300: Personalised nutrition - looking at the impact of different interventions

Food Matters Live Podcast

Personalised nutrition has been making headlines for some time, but how much impact do different types of interventions have, and which work best?

Science has now advanced to a point where it can look deep inside us as individuals and calculate individual nutrition and health needs.

As a result, the personalised nutrition sector is rapidly expanding. But among the hundreds of apps and advisors out there, reliable research about the effectiveness of these tools isn’t easy to find.

The health advice may be personal, the question is: Will it work? And will any lifestyle changes stick around long-term?

This where the Preventomics Programme comes in. It has been gathering evidence on the effectiveness of different approaches to personalised nutrition, and analysing their worth.

It is a huge bit of research, looking at the potential of omics sciences, especially metabolomics, and changes in habits as drivers of development.

Participants were given personalised plans for nutrition and lifestyle habits to improve their health, based on the individual, such as physical and behavioural traits, lifestyle, genotype, preferences and physical condition.

There were three scenarios:

• Personalised recommendations at the point of sale with products suggested to be added to the basket beneficial for the users.
• Personalised delivery food service responding to the nutritional user’s profile, preferences and physical and behavioural traits.
• Personalised nutritional advice by nutritionists for subjects with abdominal obesity through a software and mobile app.

Listen to the full episode to find out what was learned and how it might impact the personalised nutrition sector in the future.

Josep Maria del Bas, Senior researcher in the Nutrition and Health Department, Eurocat

Josep Maria del Bas has degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry and holds a PhD in Nutrition and Metabolism from Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona.

He has focused his professional career on the study of molecular mechanisms involved in the interaction between nutrition and health.

His current duties at Eurecat include coordinating multidisciplinary teams dedicated to researching the health effects of food and pharmaceutical products.