Dietary Patterns and Personalized Nutrition
Promoting healthy aging by focusing on dietary patterns and tailored nutritional guidance based on genetics is being pursued by several research teams. The focus on dietary patterns over individual nutrients is predictive of health outcomes and reflective of the way people eat. Looking at dietary patterns is proving to be a better approach to moderating the impact of age-related conditions and metabolic, physical and cognitive changes characteristic of aging. The HNRCA also uses computing power to analyze huge datasets from existing cohorts to study the effect of various diets on millions of individuals and identify biomarkers that sustain health and define specific dietary factors.
Key research objectives
- Characterize diet to determine patterns that associate with healthy aging, and construct models of the various components of these dietary patterns to determine the contribution that each component of the pattern provides to overall associations, while concurrently considering the joint associations of different dietary components.
- Identify genomic, epigenomic, metabolomic, and microbiome-related biomarkers that sustain healthy aging, and define specific personalized dietary, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors associated with optimal health of older adults.
- Determine the effect of food components and their metabolites, dietary patterns, and lipid-modifying therapies on cardiometabolic risk factors and lipoprotein, sterol, bile acid, and fatty acid metabolism in humans, and using animal, and in vitro models.
Scientists:
Sai Das, PhD
Paul Jacques, DSc
Chao-Qiang Lai, PhD
Alice Lichtenstein, DSc
Jose Ordovas, PhD
Laurence Parnell, PhD
Sheldon Rowan, PhD