Personalised diets can influence several key aspects of health, including lowering your weight, cholesterol and heart disease risk, as well as improving your mood, metabolism and gut health. And this is kind of what you’d expect. But does it mean that general government advice is wrong? Not exactly, but improvements for people following personalised guidance were greater in some areas than for those following current government guidelines.
Trouble is, people often don’t follow generalised health advice. Numerous chronic diseases can be linked back to our diets, including stroke risk, heart disease and some cancers. New research suggests changing our diet can make us healthier and reduce the risk of chronic disease.
There’s also wide variation in how people’s bodies respond to food, even between identical twins. Despite this, little research has been done into the effectiveness of personalised dietary approaches. So would a personalised diet plan, tailored to an individual’s biology, lifestyle and health history, have a greater impact than generic nutrition advice such as avoiding red meat? For the research, personalised diet programmes were created by ZOE, a science and nutrition company co-founded by King’s College London professor Tim Spector – for whom I have a lot of time – which aims to help people improve their health with personalised advice.
Some 347 Americans took part in the study, with researchers comparing the effects of following an 18-w.