Diet that worked for your friend may not work for you

So you’ve been consuming the healthiest of foods but are simply unable to get off that weight-loss plateau? There’s a reason why you’re not losing weight.

New research has shown that healthy foods may differ by an individual as people can metabolize the exact same foods in very different ways. What this essentially means is that a healthy diet for one person may not be healthy for another person.

The comprehensive study, conducted by researchers Eran Elinav and Eran Segal at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has been published in the journal Cell.

The study tracked the blood sugar levels of 800 people over a week and demonstrates the power of personalised nutrition to help individuals identify which foods can help or hinder their health goals.

In a statement, Segal said that the data opened one’s eyes to “the possibility that maybe we’re really conceptually wrong in our thinking about the obesity and diabetes epidemic”.

“The intuition of people is that we know how to treat these conditions, and it’s just that people are not listening and are eating out of control – but maybe people are actually compliant but in many cases we were giving them wrong advice,” he said.

The authors focused on one key component used in creating balanced diet plans such as Atkins, Zone or South Beach. Known as the glycemic index or GI for short, it was developed decades ago as a measure of how certain foods impact blood sugar level and has been assumed to be a fixed number.

But this latest research shows that it’s not. It turns out that it varies widely depending on the individual.

The work “really enlightened us on how inaccurate we all were about one of the most basic concepts of our existence, which is how we eat and how we integrate nutrition into our daily life,” Elinav said.

According to the researchers, the findings show that tailoring meal plans to individuals’ biology may be the future of dieting.

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