Gut microbiome and its potential link to personalized nutrition

Abstract

Diet is increasingly appreciated to have a tremendous impact on many aspects of the host’s biology in health and disease. Dietary content and timing are also central in shaping the gut microbiome, and contribute to its taxonomic and functional diversity. Regardless, current dietary recommendations remain largely non-personalized, and feature disappointing long-term efficacy in treating obesity and its complications. Personalized nutrition aims to utilize inter-individual host and microbiome variations in generating data-driven personalized dietary recommendations. While personalized nutrition has yielded encouraging and potentially clinically applicable results across several cohorts, host-microbiome interaction networks driving such crosstalk and the mechanisms mediating their metabolic impact remain elusive and merit further studies. Herein, we summarize the latest advances in utilizing diet-microbiota interactions towards the development of personalized nutrition, while focusing on the prospects, challenges and unknowns in integrating this promising new data-driven approach into human precision health.