The nutraceuticals industry is still scratching the surface in developing truly personalized nutrition products. Innovators face many technical hurdles in their quest to deliver products precisely-tailored to consumers based on their genes, phenotypes, sex, health history, lifestyle, gut environment, and more.

Nutrigenomics, the study of how these factors interplay, is still a relatively nascent field. Premium brands have been developing the first generation of products alongside testing services to deliver a unique consumer experience and nutritional regimen.

Who’s Looking for Personalized Nutrition Products and Why? 

Matthew Oster, senior industry manager of consumer health for Euromonitor International, discussed the personalized nutrition market, consumer profiles, and what people expect from this field at SupplySide West 2022.

“The demand for personalization is not something that exists in a vacuum with nutrition products,” he said. “Consumers who can afford them want personalized products unique to them.”

Generally, consumers want technological advances to offer actionable, real-time data. Those who index the highest for enthusiasm about personalized nutrition are women between the ages of 38 and 44, parents with children in the home, people who self-report excellent health, high-income and highly-educated consumers, according to Oster.

Creating a service that allows people to understand their own personal data and apply that knowledge is a key challenge. Providing minimal information with an isolated pill pack won’t get a brand far, Oster said.

“Do I, as a consumer, understand what this product is designed to do for me? Do I know where these ingredients are coming from, and exactly why they’re ideal for me? Personalized nutrition products and services range from minor degrees of customization to leading-edge bespoke products, and there are lots of opportunities along that spectrum if you know how to best engage with the consumer at any point in the lifespan,” Oster said. “In the future, the main component might be the services, with products as a secondary item, because it’s guidance that people are seeking.”

Complexity of Nutrition Science

There are many unknown factors as to why some people respond to a given nutritional intervention while others don’t. A rush to market products as personalized may damage consumer trust in the field, according to Silvia Berciano, MSc, entrepreneurship advisor and former research director at Tufts University’s Food & Nutrition Innovation Institute.

The PREDICT Study in the U.K., for instance, demonstrated the variability in postprandial responses to a standardized set of meals, especially with glucose, triglyceride, and insulin responses. While the study raised more questions than answers, researchers called for “a big change to the fundamentals of nutrition science,” Berciano said. “Looking at high-risk populations in randomized, controlled clinical trials doesn’t allow us to generalize findings for healthy populations.”

“There are profound inter-individual differences in disease risks, behaviors, and responses to diet. This limits the effectiveness of one-size-fits-all approaches, even when adherence is high,” Berciano noted.

By better understanding interactions between diet and other factors, nutrition will become a more mainstream component of medicine, Berciano said. “Advanced means using AI and algorithms can be much more helpful than the current approach. More than half of the population is suffering from diet-related conditions with our current efforts.”

Gut Microbiome Questions

Beyond the role of genes in nutrient metabolism, big questions exist for the gut microbiome, Berciano noted. There is no one ideal, healthy gut microbiome profile, and there is redundancy around how certain bacteria assist or compromise nutrient absorption.

“Even though diet may impact the gut microbiome and its composition, things are complex, and we know that responses vary widely in people taking the same prebiotic fiber, and opposite effects can occur in terms of which bacteria are being fed,” Berciano said.

Wearable and implantable technology will allow researchers to cover larger populations than ever before to gather real-world phenotypic data. “We don’t know yet what’s normal when it comes to interindividual responses to the things we eat every day,” Berciano said. “There’s still a lot we need to understand about daily variations.”

Building The Foundation

Integrating nutrigenomics into scalable products and services is a heavy lift. 

According to Jennifer Cooper, president of Alternative Labs, the nutrition industry should take some inspiration from the field of cancer oncology, which had to develop “-omics” research models to develop drugs that a majority of patients respond to.

Unlike drug discovery for diseases, however, nutrigenomics covers how nuanced and long-term nutritional choices and environment can change gene expression. While questionnaires may serve as a first step toward personalization, bringing more validated tests to the consumer level is much-needed. 

“We need to spend money on good mechanism of action studies that go into proprietary ingredients,” Cooper said. “This is where the nuance lies in finding ingredients with more targeted effects. And remember that the legality of claims lies in structure and function, and these studies bring your health claims into a safe harbor.”

Targeting Weight, Aging, Longevity, and More

To think about how this investment might influence a particular product category, take weight management, for example. “We’ve been talking about thermogenesis for many, many years, but it’s well-known that this isn’t the most important mechanism to investigate,” Cooper said.

Aging and longevity represent another opportunity for precision nutrition, Cooper noted.

Hallmarks of the biological clock will become central in the discussion about potential anti-aging interventions, such as DNA methylation, telomere attrition, deregulated nutrient sensing, and much more. “While these hallmarks seem esoteric, nutrient interventions are being tested for each one of these areas,” Cooper said. 

One of the biggest learning curves to drive the narrative of personalization will be restructuring how dietary supplements are produced.

“Manufacturing, for the past hundred years, has been about producing things with uniformity,” Cooper said. “Being able to pump out large amounts of product at low cost has made things more accessible to the consumer. But the science is pushing the narrative in the opposite direction. The industry needs to learn, starting today, how to produce products in a modular way, and reduce the lead times on custom products.”