Food & You: A digital cohort on personalized nutrition

Abstract

Nutrition is a key contributor to health. Recently, several studies have identified associations between factors such as microbiota composition and health-related responses to dietary intake, raising the potential of personalized nutritional recommendations. To further our understanding of personalized nutrition, detailed individual data must be collected from participants in their day-to-day lives. However, this is challenging in conventional studies that require clinical measurements and site visits. So-called digital or remote cohorts allow in situ data collection on a daily basis through mobile applications, online services, and wearable sensors, but they raise questions about study retention and data quality. “Food & You” is a personalized nutrition study implemented as a digital cohort in which participants track food intake, physical activity, gut microbiota, glycemia, and other data for two to four weeks. Here, we describe the study protocol, report on study completion rates, and describe the collected data, focusing on assessing their quality and reliability. Overall, the study collected data from over 1000 participants, including high-resolution data of nutritional intake of more than 46 million kcal collected from 315,126 dishes over 23,335 participant days, 1,470,030 blood glucose measurements, 49,110 survey responses, and 1,024 stool samples for gut microbiota analysis. Retention was high, with over 60% of the enrolled participants completing the study. Various data quality assessment efforts suggest the captured high-resolution nutritional data accurately reflect individual diet patterns, paving the way for digital cohorts as a typical study design for personalized nutrition.

Personalized glucose prediction using in situ data only

“…Carbohydrate counting is a straightforward method, but its predictive power for PPGR is relatively weak. The high performance of our carbohydrates-only model, compared to other studies, is likely due to Food & You participants tracking their food intake for at least 14 days, coupled with the high temporal resolution data collection through the MyFoodRepo app (Héritier et al 2023). The development of the G+Dc+Dt model, which requires only a glucose sensor and food tracking with the app, substantially improves model performance to R=0.71.…”

“…The "Food & You" study, conducted in Switzerland, is a digital nutrition cohort where participants, over 2-4 weeks, use mobile applications and sensors to monitor their food intake, physical activity, and glycemia (Héritier et al 2023). All interactions and data collection are digitally facilitated, leveraging the potential of fully remote, "in situ" studies in epidemiological research.…”

“…Here, we assess the impact of these features, using our large digital nutritional cohort "Food & You" (Héritier et al 2023) of more than a thousand participants, and to highlight the potential improvement strategy in accuracy of such models from the previous studies using the same approach. Overall, we find that the most accurate PPGR prediction model only requires glycemic and dietary information.…”