I KNEW A GUY IN COLLEGE WHO COULD consume heaping bowls of ice cream without any discernable effect on his six-pack abs. I’ve been wondering ever since why my body doesn’t respond that way to my favorite dessert—or, for that matter, if I’ll ever find one that I won’t regret the next day when I step on the scale. Recent advances in nutrition science now are edging closer to delivering on my dream of dessert with impunity—and a lot of other health benefits, besides.
It’s long been obvious, to scientists and lay people alike, that each person responds differently to a given food or diet regimen. For years, scientists have tried to figure out how to accommodate these idiosyncrasies in a way that improves health and avoids common ailments such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes—and, for better or worse, helps people lose weight.
After years of trying to find genes that might account for individual differences, scientists have come to realize that genes alone cannot explain the human body’s relationship to food in all its complexity. Diet and health involve genes and many other factors besides, including sleep, exercise, stress and other lifestyle matters. One of the biggest factors—perhaps the biggest—is the community of trillions of individual microorganisms that live in each person’s gut, called the microbiome.
This news is good because, while you can’t change your genes, you can cultivate healthy gut bacteria, change the timing of meals and adjust diet and lifestyle factors to optimize metabolic health.
It would also be a data nightmare, if it weren’t for recent advances in artificial intelligence—in particular, a type of AI called machine learning, which can recognize patterns in mind-boggling amounts of data. AI can digest all the measurements required to assess the state of each individual’s health and use them to generate helpful insights, including predictions about how food choices impact wellness and risk for disease.
The goal of this science is to arrive at a long-promised era of personalized nutrition, with potentially profound effects on human health. Last year, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced plans to dole out more than $170 million in research grants to speed the development of new algorithms that predict individual responses to food and dietary routines. The agency is gearing up to recruit and enroll 10,000 Americans in a study that will track their daily diets, feed some of them special diets selected by researchers, carefully track individual responses and then use some of these algorithms to analyze them. The study will take into account an individual’s
