In the final stage of the study, researchers developed a dietary intervention based on the algorithm to test the ability of making personalized dietary recommendations to lower blood glucose levels in response to food.
Advertisement
“For many years, our thinking has been that people develop obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases because they are not compliant with our dietary advice”, Elinav and Segal told Endocrine Today. But, this system was based on researches that average how tiny groups of people reacted to various foods. “There are profound differences between individuals – in some cases, individuals have opposite responses to one another”, Segal explained. In addition, the volunteers received a few standardized/identical meals for their breakfasts.
In the study, called the Personalized Nutrition Project, the researchers focused on the effect of various foods in the blood glucose levels of 800 participants for a week, analyzing the results for a total of 46,898 meals. Blood glucose levels were affected differently by the same foods in different people and depended on lifestyle factors (eg, whether the food was consumed before exercise or sleep).
Lead authors Eran Segal and Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science found that different individuals showed vastly different responses to the same food, even though their own responses remained the same day to day.
“In contrast to our current practices, tailoring diets to the individual may allow us to utilize nutrition as means of controlling elevated blood sugar levels and its associated medical conditions”, Eran Elinav, study coauthor from Weizmann’s Department of Immunology, said in the press release.
Compliance can be the bane of nutrition studies. The participants also input lifestyle and food intake information each day into a mobile app, reports the Washington Post. The different responses to food was shown to be due to the “uniqueness” of her gut bacteria.
The individualized feedback yielded many surprises. One participant, for example, experienced blood sugar spikes after eating sushi, while another participant experienced spikes after eating tomatoes. Consistent changes in gut microbes were found with the good diets, suggesting an individual’s microbiome may be influenced by a personalized diet.
Advertisement
Like many people, one middle-age woman in an Israeli study just couldn’t seem to find a diet that worked. Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Responses.
