Melissa Taylor, Modern Readers, Nov 20, 2015
This was revealed by a new study from Israel that suggests the definition of "healthy" in food may differ from one person to another."The first very big surprise and striking finding that we had was the very vast variability we saw in people's response to identical meals," said Weizmann Institute of Science researcher Eran Segal. Segal's team evaluated about 800 people, and discovered some interesting findings; for example, tomatoes led one respondent to have elevated blood sugar levels, despite being a normally healthy and low-fat food.
Each of the participants wore blood sugar monitors that tracked levels every five minutes over the span of a week. They were also asked to provide stool samples to allow the researchers to analyze their gut microbiome, and to keep a detailed log of all the foods they ingested during that one week. None of the subjects were diabetic, but some had pre-diabetes or were obese.
It wasn't just the case of the tomatoes that mystified researchers. Another example had some of the participants' blood sugar at higher levels after they ate sushi, as compared to after eating ice cream. "There are profound differences between individuals - in some cases, individuals have opposite responses to one another - and this is really a big hole in the literature," Segal observed.
Fruits and vegetables are usually among the healthy foods included in diets meant to reduce blood sugar levels, while dieters are also advised to avoid refined sugars and white flour, among other products that may elevate blood sugar. However, the Israeli study suggests that these conventional recommendations aren't for everybody, and that overweight individuals are blamed more than they should for overeating or not living a healthy lifestyle.
The researchers believe that personalized diets should be recommended to people, instead of the one-size-fits-all diets that are strikingly similar to each other. The study, according to Lenox Hill Hospital director of inpatient diabetes Minisha Sood, who wasn't involved in the study, "highlights the importance of individualized nutrition - dietary advice should vary from person to person and should be tailored to meet the needs of a given individual based on their reactions to different foods."
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