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Personalized diets may alleviate elevated glucose levels
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Elevated postprandial blood glucose and its metabolic consequences may successfully be modified by personalized diets, according to recent study findings published in Cell.
Further, researchers said the glycemic index, a previously developed standard, for any given food is not a set value and depends on the person.
“Using a huge 800-people cohort, we devised a predictor for a person’s postprandial glycemic response to untested food by taking into account their health state, medical history, lifestyle and microbiome,” Eran Elinav, MD, PhD, and Eran Segal, PhD, both of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told Endocrine Today. “We validated this predictor on 100 unseen people with very good results, and then used it to construct diets that lowered postprandial glycemic response to food.”
Eran Elinav
Elinav, Segal and colleagues evaluated 800 people aged 18 to 70 years without previously diagnosed type 2 diabetes to determine whether personalized nutrition can help people identify the foods that affect their health goals. Researchers compiled data on body measurements, blood tests, glucose monitoring and stool samples and equipped participants with a mobile app to report lifestyle and food intake (46,898 meals were measured).
An algorithm was generated for predicting individualized responses to foods using lifestyle, medical background and the composition and function of the person’s microbiome.
The algorithm was further tested in a follow-up study of 100 volunteers and successfully predicted individual blood glucose responses to different foods. Blood glucose levels were affected differently by the same foods in different people and depended on lifestyle factors (eg, whether the food was consumed before exercise or sleep).
Eran Segal
In the final stage of the study, researchers developed a dietary intervention based on the algorithm to test the ability of making personalized dietary recommendations to lower blood glucose levels in response to food. Participants were assigned to a “good” diet for 1 week and a “bad” diet for another. Consistent changes in gut microbes were found with the good diets, suggesting an individual’s microbiome may be influenced by a personalized diet.
“For many years, our thinking has been that people develop obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases because they are not compliant with our dietary advice,” Elinav and Segal told Endocrine Today. “However, based on our study, another possibility is that people are, in fact, compliant but that the dietary advice that we are giving them is inappropriate. Thus, while the extensive profiling that each of our study participants underwent is not yet available to the general public, we believe that a take-home message for people from our work is that if a diet did not work for you, it may be the diet’s fault and not your fault.” – by Amber Cox
Disclosure: Elinav and Segal report no relevant financial disclosures.
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