NUTRIOME · Precision nutrition and postprandial immune responses

Precision nutrition and postprandial immune responses

A grand challenge for sustainable development in Europe is to improve public health through reducing incidence of non-communicable diseases, premature mortality and health costs. An unhealthy diet is one of the most important risk factors for the global burden of diseases. Therefore, changing the dietary habits in the population toward healthier and more sustainable alternatives is urgently needed. Precision nutrition has emerged as a paradigm with promising results that could help to improve health in the post-genome era. This paradigm has been fuelled by rapid developments of novel omics technologies and remote clinical testing equipment, which are instrumental for a success in providing data-driven solutions to guide toward healthier eating for the individual consumer as well as for improving fundamental understanding of the effects of diet on human health. This approach could, to a greater extent than existing practice, improve efficacy to dietary interventions and maximizes the human health benefits and reduces the burden of diseases and their costs. To allow development of more effective preventive strategies via precision nutrition, the determinants driving the inter-personal differences in response to specific foods and meals need to be better understood. This implies also the underlying mechanisms causing differential responses. We eat meals several times per day and are during the day constantly in the postprandial phase. Postprandial changes in circulating metabolites play a major role on human health and the immune response. This leads to the question if one can predict the type of meal, which will be most beneficial to improve an individuals’ metabolic health. Once such knowledge emerges, tailored stratified dietary advices can be developed and evaluated. The focus of NUTRIOME is to train 10 Research Doctoral Candidates (RDCs) in data-driven precision nutrition using two complementary training strategies to learn how to handle and combine multi-omics data, to evaluate the response to foods and diets. We will provide multi-disciplinary training, so that the RDCs: i) are able to utilize, share and disseminate the growing pool of public available multi-omics data, ii) know the regulations and routine for collaborative data sharing in a FAIR manner, and iii) are experts in analysing, integrating and, including algorithm development, iv) are able to design and conduct precision nutrition intervention studies. This will provide a new competence profile to resolve a bottleneck for development of personalised preventive solutions for improved health in Europe and beyond.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union