The Gut Microbiome and Individual-Specific Responses to Diet

Abstract

Nutritional content and timing are increasingly appreciated to constitute important human variables collectively impacting all aspects of human physiology and disease. However, person-specific mechanisms driving nutritional impacts on the human host remain incompletely understood, while current dietary recommendations remain empirical and nonpersonalized. Precision nutrition aims to harness individualized bodies of data, including the human gut microbiome, in predicting person-specific physiological responses (such as glycemic responses) to food.

ABSTRACT

Nutritional content and timing are increasingly appreciated to constitute important human variables collectively impacting all aspects of human physiology and disease. However, person-specific mechanisms driving nutritional impacts on the human host remain incompletely understood, while current dietary recommendations remain empirical and nonpersonalized. Precision nutrition aims to harness individualized bodies of data, including the human gut microbiome, in predicting person-specific physiological responses (such as glycemic responses) to food. With these advances notwithstanding, many unknowns remain, including the long-term efficacy of such interventions in delaying or reversing human metabolic disease, mechanisms driving these dietary effects, and the extent of the contribution of the gut microbiome to these processes. We summarize these conceptual advances, while highlighting challenges and means of addressing them in the next decade of study of precision medicine, toward generation of insights that may help to evolve precision nutrition as an effective future tool in a variety of “multifactorial” human disorders.