If you live in the 21st century, healthy eating is everything, so knowing exactly which foods will nourish your body and keep you fit feels as if it may be a superpower. Personalised nutrition could work out which particular foods are ideal for you, tailored to your specific genetic makeup. The idea is that this may improve your levels of fitness, as well as your general level of health. For health enthusiasts, fitness instructors or nutritionists, this is great.
Introduction to Personalized Nutrition
Picture the ability to decode your nutritional profile from your very DNA. Seems like the stuff of science fiction, but this is the promise of contemporary personalised nutrition: the potential to create a tailored nutritional programme based on your personal genetic profile. The rationale underlying personalised nutrition is undoubtedly convincing: the so-called one-size-fits-all diet is no longer seen as the holy grail, and people can see dietary improvements by using technological information about their genetic codes.
The concept of tailoring food to suit an individual stems from nutrigenomics which looks at a combination of biological, environmental and genetic factors surrounding nutrition and their influence on health. By looking at certain genetic markers, nutritionists can recommend a plan that fits with a person’s own predispositions – and that might mean the difference between a generic run-of-the-mill diet plan, or a meal plan that’s tailor-made to enhance your vitality, and prevent disease to boot. For health and fitness enthusiasts, this could be the start of a nutritional (and even fitness) revolution.
The blog will describe a new emerging science of personalised nutrition and its revolutionary application to your dietary habits, and detail exactly how the science of DNA testing works and how it can benefit you. You can learn what the benefits are, read about the success stories from real-world practitioners, and find answers to the main questions of how to begin taking advantage of the science of personalised nutrition. By the end of the blog, you’ll also have a glimpse into the immediate future trends that can take personalised nutrition to the next level. This blog is ideal for nutrition and fitness experts who want to expand their knowledge, and food industry professionals in search of the next big thing. Enjoy!
Understanding DNA Testing for Nutrition
DNA testing for nutrition makes a personalised approach to diet seem like a real possibility Our DNA is first tested – often all you have to do is send back a tube of saliva – and then the DNA results are scanned for variations in genes that might affect your metabolism, nutrient absorption and/or your risk of certain diseases.
And the science that underpins the testing is built on genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, that could give important signals about how your body transforms one nutrient into another, creating metabolic pathways, and about what you should eat based on your own genetic makeup. Maybe you possess a SNP that slows down the process of caffeine metabolism, so you can go without that morning jolt; or you have a mark that shows you need more omega-3 fatty acids and less saturated fat than the average Joe. If that’s the case, your nutritionist can tailor a diet to your DNA.
Precision is one of the major features of DNA-based nutrition advice … DNA testing studies have a growing amount of data to build on, and gene-sequencing technology is getting better all the time, making DNA results increasingly useful in tailoring useful dietary advice.The next sentence is important: but genes are just part of the picture. While our genes set out or presumably control the basic plan, other factors such as environment and physical activity do the real work. Put another way, DNA testing is just a part of the overall picture for personalised health.
The Benefits of Personalized Nutrition
One of the most compelling benefits of personalised nutrition is that it facilitates the provision of tailored dietary recommendations based on your individual, genetically unique profile. For any discerning health enthusiast, this means that it becomes obsolete for you to follow ‘one-size-fits-all’ diet regimens in favour of more precisely targeted advice that sensitively responds to your body’s specific needs and weaknesses. This can allow you to achieve greater body weight management success, burn more energy and feel better over the long-term.
For personal trainers and other fitness professionals, personalised nutrition can be a valuable tool for improving your clients’ performance and rate of recovery. For example, knowing which genes are important in helping to generate and use muscle protein synthesis would allow fitness professionals to help their clients establish the most appropriate diets to maximise muscle building and repair. And utilising personalised nutrition to detect food sensitivities has potential to eliminate unnecessary inflammation and promote optimal health.
