Food4Me - personalised nutrition initiative

That's a very impressive-looking shop window, but I had difficulty finding substance, even in what they say they are going to do. Here is the only place I could find any science, and it's no more than a few very well-known and clear-cut examples of gene/diet interaction, and a promise of more. Here are the Aims and Objectives and here the Expected Outcomes, and, well, I realise that's the sort of Eurospeak one must write for an EU Framework project (I speak from experience), but according to that page it's been going a year already, and I don't see even a schedule of deliverables.

I looked at their list of members and thought "cat-herding" (speaking from experience again), then looked on their contact page and at last found a real scientist doing real science. The head of the project is Mike Gibney at University College Dublin. As I know nothing about nutrition, it would be presumptuous for me to say much more than that if you're interested in nutrition, his blog looks well worth reading.

Have they produced anything yet?

What evidence is there that the variations in individual nutritional needs are significant enough that it is worth evaluating them? It seems far more common for health problems to arise from people failing to abide by (relatively basic) generalised nutrition guidelines.

Before something like this would be possible, we would need a general concept of "a nutritious diet for the average human" that wasn't blatantly flawed to then modify based on individual traits.

As is, the field of nutrition is a pseudo-scientific mess that keeps "building" on theories that were never supported by data, but will never be rejected with the current methodology. To start, we should perform a bayesian re-analysis of every major hypothesis in the field of nutrition using the data we already have and then take the actual results seriously. Even if it suggests "outrageous" things that everybody "knows" is wrong like saturated fat is perfectly safe, or whole grains and vegetable oil are unhealthy (and it will).

We also have to realize that good nutrition choices with our current data are simply "prudent risk adverse decisions" based on inference from very weak data. We don't have to know if X is good or bad for you and why to make a decision to eat it or not with the data we do have.

The most pressing need in human health right now is a Bayesian revolution in the field of nutrition.

I believe I have a few results of this nature in my 23andme profile but, like most results there, they indicate e.g. that I might gain an extra .5 pounds compared to average on a high fat diet.

I got a kick when I logged in there and it said something to the effect of 'see how your genes affect your weight' and after entering height, age, and weight it told me that my genes were responsible for 2lb (whatever that meant).

It does also note lactose tolerance, alcohol and caffeine enzymes, coeliac disease risk, etc.