Universal diets don’t work because ‘healthy’ foods differ by individual, study finds

[SecularMotion]

It’s no secret that lots of us struggle with food. In many parts of the world, large segments of the population are developing health problems such as diabetes and obesity at alarming levels, suggesting that current dietary policies are ineffective at keeping people within their healthy weight range.

According to a new study, this situation isn’t altogether surprising. Israeli researchers tracked the blood sugar levels of 800 participants over the course of a week and found that even if people all eat the same meal, how they end up metabolising it will differ from person to person. In other words, what might be healthy for you won’t necessarily be equally healthy for somebody else.

The researchers say the problem lies with the manner in which most dietary systems measure results. Take the glycemic index (GI), for example, which ranks foods based on how they affect blood sugar. There’s no doubting it’s a useful starting point to gauge how foods can impact glucose levels, but it’s based on studies that average out how groups of people respond to food – not particular individuals like you or me.

“Most dietary recommendations that one can think of are based on one of these grading systems; however, what people didn’t highlight, or maybe they didn’t fully appreciate, is that there are profound differences between individuals – in some cases, individuals have [the?] opposite response to one another, and this is really a big hole in the literature,” said Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

http://www.sciencealert.com/universal-diets-don-t-work-because-healthy-foods-differ-by-individual-study-finds

[phantom power]

1. Another giant hole is understanding how our gut bacteria ecosystems influence all of this.

[laundry_queen]

2. Yep.

Good program explaining this -you can only watch the video in Canada...there are programs though that can easily get around this :

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/it-takes-guts