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Personalized Nutrition Better Than 'One-Size-Fits-All' Approach

People receiving personalized nutrition advice develop more healthful eating habits including consuming less red meat and reducing their salt intake, a study has found.

A website also has been shown to be effective at helping people make important changes to their eating patterns.

Publishing in the International Journal of Epidemiology, the pan-European study, led by Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, surprisingly found there was no evidence that personalization based on more complex information made any difference to the outcome.

The "Personalized Nutrition" Approach
The "personalized nutrition" approach is based on the idea that by "individualizing" advice and support, each of us can, and will be motivated to, make the dietary changes necessary for our individual needs.

Instead of providing generic advice such as "Eat at least five portions of fruits and vegetables daily," or "Eat two portions of fish, one of which is oily fish, per week," a personalized nutrition approach uses information to derive specific advice and support relevant for the individual.

Professor John Mathers, director of the Human Nutrition Research Centre at Newcastle University, and lead of the intervention study, explains: "Many of us know that we could improve our health and wellbeing if we eat better; however, we find it really difficult to change our eating habits and to maintain those improved eating patterns.

"In this study, we found that personalized nutrition advice helped people to make bigger and more appropriate changes to their diets than the conventional healthy eating advice which was followed by our control group."

Three Food Goals
To help them focus on the aspects of their individual diets that most need change, each participant was given three personalized food-based goals. For example, an individual might be recommended to choose whole grain versions of breads and breakfast cereals to increase their intakes of dietary fiber. Another might be advised to reduce, or even avoid, specific high-fat dairy products to lower their intakes of saturated fats.

Mathers adds, "Six months after they started, those participants in the personalized nutrition groups had improved their eating patterns significantly more than those in the control group. They were eating a healthier diet overall including less red meat, saturated fat, and salt and were eating significantly more of the B vitamin folate, found in vegetables and fruits.

"The important message is that, compared with the control group, the personalized nutrition groups had about double the improvement in overall healthiness of their diets measured using the Healthy Eating Index. We would expect this to translate, eventually, to bigger improvements in health and well-being."

Web Success
The study, called Food4Me, was innovative in that participants were recruited online and then reported their dietary and other data via the web. Participants collected their own blood samples using kits provided.

In the study, 1,607 adults across seven European countries joined through the Food4Me website and were randomized to one of four treatment groups. In addition to a control group that was given conventional dietary advice, participants were allocated to one of the following three different personalized nutrition options:

• personalized nutrition based on analysis of current diet;
• personalized nutrition based on diet and phenotype (adiposity and blood markers); or
• personalized nutrition based on diet, phenotype, and genotype (five genes were examined for which there was strong evidence of diet-gene interactions and the opportunity to tailor dietary advice based on genotype).

At the end of six months, 79% of the participants completed the study successfully, and the researchers discovered that those randomized to the personalized nutrition treatment groups had significantly greater improvements in their eating patterns than those randomized to the control group. To their surprise, the researchers found that there was no evidence that the different bases for personalization made any difference to the outcome.

Reaching Out
Mathers says the Food4Me intervention study provides proof of principle for an approach that could have much greater public health benefits.

He adds, "What is exciting about this study is that we now know that the internet can be used to deliver personalized nutrition advice to large numbers of people. People find this approach convenient, and it's better at improving people's diets than the conventional 'one-size-fits-all' approach.

"People were able to use the internet to upload relevant information about themselves and about their current eating patterns, which was then used to work out the personalized advice relevant to each participant.

"Importantly, they stayed with the intervention for the six months of the study so that the research team could find out if the dietary changes made were being sustained. Taken together, the evidence suggests that this approach could be scaled up to help much larger numbers of people chose healthier eating patterns, and this could be a valuable tool for improving public health."

— Source: Newcastle University