Quantifying the effect of nutritional interventions on metabolic resilience using personalized computational models

The manifestation of metabolic deteriorations that accompany overweight and obesity can differ greatly between individuals, giving rise to a highly heterogeneous population. This inter-individual variation can impede both the provision and assessment of nutritional interventions as multiple aspects of metabolic health should be considered at once. Here, we apply the Mixed Meal Model, a physiology-based computational model, to characterise an individual’s metabolic health in silico. A population of 342 personalised models were generated using data for individuals with overweight and obesity from three independent intervention studies, demonstrating a strong relationship between the model-derived metric of insulin resistance (ρ=0.67, p<0.05) and the gold-standard hyperinsulinemic-euglycamic clamp. The model is also shown to quantify liver fat accumulation and β-cell functionality. Moreover, we show that personalised Mixed Meal Models can be used to evaluate the impact of a dietary intervention on multiple aspects of metabolic health at the individual level.