Science News: “A good diet for you may be bad for me”

Science news reports:

Eating the same foods can lead to different blood sugar spikes in different people

People’s blood sugar rises or falls differently even when they eat the exact same fruit, bread, deserts, pizza and many other foods, researchers in Israel report November 19 in Cell. That suggests that diets should be tailored to individuals’ personal characteristics.

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Mixes of microbes living in people’s guts, known as the gut microbiome, also changed with the good and bad diets. Bacteria help break down food and have been implicated in causing obesity and diabetes. This study can’t distinguish whether the microbiome is causing differences in blood sugar responses or being influenced by how a person responds to certain foods, says Peter Turnbaugh, a microbiome researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

...It turned out that foods on the “good” diet for one person were sometimes on another participant’s “bad” list, Segal says. For instance, one woman’s blood sugar spiked when she ate tomatoes. But tomatoes were on other people’s healthy list.

“What our data suggest is that relying on population averages is not only inaccurate, but may even be dangerous in some cases,” Elinav says.

WIND: more and more evidence suggests that gut biome has a huge impact on overall health and weight.

But even more intriguing is to see a statement which finally recognizes junk science like BMI for what it is: individuals are not averages. BMI is an obviously flawed cased, but now this study shows that responses to food are highly individual. Which pretty much shows the malpractice of doctors and nutritionists who prescribe diets for an indidvidual based on population average responses. Yet generalized averages are the starting basis for medical care of many kinds—malpractice when treating an individual, just as it would be to give everyone O+ blood because most people have O+ blood. Modern medical science is only beginning to see the light yet public health discussions almost always revolve around benefits based on averages. As if any health issues can exist without individuals.