05/11/2021
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Berry S. Precision Nutrition – Fact or Fiction? Presented at: ObesityWeek; 1-5 November 2021 (virtual meeting).
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Berry reports that he has received consulting fees from ZOE Global.
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Advances in big data capture and multi-omics technology can provide the depth and precision needed to better determine individual responses to food so researchers can personalize diets for optimal success, according to a spokesperson.
The transition from population-based dietary guidelines to so-called precision nutrition is challenging because of the complexity of foods and individual human responses to foods, which are very different. Sarah Berry, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Nutritional Science at King’s College London said during a virtual presentation at ObesityWeek’s annual meeting. New technologies that use genomic, metabolomic, metagenomic, and meal-related information to predict individual metabolic responses to food can help researchers untangle the tremendous variability observed between people, Berry said.
Berry is one Associate Professor in the Nutritional Science Department at King’s College London.
“We all react differently to food – what we eat, how we eat and who we are shapes those responses,” Berry told Healio. “The small contribution that genetics makes to most of us in shaping our responses to food, and the relative influence of easily modifiable factors, may come as a surprise to some; however, the basic principles of healthy eating still apply to everyone. Eat less processed foods, more high fiber foods, a wider variety of unprocessed plant foods, and enjoy your meal. “
Berry said a paradigm shift is taking place in nutrition research and its conduct thanks to the development of digital devices such as continuous glucose monitoring, the introduction of DNA and microbiome testing at home, and the advent of citizen science.
“By collecting this data, using remote and novel technologies, and sharing with nutritionists, we in nutrition research can fast-forward to the kind of data we need to make precision nutrition a reality.”
Berry is partnering with leading scientists for the PREDICT program, a series of studies aimed at predicting personalized food responses based on individual traits such as the composition of the gut microbiome. PREDICT is the largest ongoing nutritional research program.
For the PREDICT 1 study, researchers analyzed postprandial metabolic responses in a controlled clinical setting and during a two-week period at home in 1,002 twins and unrelated healthy adults in the UK and 100 people in the US study, participants ate standardized meals, wore CGMs and activity trackers and provided blood samples while using a study app. Nutritionists monitored data in real time. In-depth clinical tests were also conducted that included deep phenotyping on an unprecedented scale and depth, Berry said.
“We were able to use this huge amount of data to find out how much variability there is in food and what factors determine that variability,” said Berry.
In the results published in Nature Medicine in October 2020, the researchers reported large inter-individual variability in postprandial responses to triglyceride levels (103%), glucose (68%), and insulin (59%) after identical meals. Person-specific factors such as the gut microbiome had a greater influence (7.1% of the variance) than the macronutrients in meals (3.6%) for postprandial lipemia, but not for postprandial glycemia (6% and 15.4%, respectively).
“This is important because for precision nutrition to be valuable, we have to look between, but also within, the individual,” said Berry, also the senior nutritionist of the PREDICT program. “Because we dosed all of our test meals in duplicate, we were able to study the intra-individual variability and we found that it is much less than the inter-individual variability.”
Data showed that genetic variants had only a modest impact on predictions, Berry said. Instead, a combination of determinants, including food type, time and order of eating, exercise and sleep habits, and factors such as age and gender, influence responses to nutritional outcomes.
“Our research has shown that how we react to food is unique to everyone,” said Berry. “We have to look at these multiple factors in order to turn precise nutritional values into facts and not just fictions.”
Reference:
Berry SE et al. Nat. Med. 2021; doi: 10.1038 / s41591-020-0934-0.
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