The Poop About Your Gut Health and Personalized Nutrition

Changing your diet to improve your health is nothing new--people with diabetes, obesity, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, food allergies, and a host of other conditions have long done so as part of their treatment. But new and sophisticated knowledge about biochemistry, nutrition, and artificial intelligence has given people more tools to figure out what to eat for good health, leading to a boom in the field of personalized nutrition. Personalized nutrition, often used interchangeably with the terms "precision nutrition" or "individualized nutrition" is an emerging branch of science that uses machine learning and "omics" technologies (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) to analyze what people eat and predict how they respond to it. Scientists, nutritionists, and health care professionals take the data, analyze it, and use it for a variety of purposes including identifying diet and lifestyle interventions to treat disease, promote health, and enhance performance in elite athletes. Increasingly, it's being adopted by businesses to sell products and services such as nutritional supplements, apps that use machine learning to provide a nutritional analysis of a meal based on a photograph, and stool-sample tests whose results are used to create customized dietary advice that promises to fight bloat, brain fog, and a myriad of other maladies.