Giving Compass' Take:

• Professor Lorraine Brennan from the University College Dublin in Ireland, who is working to make a tool that helps personalize nutritional dietary plans. 

• How will this help individuals understand their health and influence more positive eating behaviors? 

• Read more about the promise of personalized medicine. 

Six of the seven major risk factors for premature death — high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity and excess body weight, inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption, physical inactivity and alcohol abuse — are linked to the way we eat, drink and exercise, according to Eurostat.

‘In recent years, we are realizing that people respond to food intake in different ways,’ said Professor Lorraine Brennan from the University College Dublin in Ireland. ‘As a result, it is clear that we need to move from one-size-fits-all dietary recommendations to more personalized recommendations.’

Together with her team, she aims to develop a new tool that will accurately assess dietary intake and classify individuals into dietary patterns, or nutritypes. It’s important to know what a person ate, as this will tell you whether their diet was a factor in how long they lived or whether they fell ill, explains Prof. Brennan. By combining all the different biomarkers found in an individual, the researchers can then classify someone as having a healthy or non-healthy dietary pattern, as a whole, and help them specifically modify their diets on a personal level.

Dr. Riekelt Houtkooper from the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is looking at how the combination of genes and diet contributes to the ageing process, as part of a project called MetaFlex.

‘If we know a certain gene is involved, we can identify which drugs can interfere with that particular protein (encoded by the gene) or that particular pathway and then we can externally interfere with that particular aspect of your body. Theoretically, this even opens up the opportunity for big burger companies to mash those kinds of molecules into their burgers and basically cancel out all the harmful effects of bad diets,’ said Dr. Houtkooper.

Read the full article about personalized nutrition at The Naked Scientist.