LSU Health New Orleans scientists will participate in a $170 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that will develop algorithms to predict individual responses to food and dietary routines. Lucio Miele, MD, PhD, Chair of Genetics, and principal investigator of the LSU Health New Orleans All of Us study site, and Judd Shellito, MD, Lowenstein Professor of Medicine, have been awarded a 5-year $1.63 million grant to enroll 2,000 participants in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, administer dietary surveys, collect data, administer research meals to a subset of participants and collect samples for metabolic and ancillary studies. The LSU Health New Orleans team will work with researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

Powered by the All of Us Research Program, the Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH) study will recruit a diverse pool of participants who are also part of NIH's All of Us Research Program to create more personalized nutrition recommendations. How nutritional, physical, and environmental factors combine to influence individual health is not yet understood. Data on multiple potential predictive factors, including the microbiome of the gut, metabolism, nutritional status, genetics, and the environment from a total of 10,000 participants, will help the researchers develop a more complete picture of how individuals respond to different foods or dietary routines.

"The role of diet in maintaining health cannot be overemphasized," notes Dr. Miele, who also serves as Assistant Dean for Translational Science at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine. "A healthy diet, along with exercise, decreases modifiable risk factors for many chronic diseases, from diabetes to heart diseases to cancer. The Nutrition for Precision Health initiative leverages the national All of Us Precision Medicine Research Program to generate scientific evidence for healthy, sustainable diets and to better assess individual risk of diseases associated with poor nutritional health."

The study will not only provide the knowledge to individually tailor nutritional prevention or treatment approaches for chronic diseases but will also help reduce health disparities.

The link between diet and health has been known since the beginning of humankind. This grant will apply some hard science to diet and will lead to practical dietary interventions to improve health and well-being."

Judd Shellito, MD, Lowenstein Professor of Medicine