About Us
The Personalized Nutrition Project is a large-scale nutrition initiative that aims to help people make food choices that are better for their health and well-being. We take an unbiased scientific approach to nutrition that combines the collection of a wide range of information and the development of accurate predictive algorithms.
We are all different. Therefore, general recommendations about food may not be good for everyone. Here, we intend to make food selection a personalized process, as it should be.
The Personalized Nutrition Project is led by Prof. Eran Segal and Dr. Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Our Story
The modern era is marked by an unhealthy increase in body weight across the world. Metabolic diseases are also on the rise, with more and more cases of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. General nutritional recommendations, published by governmental agencies, are not effective for controlling these rises in weight and disease. This is largely because different people respond differently to food. Therefore, food choices that are good for one person may not be good for another.
One source of such variability is our microbiome - the collection of 100 trillion germs and microbes that we carry around with us. Each of us has a unique microbiome, which is affected by what we eat, and in turn, affects our response to food (learn more).
Our aim in the Personalized Nutrition Project is to understand individual variation and construct a truly personalized diet.
How we do it
We take an unbiased and scientific approach to the nutritional problem.
During a special measurement week, our participants are connected to a glucometer that measures their blood sugar response to the food they eat during that week, as well as their blood sugar response to exercise, sleeping, and other activities. Participants are asked to log what they eat and when they exercise and sleep using a specialized mobile application that we designed. Participants are also asked to hand in a sample of their microbiome for analysis.
After collecting this information, we design algorithms that utilize our entire database of microbiome and responses to foods in order to predict how each participant responds to food that he/she did not test, thus arriving at personalized nutritional predictions.
Who is it for?
The Personalized Nutrition Project is open for registration and is free of charge.
The first stage of the project is currently available only in Israel and is open to people who are at least 18 years old and do not inject insulin.