Precision nutrition — review of methods for point-of-care assessment of nutritional status

• Quantification of nutritional biomarkers is critical for nutritional assessment.
• Portable diagnostics for quantification of nutritional biomarkers are essential.
• Nutritional diagnostics in resource-limited settings have many design challenges.
• Lab-on-a-chip mobile platforms can meet the needs of nutritional diagnostics.
• Nutrition scientists can use modern diagnostics for precise nutritional assessment.

Precision nutrition encompasses prevention and treatment strategies for optimizing health that consider individual variability in diet, lifestyle, environment and genes by accurately determining an individual's nutritional status. This is particularly important as malnutrition now affects a third of the global population, with most of those affected or their care providers having limited means of determining their nutritional status. Similarly, program implementers often have no way of determining the impact or success of their interventions, thus hindering their scale-up. Exciting new developments in the area of point-of-care diagnostics promise to provide improved access to nutritional status assessment, as a first step towards enabling precision nutrition and tailored interventions at both the individual and community levels. In this review, we focus on the current advances in developing portable diagnostics for assessment of nutritional status at point-of-care, along with the numerous design challenges in this process and potential solutions.

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