With tailored nutritional advice, supplement intake and service, subjects involved in a 12-week RCT had better BMIs, body fat percentages, waist circumferences, blood lipids and uric acid levels.
The Amway-funded study titled “Personalized Nutrition Intervention Improves Health Status in Overweight/Obese Chinese Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial” was published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition.
“Most population strategies to reduce the burden of non-communicable diseases have used conventional ‘one size fits all’ public health recommendations throughout the past decades, but with limited efficacy.
“Personalized nutrition approaches, which provide nutrition advice, products, and services tailored for an individual according to his or her unique biological characteristics, may provide extra motivations to the individual, and therefore, be more efficacious in preventing non-communicable diseases,” hypothesised the researchers.
Hence, the team set out to conduct a randomised, controlled, multicentre clinical trial in Aier and Songnan Hospital, Shanghai, China, on 318 subjects. The subjects were divided into two clusters – one group received personalised nutrition, while the other became the control.
Besides obtaining the subjects’ anthropometric measurements, physical activity and food intake questionnaires were distributed and analysed. In addition, the intervention group subjects received nutritional supplements provided by dietitians.
Potential future intervention
In the study, clinical outcomes like weight, BMI, body fat percentage, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, LDL, uric acid, homocysteine, folic acid and calcium were found to have improved in the personalised nutrition group than the control.
The team also observed dietary behaviour changes in the personalised nutrition group, including the increased consumption of whole grains, vegetables, especially dark green ones, fruits, dairy and nuts, proving the method’s efficacy again.
Besides better nutrition, there was heightened physical activity and a decrease in ‘bad’ blood biomarkers by the participants who were guided by the personalised nutrition. For instance, the BMI decrease was associated with the increase of moderate metabolic equivalents of task and the intake of vitamins B2, B6 and B12. Overall, these results pointed to a change in behaviour among the subjects in the intervention group.
According to the scientists, the study was the first RCT in China that proved the benefits of personalised nutrition intervention in overweight and obese adults, thereby providing a possible framework for the development of customised advice that leads to lifestyle modification and improvement of clinical outcomes.
Previously, scientists would also neglect the intake of supplements, leaving a knowledge gap in the study of personalised nutrition intervention. However, in this study, the researchers provided a holistic solution involving diet, supplements and physical activity for each subject.
“Personalised nutrition showed greater benefits to health status in overweight or obese Chinese adults compared with the benefits from the conventional intervention. The approach and the associated outcomes presented here open up the possibility for positive health outcomes in a general population should a similar program become widely available,” the scientists concluded.
Source: Frontiers in Nutrition
“Personalized Nutrition Intervention Improves Health Status in Overweight/Obese Chinese Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial”
Authors: Kan Juntao et al.
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