Unlocking human healthspan: Personalizing nutrition according to gut bacteria

Nathan Price, chief scientific officer at personalized wellness solutions firm Thorne and Professor at Buck Institute for Research on Aging in the United States, provided a presentation at the NutraIngredients Active Nutrition Summit last month, in which he discussed data revealing the impact of the microbiome on individuals’ responses to nutrition.

Discussing key takeaways from his presentation, he highlighted the Pioneer 100 Wellness Project, which began in 2014 as a 9-month study involving 108 participants. It set out to establish cost-efficient procedures for data collection, develop analytical tools, identify patterns correlating with wellness and understand how to best present longitudinal health information to individuals.

Findings were initially published in Nature Biotechnology in 2017, but since then the project has expanded to include over 5,000 participants, and the results of the study have been published across more than 25 papers.

One key discovery was that an individual’s genome is highly predictive of the ability to lower LDL cholesterol and raise HDL cholesterol. He noted, however, that no health programs today take “what seems to be one of the most important variables” into account.

The study examined individuals who successfully lost weight and found that the composition of their microbiome was highly predictive of their success.

“Once we corrected for BMI, we saw no signal in the 700 metabolites that would predict whether people would lose weight in the proteome—that really surprised me," he said.

“A questionnaire about what people ate was also not predictive. There were two things that mattered. The first was how fast the microbiome was growing, particularly the bacteroides, and the other big thing that mattered was the gene content of the microbiome.”

He added: “If you take in carbohydrates, some people’s microbiome will break that into simple sugars that spikes insulin in your blood, making it much harder to lose weight. Other people’s will make more SCFAs that don’t spike insulin, and one of the SCFAs, butyrate, is a stimulant for GLP-1, which now everyone understands is a really important aspect to losing weight.”

He explained that people’s microbiomes become more unique after the age of 50, making personalized approaches all the more important as people age.

What’s more, there are certain nutrients that will have different impacts within the body depending on the gut bacteria.

“Some people’s microbiome will turn L-carnitine, found in red meat, into trimethylamine, which then becomes TMAO, which is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, so some people will get more negative responses to L-carnitine but only based on their microbiome,” Price said.

Another example is the gut’s response to phosphatidylcholine, a compound found in eggs which has positive impacts on brain health.

However, the gut bacteria can also turn this into trimethylamine, meaning the consumption of this nutrient can be counter indicative in certain people.

In addition to weight management, Price identified cognitive function as another aspect of health with huge potential for personalized nutrition interventions.

“If you’re trying to do something in late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, for example, by that time a bunch of your neurons have died, you’ve lost billions of synapses,” he said.

“The notion that you could take a small molecule drug and recapitulate all of that that you’ve lost, it’s really hard to imagine how that would be possible. But prevention, which is basically stopping your neurons from dying in the first place, that is eminently doable…

“There’s a lot you can do…that gets down to trying to make sure you have enough energy to keep those neurons alive… Dietary choline, keeping inflammation levels down, makes a difference.”