Time to get personal? Huge potential in the nutritional consumer awareness that technology presents, says Irish researcher

18 Mar 2019 --- Technological advances, including wearable nutrition tracking devices and microbiota mapping tools, present new potential to address an aware consumer, who is interested in tailored nutrition concepts that specifically work for them. The challenge for industry is how to harness this market opportunity with substantiated nutritionals with proven benefits. Personalized health platforms with potential have expanded beyond gut health to encompass those ranging from anything from sleep quality to cognitive health.

“Technology has made people aware of their own behavior for the first time, as people are wearing these devices and using them,” Dr. Lisa Ryan, Head of the Department of Natural Sciences at Galway-Mayo (GMIT) in Ireland, tells NutritionInsight. “One of the targets of public health in the past was to make people more aware of what they were doing. It is now about harnessing that awareness and driving it into further good. People are really engaging with their health and wanting to try to do something to address it. Our challenge is to be able to allow them to do so.” A video interview with Lisa Ryan can be found here.

For Ryan, beyond the consumer, technology is also an enabler from an academic and industry perspective when it comes to personalized nutrition development. “We need technology be able to have a large amount of analysis of people’s gut microbiota. But also we need to be able to make sure that we can develop unique products based on specialized advances, to make that happen on a large scale,” she explains.

Dr. Lisa Ryan, Head of the Department of Natural Sciences at Galway-Mayo (GMIT) in IrelandRyan, who is on the Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute’s Scientific Advisory Council, spoke at the first Kerry Wellness Conference, at the company’s headquarters in Naas (Ireland). She notes that the trend towards personalization is very real, albeit still somewhat undefined. “People want to feel like things are being tailored towards them and then it is a matter of how that is going to come about,” she explains.

“Something that the food industry needs to look at it is how we are going to achieve that. One of the things that we will need to look at is the requirements of every individual, depending on their age, gender, the state of their microbiota in their gut. They will all have individual requirements and in the future we will be able to deliver products that are individual to them,” she adds.

From a scientific perspective, one of the most personalized spaces of an individual is the human gut. Here we are seeing developments in being able to track how the bacteria in the gut can influence disease states. “We can have targeted strategies for things like probiotics or prebiotics, which tend to be dietary fiber components that can feed our own bacteria in the gut and lead to positive outcomes on health,” she notes. “We are also beginning to discover more about what the bacteria in our gut control. We know, for example, that there are links between the bacteria in our gut, our brain and our decision making. All of those things mean that we can personalize the types of dietary strategies that we deliver to individuals,” Ryan adds.

She notes that there are a number of foods and ingredients that can be used to target the growth of certain bacteria or influence appetite regulation. “For example, we have looked at studies where we may use polyphenols that may impact appetite regulation hormones. You will have no change in the calorie load of a meal, but you can put in certain phytochemicals and then the brain thinks it’s fuller, when it is not,” she explains. “You can look at prebiotics and probiotics to enhance the bacteria in the gut. So you can create a healthier environment where there is a reduced risk of a certain number of diseases,” Ryan adds.

On the research front, there is a strong focus on the guts of people with a lot of disease states, she explains. “Here researchers are looking at the populations in those guts and what are the microbiomes and what genetic information exists within the gut on different age groups, disease states and in different categories,” Ryan notes.

The human genome was itself only mapped fairly recently [2000], but assessing the genetic makeup of the microbiota is an even more recent phenomena, which has been partly fueled by a basic shift in demographic composition. “Microbiota information takes a long time to build up and is particularly interesting in the case of the older populations. We haven’t had those populations to study until recently. We didn’t have populations in their 80s or 90s of this size in the past and we could only begin to get that information now,” she explains.

Phytochemicals could have strong potential on this personalized platform too, with a wealth of research taking place. For example, GMIT has specifically looked at the phlorotannins that come from seaweed, as well as green tea polyphenols, while many other researchers have looked at anthocyanins. All have different signaling effects and individuals will respond differently to them. “The interesting thing is that you can’t see an increase or decrease in gut hormones and it doesn’t always correlate with behavior. For example, we could increase a gut hormone that should reduce appetite. It may be there at a higher level, but somebody can still consume them. So there are still differences between what the brain and the body’s responses are telling us,” she adds.

At the event, Kerry highlighted various personalized nutrition concepts, including Prepd Pack, which is claimed to redefine the whole experience of taking lunch, from planning and preparing, to tracking the nutritional value of lunches. Hapifork is an electronic fork that helps consumers to monitor and track their eating habits. For Ryan, one of the key areas to successful nutritional intervention strategies for individuals relates to improved sleep quality, whether it is about improved cognition, stress reduction or energy. “We know that people who don’t get good quality sleep tend to have a higher weight, be more stressed and tend to not concentrate as much, so sleep in itself is a very important target from a personal health point of view,” she explains.

Some of the traditional components to help sleep quality include milk drinks, certain proteins and melatonin. But certain components in cherry juice have been touted too, for example. GMIT is currently assessing some sports populations to see if there are specific nutritional interventions that can help enhance sleep, either before matches or after, thereby influencing performance. “In the sporting populations, we are looking at sleep quality and quantity and how it may impact on both injury risk and performance. In individuals, we will also be looking at sleep behaviors and how that links to food choices first thing in the morning and throughout the day,” Ryan notes.

She stresses that one of the biggest issues in this field is that the markers of enhanced sleep quality are not so well understood, with a focus on length rather than quality. “One of the best markers in terms of how you slept is how long, but is also about how you feel when you wake. Whether you dreamt can give a good indication about whether you had a good night’s sleep or not. If you remember nothing, the chances are you did not go into a very deep sleep,” she concludes.

The rise of wearable devices that allow users to log their steps and nutritional intake has helped create a platform for personalized nutrition concepts that can meet the demands of a more aware consumer. The challenge for industry will be how to further innovate within this space, with microbiota-improving, satiety-enhancing and even sleep-improving concepts just some of the platforms that can thrive amid this new dynamic.

By Robin Wyers