A.I. DIET ~ PERSONALIZED DIET WITH ALGORITHMS
“We are not what we eat.”
As a doctor, I have always wondered why are there so many diet books in the market? Why does every person respond differently to the same diet? Why doesn’t every overeater become obese? I remember reading an interesting case report, published in the prestigious medical journal of NEJM a few years ago about an elderly man who was eating 12 eggs a day for many years. Yet, his blood cholesterol levels were normal and his arteries were clean of cholesterol plaques. Isn’t he supposed to have high blood cholesterol levels?
What all of these questions and case report mean to me is that we, as individuals must be metabolizing food differently. If this is so, then our present methods studying diet, nutrition, food metabolism and good health are not proper. Indeed, when we look at these methods more closely, we see that our present study methods are observational and they depend on food dairies and participants memories.
We need different and more objective controlled studies with new parameters and methods to study the effects of diet on our health, which is multifaceted and varies for every person. These variabilities depend on many factors, such as person’s genetic makeup, general health, medications, living environment, stress level, exercise and most importantly, about 40 trillion count and 1,000 different bacterial species that live symbiotically in every person’s the gut.
A recent interesting scientific study, in these regards, comes from The Institute of Science of Israel entitled, “Personalized Nutrition by predicting of Glycemic Response” which was published in the famous journal “Cell.” The researcher took into account all of the above mentioned variables as well as additional factors. They studied 800 non-diabetic individuals for their research. (The details of material and methods of this research are beyond of our article). With the help of sensor monitoring, A.I. and machine learning, they have collected a huge database, totaling a billion pieces of information for their study. This big data is beyond the comprehension and analysis of a human’s brain capacity. This only could be done with the help of A.I. and deep machine learning.
In conclusion, they found out that close to a hundred factors are involved in the body glycemic response to food intake. Blood sugar spikes after eating was not because of the amount and the type of food consumed but instead it was the microbiome population and dominant species in the gut.
To me, as I see it, it appears that besides our genetic and biologic differences, our gut’s microbiome population plays an important role in our unique response to food intake. So, just like individualized medical care and treatments, in the future, our diets have to be individualized as well. There is no such a thing as, ”one size fits all” universal diet.
Already, some opportunistic startup companies are marketing a ”nutrigenomic diet.” For a fee, they will sample your saliva provide you with your DNA makeup and suggest nutritional guidelines. There is no scientific basis of their claims. This is just another commercial gimmick.
