Research Description
Over the past decades, the number of individuals affected by obesity and type 2 diabetes has increased at alarming rates. While obesity and type 2 diabetes can be prevented by the adoption of a healthy lifestyle, unsustainable adherence to healthy dietary recommendations is a major reason of the escalating obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics worldwide. To inform optimized dietary recommendations it is crucial to understand how people interact with and respond to foods. Owing to recent advances in biology and technology, it is now clear that food preferences, as well as how our body respond to foods, are in part influenced by biological factors. The main objective of this project is to discover new strategies that can help improve dietary quality and optimize dietary recommendations. To achieve this goal, we will investigate if differences in our genetic code can help identify people who are more likely to make unhealthy food choices. Next, we will use information from a study in which 1,100 participants consumed exactly the same meals, to investigate if genetic differences contribute to different metabolic responses to consumed meals. Finally, we will use information from long-term observational studies and a clinical study designed for the prevention of type 2 diabetes to examine if subgroups of individuals with similar genetic characteristics are less likely to adhere to healthy dietary recommendations. We expect to generate new knowledge that can be translated into more effective and sustainable strategies for obesity and type 2 diabetes prevention.Research Profile
What area of diabetes research does your project cover? What role will this particular project play in preventing, treating and/or curing diabetes?My research interests span nutrition, metabolism, and genomics, all aimed at elucidating molecular mechanisms underlying the success or failure of therapeutic strategies for type 2 diabetes prevention and care. Unhealthy diet is a major driving force behind the escalating type 2 diabetes epidemics, yet underlying mechanisms regulating food choices are poorly understood, and large inter-individual variability exists in response to dietary interventions. This project aims to gain knowledge on how people interact with and respond to foods. Findings from these studies could provide new knowledge with the potential to help guide the design and implementation of more effective, tailored, and sustainable strategies for type 2 diabetes prevention and care.
If a person with diabetes were to ask you how your project will help them in the future, how would you respond?That person will know firsthand that people with type 2 diabetes are often stigmatized for making unhealthy food and lifestyle choices. This “victim blaming” view has been persistent, disparaging, and highly inefficient as rates of type 2 diabetes continue to rise worldwide. Acknowledging the importance of the obesogenic environment and its amplification of our genetic differences, is essential not only to destigmatize diabetes, but also to inform more effective strategies to advance the prevention of diabetes. In the future, findings from this project will equip people with diabetes with new knowledge to better understand how their body respond to food cues, which foods or meals are more appropriate for them, and how to improve adherence to specific dietary recommendations based on individual and social factors. But before this knowledge is widely applied or recommended, it is important that we vet it through projects such as this.
Why important for you, personally, to become involved in diabetes research? What role will this award play?Diabetes is now a national priority and the most expensive chronic illness in the U.S. totaling $327 billion in 2017. I am motivated by the critical need of supplanting the outdated “one-size-fits-all” approach for diabetes prevention and treatment with more effective, tailored, and sustainable strategies. My prior research has demonstrated the influence of different environmental and physiological factors on food choice behaviors and variations in responses to meals, but we are still a long way from knowing the real value of this knowledge and what it means in practice. The support of the American Diabetes Association will be instrumental in helping me push my research forward by providing the means to generate high quality evidence on how people interact with and respond to foods. The American Diabetes Association award will also provide a catalyst for generating a wealth of preliminary data to substantiate future research applications.
In what direction do you see the future of diabetes research going?I believe a major direction for the near-term future of type 2 diabetes research will be diabetes prevention given the increasing impact of the disease on populations and healthcare budgets. Elucidating how behavioral and social factors interact with biology to disproportionally effect specific groups of individuals is an unmet medical need. I think this will be a major growth area for diabetes research because of the emergence of transformative new tools that now make it possible to better understand the biology of food-decision making and metabolic responses to foods.