4th September 2026 | Cameron Jones - Director of Operations & Product Development
Personalised supplements reflect a wider shift towards individualised healthcare and nutrition. As personalised medicine and precision nutrition develop, tailored supplementation offers a more targeted, convenient and cost-effective alternative to a one-size-fits-all approach.
The death of the textbook approach
For a long time, healthcare has largely been built around a fairly simple principle: find out what works for most people and apply it to as many people as possible. It is an approach that has delivered enormous improvements in health and life expectancy, but as our understanding of human biology develops, its limitations are becoming increasingly apparent.
We are not all biologically the same. Genetics, metabolism, lifestyle, environment, age and countless other factors influence how our bodies respond to everything from food and exercise to medication. The idea that one intervention should therefore produce exactly the same outcome in everyone is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
Personalised medicine, sometimes referred to as precision medicine, is the idea that prevention, diagnosis and treatment can be better tailored to the characteristics of the individual. Rather than simply asking what works for the average patient, modern medicine is increasingly asking why something works for one person but not another, and whether that information can be used to make treatment more effective.
Cancer is perhaps the clearest example of where this is heading. For many years, cancers were largely classified according to where they occurred in the body. A patient might be diagnosed with lung cancer, breast cancer or bowel cancer, and treatment would then be selected largely around that diagnosis. However, we now understand that cancers are considerably more complex than this. Two people with what appears to be the same cancer can have very different genetic and molecular characteristics within their tumours.
Those differences can be extremely important. Certain mutations or biomarkers can influence how a tumour develops and how it responds to a particular treatment. As a result, genomic testing is increasingly being used to identify characteristics that may help clinicians select more appropriate therapies for individual patients. The NHS has invested significantly in genomic medicine, with cancer one of the areas where this approach is already having a practical impact.
This represents a fundamental change in thinking. The objective is not necessarily to discover one universal treatment that can cure every form of cancer. Instead, the direction of travel is towards understanding the biology of an individual's disease and using that information to determine what is most likely to work for them.
In other words, the future of cancer treatment is becoming less about treating the disease in the abstract and more about treating the disease in the individual.
The same principle is beginning to emerge elsewhere in healthcare, including nutrition.
From personalised medicine to personalised nutrition
Nutrition has traditionally relied heavily on population averages. Recommended intakes are designed to provide guidance for large groups of people, which is both practical and scientifically useful. But averages inevitably disguise individual variation.
We have known for some time that people can respond differently to the same foods and nutrients. More recently, researchers have started investigating whether factors such as genetics, gut microbiome composition, metabolism, lifestyle and existing health characteristics can help explain some of these differences.
This has led to the emergence of precision nutrition, an area of research exploring whether nutritional recommendations can be better tailored to the individual.
Some of the research is particularly interesting. A 2024 randomised controlled trial published in Nature Medicine investigated a personalised nutrition programme that incorporated information such as individual post-meal glucose and triglyceride responses, microbiome data and health history. The researchers found improvements in several cardiometabolic measures compared with more conventional dietary advice.
That does not mean personalised nutrition has suddenly replaced conventional nutritional guidance. It has not. The field is still developing, and there are important questions around which measurements are genuinely useful, how different types of data should be interpreted and whether personalised interventions provide meaningful long-term benefits.
But the direction is interesting because it challenges a very familiar assumption: that the best nutritional advice for one person should necessarily be the best nutritional advice for everyone.
What does this mean for supplementation?
Supplementation sits somewhere between medicine and nutrition. It is not a replacement for a good diet, nor should it be presented as one. But it does raise an interesting question about how we approach individual nutritional requirements.
The current supplement market is largely built around individual products designed around particular purposes. Someone interested in sleep might buy one product, someone looking for cognitive support another, and someone interested in general health might add several more. Over time, it is easy for a simple nutritional routine to become a collection of different products, doses and instructions.
A more personalised approach could potentially simplify this. Rather than asking someone to purchase and take a number of separate products, supplementation can be considered as a whole, with the relevant nutrients and ingredients brought together according to the individual's requirements. In practical terms, this could mean taking one or two personalised capsules each day rather than managing several different products.
There is an obvious convenience benefit to this, but there is also a potential cost benefit. Combining relevant supplementation into a smaller number of products can reduce unnecessary duplication and avoid the situation where people are continually purchasing multiple products simply because they have been marketed towards different aspects of health.
Of course, this only works if the underlying choices are sensible. Personalisation should not become an excuse to add more ingredients simply because a product is supposed to be "personalised". The evidence for the individual ingredients, appropriate dosing, toxicology and the relevance of those ingredients to the individual still matter.
Personalised health is not about making everything different for the sake of being different. It is about recognising that people are different and using the information available to make more appropriate decisions.
We are still some way from a world where every aspect of healthcare, nutrition and supplementation is completely individualised. There are limitations to the science, limitations to the data available and plenty that we still do not understand about human biology.
But the underlying principle is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Medicine is moving towards treating the individual rather than simply treating the average. Cancer treatment is becoming increasingly targeted according to the biology of a patient's tumour, while research into precision nutrition is beginning to explore how the same principle could apply to what we eat and supplement with.
Increasingly, it is becoming: “What works for this person?”
That may ultimately prove to be one of the most important questions in the future of healthcare.