Moving beyond one-size-fits-all diets toward individualized, research-informed nutritional healthcare.
We have more nutritional information available than at any point in human history. We know that adequate protein, dietary fiber, essential micronutrients, and a diverse intake of nutrient-dense foods support health. We understand the risks associated with poor dietary quality, excessive energy intake, and nutritional deficiencies. Yet despite these advances, individuals continue to experience remarkably different outcomes from seemingly identical dietary recommendations.
Why does one person experience a significant improvement in blood glucose after changing their diet while another sees little improvement? Why do some individuals respond favorably to certain foods, meal schedules, or dietary interventions while others struggle? And why do nutritional strategies that work during one stage of life sometimes become less effective during another?
These questions reflect an important reality: Human nutrition is not simply about the nutritional composition of food. It is also about the individual consuming it.
This is the foundation of precision nutrition, an emerging scientific approach that seeks to understand how our unique biology, environment, behaviors, and circumstances influence our nutritional needs and responses to dietary interventions.
What Is Precision Nutrition?
Precision nutrition is a multidimensional approach to nutritional assessment and intervention that uses individual biological, behavioral, environmental, and clinical information to develop more targeted dietary recommendations.
In their 2020 JAMA article, Precision Nutrition—the Answer to "What to Eat to Stay Healthy," National Institutes of Health researchers Griffin Rodgers and Francis Collins described the need to move beyond generalized dietary prescriptions toward understanding the complex relationships among genetics, metabolism, the gut microbiome, physical activity, food environments, and socioeconomic influences.
Their central argument was that answering the question of what we should eat requires a more comprehensive understanding of what, when, where, how, and why we eat.
This represents an important evolution in nutritional science: moving from studying foods and nutrients primarily at the population level toward understanding how dietary patterns interact with the unique characteristics of individuals.
Rather than assuming everyone will respond similarly to the same dietary strategy, precision nutrition investigates why responses differ and how those differences can guide more effective interventions.
Research: Rodgers & Collins, JAMA, 2020 [1].
How Is Precision Nutrition Different From Traditional Nutrition Advice?
Traditional nutritional recommendations have historically relied on population-level research to establish dietary guidelines, recommended nutrient intakes, and strategies for preventing chronic disease.
These recommendations remain essential. Consuming adequate nutrients, emphasizing minimally processed foods, and maintaining healthy dietary patterns are principles supported by substantial scientific evidence.
However, population averages do not fully capture individual variability.
For example, two individuals may consume identical meals but exhibit considerably different postprandial (after-meal) glucose, insulin, and triglyceride responses.
In the PREDICT 1 study, published in Nature Medicine, researchers evaluated 1,002 adults and identified substantial variation in metabolic responses to identical meals. Factors such as gut microbiome composition, meal characteristics, and individual metabolic physiology contributed differently to these responses.
These findings highlight an important distinction:
Traditional nutrition asks, "What dietary patterns are generally associated with better health?" Precision nutrition adds, "Which dietary strategy is most appropriate for this individual, under these circumstances, and how can we measure its effectiveness?"
The two approaches are complementary rather than competing. Precision nutrition builds upon established dietary science by incorporating individual differences into assessment, intervention, and follow-up.
Research: Berry et al., Nature Medicine, 2020 [2].
Understanding the Four Pillars of Precision Nutrition
A 2024 review by Han and colleagues, The Future Landscape and Framework of Precision Nutrition, proposed four interconnected components for advancing the field.
1. Understanding Individual Nutritional Requirements
Nutritional needs are influenced by more than age, sex, and body weight. Genetics, body composition, physical activity, metabolic health, medical conditions, medications, reproductive status, and other physiological factors can influence nutrient requirements and responses.
Furthermore, these requirements are dynamic rather than fixed. An individual's nutritional needs may change during pregnancy, athletic training, injury recovery, illness, or aging. Precision nutrition seeks to identify these differences to guide more appropriate dietary recommendations.
2. Measuring Dietary Intake and Nutritional Status More Accurately
Food journals, dietary recalls, and questionnaires remain useful tools, but they have limitations. People may unintentionally underestimate portion sizes, forget foods they consumed, or inaccurately recall dietary habits. Advances in nutritional biomarker research provide opportunities to supplement these subjective methods with objective biological measurements.
For example, selected blood and urinary metabolites can provide evidence of recent consumption of particular foods or food components. Other biomarkers can help evaluate nutrient status, metabolic health, or physiological responses. These measurements answer different questions, making appropriate test selection and interpretation essential.
3. Developing Multidimensional Dietary Interventions
Precision nutrition considers not only which foods are consumed but also meal composition, portion sizes, eating patterns, nutrient timing, lifestyle behaviors, and individual preferences.
For example, someone with insulin resistance may benefit from different priorities than an endurance athlete, an individual with gastrointestinal disease, or someone preparing for pregnancy. The objective is to identify a nutritional strategy that addresses the individual's specific needs while remaining practical and sustainable.
4. Translating Research Into Clinical Practice
The final component involves turning scientific information into actionable nutritional care. This includes integrating nutritional assessments with clinical decision-making, digital monitoring, behavioral coaching, and emerging computational technologies.
