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Diet Studies – A Big Missed Steak

It’s hard for me to stay on top of the latest diet trends, thankfully our trends tool can do that. Apparently, keto diets are all the rage. I think I’ll stick to my seefood diet – when I see food I eat it (this is not my joke please don’t send me hate mail over this).

It’s clear that diet plays a role in our health, but exactly how is still an evolving picture. Studies are constantly changing conventional wisdom: Is red meat good or bad for us? How much should we be eating? Is breakfast the most important meal of the day or completely unnecessary?

Diet is extremely hard to study since the health outcomes can take a long time to see, there are tons of random variables that could have attributed to that outcome, and each person metabolizes food very differently.

The key here is personalization. Each person is going to react to food differently, so overarching studies may not be the most useful guidance. Maybe what we need is granular data about individuals (genome, microbiome, health history, environment, etc.) and then have diets tailored to cohorts of people very similar to you instead of benchmarking against the population.

For expert intelligence clients, we put together a list of companies trying to do this for nutrition. See them here.

Stay healthy,

Nikhil
@nikillinit