Page 47 - FoodFocusThailand No.163 October 2019

STRATEGIC R&D

Strengths of Personalized Personalized nutrition, therefore, is the aspect of food and health that gain a lot of
Nutrition attention. However, personalized nutrition requires substantiation with scientific evidence
• Interindividual variation in in these 2 areas. Firstly, the well-designed randomized controlled trials enrolling participants
response to dietary factors is a real based on pre-selected genotypes. This research needs expertise from different disciplines,
phenomenon. such as, behavioral psychologists, computer scientists, biomedical scientists and
• Some studies have shown that nutritionists. Secondly, study in terms of “omics” is needed. Omics study will provide
personalized nutrition results in greater greater mechanistic information, for example, epigenomics, metabolomics, and
improvement in diet than traditional microbiomics.
nutritional approach. However, not only personalized nutrition may reduce all the risks for diseases and
• Personalized nutrition may foster support to have good health but also other factors contribute to that. This is due to the
sustained change in behavior. complexity of body.
• The personalized nutrition
approach or precision medicine will
drive scientific developments beneficial
for personalize nutrition and therefore
public health.
Weaknesses of Personalized
Nutrition
• Scientific evidence for
personalized nutrition is mostly based
on observational studies with low
reproducibility.
• The theoretical basis for
personalized nu tritio n is
underdeveloped.
• The persistence over time and
heritability of interindividual differences
in response to dietary factors are
mostly unknown.
• There are few well-designed
randomized controlled trials that
demonstrate the efficacy and safety of
personalized nutrition.
• Most commercial offerings in the
personalized nutrition are based on
direct to consumer tests that are
unregulated and have limited public
evidence.

OCT 2019 FOOD FOCUS THAILAND 47

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