No two people have exactly the same health needs. This is why the personalized nutrition industry was developed, with the aim of creating tailor-made diets that, in a number of ways, fit the individual like a glove.
However, is it really possible to personalize a diet? How can it be done?
Research into individual differences
“There is no such thing as a universally healthy diet,” said Markus Stripf, co-founder of personalized nutrition search engine Spoon Guru, at FoodNavigator’s Positive Nutrition Digital Summit last month. Every individual is different.
For example, he suggested, “we all have completely unique microbiomes. Even identical twins don’t have the same microbiome.”
“I think it is important to recognize that there are many inter-individual differences in the way people, individuals respond to a food product or a diet,” says Marjolijn Bragt, program leader for nutrition and health at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research.
At Wageningen Food & Biobased Research, Bragt said, various research directions have been pursued to determine individual differences when it comes to how consumers respond to food and nutrition.
“We conduct research into how people digest and absorb plant proteins; and what we see is that some individuals are very capable of digesting a protein, while other consumers cannot, when it comes to the same protein.”
“I think genetics does indeed play an important role. For example, you can think of genetics that can influence the abundance or activity of certain digestive enzymes in the intestines. The effect of other factors should not be underestimated, such as age, gender, the background diet a consumer already consumes, the level of physical activity in your microbiome.”
Melissa Snover, CEO and founder of 3D printed gum brand Nourished, uses an algorithm to examine individual differences in nutritional needs to determine which nutrients Nourished customers need. This algorithm has revealed the full extent of how extensive a variety of nutritional needs can be.
“Right now we’re focusing on wearable technology, which automatically enters data, and phenotyping questionnaires, which give us information on the two really biggest topics we can support on day one. [These] his lifestyle – so what happens every day that supplementation and nutrition can support or counteract the negative effects – and ‘what are your goals?’
Timo Spring, CEO and founder of the AI-based personal nutrition advice platform Prevess, emphasized the importance of precision. “We always start with a small digital health twin of the person. From this point we must define the health goal; Because even if we identify certain challenges in the body, an imbalance in terms of nutrients or the gut microbiome, this can sometimes be a discrepancy with the health of the person.
“That has to be aligned somehow. We are currently creating what we call health protocols, and these health protocols are the starting point. They bring the health goal at the end. By figuring it out based on the latest science and providing regular feedback and retesting, even if we have information supported by scientific articles, we can really understand it, on one level, if it really is. [working]”.
Responding to individual differences
Once you figure out a consumer’s individual health needs, the process has only just begun. Meeting individual health needs is a complex process.
“It can get very complicated,” says Stripf, whose search platform Spoon Guru aims to help consumers find the right products to meet their nutritional needs.
“You may have a health problem that you need to deal with, but you may also have specific preferences. If you extend this to a household, you can encounter very concrete problems. The challenge is: how can you deal with different dietary requirements and make it easy?
“For example, my household: I don’t eat meat, my wife has some food intolerances. For example, it is very difficult for a retailer to respond to that specific need and provide a personalized experience that allows us to find exactly the right foods for our needs. But what we fundamentally need to do is find a balance between dietary preferences and health needs.
“We believe technology can play an important role by effectively being a digital enabler to help people achieve better health outcomes through greater transparency, more advanced discovery experiences and better profiling to truly understand what the individual needs.”
Giving consumers what they want goes beyond just food, according to Prevess’s Spring. Consumers also want convenience, and without this personalized nutrition is much less likely. “I think this is the challenge to find a solution that fits so smoothly with the people that I would say it makes the recommendation more convenient.”
Generative AI, which Spring’s platform uses, is able to process data in a much more efficient way than any human, allowing the platform to provide this convenience. “I think it’s important to take this technology and make it very practical,” he said.
Nourished’s Snover highlights the versatility that 3D printing enables as a way to provide consumers with nutrition that is almost unique. The technology “makes it possible to combine seven of 39 different potential nutrients. Then you can also adjust the taste.
“So basically we can make billions of different products and each print is a unique product and we never make the same product twice.
“We’ve done it for hundreds of thousands of people now, and less than a hundred times there has been an exact copy of a product for two customers. So it’s super interesting to see that happen when the algorithm decides this.”
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