From Precision Medicine to Precision Nutrition?

How do you think about nutrition when it comes to health care??

Sure, for many of us who are educated enough and can afford it, we can harbor elitist attitudes about our diets.?Case in point, have you ever met a hostile vegan??Though I'm still not convinced the one I met recently wasn't just "hangry" from not getting enough protein.

Joking aside, what if there is actually an insight to be learned from that interaction.?What if nutrition isn't a one-size-fits-all like we tend to approach it? What if that hangry vegan had a genetic factor incongruent with her current diet? What does this mean for those whose diets aren't by choice, but by necessity?

I'm acutely aware that we have basic access issues we urgently need to solve first.?Many people can't have this conversation about eating healthy when they can only think about whether they will find anything to eat at all.?For those of us working to tackle these kinds of challenges, though, the notion of personalized nutrition raises questions about what kind of nutrition should we provide access to.

The SAS Health Pulse podcast , hosted by my friend Alex Maiersperger , recently sent me down this rabbit hole after Alex got into a conversation with Antonio De Castro , one of our colleagues in Singapore, about nutritional research.

I didn’t realize how much more complex it is to research nutrition than to research drugs. And here I thought it wasn't as much a focus just because it's not as lucrative an area as pharmaceuticals (though I believe that also to be an implicit bias).

Nutritional trials require more time to monitor the effects, which are not as immediate or near term as they are with drugs. This makes subjects more vulnerable to external factors beyond what can be controlled within a trial.

While I’m new to this concept and intend to monitor, I'm hopeful for the continued evolution of analytically powered innovations in the #lifesciences sector such as decentralized clinical trials, real world evidence, and digital twins.?As genomic data becomes more ubiquitous, I will be looking to colleagues like Antonio to help organizations better understand personalized or precision nutrition.?

But I’m also interested in hearing your thoughts. Check out this episode , and let me know how it hits in your space. Are there additional avenues we should be exploring? Are there better ways to attack this problem? And if so, how do we even start?

Like all challenges in #healthcare , it takes more than just a few great minds to push forward. With your work, along with Antonio and Alex, I think we can move nutritional outcomes in the right direction.?