Chrissy Kinsella was looking for a more personalized approach to her health. "You know, what is good for you as an individual may not necessarily be good for the next person," she says. So she reached for a subscription to Zoe--a personalized nutrition service cofounded by Tim Spector, a celebrity scientist and a genetic epidemiologist at King's College London. Kinsella paid the £299 ($365) for a testing kit and later received a bright yellow package in the mail: a bundle of vials, patches, and muffins. By testing, scoring, and monitoring how you respond to different foods, Zoe says, it can help with a whole host of problems.

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.

The Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML), a leading lab at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech is applying artificial intelligence (AI) methods to personalized nutrition and health. These efforts are aligned with the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) which not only aids the researchers and physicians cure people, but also empowers individuals to monitor and take a more active role in their own health. As opposed to the PMI, personalized nutrition refers to tailored nutritional recommendations aimed at the promotion, maintenance of health and prevention against diseases. However, there are numerous challenges in the path of making personalized nutritional recommendations for the health well-being and disease prevention. The "one-size-fits-all" template is based on generic suggestions regarding nutritional recommendations for improving an individual's health are not helpful.