Can metabotyping help deliver the promise of personalised nutrition?

Abstract

Over a decade since the completion of the human genome sequence, the promise of personalised nutrition available to all has yet to become a reality. While the definition was originally very gene-focused, in recent years, a model of personalised nutrition has emerged with the incorporation of dietary, phenotypic and genotypic information at various levels. Developing on from the idea of personalised nutrition, the concept of targeted nutrition has evolved which refers to the delivery of tailored dietary advice at a group level rather than at an individual level. Central to this concept is metabotyping or metabolic phenotyping, which is the ability to group similar individuals together based on their metabolic or phenotypic profiles. Applications of the metabotyping concept extend from the nutrition to the medical literature. While there are many examples of the metabotype approach, there is a dearth in the literature with regard to the development of tailored interventions for groups of individuals. This review will first explore the effectiveness of personalised nutrition in motivating behaviour change and secondly, examine potential novel ways for the delivery of personalised advice at a population level through a metabotyping approach. Based on recent findings from our work, we will demonstrate a novel strategy for the delivery of tailored dietary advice at a group level using this concept. In general, there is a strong emerging evidence to support the effectiveness of personalised nutrition; future work should ascertain if targeted nutrition can motivate behaviour change in a similar manner.

Evaluation of the Metabotype Concept Identified in an Irish Population in the German KORA Cohort Study

“…Metabotypes as described here may be useful for the development and establishment of targeted strategies at a group level. [ 1 ] For the metabotype clusters identified in NANS and also for metabotype clusters identified in the European Food4Me study, O'Donovan et al. [ 20,33 ] previously developed decision tree approaches for targeted dietary advice, which showed high accordance with personalized advice.…”

“…Thus, metabotyping seems to be a promising tool to simplify the delivery of effective advice to large populations. [ 1,16–19 ] As unhealthy dietary behavior and physical inactivity are major risk factors for many cardiometabolic diseases, [ 34,35 ] targeted lifestyle approaches may be useful in disease prevention and treatment. This seems to be especially relevant for metabotype cluster 3 with the highest occurrence of diseases and risk factors.…”

“…The metabotyping concept is defined as the formation of metabolically/phenotypically homogeneous subgroups of individuals, so‐called metabotypes or metabolic phenotypes. [ 1–6 ] This concept has been successfully applied in a number of different populations. [ 1,7,8 ] Due to its broad definition, studies showed large heterogeneities in its application, especially in the amount and type of metabolic parameters used for the identification of metabotypes.…”

“…Thus, a reduced set of standard clinical parameters allowing the identification of distinct metabolic subgroups may be useful in practice, for example, for effective targeted strategies for disease prevention at the metabotype subgroup level. [ 1,7,16–19 ] In previous work in an Irish cross‐sectional study in adults ( n = 875), named Irish National Adult Nutrition Survey (NANS), O'Donovan et al. [ 20 ] identified three metabolically distinct subgroups of individuals using k ‐means cluster analysis based on the four clinical standard serum parameters triacylglycerol (TAG), total cholesterol (TC), HDL cholesterol, and glucose.…”

Use of metabotyping for optimal nutrition

“…A more realistic version is similar to the concept developed within Food4me where personalised advice is delivered by assessment of the individual on a number of levels. From a public health viewpoint this is still not easy to scale to the population level and as a result the concept of delivery of nutrition advice to groups of individuals has emerged [6][7][8]. Classification of individuals into groups can be achieved through analysis of their metabolic/phenotypic profile.…”