everything was called: The Poop about stool sample tests and personalized nutrition
Changing your diet to improve your health is nothing new – people with diabetes, obesity, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, food allergies, and many other conditions have long had this as part of their treatment. But new and sophisticated insights into biochemistry, nutrition, and artificial intelligence have given people more tools to figure out what to eat for good health, which has sparked a boom in personalized nutrition.
Personalized nutrition, often used interchangeably with the terms “precision nutrition” or “individualized nutrition”, is an emerging branch of science that uses machine learning and “omics” technologies (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) to analyze what people eat , and predict how they will react to food. Scientists, nutritionists, and healthcare professionals ingest, analyze, and use the data for a variety of purposes, including identifying diet and lifestyle interventions to treat disease, promote health, and improve performance in elite athletes.
It is increasingly being used by companies to sell products and services such as nutritional supplements, apps that use machine learning to create a nutritional analysis of a meal based on a photo, and stool sample tests, the results of which are used to create tailored dietary recommendations, promises gas, Combat brain fog and a host of other diseases.
“Nutrition is the most powerful lever for our health,” said Mike Stroka, CEO of the American Nutrition Association (ANA), the professional organization whose mandate includes certifying nutritionists and educating the public about science-based nutrition for health care professionals. “Personalized nutrition is getting bigger.”
In 2019, personalized nutrition was a $ 3.7 billion industry, according to ResearchandMarkets.Com. It is expected to be worth $ 16.6 billion by 2027. Factors driving this growth include consumer demand, the falling cost of new technology, greater ability to provide information, and increasing evidence that there is no consistent diet.
Sequencing of the human genome, which began in 1990 and completed 13 years later, paved the way for scientists to find links between diet and genetics more easily and accurately.
When the term “personalized nutrition” first appeared in the scientific literature in 1999, the focus was on the use of computers to educate people about their nutritional needs. It wasn’t until 2004 that scientists began to think about how genes affect how and what we eat and how our bodies react to them. Take coffee for example: some people metabolize caffeine and the other nutrients in coffee in a productive and healthy way. Others don’t. Which camp you fall into will depend on a variety of factors, including your genetics, age, environment, gender, and lifestyle.
More recently, researchers have been studying links between gut microbiome health and conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and depression. The gut microbiome, the body’s least known organ, is made up of more than 1,000 types of bacteria and other microbes. Weighing almost a pound, it produces hormones, digests food the stomach can’t, and sends thousands of different diet-derived chemicals through our bodies every day. The microbiome is key to understanding nutrition in many ways and the foundation for the growth of personalized nutrition.
Blood, urine, DNA, and stool tests are part of the personalized nutritional toolkit that researchers, nutritionists, and healthcare professionals use to measure the gut microbiome and the chemicals (known as metabolites) it produces. They use this data, sometimes in conjunction with self-reported data collected through surveys or interviews, as a basis for nutritional advice.