The NIH is spending $189 million on a landmark study to precisely determine what you and I should eat. The study involves 10,000 volunteers, who will spend weeks and months recording their diets. According to the Wall Street Journal, 500 study participants will live in scientific facilities where they can be intensely monitored. The 500 will be tethered to blood glucose monitors and other measures to determine how each diet affects them.
At this point in time is there anyone who actually does not know the difference between a healthy diet and an unhealthy one? Here’s what the WSJ had to say:
Scientists agree broadly on what constitutes a healthy diet—heavy on veggies, fruit, whole grains and lean protein—but more research is showing that different people respond differently to the same foods, such as bread or bananas.
Years ago there was a book called, Eat Right for Your Type, suggesting people with different blood types react differently on different diets. The NIH study may not necessarily be pursing the same premise, but it is looking at how different people respond to different diets.
If all goes according to plan, in a few years you’ll be able to walk into your doctor’s office, get a few simple medical tests, answer questions about your health and lifestyle, and receive personalized diet advice, says Holly Nicastro, coordinator for the NIH’s Nutrition for Precision Health study.
A recent walk down the snack aisle at my local Kroger does not provide me with any confidence that the NIH will change anyone’s behavior. It reminds me of the old saying about “preaching to the choir.” People who already eat healthy will continue to do so, but perhaps they will rely less on fads and more on science. The scientists are keeping an open mind. Maybe pizza and burgers won’t be vilified to the same degree they are now.
The study’s scientists aren’t going in with any particular hypotheses about which foods are best. Instead, they will take the vast amounts of data they are collecting to create algorithms that, they hope, can predict what a particular diet will do for any one of us. They’re recruiting participants with a range of ages, ethnicities, backgrounds and health conditions to make sure the results apply broadly.
Participants are assigned a different diet, some high in carbs, some high in fat, some high in protein. One man, Kevin Elizabeth (28) was assigned an ultra-processed food diet.
Elizabeth was encouraged to consume every last morsel of his Frosted Flakes breakfast, down to the sugary milk left behind in the cereal bowl. Scientists at the facility here, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, part of the Louisiana State University System, want to know exactly how much he’s eating of his carefully designed meal.
He wore a heart-rate monitor, a device to record his physical activity, and a continuous glucose monitor to measure blood sugar. An IV stuck out of his hand. Nine times over the next four hours, a technician drew Elizabeth’s blood to measure his body’s response to the meal, including his insulin and glucose levels, along with dozens of other metrics. Elizabeth gave samples of urine, stool and saliva. Scientists had already collected specimens of his hair and nails, and put him through a DEXA scan, a full-body X-ray that quantifies the amounts of fat, bone and muscle.
Elizabeth was on day 13 of the largely ultra-processed diet when he had his blood drawn around his Frosted Flakes breakfast. The diet resembled what Elizabeth typically eats at home (a lot of convenience foods like frozen pizza), though he said he felt more tired than usual, especially during exercise.
I can’t help but believe this isn’t a huge waste of taxpayer money. People eat ultra-processed foods because they’re convenient. They buy frozen, prepared foods for the same reason. Perhaps people don’t know any better, but I assume they believe the detrimental health effects are small at the margin. Perhaps they hate to cook or don’t know how. Or perhaps they have the taste buds of a goat. I doubt if anything the scientists find will change what we already know. That is, fat and carbs are fine in moderation, as is red meat. Veggies should be a significant portion of meals and sweets kept to a minimum. Scientists may even find that all the participants lose weight when they cannot snack between meals. They will also probably find that some people (for reasons scientists cannot ascertain) fare better on poor diets than others.