The future direction of personalised nutrition: my diet, my phenotype, my genes

Abstract

Although personalised nutrition is frequently considered in the context of diet–gene interactions, increasingly, personalised nutrition is seen to exist at three levels. The first is personalised dietary advice using Internet-delivered services, which ultimately will become automated and which will also draw on mobile phone technology. The second level of personalised dietary advice will include phenotypic information on anthropometry, physical activity, clinical parameters and biochemical markers of nutritional status. It remains possible that in addition to personalised dietary advice based on phenotypic data, advice at that group or metabotype level may be offered where metabotypes are defined by a common metabolic profile. The third level of personalised nutrition will involve the use of genomic data. While the genomic aspect of personalised nutrition is often considered as its main driver, there are significant challenges to translation of data on SNP and diet into personalised advice. The majority of the published data on SNP and diet emanate from observational studies and as such do not offer any cause–effect associations. To achieve this, purpose-designed dietary intervention studies will be needed with subjects recruited according to their genotype. Extensive research indicates that consumers would welcome personalised dietary advice including dietary advice based on their genotype. Unlike personalised medicine where genotype data are linked to the risk of developing a disease, in personalised nutrition the genetic data relate to the optimal diet for a given genotype to reduce disease risk factors and thus there are few ethical and legal issues in personalised nutrition.