Personalized Nutrition: Beyond the One-Diet-Fits-All Paradigm for Sustainable Dietary Habits
Editorial
For decades, nutrition science and public health policy have been shaped by the assumption that standardized dietary guidelines could be universally applied. This one-diet-fits-all paradigm emerged alongside the globalization of food systems and the unification of nutrient-based recommendations aimed at preventing chronic diseases (Deckelbaum RJ et al., 1999; Tanne, 1999), often at the expense of local dietary patterns and food cultures (Barquera, 2022). While well intentioned, this approach has largely overlooked genetic diversity, cultural contexts, and regional food systems, raising questions about its long-term effectiveness and sustainability.
The global promotion of dietary models such as the Mediterranean, Japanese, or Nordic diets beyond their regions of origin illustrates these limitations (D’Innocenzo et al., 2019; Abe et al., 2020). Although effective within their original contexts, applying these models universally may neglect the nutritional, cultural, and economic value of indigenous diets and may conflict with sustainability objectives and personalized nutrition principles (Burt et al., 2021; Phokaewvarangku et al., 2023; Figuero et al;, 2021). Embedding such dietary patterns into national guidelines may therefore result in recommendations that are inadequately aligned with population-specific metabolic profiles and food environments (Ojeda-Granados et al., 2021).
In this context, personalized nutrition has emerged as a promising framework to reconcile health promotion with environmental sustainability. Recent research reflects this shift.
A first synthesis paper (Ieremia et al., 2025) highlights the limitations of demand-side nutrition policies—such as dietary guidelines, food labeling, and fiscal measures—which often rely on generic and poorly actionable recommendations. Identifying population subgroups instead allows dietary advice to be anchored in existing consumption patterns and nutritional needs, enabling culturally acceptable, locally contextualized, and behaviorally realistic dietary pathways.
Experimental evidence further supports this approach. In the MyPlanetDiet randomized controlled trial Davies et al., 2025 showed that personalized, sustainability-oriented dietary advice can significantly reduce diet-related greenhouse gas emissions while improving diet quality. Participants receiving tailored guidance increased intake of plant-based foods, including fruits and vegetables, and reduced red meat consumption compared with those following standard healthy eating guidelines.
In parallel, advances in artificial intelligence have enabled scalable digital nutrition systems for obesity and type 2 diabetes management capable of translating clinical and sustainability criteria into personalized dietary outputs, promoting plant-based, seasonal, and locally sourced foods while supporting adherence (Gavai et al., 2025).
Together, these advances represent important progress toward sustainable personalized nutrition. However, they also raise an important question: to what extent can such strategies remain robust without explicitly accounting for biological diversity?
Moving beyond the notion of a universal diet requires recognizing diversity as both cultural and biological. Long-term interactions between genomes, food environments, and traditional dietary patterns, which are rich in fruits and vegetables, may contribute to population-specific metabolic profiles. From a methodological perspective, combining population-level genetic data with dietary intake, lifestyle parameters, and cultural patterns can improve subgroup classification and metabolic responses to sustainable diets.
Applying personalized and sustainable nutrition frameworks therefore requires addressing the interconnections between the triad of genetic adaptation, local food systems, and cultural dietary practices (Roman et al., 2025). For example, traditional Mexican milpa-based diets illustrate how long-term interactions between populations and local food systems may shape metabolic adaptations. Results from the GENOMEX project suggest that genetic variation in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism reflects such historical exposures, underscoring a potential mismatch with modern unhealthy diets. (Roman et al., 2024).
Overall, these developments point to the need to rethink nutrition science and policy. Moving beyond one-size-fits-all dietary models will require integrating sustainability objectives with the biological and cultural foundations—genes, diet, and food culture—that shape population eating patterns and chronic disease risk.
In Jalisco, Mexico, Sonia Roman is a Senior Scientist who specializes in genomic nutrition in hepatology at the University of Guadalajara Health Sciences Center. Her research is centered on genome-based nutritional interventions for Mexicans designed to address obesity, type 2 diabetes, and MASLD by integrating genetic diversity, dietary practices, and food culture.