when you eat Too many during the festive season, you may be thinking about a healthy diet plan for 2022. But as anyone who has ever eaten knows, there are countless options. Now we are in the midst of a revolutionary era of understanding the human body, which raises the question: can new science tell us which diet plan is best for losing weight? ??
Many diets have their roots in a system that evaluates foods according to their effect on blood sugar levels. This method of characterizing food was born in 1981 from a study led by David Jenkins of the University of Toronto.
They scored each type of food according to how much they raised their blood sugar levels. I got 100 points using sugar as a benchmark. 87 points for honey, 59 points for sweet corn, 38 points for tomato soup, and so on.
Today, all conceivable foods are analyzed in this way, and countless diet plans are built to rank foods in this way. In general, people who want to lose weight are advised to avoid foods that cause blood sugar spikes.
But we all came across people who seemed to maintain a healthy weight no matter how much cake, chocolate, or wine they consumed. And this (the difference between us) leads us to a new understanding of what the best diet plans really are, as significant progress is currently underway.
In 2015, Eran Elinav and Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel conducted a fascinating study. They recruited 800 participants and instead of doing several glucose measurements over several hours as in 1981, all participants’ blood glucose levels were measured every 5 minutes for 7 days. Diabetes.
In addition, each participant completed a detailed medical questionnaire, underwent various physical assessments such as height and hip circumference measurements, and analyzed stools for the types of bacteria contained.
It turns out that blood sugar spikes, just like in previous studies. But decisively, this was the only case on average. The change from person to person was enormous.
Some foods have a dramatic increase in blood sugar, while others appear to be almost unresponsive. This could not be explained as a random variation, as the same person responded the same each time he ate that particular food. For example, in a middle-aged woman, her blood sugar spiked every time she ate tomatoes. Another person spiked particularly strongly after eating a banana.
Seagull’s wife, Keren, was particularly stunned. As a nutritionist, she was trained to guide countless people about what they should and shouldn’t eat.
Now her husband had evidence that her dietary advice may not have always helped. The fact that postprandial sugar levels in some people soared in response to rice more than ice cream shocked her.
She realized that while beneficial on average, she might have personally turned some of her patients to the wrong type of food.
We used a machine learning algorithm (a type of artificial intelligence) to understand the factors that need to be considered to generate the most accurate predictions of a person’s postprandial glucose response. One factor stands out as the most important contributor to date. It is the type of bacteria found in feces that reflects the intestinal flora.
Finding the right diet: very complex
So what does this mean? That means there isn’t a single best diet plan — everything is personal. What constitutes a healthy diet depends on who is eating it. Genetics, lifestyle, microflora, perhaps immune system status, history of infection, etc. Each term is very complex, and how it interacts is even more complex.
Our understanding of the details of whether a diet works for an individual is just beginning. But soon, with the help of computer algorithms and big data analysis, we are certainly due to a revolution in the science of diet and nutrition.
Problems emerge when it becomes clear that personalized nutrition has a significant impact on human health. Whether the analysis of a person’s blood and microbiota to create a personalized diet plan will be part of routine preventive care paid by taxation. ??
Indeed, where do we draw a line between nutritional products, diet plans, and medicines? As science matures, new policies need to be developed. This is especially important when it comes to a very important part of our daily lives: what we eat and drink.
This article was originally published conversation Along Daniel M. Davis At the University of Manchester. Read the original article here.
