What is the promise of personalised nutrition?

The future backbone of nutritional science: integrating public health priorities with system-oriented precision nutrition

Adopting policies that promote health for the entire biosphere (One Health) requires human societies to transition towards a more sustainable food supply as well as to deepen the understanding of the metabolic and health effects of evolving food habits. At the same time, life sciences are experiencing rapid and groundbreaking technological developments, in particular in laboratory analytics and biocomputing, placing nutrition research in an unprecedented position to produce knowledge that can be translated into practice in line with One Health policies. In this dynamic context, nutrition research needs to be strategically organised to respond to these societal expectations. One key element of this strategy is to integrate precision nutrition into epidemiological research. This position article therefore reviews the recent developments in nutrition research and proposes how they could be integrated into cohort studies, with a focus on the Swiss research landscape specifically.

Forgetting how we ate: personalised nutrition and the strategic uses of history

Personalised nutrition (PN) has emerged over the past twenty years as a promising area of research in the postgenomic era and has been popularized as the new big thing out of molecular biology. Advocates of PN claim that previous approaches to nutrition sought general and universal guidance that applied to all people. In contrast, they contend that PN operates with the principle that "one size does not fit all" when it comes to dietary guidance. While the molecular mechanisms studied within PN are new, the notion of a personal dietary regime guided by medical advice has a much longer history that can be traced back to Galen's "On Food and Diet" or Ibn Sina's (westernized as Avicenna) "Canon of Medicine". Yet this history is either wholly ignored or misleadingly appropriated by PN proponents. This (mis)use of history, we argue helps to sustain the hype of the novelty of the proposed field and potential commodification of molecular advice that undermines longer histories of food management in premodern and non-Western cultures. Moreover, it elides how the longer history of nutritional advice always happened in a heavily moralized, gendered, and racialized context deeply entwined with collective technologies of power, not just individual advice. This article aims at offering a wider appreciation of this longer history to nuance the hype and exceptionalism surrounding contemporary claims.