Precision nutrition: A review of current approaches and future endeavors

Background: Precision and personalized nutrition approaches aim to leverage human variability to design tailored dietary interventions to improve health. With an extensive range of technological advances and opportunities for integrative precision nutrition, a review of current and future global trends is needed. Scope and approach: The purpose of this review paper is to synthesize and critically appraise the latest developments, potential applications and future research needs in the field of precision nutrition. Selected examples of international studies that implement nutritional genetic, epigenetics, genomics, metabolomics and metagenomics approaches will be reviewed. Key findings and conclusion: Precision nutrition integrates genetic, metagenomic, metabolomic, physiopathological, behavioral and sociocultural cues to understand metabolism and human wellbeing and implement health actions. Such wide-ranging measures require advances in 1) high-throughput multi-omics techniques, and 2) integrative big data systems. Over recent decades, research in the fields of nutritional genetic, epigenetics, genomics, metabolomics and metagenomics has accelerated exponentially. These approaches provide deep genotypic and phenotypic insights into human variability in response to diet, which has informed a new era of personalized and precision nutrition interventions. Moreover, advances in big data and machine learning have paved the way for integrated precision nutrition applications across research, industry and healthcare. This review will consider each of these areas in turn, such that the outcomes of this research will assist with understanding the latest developments and future consolidation trends in the field of precision nutrition.