AHS17 Jumping out of the nutrition system - Adele Hite and Sean Mark
Channel: AncestryFoundation
Date: 2017-10-24

Jumping out of the nutrition system, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Dietary Guidelines

Mainstream dietary guidance relies on nutritional epidemiology to draw conclusions about links between diet and chronic disease. In turn, nutritional epidemiology operates by extracting information from populations of carefully chosen individuals and sequestering it in unwieldy, if not proprietary, datasets. This information system creates a closed loop of nutrition research, clinical guidelines, and dietary policy that only returns information to individuals through a filter of obscure methodology distilled into one-size-fits-all guidance by experts burdened with ideological and institutional allegiances. This presentation explores a new project designed to democratize this process by bringing “n of 1” nutritional approaches together with the power of population-based information, enabling individuals, clinicians, and researchers to develop virtual “nearest neighbor” communities based on attributes that may affect health outcomes. This returns the power of population-based information to individuals and sidesteps the information system behind current dietary guidance to help create one reflecting ancestral health frameworks.