NIH Launches “All of Us” Precision Nutrition Research Initiative

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched its Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program (NPH), a national initiative to learn how biological differences influence how people respond to food and dietary patterns, according to a press release shared with HealthITAnalytics.

NPH aims to enroll 10,000 participants with various backgrounds from 14 sites across the US. Data from these participants, who must be 18 years of age and enrolled in the All of Us Research Program, will then be analyzed using artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to help develop models that can predict an individual's response to certain foods or eating patterns. Such models have the potential to support personalized nutritional guidance from clinicians.

“Poor diet is one of the leading causes of preventable disease and death around the world. If everyone followed the healthy eating guidelines that we have available now, we still may not achieve optimal health because our bodies respond differently to food,” said Holly Nicastro, PhD, coordinator of NPH, in the press release. “Through this study, we are looking to better understand differences in individual responses and pave the way for more tailored guidelines in the future.”

NPH acknowledges that nutrition is critical for the prevention and treatment of many chronic diseases, including diabetes and hypertension, but seeks to address gaps in current dietary recommendations. These recommendations do not consider individual biological differences that impact how a person will respond to dietary patterns or types of food, leading to a “one-size-fits-most” approach to nutrition.

Precision nutrition, however, focuses on making more specific dietary recommendations based on a person’s unique characteristics, such as genes, health history, gut microbiome, lifestyle, and social determinants of health (SDOH).

“Nutrition is perhaps one of the most powerful medicines we have available, but is among the least understood,” said Geoffrey Ginsburg, MD, PhD, All of Us’ chief medical and scientific officer. “By tapping into the All of Us infrastructure and platform, NPH will be set apart from other nutrition studies by its scale and diversity. The value of NPH will be amplified by the research community as new data types are made broadly available in the Researcher Workbench to explore and advance our understanding of nutrition and health.”

 NPH consists of three study components, and participation will vary across each component. In the first, all NPH participants will be tasked with completing surveys, reporting their daily diets, and providing urine, stool, and blood samples for microbiome analysis and other lab tests.

The second and third components will take subsets of the NPH cohort to be given diets selected by researchers, but one subset will be asked to live in a research center while on the diets, and the other subset will not.

All NPH participants will also undergo meal challenge tests aimed at measuring biological changes following consumption of a standardized study-provided meal or drink.

Data from the study will be linked to participants’ information from the All of Us Research Program, which contains genomic and EHR data.

Participants will then receive interpreted information from the study regarding their health, including diet composition, metabolism, body fat percentage, and microbiome makeup.

NPH data will also be made available to researchers through All of Us’ data platform, the Researcher Workbench, to bolster additional studies on health and precision nutrition.