Implementing a personalised nutrition strategy leads to following the Mediterranean diet to a greater extent and could be effective in weight loss, according to the results obtained in a clinical study carried out by the Eurecat technology centre with 134 participants who received personalised nutrition and lifestyle tips to improve their healthy habits using an online technology platform, as part of the European PREVENTOMICS project.
The aim of the project, coordinated by Eurecat’s Nutrition and Health Unit, is to educate people to prevent the appearance of diet-related diseases. With their participation in the study, the volunteers have ‘managed to learn and maintain new healthy life habits, increase their trust and satisfaction in a more personalised diet and improve their adherence to the Mediterranean diet, recognised as one of the best models for preventing chronic illnesses and improving quality of life’, explains Dr Josep Maria del Bas, the director of Eurecat’s Nutrition and Health Unit and the project’s principal investigator.
According to Dr del Bas, ‘the key success of personalised nutrition is that it makes it possible to acquire dietary behaviour that maximises the health benefits of long-term adequate nutrition’.
To make the personalised recommendations through an online application, the PREVENTOMICS project analysed numerous health biomarkers based on biological samples from the participants, using a combination of routine biochemical analyses and innovative omic sciences techniques.
Dr Biotza Gutiérrez, the coordinator of the PREVENTOMICS project and European project manager at Eurecat, explains that, using the results, ‘the participants were classified into five groups according to the metabolism behaviour that required the most optimisation. These groups were based on inflammation, carbohydrate metabolism, lipid metabolism, change in intestinal microbiota and oxidative stress, to give them food intake recommendations’.
A total of 134 people completed the study, which was carried out at Eurecat’s facilities in Reus and finished at the end of December last year. Beforehand, over 200 preselection visits were carried out, from which 193 volunteer participants were selected.
All the volunteers had access to an online portal that allowed them to make a shopping list encouraging the Mediterranean diet. The participants were randomly distributed into three groups to evaluate the system’s effectiveness according to the degree of personalisation. Thus, in one of the groups, the participants received personalised nutrition recommendations based on their metabolic profile; in the second, they received the same personalised nutrition recommendations with the addition of a lifestyle improvement programme; and in the control group, they were given general healthy eating recommendations. This process made it possible to assess whether the personalised approach is more effective than general nutritional recommendations.
The PREVENTOMICS project, financed by the European Horizon 2020 programme, was developed by a consortium of 19 international partners that includes, besides Eurecat’s Nutrition and Health, Omic Sciences and Digital Health Units, the companies ALDI, Alimentòmica, Onmi, Simple Feast, METEDA and Carinsa; the research centres and universities the University of Parma, University of Southampton, University of Copenhagen, Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Leitat, Wageningen University, Jagiellonian University of Krakow and University of Maastricht; as well as the patient association Osteoarthritis Foundation International (OAFI), the Spanish Organisation of Consumers and Users (OCU) and the Spanish Association for Standardization (UNE).
