There is an urgent need for smart strategies to promote healthier and more sustainable dietary choices for improved human and planetary health. Emerging evidence indicates that tailoring diets more to the individual is required for optimal health benefits. Importantly, personalisation of dietary advice has been shown to induce greater dietary changes than more generalised advice, and may therefore promote long-lasting behaviour change.
Personal environmentally sustainable diets
This project investigates what environmentally sustainable diet best suits an individual for improving personal health and well-being both short and long-term. The identification of what diet best suits an individual requires a short-term health effect marker. Novel technologies such as Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) sensors have enabled the assessment of short-term health effects of foods and meals based on post-meal glucose responses. Improving glucose responses via dietary modification may not only benefit (cardiometabolic) health and well-being, it may also support long-term behaviour change via increased vitality and well-being.
Various landmark studies have shown that post-meal glucose responses to identical foods are meals are highly variable between individuals, indicating the need for more personalisation of dietary advice. Interestingly, the variability in individual post-meal glucose responses also seems to be highly different between foods. Some foods elicit relatively consistent responses linked to the inherent qualities of the foods themselves (food-specific), while other foods lead to highly differential responses between individuals, suggesting that the individual’s response to these foods depends on the person (person-specific).
Project aims
This project aims to:
1) Identify which foods and meals elicit either food- or person-specific post-meal glucose responses
2) Identify person-specific determinants of glucose responses and use these factors to develop an algorithm for the prediction of individual glucose responses
3) Identify more sustainable alternatives for foods and meals with beneficial (individual) glucose responses
4) Develop personalised, environmentally sustainable food recommendations based on these findings for personalised dietary advice
5) Examine the effectiveness of the developed personalised dietary advice based on these findings on cardiometabolic health, vitality and well-being, and diet-related environmental impact.
The scientific knowledge generated by this project can be used to develop smart tools for personalised dietary advice to promote healthier and more sustainable diets among Dutch consumers.
| In 2022 this project team received seed funding from the working group Artificial Intelligence for optimal preparation of the project in 2023 (writing a grant proposal and building a consortium). The project was then named: ‘Creation of automatically generated personalized dietary advice to improve the post-meal glucose response. Optimizing functioning and self-efficacy within different stages of life‘. In 2023 TKI AgriFood granted subsidy of 432k Euro to the project, now called ‘Personalised dietary advice for human and planetary health’. |
Project Team
- Natal van Riel – Eindhoven University of Technology
- Hanna Hauptman – Utrecht University
- Lydia Afman – Wageningen University & Research
- Anouk Gijbels – Wageningen University & Research