Precision nutritional immunology: Personalized dietary strategies for immune disorders

The relationship between diet and immunity is neither simple nor uniform. What we eat shapes how our immune system develops, responds to threats, and recovers from dysregulation, and this influence operates at every level, from the composition of the gut microbiome to the epigenetic marking of immune cell precursors. Decades of research have established that deficiencies in vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids compromise host defense, while excess energy intake and ultra-processed diets fuel chronic low-grade inflammation at the root of many modern diseases. What has lagged behind, however, is the recognition that these effects are deeply individual. Two people eating identical diets can mount strikingly different immune responses. Understanding why this happens, and using that knowledge clinically, is the central challenge this Research Topic is designed to address.For all the progress made in nutritional immunology, a frustrating gap persists between mechanistic insight and personalized clinical application. Dietary recommendations for patients with rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, or food allergy remain largely generic, averaged across populations in ways that obscure the very variation that matters most to individual patients. A Mediterranean diet may calm inflammation in one patient and have little measurable effect in another, and we still poorly understand why.Advances in gut microbiome profiling, single-cell transcriptomics, metabolomics, and machine learning are making it increasingly feasible to characterize a patient’s immune-nutritional phenotype with real precision. Early intervention studies using these tools are producing preliminary but genuinely encouraging results. The goal of this Research Topic is to bring that work together: to map what we know, identify where the evidence is thin, and point toward the clinical frameworks that could eventually make personalized nutritional immunotherapy a routine part of managing immune-mediated disease.We welcome contributions across the full breadth of this emerging field. Studies exploring how genetic variation influences individual responses to specific nutrients, how dietary patterns reshape the microbial communities that train and regulate immune cells, and how bioactive food compounds interact with inflammatory signaling pathways are all central to the collection. So too are clinical trials testing personalized dietary interventions in autoimmune or allergic conditions, and methodological manuscripts proposing better ways to integrate multi-omics data in nutritional research.We are equally interested in work that tackles the practical barriers: how AI-assisted tools might support dietary monitoring in real-world care, how findings translate across different life stages and populations, and how precision nutritional strategies might eventually scale beyond specialist settings. Authors should aim for translational clarity, wherever possible grounding findings in their implications for patients and clinicians rather than stopping at the molecular level.Please note that manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by robust and relevant validation (clinical cohort or biological validation in vitro or in vivo) are out of scope for this Research Topic. Manuscripts focusing solely on cost-effectiveness studies are also not considered for publication in this journal. Topic editors: Vinay Kumar, Radha Goel Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83756/precision-nutritional-immunology-personalized-dietary-strategies-for-immune-disorders