Table Of ContentCopyright
Neither this diet program nor any other diet program should be followed without
first consulting a health care professional. If you have any special conditions
requiring attention, you should consult with your health care professional
regularly regarding possible modification of the program contained in this book.
Copyright © 2017 by Eran Segal, PhD, and Eran Elinav, MD, PhD
Cover design by Face Out Studios. Photography by Tamara Staples.
Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not
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Interior illustrations © Noa David, Design, Photography & Printing Branch,
Weizmann Institute of Science Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data Names: Elinav, Eran (Medical doctor), author. | Segal, Eran
(Computational biologist), author. | Adamson, Eve, author.
Title: The personalized diet : why one-size-fits-all diets don’t work / Eran
Elinav, MD, PhD, and Eran Segal, PhD with Eve Adamson.
Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Life & Style, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017029726| ISBN 9781478918806 (hardback) | ISBN
9781478918783 (audio download) | ISBN 9781478918790 (ebook) Subjects:
LCSH: Nutrition. | Weight loss. | BISAC: HEALTH & FITNESS / Nutrition. |
HEALTH & FITNESS / Weight Loss.
Classification: LCC RA784 .E45 2017 | DDC 613.2/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029726
ISBNs: 978-1-47891880-6 (hardcover), 978-1-47891879-0 (ebook) E3-
20171025-JV-NF
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Future of Dieting
PART I
A Twenty-First-Century Epidemic and the Personalized Nutrition Solution
CHAPTER 1: A Bread Story
CHAPTER 2: Modern (Health) Problems
CHAPTER 3: The Misinformation Highway
CHAPTER 4: Everything You Thought You Knew about Nutrition May Be
Wrong
CHAPTER 5: The Universe Inside Your Gut—and Why It Matters
CHAPTER 6: Blood Sugar: Your Ultimate Food Feedback Response
CHAPTER 7: The Personalized Nutrition Project
PART II
The Personalized Diet Program
CHAPTER 8: Testing Your Blood Sugar Responses
CHAPTER 9: Fine-Tuning Your Personalized Diet
CHAPTER 10: Your Personalized Diet Organizer
CHAPTER 11: The Future of Dieting
About the Authors
Notes
Newsletters
To our teachers, colleagues, and students, for making our
joint truth-pursuing journey an enjoyable and moving
experience
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Personalized Diet is a culmination of two years of extensive effort. It
translates a large set of results and discoveries stemming from years of grueling
scientific research performed at our two labs into a story that is easy to grasp for
nonscientists and touches upon the very basis of our lives: our diet, health, risk
of becoming obese and developing diabetes and many other “modern diseases,”
and the mysterious bacteria that live within us and with us and make us who we
are.
We are grateful to our agent, Alex Glass, for recognizing that this story
should be brought into the broad public and for initiating, assisting, and guiding
us throughout the process. We are deeply indebted to Eve Adamson, who has
spent countless hours brainstorming, writing, and editing with us, in an effort to
bridge the gap between science and common knowledge, to make this book
accessible to all. We couldn’t have done this without you! We thank our
publisher, Grand Central Publishing, for believing in us and for taking this idea
from its raw form, step-by-step through the journey of book creation. In this
regard, we especially thank Sarah Pelz and Sheila Curry Oakes for their insights
and help in editing the book.
We are grateful to the Weizmann Institute of Science for providing us with
the complete academic freedom to carry out research that is driven solely by our
curiosity to explore the unknown in a way that we deem as most interesting. It is
this boundary-free and limitless environment that allows a computer scientist
and an immunologist the freedom to decide to study nutrition. The state-of-the-
art infrastructure and support of our institute allows us to probe into the very
secrets of life.
We are deeply thankful to the many students, postdocs, research associates,
technicians, and other lab members of the Segal and Elinav labs who have
joined, from across the world, this journey of studying nutrition, the
microbiome, and how both interact with the human body in promoting health or
the risk of disease. From secretaries, to hourly students, to autoclaving
personnel, to staff scientists, you are all part of our team. Your creativity, drive,
intelligence, diligence, motivation, and endless effort are driving us forward in
our quest to cure human disease. We are lucky to be working with such a
talented team as yourselves. The stories in this book are your stories as well.
I (Eran Segal) wish to thank Eran Elinav for being such a close collaborator
and friend, and for just being there day and night, to consult and advise on both
small and large issues alike. The different and complementary skills and
knowledge that you bring always enrich me with a different and fresh
perspective, making the end result much better and the way to get there
enjoyable.
I (Eran Elinav) would like to thank my partner in crime, Eran Segal, for being
a long-standing scientific partner, colleague, and, of no less importance, friend.
You come from a different background and speak a different scientific language,
but you make our interaction a joyful and fulfilling intellectual and personal
experience.
We would both like to thank our mutual friend Professor Eran Hornstein (a
third Eran!) for recognizing our common scientific interests and introducing us
to each other on a cold New Haven afternoon in 2012, which was the beginning
of what continues to be a long and fruitful partnership.
And last, but not least, we are deeply thankful to our beloved families. Our
parents, Rachel and Yoffi Segal, and Rivka and Yankale Elinav; our wives,
Keren Segal and Hila Elinav; and our children, Shira, Yoav, and Tamar Segal,
and Shira, Omri, and Inbal Elinav. For too many years, we have seen far too
little of you, and even less so with the making of this book. But your love,
partnership, and continuous support are what make our clock (and microbiome)
tick. Keren, your passion for nutrition over the past two decades, which I once
ignored, has finally caught up with me and become a major part of my world. I
thank you both for that and for the endless discussions and advice that you gave
me on the subject. Hila, your wisdom, common sense, healthy skepticism, and
(as an infectious disease specialist) your endless knowledge of microbes are
always instrumental to me. We will never stop arguing about the role of
microbes and human excretions (yes, at dinner; yes, in front of the children) and
having a laugh while at it. Keren and Hila, we could never have done any of this
without the two of you.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the Future of Dieting
Imagine that there was no single food that was bad for everyone or good for
everyone—not chocolate, not kale, not cookies, not a big salad, not a banana, not
coffee. Imagine something you love to eat—something you think is a terrible
dietary choice (but that constantly tempts you, like a juicy, fat steak or a bowl of
mint-chip ice cream)—is actually okay to eat and won’t have a negative impact
on your health. What if a food you hate—something you force down because
you think it is good for you and will help you lose weight or avoid health
problems, something like rice cakes or steamed fish—is exactly the wrong thing
for you? What if we told you that carb-loading with pasta before endurance
sports might be bad for you and slow you down, that diet soda might be directly
contributing to your weight gain, or that sushi might be making your blood sugar
spike in a way that could increase your risk of diabetes?
Imagine no longer having to suffer through painful diets that restrict too
many foods. Imagine never having to go through another cleanse, another
“induction phase,” another fast, another starvation diet. Imagine eating carbs
again, eating fat again, or eating meat again, if that is what you’ve been longing
for. And imagine not having to pay attention to the never-ending stream of
confusing and contradictory dietary information telling you the foods to eat, or
not eat, in order to lose weight or fight chronic disease. Imagine that science has
finally begun to scratch the surface of the complex question about the optimal
diet and that you no longer have to wonder what is right for you to eat, because
you finally understand that there is no single correct diet philosophy that will
work for all people. What if each person requires a different diet tailored to his
or her own body composition? And that science is only beginning to discover a
methodology so an individual can determine exactly what his or her diet should
be? What if you finally understood how and why optimal nutrition must (and
can) be personalized?
What if you could use that information for the benefit of your own health and
weight-loss efforts, right now?