Ultimately, precision nutrition must demonstrate that more detailed assessments lead to meaningful improvements in patient outcomes—not simply more information.
Research: Han et al., Engineering, 2024 [3].
Nutritional Biomarkers: Moving Beyond Guesswork
One of the most promising advances in precision nutrition involves the development of objective nutritional assessment tools. In a 2024 review published in Nature Metabolism, Cuparencu and colleagues examined the emerging role of biomarkers of food intake, particularly compounds detectable in blood and urine.
These biomarkers may help researchers more accurately determine whether specific foods or dietary components were consumed, assess adherence to dietary interventions, and reduce limitations associated with self-reported dietary information.
However, an important distinction must be made between three different categories of nutritional information:
Biomarkers of dietary intake: Evidence that particular foods or dietary compounds have been consumed.
Biomarkers of nutritional status: Information about nutrient availability, body stores, or potential deficiencies.
Biomarkers of physiological response: Measurements such as blood glucose, lipid concentrations, or other metabolic indicators that help evaluate how the body responds.
These measurements are related but not interchangeable. For example, knowing that someone consumed a food does not necessarily establish that they absorbed its nutrients adequately or experienced a beneficial physiological response.
More recent research published in Nature Food in 2026 further explores integrating dietary biomarkers, digital food tracking, image-based technologies, and repeated measurements to improve dietary assessment.
Together, these developments offer a pathway toward more objective, comprehensive nutritional evaluation, although many specialized biomarkers still require further validation before routine clinical use.
Research: Cuparencu et al., Nature Metabolism, 2024 [4]; Cuparencu et al., Nature Food, 2026 [5].
The Gut Microbiome: Why the Same Food May Affect People Differently
The gastrointestinal microbiome is another important area of precision nutrition research. Our intestinal microorganisms participate in the metabolism of dietary components, production of microbial metabolites, and regulation of several physiological processes.
Microbial composition varies considerably between individuals and is influenced by dietary habits, medications, environmental exposures, and other factors.
In a 2021 Nature Medicine study involving 1,098 deeply characterized individuals, Asnicar and colleagues identified associations among gut microbial species, habitual dietary patterns, and cardiometabolic measurements.
Research continues to investigate whether microbiome information can help predict responses to specific nutritional interventions.
For example, a 2025 randomized trial involving 802 individuals with prediabetes found that a dietary fiber intervention did not significantly improve the primary outcome across the entire study population compared with usual care. However, exploratory analyses identified metabolic subgroups with different responses, and researchers developed microbiome-based models to help predict who might benefit.
This illustrates both the promise and the limitations of precision nutrition.
A dietary intervention may produce different outcomes across individuals, but identifying reliable predictors of those differences requires careful scientific validation.
The gut microbiome is an important contributor to nutritional variability, not a standalone explanation for every dietary response.
Research: Asnicar et al., Nature Medicine, 2021 [6]; Nature Communications, 2025 [7].
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Personalized Nutrition
Human nutrition involves an enormous number of interacting variables. Genetic information, dietary patterns, metabolic biomarkers, microbiome data, medications, sleep habits, activity levels, and social circumstances can collectively influence nutritional outcomes.
Analyzing these relationships presents challenges that traditional methods may not fully address.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning offer opportunities to identify patterns across complex datasets and develop models that predict individual responses to nutritional interventions.
A 2025 Nature Communications Perspective by Mehta and colleagues explored these possibilities in maternal and child health, particularly in low-resource settings.
The authors discussed how emerging technologies may complement conventional nutritional assessment by incorporating clinical, biochemical, microbiome-related, social, and environmental information.
Potential applications include improving nutritional screening, identifying vulnerable populations, and informing more targeted interventions during pregnancy and childhood.
Importantly, this research also highlights that precision nutrition should not be limited to individuals who can afford expensive laboratory testing or advanced technologies.
The future of the field must include approaches that are accessible, culturally appropriate, and applicable across diverse populations.
AI may eventually help clinicians interpret increasingly complex nutritional information, but its predictions must be validated for accuracy, safety, fairness, and real-world clinical benefit.
Research: Mehta et al., Nature Communications, 2025 [8].
Does Precision Nutrition Actually Improve Health Outcomes?
Understanding individual differences is scientifically valuable, but the most important question is whether precision nutrition produces better health outcomes.
A 2024 randomized controlled trial published in Nature Medicine compared an 18-week personalized nutrition program with standard dietary advice.
The personalized program incorporated information about postprandial glucose and triglyceride responses, gut microbiome composition, cardiovascular risk, and health history.
Compared with the control group, participants receiving personalized guidance experienced greater improvements in triglyceride concentrations, dietary quality, body weight, waist circumference, and HbA1c.
However, not every outcome improved. The trial did not demonstrate a significant between-group difference in LDL cholesterol.
Additionally, the personalized intervention included more intensive guidance and digital support than the control condition, making it difficult to determine how much of the benefit was attributable specifically to biological personalization.
These findings are encouraging, but they reinforce the importance of evaluating individual precision nutrition programs rather than assuming that all personalized approaches are superior.
