Toward Precision Medicine Using Precision Nutrition Toolkit

The overarching goal of precision nutrition is to replace "one-size-fits-all" dietary advice with more individualized recommendations to improve chronic disease prevention or management. Interest in precision nutrition has increased with advances in technologies such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and gut microbiome measurements. Precision nutrition programs have three main applications in precision medicine. First, they aim to provide more "precise" dietary assessments by more precisely characterizing diet through artificial intelligence, wearables, or employing omics technologies. Second, precision nutrition enables us to understand the underlying mechanisms by which diet affects disease risk and to identify individuals who are more susceptible to disease from gene-diet or microbiome-diet interactions. Third, precision nutrition can be used for "personalized nutrition" recommendations, where machine learning algorithms can combine data from omics profiles with other personal and clinical measures to improve disease risk.

Proteomics and metabolomics in particular provide the ability to discover biomarkers of food or nutrient intake, proteomic or metabolomic signatures of diet and disease, and discover the underlying mechanisms of diet-disease interactions. Although some challenges must be overcome to improve the reproducibility, cost-effectiveness, and efficacy of these methods, precision nutrition approaches have great potential in nutrition research and clinical applications.