Personalised nutrition: An integrated analysis of opportunities and challenges

The present proposal sees the development of business and value creation models as central to the development of personalised nutrition and thus it is intended to engage in a series of interviews with key stakeholders, which will generate a number of scenarios to be considered by these stakeholders. Parallel to that we will run some focus groups with consumers and develop a tool to ascertain consumer attitudes to personalised nutrition in 8 EU countries (1,000 per country) representing a breadth of gastronomic traditions. Within these 8 countries, we will recruit 1,280 subjects and offer 3 levels of personalised nutrition: 1 Personalised dietary advice alone; 2: personalised dietary advice based on biochemical phenotypic data; 3: the latter to include genomic data. These will be compared with a control group, which will be offered non-personalised dietary advice. All of the data on dietary intake and all of the advice will be Internet delivered and will last 6 months. Within each of the 3 levels of personalised nutrition groups, half will receive their feedback at months 0, 3 and 6 while the other half will have continuous feedback on demand with intensive coaching.

The overall outcome measurement will be changes in a healthy eating index. The data gathered in this study will feed into the development of algorithms to provide automated feedback for future services delivering personalised advice on food choice. We will bring together an international group of experts to develop best practice in the application of all aspects of nutrigenomic research to personalised nutrition. We will also scope out existing and future technologies, particularly those involving biofeedback, which will help the development of personalised nutrition. Finally we develop position papers on the ethical and legal aspects of personalised nutrition. Permeating all of this work will be a wide-ranging communications programme aimed at all stakeholders of relevance to personalised nutrition.