The National Institutes of Health, the clinical research arm of the U.S. Department of Health, has announced a plan to expedite research on precision nutrition – developing targeted and effective diet interventions in diverse populations – among other goals in its “2020-2030 Strategic Plan for NIH Nutrition Research” over the next decade.
 
NIH and its Nutrition Research Task Force (NRTF) will collaborate with those in the nutrition science community, healthcare practitioners, the public, and others, with a focus on precision nutrition, affecting a range of studies amounting to $1.9 billion in the year 2019 alone. Precision nutrition research differs from genomic research in that it takes into account a wider range of contributions to an individual’s diet and metabolism, with variables that are more accurate in that they change across time, NIH reports. Additionally, it is categorized by a reliance upon developing algorithmic and artificial intelligence tools.
 
Additionally, the 2020-2030 strategic plan calls for a major expansion of resources toward investigating the diet-host-microbiome interrelationship, including attempts to discover and understand the unknown metabolites that arise from the microbiome and host metabolism of food.
 
 The strategy will involve expanding collaboration across NIH institutes with one end goal being the development of individualized dietary recommendations based on optimizing unique individuals’ health and quality of life. NIH nutrition researchers will be more inclined, for example, to form interdisciplinary teams with data scientists to create more complex, multidimensional epidemiological datasets.
 
The plan is organized around four strategic goals: foundational research (through collaboration with those in the fields of bioinformatics, neurobiology, and genomics), the role of dietary patterns, the role of nutrition across a lifespan (focusing on the time windows of pregnancy, infancy and toddlerhood, and older adulthood), and reducing the burden of disease in clinical settings.
 
As the plan is put into action, NIH will seek input from the nutrition community to guide priorities identified in each of the strategic goals, and catalyze that nutrition research at NIH-funded universities, institutions, and NIH labs.
 
“Good nutrition is so central to our livelihood that it is hard to consider it as an isolated area of research, and we must not ignore its broad influence on individual and community health,” Francis S. Collins, director of NIH, said. “Diseases linked to poor diet are the most frequent causes of death in the United States, and diet is the leading risk factor for premature death worldwide. Reducing even a fraction of this burden by improving people’s diets would not only save countless lives but also reduce annual health expenditures by billions of dollars.”
 
 The NIH 2020-2030 Strategic Plan can be viewed here.