Today I am relaunching a small provocation starting from a very interesting article published for Vox : as many of you have seen, in fact, in recent years there has been a lot of talk about topics such as
– personalized diet or tailor -made diet
– nutrition or gymnastics functional (and when you ask functional for what? you get ten different answers)
– nutrigenomics, genetic diet, and so on
until you get to the rhetoric of: we are all different, what works for me does not work for you , and so on.

Well, if in general all arguments can appear sensible (it is true that we are different, but it is obvious that we are different), even the discourse of personalization risks being distorted in favor of marketing , and without that, beyond the big words, there is a real scientific foundation behind it.
So one thing is whoever makes you the very right and sacrosanct tests to understand how to set up your nutritional plan and your training plan, another is the service that presents itself as personalized and functional when it is not.
To make you understand what I’m talking about and help you understand and not fall into the trap of yet another false myth, let ‘s analyze when the use of personalization becomes exaggeration and therefore marketing.

What the article appeared on Vox was talking about is the birth of a new app / service that from 2017 will make your weight loss goal become personalized: Habit . Habit, at a cost of about $ 300, in fact promises from 2017 to be able to draw up a personalized plan based on a mysterious algorithm and analyzes made on a sample of your blood and saliva. It sounds amazing, futuristic. 

And it is a bit too much, a bit like those health gurus who talk about nutrigenomics without ever saying that this branch of science is still a newborn , and that from current nutrigenomics knowledge it is impossible to set up a personalized diet based on them.