Precision nutrition—chances are you’ve heard of it, whether from an app promising dietary guidance specific to your needs, or a USDA announcement of research priorities.
But what exactly is it? The father of nutrigenomics, who works at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University, has answers.
José Ordovás, senior scientist and scientific advisor at the HNRCA, began exploring how particular genes affect people’s responses to specific nutrients when eating the same foods – now referred to as nutrigenomics – thirty years ago. “I was working on understanding lipids, and I met a fellow working on the genes underlying lipid metabolism,” he said. “It was pure serendipity.”
He found that dietary changes reduced cholesterol and cardiovascular disease in some people, but not in others. “I had great scientific curiosity. I saw something I didn’t understand, and I wanted to understand it,” he said.
His pursuit of that understanding has evolved into a multidisciplinary field that integrates nutrition and behavioral sciences with genomics, metabolomics, and artificial intelligence.
Called precision nutrition, it promises to transform public health by tailoring dietary guidance to the diverse biological and environmental needs of individuals and communities, Ordovás says.
“The science of precision nutrition is still being written—but its promise is already reshaping how we think about health,” Ordovás says. “By integrating diet and other lifestyle factors with real-time health data from new technologies like wearable sensors, we can give future generations the tools not just to live longer, but to live better.”
What exactly do we mean by “precision nutrition?” José Ordovás: At Tufts, we were studying precision nutrition before it even had a name. In the early 1990s, my colleagues and I began exploring how genes shape responses to dietary sugar and fats. We noticed that two people could eat the same meal yet show very different glucose or triglyceride responses -one person’s blood sugar may rise sharply after white bread while another shows almost no change, because of small differences in their genomes. Observations like these led us to realize that the same dietary advice cannot work equally well for everyone. Over time, that focus expanded beyond single genes to include the full picture of how diet shapes health across the lifespan.
Today, precision nutrition uses the most current scientific methods to determine, with increasing certainty, which dietary patterns support the best health outcomes for groups of individuals who share traits such as genetics, microbiome profiles, or age, while also considering their exposome – the combined influence of their environment, lifestyle and life experiences.
Compared to traditional nutrition, which often takes a one-size-fits-all approach, precision nutrition guides each of these subgroups along their optimal dietary route. It’s like moving from a map to a GPS. And it provides the scientific foundation for personalized nutrition, which further zooms in on what works best for the individual.
Why is precision nutrition getting so much attention right now right now? Ordovás: Because the tools have finally caught up with the idea. Advances in genomics, microbiome science, metabolomics, and especially AI now allow researchers to analyze thousands of variables at once and understand how different bodies respond to food.
Until recently, nutrition science had a data problem—too little information and too few ways to connect it. Now we have abundant data from better sensor technology and the computing power to make sense of it. That’s what makes this the decade of precision nutrition.
And the real breakthrough is just beginning as researchers integrate AI with multi-omics data – such as genomics, metabolomics, and microbiome profiles – and wearable data to test predictions in controlled studies.
One of the most ambitious examples of this work is the NIH-led Nutrition for Precision Health study, which is enrolling more than 10,000 participants across the U.S. to build predictive models of individual dietary responses. Tufts scientists, including our team at the HNRCA, are part of this landmark effort.
How does precision nutrition connect with the Dietary Guidelines? How about the food as medicine approach? Ordovás: Precision nutrition can refine the Dietary Guidelines, which set a baseline for the general population, by identifying who benefits most from which recommendations, making them smarter and more responsive to human diversity. Eventually, validated models may lead to adaptive guidelines that evolve in tandem with our increasing understanding of biology and lifestyle.
Precision nutrition is complementary to food as medicine efforts such as medically tailored meals and produce prescriptions. It can explain why some individuals benefit more than others from these interventions, and by integrating diet with physical activity, sleep, and stress, reveal how these factors interact biologically. Bringing all those pieces together lets us move from treating disease to preventing it.
Who can access precision nutrition today, and how can we make it more equitable? Ordovás: Some companies already offer versions of personalized and precision nutrition, but they rely on partial and evolving information. Currently, most precision nutrition research is conducted in controlled settings in order to validate methods.
Before this becomes mainstream, we have to make sure the tools are accessible to everyone. That’s why Tufts is now partnering with local community health programs to distribute devices and provide education on data literacy, so that precision nutrition becomes a tool for addressing health disparities and improving health outcomes across diverse populations.
Encouraging personalized dietary recommendations in national guidelines could also show insurance providers the value of covering personalized nutrition services. Ultimately, making tailored health interventions accessible to all communities opens the way for more equitable healthcare solutions.
What remains to be learned about precision nutrition? Ordovás: Scientific hurdles remain, such as the complexities involved in interpreting vast biological data. Ethical considerations, including data privacy and equity in access to precision nutrition tools, must be addressed, and regulatory frameworks will need to catch up to ensure safe and equitable implementation.
Additionally, precision nutrition isn’t just about decoding the person—decoding the food is essential if we want to match the right food to the right biology. That’s where a major gap remains: Scientists estimate that we understand only 5–10 percent of the bioactive compounds in foods.
Researchers at the HNRCA and Tufts are actively investigating specific foods—such as blueberries, known for their complex phytochemicals, and broccoli, rich in sulforaphane—to unlock some of this nutritional mystery.
The next revolution will come from uncovering the “dark matter” of food, the thousands of bioactive compounds in foods that we know exist but have not yet fully identified or understood.. When we pair that with real-time data on how we live, we’ll move from precision nutrition to true precision health – where diet, lifestyle, and environmental exposures are integrated to support long-term well-being.
What’s your vision for the future of precision nutrition? Our major goal is to translate discovery into prediction, so that one day we can forecast how a given person or subgroup will respond to a specific diet in real life, not just under controlled conditions.
The beauty of precision nutrition is that rather than trying to cure or manage disease, we’re catching the individual well before it manifests. We can give each person an individual crystal ball that can not only predict disease decades from now, but prevent it.
For example, based on your genome, we might know you’re at high risk of type II diabetes. But developing it is not a fait accompli. It’s based on interactions with other factors that you can modulate, such as diet and exercise. It could be that the diabetes never appears.
Precision nutrition is no longer a fad; it’s a science. Governments are interested in funding it, hundreds of companies around the world are dedicated to it, and within the decade we will have operations offering it to the public.
I envision a world of precision healthy aging —where diet, activity, sleep, and environment are harmonized through real-time data and a deeper understanding of the foods themselves, and all come together in real time to shape how well we age.
