How Does Each Individual Respond to Specific Foods?
The National Institutes of Health is now enrolling for the Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH), powered by the All of Us Research Program in collaboration with UAB and other partners. The project, which is the largest precision nutrition effort of its kind, aims to engage a diverse group of participants to learn more about how our bodies respond differently to food.
NPH will use artificial intelligence to analyze information provided by participants to develop algorithms that predict responses to dietary patterns. The study’s findings may one day allow clinicians to offer more customized nutritional guidance to improve overall health.
Current dietary recommendations do not consider individual biological differences in how people respond to foods or ways and timing of eating. NPH will study how a range of factors, including genes, lifestyle, health history, gut microbiome, and social determinants of health, influence a person’s response to diet.
NPH plans to enroll 10,000 participants age 18 or older from diverse backgrounds. To participate, individuals must be enrolled in NIH’s All of Us Research Program. All of Us aims to engage at least one million participants in building a health database that reflects the diversity of the United States to help speed up medical research and enable individualized prevention and treatment.
The study consists of three modules. In the first module, participants will complete surveys, report their daily diets, and give blood, urine and stool samples for lab tests, including microbiome analysis. In the second module, a subset of participants will be given diets selected by researchers. In the third module, participants will also be given diets selected by researchers, but will be asked to stay in a research center while on the diets.
All participants will take part in meal challenge tests, where physiological changes will be measured after they eat a standardized meal. Participants will receive interpreted information from the study on their health, including body composition, microbiome makeup, metabolism and diet composition.
At UAB, participants in module three will have the opportunity to spend three, two-week blocks of time living in Wi-Fi-enabled cottages on the Lakeshore Foundation campus. Participants will be able to take advantage of the facilities at Lakeshore — such as the gym, pool and walking trails — throughout their stay. Participants will receive compensation for their time, as well as all meals and snacks for the duration of their stays.
NPH will link participants’ data from the study to information obtained through the All of Us Research Program, including genetics information and data from electronic health records and additional surveys. The study use AI to analyze this data from participants to develop algorithms predicting how a person will respond to a particular food. This information will ultimately be accessible through the All of Us data platform, the Researcher Workbench, to support other studies on health and disease. Strict safeguards are in place to keep the data secure and protect participant privacy.
