Sarah Berry
Sarah E. Berry is a nutrition scientist at King's College London and the first author of the 2020 paper in Nature Medicine from the PREDICT programme. It found that people differ enormously in how their blood sugar, blood fat and insulin respond to identical meals, and that genetics explains less of that variation than the composition of the meal, the time of day, the gut microbiome and sleep do.
Who they are
She is the first author, and Tim Spector is the name the public knows. The house rule about crediting first authors rather than famous ones exists for cases exactly like this one, and it is applied here without exception.
The commercial interest is disclosed in the body, every time. Berry is a consultant to ZOE, the company sells personalised nutrition subscriptions built on this kind of finding, and the work is nonetheless real and peer-reviewed in a Nature journal. Conflicted is not the same as compromised: use the evidence, and say who paid for it. A publisher's correction exists on the paper.
Key papers
Berry, S. E., Valdes, A. M., Drew, D. A., Asnicar, F., Mazidi, M., Wolf, J., et al., with Spector, T. D. as last author (2020). "Human postprandial responses to food and potential for precision nutrition", Nature Medicine, 26, 964 to 973. First author. Abstract and reported findings read. A publisher's correction exists. Commercially conflicted: ZOE consultancy and funding.
Key ideas
Use it for one point only, which is that responses to the same meal vary enormously between people. That is also the reason this publication does not prescribe anything about food. It is not an argument for buying a test.
The finding that inherited genetics accounted for less of the variation than meal composition, timing, microbiome and sleep is the part most often dropped when this work is summarised, and it is the part that makes the "everyone is different" claim interesting rather than fatalistic.
The paper's own disclosure statement records the authors' commercial interest in the company that sells a product based on the findings, and it is repeated here because disclosure is a house standard.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Berry, S. E., et al. (2020). Nature Medicine, 26, 964 to 973. Commercially conflicted, disclosed above.
- Vault record, 2026-09-11. First-author credit applied per house rule; see also the page for Tim Spector, which exists to record the same correction from the other end.