Published in the ‘Annual Review of Nutrition’, this new report highlights the growing focus on precision nutrition. The concept suggests that population subgroups may react similarly to dietary exposures, and understanding this variation enables tailored recommendations beyond those given at a population level.
However, in their report, Dr. Regan Bailey, associate director of precision nutrition, and Dr. Patrick Stover, director at the Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture, at Texas A&M University, emphasize the severe lack of current knowledge on precision nutrition interventions.
Despite scientific advances and efforts to improve health through nutrition, our nations continue to face an unprecedented burden of diet-related chronic disease, increased prevalence of overweight and obesity in young children, and unevenly distributed declines in life expectancy among racial-ethnic groups.
Recognizing the benefits of targeted dietary guidance for primary prevention of chronic disease over treatment, efforts in dietary guidance now go beyond addressing nutrient deficiencies and focus on chronic disease reduction.
This new approach must consider individual responses to nutrition. The report states, “The multifactorial etiology of chronic diseases, the complexity of food composition, and the multitude of food interactions with physiological systems, nutrition behaviors, the aging process, and human biological variation all contribute to differences in the diet-disease relationship. This indicates the need for greater precision in achieving health through diet, reflected in more nuanced dietary guidance, practice, and food policy.”
While omics-based approaches have affirmed inherent individual differences in genetics, metabolism, and responses to environmental and lifestyle changes, translating this data for classifying responders and non-responders with respect to diet and nutrition is currently impractical due to prohibitive costs.
The authors highlight weak spots in evidence due to the long latency of most chronic diseases and the observational nature of research on the association between chronic disease and diet. Establishing cause and effect relationships becomes challenging.
To advance provisions in this field without overpromising, they question how to meaningfully actualize precision nutrition without recommending weak evidence that may not stand the test of time.
The complexities of the diet-chronic disease relationship, the multifactorial nature of antecedents and progression of chronic disease, and interactions among diet and other lifestyle behaviors further complicate research in this area.
Furthermore, the authors argue that nutrition researchers are largely untrained in leveraging advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, which have been successful in other fields.
While there is increased awareness and scientific interest in the microbiome, our knowledge remains limited. Reliance on its role in how nutrition modulates the host response may be excessive.
The report concludes that our current knowledge of how to implement precision nutrition is lacking, and suggests a more holistic approach to build a robust knowledge base.
In order to implement precision nutrition, precision dietary assessment is essential. It is crucial to gather data not only on the factors that need to be captured but also on the context of food behaviors for actionable and meaningful recommendations. Real-time monitoring, data science, and integrated efforts across disciplines are key for progress.