As researchers emphasized in a 2025 Nature Reviews Endocrinology article, advancing precision nutrition requires clearer definitions, consistent scientific standards, and stronger clinical validation.
Research: Bermingham et al., Nature Medicine, 2024 [9]; da Silva et al., Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 2025 [10].
What Does a Precision Nutrition Approach Look Like in Practice?
Our approach to nutritional healthcare emphasizes understanding the individual before developing an intervention.
Rather than beginning and ending with calorie targets, macronutrient ratios, or generalized food lists, we seek to understand the broader clinical and lifestyle context influencing nutritional health.
This may include evaluating habitual dietary intake, nutrient adequacy, body composition, metabolic health, gastrointestinal function, physical activity, sleep, stress, medications, food preferences, and barriers to healthy eating.
When clinically appropriate, additional laboratory testing and biometric monitoring may help clarify specific questions or establish measurable outcomes.
The process follows a continuous cycle:
Assess → Interpret → Personalize → Implement → Measure → Refine
Initial assessments help identify priorities. Individualized recommendations translate those findings into practical dietary strategies. Follow-up measurements and patient feedback then help determine whether those interventions are achieving their intended goals.
For some individuals, this may mean addressing inadequate fiber intake or improving dietary quality. Others may require strategies for managing glucose regulation, meeting athletic nutritional demands, correcting deficiencies, or navigating gastrointestinal symptoms.
Nutrition education and health coaching are essential components of this process because even the most sophisticated nutritional recommendation has limited value if it cannot be implemented consistently.
Personalization also means recognizing when additional testing is unnecessary. A more comprehensive approach should involve more informed decisions—not automatically more expensive investigations.
Beyond Personalized Diets: Nutrition Across the Lifespan
One of the most important contributions of precision nutrition is recognizing that nutritional requirements and responses change over time.
The NIH's precision nutrition research strategy emphasizes nutritional health across the lifespan, including early development, adulthood, aging, and potentially intergenerational influences.
Nutrition during preconception and pregnancy has implications for maternal health and fetal development. Childhood nutrition supports growth and development. During adulthood, nutritional priorities may evolve with occupational demands, physical activity, metabolic changes, and chronic health conditions.
Later in life, maintaining nutritional adequacy, muscle mass, physical function, and overall health becomes increasingly important.
Precision nutrition provides a framework for adapting dietary recommendations as an individual's health, environment, and goals evolve.
In this sense, personalization is not a single diet developed from a snapshot of laboratory results.
It is an ongoing process of aligning nutritional strategies with changing biological requirements, personal circumstances, and measurable health outcomes.
The Future of Nutrition Is Personal—But It Must Remain Scientific
Precision nutrition represents an important shift in how we investigate and approach nutritional healthcare. It recognizes that dietary health emerges from interactions among food, physiology, behavior, environment, and time.
It also acknowledges that although population-level nutritional recommendations provide an essential foundation, individual circumstances can influence which strategies are most appropriate and effective.
Advances in biomarker science, microbiome research, metabolomics, wearable technologies, and artificial intelligence are expanding our ability to investigate these differences.
However, greater technological sophistication does not automatically mean better care. The real measure of precision nutrition will be whether it can deliver safe, accessible, sustainable, and clinically meaningful improvements in health.
At Arete Health, we believe the future of nutritional healthcare lies in combining established nutritional science with individualized assessment, practical education, measurable outcomes, and ongoing refinement.
Because the goal is not simply to tell people what to eat. It is to help them understand how to nourish their bodies in ways that support their individual needs, health goals, and long-term capacity to thrive.
References
Rodgers GP, Collins FS. Precision nutrition—the answer to "What to Eat to Stay Healthy." JAMA. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.13601
Berry SE, et al. Human postprandial responses to food and potential for precision nutrition. Nature Medicine. 2020;26:964–973. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0934-0
Han et al. The future landscape and framework of precision nutrition. Engineering. 2024;42:15–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2024.01.020
Cuparencu C, et al. Towards nutrition with precision: unlocking biomarkers as dietary assessment tools. Nature Metabolism. 2024;6:1438–1453. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-024-01067-y
Cuparencu C, et al. Integration of modern technologies to advance dietary assessment. Nature Food. 2026;7:17–26. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01290-0
Asnicar F, et al. Microbiome connections with host metabolism and habitual diet from 1,098 deeply phenotyped individuals. Nature Medicine. 2021;27:321–332. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-01183-8
Gut microbiome predicts personalized responses to dietary fiber in prediabetes: a randomized, open-label trial. Nature Communications. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66498-x
Mehta S, et al. Advances in artificial intelligence and precision nutrition approaches to improve maternal and child health in low resource settings. Nature Communications. 2025;16:7673. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62985-3
Bermingham KM, et al. Effects of a personalized nutrition program on cardiometabolic health: a randomized controlled trial. Nature Medicine. 2024;30:1888–1897. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-02951-6
da Silva BR, et al. Advancing precision nutrition: bridging mechanistic insight and clinical implementation. Nature Reviews Endocrinology. 2025;21:515–517. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-025-01141-9