Challenges in Personalized Nutrition and Health

Personalized nutrition and approaches employed Personalized nutrition refers to tailored nutritional recommendations aimed at the promotion, maintenance of health and prevention against diseases (1). These recommendations take into account differential responses to certain individualized food-derived nutrients that arise due to the interaction between nutrients and biological processes (2). These include the interactions between internal factors such as genetics, microbiome, metabolome interactions as well as external factors such as dietary habits and physical activity (3). In contrast to precision medicine defined by the Precision Medicine Initiative (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/node/333101) as an approach toward the treatment and prevention of disease for an individual, the goal of personalized nutrition is to promote the health and well-being through diet. A balanced diet promotes good health as it provides adequate amounts of energy, proteins, vitamins, minerals, essential fats, micro, and macronutrients for the metabolic needs of the body to function properly at each stage of the lifespan. The absence of balanced food and nutrition security leads to health problems such as diabetes, obesity, and malnutrition (4). Although, the importance of nutrition and beneficial effects of food are well established, the mechanisms underlying their role in disease prevention or health benefits are incompletely understood (5, 6). Further, there exists an inter-individual response to dietary intervention due to which a sub population may benefit more than others. This underlying variability can be attributed to genetics, age, gender, lifestyle, environmental exposure, gut microbiome, epigenetics, metabolism nutrition derived from diet, and foods. The inter-individual variability to treatments and nutritional recommendations is largely reflected in biomarker values (7). Reductionist approaches fail to demonstrate how the cellular and molecular responses due to food produce health benefits (6). Current approaches used to study the inter-individual response to diet include–omics technologies such as genomics, metabolomics, proteomics integrated with the systems biology programs. These approaches are focused on integrating and analyzing complex datasets generated during dietary intervention association studies (3, 8, 9). Systems biology approaches are impacting the field of nutrition (10–12) and immunology (13), however, significant challenges still remain in the translation and application of these advances to human studies (9). A comprehensive systems-wide mechanistic understanding of the interplay between nutrition and health benefits requires the knowledge of network dynamics in the context of health, pre-disease, and disease states. This requirement gives rise to the demand for new approaches and methods that could not only quantify the effects of dietary interventions in healthy individuals but also facilitate comparison to diseased patients (6).