The National Institutes of Health is now enrolling for the NIH Common Fund’s Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program in collaboration with the University of Alabama at Birmingham and other partners. NPH — 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-based approaches 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.
“Poor diet is one of the leading causes of preventable disease and death around the world. If everyone followed the healthy eating guidelines we have available now, we still may not achieve optimal health because our bodies respond differently to food,” said Holly
Nutrition is important for the prevention and treatment of most chronic conditions and diseases, including hypertension, diabetes and stroke. However, current dietary recommendations do not consider individual biological differences in how people respond to foods or ways and timing of eating. The goal of precision nutrition is to move from a “one-size-fits-most” approach to more specific recommendations that are based on an individual’s unique characteristics and environments. NPH will study how a range of factors, including genes, lifestyle, health history, the gut microbiome (the community of microorganisms that live in the human gastrointestinal tract) and social determinants of health (the conditions in which people live, work and age that affect health), influence a person’s response to diet.
The overall aim of NPH is to enroll 10,000 participants age 18 or older from diverse backgrounds. To participate, individuals must enroll in or already be enrolled in NIH’s All of Us Research Program. All of Us is an effort that aims to engage at least 1 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, treatment and care.
“UAB is delighted to be one of six clinical centers for this landmark study to better understand why people respond differently to different diets,” said James O. Hill, Ph.D., director of the UAB Nutrition Obesity Research Center and principal investigator for the UAB site. “Our ultimate goal is to be able to identify the best diet for each person.”