Research to consider nutritional guidance unique to you

They say the best meals are made from the heart, not from a recipe book. But this USDA kitchen has none of this, not even a little bit. Here, a nutritionist wearing a white coat meticulously weighs all ingredients down to the tenth of a gram.

Sherin Stover is expected to eat every bit of her pizza. Any small morsel she misses returns to the kitchen, where it is scrutinized like evidence of a dietary crime.

Ms. Stover (participant #8180 as she goes by) is one of approximately 10,000 volunteers who have signed up for the $170 million nutrition study conducted by the National Institutes of Health. “Not many people get to engage in research that impacts a lot of people at the age of 78, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.

It’s called “Precision Health Research for Nutrition.” “When we tell people about this study, the response is usually, ‘Wow, that’s great, can we do this?'” says coordinator Holly Nicatoro.

She explained what exactly “precision” means: “Precision nutrition means personalized nutrition and dietary guidance.”

Governments have long provided guidelines for improving our diets. In the 1940s there was a “Basic 7”. In the 50’s it was “Basic 4”. So far we’ve had ‘Food Wheel’, ‘Food Pyramid’ and now ‘My Plate’.

They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages, and they’re all what works best for most people most of the time. But Nicastro says there’s no best way to eat. “We know from almost every nutritional study ever conducted that there are internal individual differences,” she says. “That means some people respond and some people don’t. There’s no one size fits all.”

Like Stover, the study’s participants were all drawn from another NIH research program called All Of Us. The program is a massive undertaking that will create a database of at least 1 million people volunteering everything from electronic health records to DNA. Stover discovered through All of Us research that she carries a gene that makes certain foods taste bitter. This may explain why she eats certain types of food more than others.

Sai Das, a professor at Tufts University who is overseeing the study, says the goal of precision nutrition is to dig deeper into these individual differences. “We’ve gone from just saying, “Let’s do this to everyone,” to “Okay, if you have X, Y, and Z characteristics, you’re more likely to respond to diet, and other “We’re starting to be able to say, ‘People are more likely to respond to diet.’ Traits A, B, and C respond differently to diet,” Das said.

For Stover, this is a huge obligation. He is one of 150 people who are paid to live for six weeks, or two weeks at a time, at several testing sites across the country. It’s so precise that I can’t even go for a walk without a companion, including food. “Well, I could stop and buy some candy…but I can’t do that!” she laughed.

While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, body fat percentage, bone mineral content, to the microbes in her gut (which are digested by a machine that is essentially a smart toilet paper reader). Everything is being analyzed and how her symptoms could be different. From other people.

“We really think that what’s going on in your poop can tell us a lot about your health and how you react to food,” Nicastro said.

Stover says he doesn’t pay attention to anything other than the strange noises the machine makes. She is a live-in participant, but thousands of others are participating from their homes, with electronic wearables tracking all sorts of health data. That includes special glasses that record everything you eat, which activates when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only what food the person is eating, but also how many calories are being consumed.

This study is expected to be completed by 2027, and thanks to it we will not only be able to eat more fruits and vegetables, but we will actually know what food combinations are best for us. Maybe. Can you ask me the questions that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer? “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” she says. “We can customize interventions all day long, but one of my hypotheses is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, that person will be more likely to follow it. Because this is for me and designed for me.”

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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givenish.

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