Ice Cream Might Be Better For You Than Sushi

There are trillions of bacteria in your belly—more than 100 times the number of genes in the human genome.

Needless to say, that mind blowing number leaves a lot of room for variation in how food is processed when it enters said belly. Conventional wisdom dictates that once food is gobbled up, it's turned into pretty much the same mush for everybody, and a lot of diets have this assumption built into them.

But scientists, pesky as always, have began to question this notion, and preliminary results suggest that diets targeting blood sugar levels may actually have adverse effects on those who have sugar-related diets like diabetics.

Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, followed a group of 800 subjects, collected their "health and lifestyle data," and then monitored their blood sugar levels every five minutes for one week. That may not sound like a lot, but it came to 46,898 meals, and enough to generate a predictive algorithm.

The team ultimately found that subjects who had eaten identical foods most definitely did not react in identical ways to food. To illustrate their point, the researchers used the example of some subjects whose blood sugar levels rose higher after eating sushi than ice cream, which is usually considered healthier than frozen dairy.

"We chose to focus on blood sugar because elevated levels are a major risk factor for diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome," Dr. Eran Elinav said in a press statement."The huge differences that we found in the rise of blood sugar levels among different people who consumed identical meals highlights why personalized eating choices are more likely to help people stay healthy than universal dietary advice."

By inputting all of this data into an algorithm, the Institute of Science team was able to predict how each participant's belly bacteria would react to the food they ate and the ensuing impact on blood sugar levels.

Among the practical implications of this study could be using their algorithm to prescribe personalized diets by focusing on individual sugar response instead of the actual type of food consumed, which is potentially great news for people who prefer ice cream to sushi.

"As soon as we saw this data," Weizmann Institute researcher Prof. Eran Elgan said in a YouTube video, "We realized that general dietary recommendation diets given to the entire population may have limited efficacy." And the team also maintains that these findings could "benefit millions across the world" who struggle to regulate their blood sugar levels.

Scientific data tends to lump people into huge categories and dispel any illusion of individuality. But when it comes to gut bacteria and sugar, it turns out that you are a little snowflake, after all. Thanks, science!