This may be a result of my personal bias, but my view is that the whole world of diet studies and advice often does not produce the results its consumers desire because of complex individual genetic differences that influence metabolism. And there may be additional influences from gut bacteria and epigenetics that also influence this process.
I think the long term answer to this question of “what do I eat to achieve the body composition I want” will be to get a 23 and me test and run it through some software that gives you a customized diet based on your genetic profile.
That being said, if I had to recommend any expert, I guess it would be Dr Aaron Carroll, who runs a YouTube channel named Healthcare Triage that essentially reviews research on various health-related topics.
In theory customization of diet based on genes is a good idea. In practice it actually requires us to know what genes make what diet benefitial which is likely a complex task. What’s the case for some software being able in 2020 to give you a good customized diet based on a genetic profile?
Frankly I don’t think it’s possible yet. Or at least if it is I’m not aware of it. But I think that will change in the coming years, mostly due to dramatic drops in the cost of genetic sequencing.
If you can sequence the DNA of enough people and track how what they eat and their disease prevalence or whatever outcomes you care about, you’ll likely be able to suss out the contributions from various genes to a particular health outcome. This has already been done for single complex traits like height or heart disease risk. But I think the next step is tying that to inputs like diet and exercise.
There are products such as https://www.dnafit.com and https://nutrigenomix.com/ on the market and I’m a bit skeptical about the extend towards which those should be trusted for more then just “consume more of Vitamin X”.
Frankly I don’t think it’s possible yet. Or at least if it is I’m not aware of it. But I think that will change in the coming years, mostly due to dramatic drops in the cost of genetic sequencing.
This may be a result of my personal bias, but my view is that the whole world of diet studies and advice often does not produce the results its consumers desire because of complex individual genetic differences that influence metabolism. And there may be additional influences from gut bacteria and epigenetics that also influence this process.
I think the long term answer to this question of “what do I eat to achieve the body composition I want” will be to get a 23 and me test and run it through some software that gives you a customized diet based on your genetic profile.
That being said, if I had to recommend any expert, I guess it would be Dr Aaron Carroll, who runs a YouTube channel named Healthcare Triage that essentially reviews research on various health-related topics.
In theory customization of diet based on genes is a good idea. In practice it actually requires us to know what genes make what diet benefitial which is likely a complex task. What’s the case for some software being able in 2020 to give you a good customized diet based on a genetic profile?
Frankly I don’t think it’s possible yet. Or at least if it is I’m not aware of it. But I think that will change in the coming years, mostly due to dramatic drops in the cost of genetic sequencing.
If you can sequence the DNA of enough people and track how what they eat and their disease prevalence or whatever outcomes you care about, you’ll likely be able to suss out the contributions from various genes to a particular health outcome. This has already been done for single complex traits like height or heart disease risk. But I think the next step is tying that to inputs like diet and exercise.
Okay, then I mostly agree.
There are products such as https://www.dnafit.com and https://nutrigenomix.com/ on the market and I’m a bit skeptical about the extend towards which those should be trusted for more then just “consume more of Vitamin X”.
Frankly I don’t think it’s possible yet. Or at least if it is I’m not aware of it. But I think that will change in the coming years, mostly due to dramatic drops in the cost of genetic sequencing.
Cost of genetic engineering is essentially low enough that it’s not the bottleneck anymore.