Personalised, population and planetary nutrition for precision health

Nutrition is a global science that originally was envisaged to biologically analyse and integrate the processes related to food transformation into energy and nutritious components for cell functions and homeostasis.1 Noteworthy, it is now evident that such physical, chemical and metabolic reactions participate in human development to ensure life expectancy and well-being, with a growing and inseparable relevance for personal, population and planetary health.2 Nowadays, nutritional challenges and nutritionist’s interests are being focused on health and wellness involving physical, emotional, intellectual, cognitive, spiritual, environmental and occupational facets.3 Moreover, according to the newer emerging health scenarios, food intake should be assessed in relationship with social, satisfaction, satiety, security, safety and sustainable dimensions. In this context, two apparently alternative approaches, one derived from a global public health perspective and another derived from a precision-personalised nutrition paradigm, should be harmonised and deliberated since they are complementary to each other and as such, personalised, participative, preventive and predictive strategies are all needed in order to maintain a healthy status as well as to prevent and manage diseases.4 The evolving notion about precision nutrition concerns personalised nutrition guidelines and tailor-made dietary prescriptions for the prevention and treatment of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular events and other chronic diseases. The management of metabolic impairments, inflammatory/haematological disturbances or neoplasia/tumorous diseases with nutritional approaches are needed for health maintenance as well as in clinical practice.5 In this context, precision nutrition not only considers an individual′s genomic background and nutrient-gene interactions but also a thorough phenotyping evaluation, including family and personal clinical features, perinatal feeding programming and expectantly a wide spectrum of bioinformatic data concerning metabolic pathways. This last aspect involves omics strategies and high-throughput technologies such as metabolomics, proteomics, (epi) genomics or metagenomics related to macronutrients and micronutrients metabolic utilisation.6 Indeed, the conceptual framework …