Biology | Personalised Nutrition The Next Fad Diet Or Something More?

The Past & Present Of What We Eat

In the days of yore, when subsistence farming was the norm, our ancestors lived by a simple philosophy: eat as much as you could whenever you could. Fast-forwarding through a millennium of agricultural revolutions and technologies, we find ourselves born in a time where food security and availability aren’t pressing issues – at least in the developed world.

However, you’ll still find pockets of tradition that hark back to those times of desperation and barbarity. Places such as France, where choosing to eat snails, frogs, intestines, and offal isn’t abnormal.

With what we eat being an evolutionary process, you might be wondering what's next. Well, the answer may lie inside of you, specifically in your genetics.

Could We Science Our Way Out Of Obesity? 

Personalised nutrition is a relatively new approach that has garnered a lot of attention as of late. It aims to solve the modern problems associated with our high consumption of nutritionally poor-quality food – the ultra-processed food problem. 

You see, western agrarian policy and technology have left us so well-fed that 1 in 8 people globally are obese. That figure rises significantly when zooming in on developed countries such as the UK, where government figures are around 64%.

The broad concept of personalised nutrition is to use an individual's genetic profile to tailor dietary plans based on their bodily requirements. This should, in theory, help healthcare professionals and patients manage existing chronic diseases and improve clinical outcomes. 

It's hoped this approach will improve on existing diet structures that don’t factor in genetic influences on the dietary metabolism of specific nutrients, or how gut microbiota can be leveraged.

Now, the jury is still out on how effective it really is. A lot of research still needs to be done, but the concept has shown some promise in managing and preventing type 2 diabetes.

Personalised Nutrition: When Are We Likely To See It

As promising as the preliminary research may seem, there are two key hurdles that need to be overcome for the science to progress.

The first is a lack of raw data in the form of genetic profiles, which are rightly subject to stringent privacy controls. And that’s very unlikely to change for a number of reasons, such as health insurance discrimination or advertisers using the data to target individuals with specific genetic components. For instance, imagine the harm that could be caused by companies identifying individuals with a genetic propensity for addictive behaviour and bombarding them with advertisements for alcohol and gambling.

Now, there is a way to perform this research whilst limiting these risks, at least in the UK where healthcare is government-funded. The NHS could ask citizens to donate their DNA to advance healthcare and treatments with the assurances of a publicly accountable oversight body.

This has already happened on a smaller scale. The 100,000 Genomes Project under the NHS collected and sequenced over 100,000 samples between 2012-2018. Shortly after the project reached its goal, the then-government announced its aim to increase its sample size to a million over the next five years; although that timeline has likely been revised as a result of the pandemic.

But even a couple million complete profiles wouldn’t be enough. The volume of data required would be on a national or even a generational scale.

This leads to the second hurdle that needs to be overcome: economic viability. The development of this and similar technologies is expensive, time-consuming, requires specialised professionals, and high amounts of computational power to analyse the massive amounts of genetic data. If the financial returns are negligible, there will be little appetite for governments to proceed.

There is a way around this problem, and that's to collectivise the research. This was done to some degree in the 100,000 Genomes Project, where researchers trying to better diagnose cancer and genetic diseases collaborated.

In the future, government-backed research projects could continue this approach, sharing this genomic database to focus on other conditions that impact the NHS, such as obesity, diabetes, and addictive propensities in terms of drugs and alcohol. With multiple research projects utilising the same data set, economies of scale would come into play, and suddenly the research becomes viable.

Citations: