BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WBMA) — UAB is looking for people to participate in nutrition research to learn more about how our bodies respond differently to food.
The ultimate goal is to be able to identify the optimal diet for each person to improve overall health and prevent chronic disease.
Nutrition is important in the prevention and treatment of most chronic illnesses and diseases.
However, current dietary recommendations do not take into account biological individual differences in how people respond to food or how and when they eat.
Dietary guidelines for Americans have always been one-size-fits-all, in part because we don’t really understand the complexity of how and why different people respond to food differently.
UAB is one of six clinical centers working to find out through a groundbreaking study with the National Institutes of Health called Nutrition for Precision Health.
Dr. Barbara Gower is multiple principal investigator on this study.
I believe that nutrition is the main determinant of health in America today.
The study looked at how a variety of factors, including age, genes, lifestyle, health history, the gut microbiome (the microorganisms that live in the human gastrointestinal tract), and the environment in which people live and work, influence a person’s health. We plan to investigate whether to give Reaction to diet.
This will be the first study in this country to attempt to collect the data needed to create personalized guidelines for optimizing diet.
The goal is to enroll 10,000 participants from a variety of backgrounds.
“I mean, I heard years ago that a lot of the original research was done on white men, and a lot of the original data in textbooks was based on data from white men. Ginger, that obviously needs to change.”
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Here’s how it works:
This study consists of three modules. All participants will participate in the first module and a subset will participate in the other two modules.
In the first module, participants will be asked to complete a questionnaire, report their daily diet, and provide blood, urine, and stool samples for clinical testing, including microbiome analysis.
In the second module, participants are given a meal selected by the researchers.
In the third, participants are also given a diet selected by researchers, but are required to stay at the research center during the diet.
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Dr. Gower says the data collected will be a game changer.
Just because you have a genetic predisposition doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get the disease. It is completely changeable and the main change factor is diet. So we can do a lot more with our diets and use the data we get from NPH to better tailor our diets to our individual needs.
UAB’s goal is to enroll 1,000 people in the study.
Click here to learn more about the study and register.
