Study: Healthy foods are unique to individuals | Hacker News Reader

Study: Healthy foods are unique to individuals

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88 pointshunglee215 comments

Business idea: Let people send in blood samples taken before and after meals, and analyze specific markers (especially glucose). Why a selftest? AFAIK the conventional way would be too expensive to do at a doctor's, at least here in Austria one glucose tolerance test is about €30 (and you would need 10-20 of them). It's also uncomfortable (1-2h sitting in the waiting room).

Does something like that exist yet?

UPDATE: Just found http://www.metabolic-balance.com, who seem to analyze hormone levels to create a personalized diet plan. But not exactly a low friction solution?

I think it's on the researcher's roadmap, have a look at their website: http://newsite.personalnutrition.org/WebSite/HowItWorksStudy...

The Cell paper full text is viewable for free here: http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01481-6

This study is long due. Is it good that we are now past anecdotical stories from friends or family ( "I can eat that a lot, but if I just take a piece of this I will feel bad" .. " For me is however the other way around..." , and so on ).

Nice to see the usage of machine learning to detect the dietary patterns. Too bad that this methods are very far from being used in the field ( i.e. my local family doctor ).

The worst thing about those anecdotal stories is how adamant everyone usually is that they're right, as if their observations about themselves must be true of the general population. I've always thought there's no reason why both people can't be right about what's right for them, hopefully this will take off.

It's even worse than that, people are generally not good about making accurate observations about themselves, too many cognitive biases.

> as if their observations about themselves must be true of the general population.

Worth noting that such attitude extends far beyond just food.

Very true. It also depends on the person, some people will happily say "I don't eat X, it gives me indigestion" whereas someone else will tell you that you shouldn't eat X because it gives them indigestion.

So, how are we supposed to know what to eat? Any correlation with what we think tastes better?

Anyway, isn't this pretty bad news for Soilent?

The traditional general advice of eating a well-diversified diet (weighted towards plants and away from statistically less healthy foods) likely still holds. It's difficult to pick specific foods without a lot of testing and experience.

This is still a single study that requires replication and metaanalysis.

The idea is that given everyone has a relatively unique gut biome a "healthy" plant (or other food) might cause a huge unhealthy spike in blood sugar and tendency towards less healthy gut bacteria. Its very interesting to think about the implications though.

..and locations (air quality, humidity, water sources, soils).

Hallelujah

I just meant that this should have been done a long time ago.

There's a lot of interesting new discoveries being made about the effects of the microbiome on human health. You can participate in this research, and get a profile of your own microbiome here: https://microbio.me/AmericanGut/

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