NEW DELHI : When it comes to weight loss, different people have different stories to tell. Everyone has come across that one guy who comes to the gym with you, does half the exercise and gains double the muscle. All this is because of our genes, says Pranav Alam, founder and CEO of Genebox. Our bodies react differently to different things.
“At Genebox, we are a dry lab. We convert genetic data to reports,” says Alam whose company has been researching DNA diets for a while now. We haven’t changed how we eat over the past 500 years. And the flaw here is one diet for all, which doesn’t work because everyone’s different, Alam explained.
Alam said roughly 100 genes that determine how you behave with food and his company can get as many as 700,000 data points for one individual, at a very cheap price. There are over 200 to 300 mutations that govern your fitness. There are many other factors too.
“I lost 50kg doing inhuman things, but I couldn’t sustain that because I didn’t know what my body was reacting to,” Alam said.
With so many data points involved, it’s almost impossible for one individual (like a nutritionist) to give you the right advice. In the next few years, we’re going to see an app or a health coaching service that’s going to tell you what you should eat. “This is where the next application of artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be,” Alam said. For this, it has to understand what would actually work for your body, he added.
Of course, implementation is the key here, but you cannot do the right thing unless you have the necessary information.
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