BATON ROUGE - The National Institutes of Health is now enrolling participants in a landmark initiative to advance nutrition research. Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program, or NPH, is working with 14 sites across the United States – including Pennington Biomedical Research Center and LSU Health Sciences New Orleans in Louisiana – to engage 10,000 participants from diverse backgrounds and learn more about how our bodies respond differently to food.

“Nutrition for Precision Health brings us a step closer to precision medicine. The study will generate a massive dataset, a wealth of biospecimens, and the algorithms that will lead to personalized dietary prescriptions that can promote health, prevent heart attacks or strokes, and importantly, address health disparities,” said Pennington Biomedical Executive Director John Kirwan, Ph.D.

The NPH study consists of three components. All study participants will participate in the first component, while a subset will take part in the other two components. In the first component of the study, participants will be asked to complete surveys, report their daily diets, and provide blood, urine, and stool samples for lab tests, including microbiome analysis. In the second component, a subset of participants will be given diets selected by researchers. In the third component, participants will also be given diets selected by researchers but will be requested to reside in a research center while on the diets.

For more information about the study and how to enroll, visit the Nutrition for Precision Health's website here.