Personalised nutrition: What’s the latest?

Each of us differs from others in obvious physical attributes such as gender, age and body size but also in respect of our individual responses to foods and nutrients. Until recently, those setting dietary requirements have addressed this problem of inter-individual variability by taking a probabilistic approach and e.g. estimating the amounts of energy and nutrients that will meet the needs of 97.5% of the population (Reference Nutrient Intakes). With today’s focus on personalised, or precision, nutrition the ambition is to harness understanding of the factors that contribute to inter-individual variation in responses to diet and to develop targeted nutritional advice, products or services that may differ for each individual and that delivers individualised benefit.

What will I learn?

• You will understand the rationale for personalised, or precision, nutrition and will include the biological factors such as genotype and gut microbiome that contribute to the inter-individual variation in responses to foods and nutrients.
• Understand why personalised, or precision, nutrition approaches have potential to make an important contribution to improving eating behaviours at a population level, to improve public health and to address health inequity.
• Understand how to meet those societal goals, and how research on personalised, or precision, nutrition will need to become much more inter-disciplinary and to include consideration of psychological and sociological factors as well as the more obvious biological factors.
• Gain insight into the research that aims to build the necessary evidence base for personalised, and precision nutrition. Such research is being undertaken in parallel with, and to some extent in isolation from, commercialisation of personalised, and precision, nutrition concepts. This marketplace has developed without regulatory oversight, defined standards or specific mechanisms for consumer protection, and consequently, there is uncertainty about their utility in improving dietary choices and, ultimately, health.