Does the effectiveness of a diet depend on your genes? Research suggests it does…

Most of our knowledge about healthy and unhealthy eating comes from epidemiological research. This looks at which diets are healthy on average. However, individual differences between people are not taken into account.

Meanwhile, you can see that diets do not always work for everyone. Popular diets work better for some people than for others. Why is this?

Scientists in the United States recently investigated the effectiveness of four popular diets for reducing metabolic conditions such as obesity and diabetes. They investigated this in groups of mice that differed from one another in genetic background. The mice were put on an American, Mediterranean, Japanese or ketogenic (low-carbohydrate) diet for six weeks. The health effects of the Mediterranean, Japanese or ketogenic diet were then compared with those of the American diet.

The study showed that the effectiveness of the different diets differed per group of mice. In all groups the low-carbohydrate diet sped up metabolism, but the extent to which depended on genetics. There was no diet that was the healthiest for all groups. Instead, it turned out that the different groups of mice all benefited from a different diet. For one group the ketogenic diet was the healthiest. Two other groups benefited most from the Japanese diet. In the last group, both the ketogenic diet and the Japanese diet improved health.

The health effects of four popular diets thus proved to depend strongly on the genetic background of the mice. If this also applies to people, it means that personal, DNA-based dietary advice will produce better health outcomes than the traditional idea that the same diet is equally healthy for everyone.

A lot more research will have to be done before it can also be determined exactly for us which diet works best based on our genes. As soon as specific genes are also found in humans that influence the effects of different diets, iGene will be able to use this information to give personal dietary advice based on your genes.

1. Barrington, William T., et al. “Improving metabolic health through precision dietetics in mice.” Genetics 208.1 (2018): 399-417.