Healthy Food To One Person May Be Unhealthy To Another
We are fond of saying ‘on man’s
food is another man’s poison’ and that is exactly what came to mind when
I saw this post written by Alice G. Walton
on Forbes on ‘Why Healthy Food To One Person May Be Unhealthy To
Another’. Most people tend to generalise on things that are appropriate
for individuals or things we think should be appropriate, forgetting
that we are uniquely different in our own various ways. From our
thoughts, to our metabolism, orientation, etc.
When it comes to food, our first thought is always, how good does it taste before or never how will my body react to this meal.
According to Alice, nutritionists have
observed that what may work for weight loss for one person doesn’t
always work for another. And now, a study in the journal Cell begins
to figure out why this is the case. It turns out that people metabolize
food very differently depending on their individual makeup – and the
makeup of their gut microbes. What may lead to a slow, steady rise in
blood sugar for one person may lead to a bizarre spike in blood sugar
for another. So knowing that foods that are healthy to one person may be
unhealthy to another could lead to a fundamental shift in the way
dietary recommendations are made moving forward.
Researchers from the Weizmann Institute
measured a number of variables in 800 people: From physical measurements
to glucose levels to gut microbes through stool samples to blood tests.
They sometimes gave people identical meals to measure how each person
responded to the same food, and provided them with a mobile app to keep
tabs on the foods they were consuming in their daily lives. Their main
aim was to monitor how each person’s blood sugar responded after they
ate a given food.
As you’d expect, things like body mass
index and age affected how people’s blood sugar response. But there were
many individual differences beyond those basic variables
Read more here
Photo Credit: Nigerian Lazy Chef
Written by Olamide Dasilva
Click here to join our Facebook group where we can have fun and interact. Catch me if you can
Posts
No comments: