Beyond Labels and Guidelines: The Future of Personalized Nutrition

We will see two new sources of nutrition information this year from the government, and one old one. As we gain more and more and more weight, we are starting to have more chronic diseases and are dying earlier but, will any of this help? Sadly, no.

First will be the FDA’s front-of-the-package nutrition icons. This is meant to make up for the fact that nutrition labels are on the back of packages and are complicated. They will reduce everything that is important down to added sugars, sodium and saturated fat. Of course, the original purpose behind the food labels back in the 1970s was, if manufacturers wanted to make a claim about the healthiness of their foods on the front of the package, FDA considered it to be misleading of all of the information wasn’t on the back. I suppose this will make their newly required information misleading.

What will you do with this new information? Track everything you eat and match it with your Daily Values for nutrients, calories, and ingredients? Even if you do, your Daily Values (recommended amounts of nutrients to consume, or not exceed each day) will not reflect your sex, weight, age, microbiome, stress levels, exercise, amount of sleep, underlying health conditions, medications and illegal drugs, or smoke and alcohol intake. There are an immense number of combinations of these things and how they interact, and they play a role in how food affects you. Let’s leave that for now.

We will also see the release of the 2024 Dietary Guidelines from the USDA. The last one recommended that men should have no more than two drinks per day and women should have no more than one. I wonder where they will go this time around? Let’s just guess it’s “no drinking” is the best thing you can do. It will ignore any studies that suggest otherwise where ignore is another word for “cherry picking research.” Like the icons, it won’t help much with your individual characteristics.

Finally, there is the USDA’s MyPlate, which used to be the Food Guide Pyramid. MyPlate will continue to tell you that your plate should include fruits, vegetables, grains, and proteins, with a side helping of dairy. The claim is that it is “intended to help people make better food choices and eat healthily.” This advice stands right next to “Watch what you eat,” and “Believe in yourself.” In other words, painfully useless advice.

The problem is, we are all different individuals. For example, “Despite having the same genes and exposure to similar environments, identical twins often had very different glucose responses to set meals, whether they were high in carbs, fiber, fat or sugar.” The same research revealed that, for foods with the same calorie content, information on the nutrition labels, like saturated fat, sodium and added sugars, accounted for less than 40 percent of how people responded biologically to the food.

Meanwhile, by 2030, the NIH predicts that nearly half of all U.S. adults are expected to be obese and will surpass 50% in 29 states. That will increase the war between acceptance, i.e., body positivity, and encouraging people to take Ozempic to reduce their weight by making the government pay for everyone. Either way, we can expect to see more diabetes and heart disease.

We need real solutions and it’s not going to come from drugs, more food labels, the Dietary Guidelines or MyPlate. It’s going to come from the same place that gave us other things that have made our lives better—cars, refrigerators, dishwashers, vacuums, washing machines, books, and computers—inventions.

People around the world are inventing replacements for the government’s general advisories. It has already started with better monitoring devices to help track our intakes and our vitals. AI and machine learning will help, but may not be sufficient, to take that information and give us individual advice on what we should eat for both health and enjoyment. Because of the complexity of all our body’s systems, i.e., “omics” like the microbiome, metabolism (metabolome), and genome, we may need quantum computers to figure out how the “omics’ interact. Finally, inventors are also creating better foods using gene editing and 3d food printers.

This is all 21st century precision, i.e., personalized, nutrition.