Personalized medicine is seen by many scientists as the future of health care and a powerful tool to improve heart health. Genetic tests and other diagnostic tools can help your health care provider find specific solutions tailored to your unique needs. But medicine is not the only field getting a personal touch. Nutrition is a relatively new target for offering personalized solutions for individuals.
While still emerging, this research seeks to combine genetics, lifestyle choices, socioeconomic conditions, and environmental factors to create individualized nutrition plans.
This approach gives health care providers another tool to help guide patients toward better heart health and overall well-being.
Eating Your Way to a Healthy Heart Through Precision Nutrition
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is supporting a multi-year effort called Nutrition for Precision Medicine. This study seeks to build on the knowledge that diet can influence cardiovascular health, as well as many other aspects of your health. Scientists want to understand how the body processes food and which pathways support or harm your physical well-being.
To better understand how diet affects health, researchers must look beyond broad food choices and examine what people eat day to day. Remembering a sandwich for lunch or pasta for dinner is a start, but meaningful insights require data on portion sizes, meal timing, ingredients, and additives which reveal how diet shapes health outcomes.
Most of us grew up knowing that the food pyramid provides a broad overview of which food groups are healthy and which foods should be eaten sparingly. The specifics change periodically as expert panels review new data that give new insights into healthy eating. These are often effective general guidelines. But two people eating similar diets following the known recommendations can have different outcomes. This is where personalized nutrition will help refine broad guidelines to help people eat a diet that works with how their bodies metabolize, or process, foods.
For example, if your genes put you at increased risk of heart disease, dietary changes can help reduce your risk or delay the onset of heart disease.
Dietary Strategies to Improve Blood Pressure and Cholesterol Levels
In some respects, some level of personalized nutrition is already here. The US Department of Agriculture offers diet suggestions through an online calculator on the MyPlate website. These types of personalized plans look at your age, weight and other factors to suggest eating plans that may help you.
If you are at risk of certain conditions or are already dealing with them, your health care provider can make recommendations. Specialized diets are available that target specific problems, including lowering blood pressure, reducing cholesterol levels, maintaining blood sugar levels and managing inflammation levels. With these various diet options, there is no need to wait around for the next generation of personalized nutrition.
While many of these diets can be part of a treatment plan for an array of conditions, researchers want to supercharge future personalized plans. Leveraging genetic information, as well as details about your gut biome, can tailor today’s diet plans to your body’s specific needs.
How Your Gut Microbiome Impacts Your Health
Your gut is home to millions of organisms that live in your stomach and digestive tract. Known as the gut microbiome, this area of research has been getting more attention in recent years as scientists recognize how this ecosystem in your gut interacts with other systems in your body.
Researchers understand that different people will react differently to the same foods, and this concept also suggests that an individual’s microbiome may process the same foods differently. The gut microbiome sends signals throughout your body in response to micronutrients, macronutrients, and phytochemicals, which are the microscopic components of the foods you eat.
In order to use information from the gut microbiome in the future, health care providers may analyze the makeup of your existing gut biome to see what changes may be needed to achieve specific health goals.
The Connection Between Metabolism and Heart Health
Another area scientists continue to explore is the metabolites that your body produces after food is consumed. These molecules influence your body’s metabolism, which is involved in converting food to energy to power cellular processes.
Unhealthy diet choices can reduce metabolic health, leading to insulin resistance. This can be bad news for heart health, as insulin resistance can be accompanied by chronic inflammation that can lead to heart and vascular problems. Health care providers have options to attempt to improve your metabolic health, which in turn could improve your heart health.
If you are looking for information to make better diet choices today, organizations including the NIH offer helpful resources. The NIH’s Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) aims for reduced sodium and saturated fat intake as key to heart disease prevention. The American Heart Association also has resources for heart-healthy eating tips and recipes.
Consult your health care provider before making major diet changes.
Visit the Nora Eccles Harrison Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute (CVRTI) website to keep up with advances in heart research and health insights.
