Could Your Healthy Diet Make Me Fat?
13th December 2015
This month, an Israeli study of personalized nutrition was heralded by a media frenzy. “This diet study upends everything we thought we knew about ‘healthy’ food,” claimed one headline. The study suggested that dieters may be mistakenly eating a lot of some foods, like tomatoes, that are good for most people, but bad for them. And it raised the possibility that an individualized approach to nutrition could eventually supplant national guidelines meant for the entire public.
What a shock.
Personalized medicine has already become well established in clinical practice. We know that the effects of some drugs vary from person to person and that genetic analysis of tumors can help doctors select the best cancer treatment for a particular patient. Despite the recent fanfare, we have also known for a long time that people respond differently to specific foods based on their genes, past health or other factors.
There’s a thought.
Unfortunately, standard diets typically fail to produce significant long-term weight loss. But those average outcomes mask tremendous individual variability. For instance, while a clinical trial published in 2005 of 160 adults randomly assigned to the Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers and Zone diets reported modest results in all groups after one year, individuals in those groups experienced weight changes ranging from a loss of 35 pounds or more to a gain of 10 or more.
Well. There it is.