome Initiative Consortium that would uncover the role of individual microbes – which include fungi, bacteria, viruses, algae and more – and how they communicate with each other, their hosts, and their environment. Overall, the researchers assessed the response of different people to more than 46,000 meals. This study suggests that people may be complying, but the advice is not right for them.
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Although the correlation between blood sugar level was expected, one surprising discovery through the study was that each person had a unique response to the meal, even though everyone was given the same meal each time.
