Challenges in Personalized Nutrition and Health
Authors
Meghna Verma, Raquel Hontecillas, Nuria Tubau-Juni, Vida Abedi and Josep Bassaganya-Riera
Abstract
Personalised nutrition takes into account the differential responses to certain nutrients present in food that arise from the interaction between these and biological processes. Currently, the strategy used to study the interindividual response (of a subpopulation) to diet includes omics technologies integrated with systems biology programs. However, there are still many challenges in relation to the application of these advances and it is necessary to develop new approaches that allow not only to quantify the effects of dietary interventions in healthy individuals, but also to compare them with sick patients.
Importance of the article for the Red Tecnomifood
The article states that the main challenges for personalized nutrition are: (1) limiting reductionist approaches and adopting advanced technologies for comprehensive data analysis, (2) need for computational infrastructure, (3) data standardization and training of researchers , (4) scarcity or lack of data and need for better imputation methods. The Tecnomifood Network works on these 4 challenges in order to establish a prediction system that allows calculating the effect of an ingredient / food in promoting health and better disease management.