Dietary interventions have the potential to treat a wide variety of chronic conditions and diseases, but generating strong evidence and a framework for their integration into health systems will be critical for their success.
Beyond its essential role in providing nutrients, food can be a powerful tool in the prevention and treatment of disease. In this issue of Nature Medicine, several studies shed new light on the impact of diet on cardiometabolic disease. Among these, Heilbronn and colleagues report greater improvements in post-prandial glycemic responses with intermittent fasting plus time-restricted eating than with calorie restriction or standard of care1 — which suggests that fasting and regulated meal timing could be beneficial for adults at risk of type 2 diabetes. Additionally, Rappaport and colleagues explored the effects of a personalized lifestyle coaching intervention that included nutritional counseling tailored to participants’ individualized clinical laboratory findings and genetic predisposition2. In response to the intervention, participants with so-called metabolically unhealthy phenotypes had greater improvements in health (defined by multi-omics metrics) than those of participants with healthy metabolic phenotypes, underscoring the potential of personalized nutrition approaches for the treatment of obesity. Understanding the complex interplay between consumption of specific foods and health and disease outcomes thus has enormous potential to inform interventions for prevention and treatment of diabetes, obesity and other metabolic diseases.
Read The Full Article at Nature Medicine