And for nutritionists: they, too, can benefit by using DNA information for truly personalised nutrition, designing dietary plans that are more nuanced and effective, thus helping them to improve client satisfaction and increase their own success rates. The possibility to customise dietary recommendations in light of genetic predispositions goes beyond the simple aid it confers on the nutritionist: it empowers clients in their food choices.
Real-Life Success Stories
Success stories tell of people dramatically improving their lives via personalised nutrition There are many anecdotal reports supporting the effectiveness of PN. Consider Sarah, who was a fitness enthusiast years ago but used to have trouble maintaining her weight despite exercising daily and eating a healthy diet. After she took a DNA test herself, she learned that she didn’t digest carbohydrates efficiently and, after tweaking her diet to get more healthy fats and proteins, she not only lost weight but also discovered that she had much more energy.
Another success story concerns a marathon runner named Tom, who suffered from fatigue and aches after running with heart-rate and pace trainers, despite his level of training. He was found to have above-average requirements for vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids, and supplementing him with these nutrients allowed him to shorten his recovery times and boost his performance to achieve his best marathon time ever.
Nutritionists have reported dozens of cases where personalised nutrition has genuinely made a difference in the lives of their clients, for example by correcting a very specific deficiency of a single nutrient, or in helping them tweak their metabolic reactions so that their bodies can make more of one specific molecule. Real-world examples bring out the potential of personalised nutrition to fundamentally change health and fitness outcomes.
How to Get Started
If you are interested in personalised nutrition, getting started is relatively simple. First, choose a company to test your DNA. There are many companies that provide nutrigenomic DNA testing, some with a good reputation and some without. Try to find a company that has a good track record and — you should be able to inspect detailed accounts of this and read reviews from happy customers.
Having settled on a service provider for your DNA testing, you’ll receive a kit that explains how to take your own DNA, through either blood or saliva samples. After sending the sample to the company, a detailed report will emerge with a list of your genetic predispositions, and your individual dietary needs as suggested by these DNA results.
But because conducting a 23andMe-style test can feel like being bombarded with information and advice, it can be helpful to establish a dialogue with a qualified nutritionist or other healthcare professional in analysing your DNA results. This will enable you to put the data in a meaningful context and help you to translate the findings into a realistic dietary plan. And while tailored food is a dynamic in-the-moment experience, the changes you make to your diet will probably need to be adapted from time to time over the years, as you respond to changes in your lifestyle or evolving health goals.
The Future of Personalized Nutrition
Personalised nutrition is changing at a rapid pace as new trends and technologies emerge to potentially alter the way that we manage our dietary health With nutrigenomics becoming increasingly data-centric, the recent developments around artificial intelligence and machine-learning can be combined to process large amounts of genetic information. This can then be used to better understand the interactions between genes and nutrients.
Another encouraging development is the adoption of wearable devices that track real-time physiological (for example, blood glucose and metabolic rate), which, together with the genomic insights, could lead to hyper-personalised diet (that could be adapted according to the body’s ever-changing needs, especially throughout a day).
With the potential to increase public-health outcomes, the future for personalised nutrition looks promising by making genetic screening more accessible and educating members of the public in the advantages of personalised dietary approaches.
Conclusion
Personalised nutrition provides us with a paradigm shift in dietary healthcare. It is based on the insights that we can use our individual genetic data to design a nutrition to our needs for optimal health, performance and prevention. Personalised nutrition can provide you with important professional qualifications, improve your health, but also improve the situation of your clients.
Personalised nutrition is still a relatively new field. Keep in mind that things change quickly. Stay updated on the latest developments, talk to professionals, and stay ready to adjust your working model as new insights emerge – and the chances are that you’ll hit your targets.
If you’re ready to take the plunge, you could also initiate a personalised nutrition programme for yourself right now. DNA testing kits continue to proliferate. Wherever you are on the spectrum, from selective shopper to avid data analyst, there is no doubt we will all be heading in this direction at breakneck speed. It is no longer science fiction. We are living in the future.