Our science

What’s a nutritional response?

When it comes to something as personal as food, everyone’s different. So how do you know what’s right for you? The answer lies in understanding your personal nutritional response - how your body breaks down and uses food.

When you eat or drink something, your body converts the fat and sugar (carbohydrates) into energy. This is called metabolism.

How high the levels of fat and sugar in your blood rise after eating or drinking and how quickly they return to normal - your nutritional response - is an important measure of metabolism and health.

Regularly eating meals that trigger an unhealthy nutritional response harms your metabolism, eventually causing long-term weight gain and health problems such as diabetes or heart disease.

Every body is unique

We’re measuring personal nutritional responses in thousands of people - the largest study of its kind in the world.

Here’s how we do it

We use blood tests and stick-on glucose monitors (originally developed for people with diabetes) to see how the levels of chemicals such as fat, insulin and sugar change in each person’s bloodstream after eating a set of identical standardized foods and their own regular meals. We also gather data on activity, sleep, hunger and gut bacteria (microbiome).

We were surprised to discover that nutritional responses to the same foods can be very different between people, even identical twins:

Blood fat and sugar levels for 1000 healthy people after eating the same standardized meal. Every line represents data from one person.

Crunching the data

We’re building machine learning models to figure out what’s going on when people eat specific foods and predict with high accuracy how they’ll respond to any meal. This way we can help them choose the foods that will optimize their metabolism and keep them healthy and feeling good for life.

To find out more read our blog or whitepapers.