Insulin resistance modifies longitudinal multi-omics responses to habitual diet

Abstract

How habitual diet influences the gut microbiome and plasma metabolome across insulin resistance states remains unclear. We conducted year-long multi-omics profiling of 71 deeply phenotyped adults, integrating repeated assessments of diet, metabolome, gut microbiome, clinical laboratory measures, and inflammatory markers. Using gold-standard insulin suppression tests and machine learning-derived dietary patterns, we examined how dietary patterns relate to metabolic and microbial landscapes by insulin resistance status. Insulin-sensitive individuals exhibited stronger and more numerous diet-omics associations than insulin-resistant individuals, identifying metabolic flexibility as a central determinant of dietary responsiveness. Parabacteroides emerged as a candidate microbial mediator between refined carbohydrate-rich dietary patterns and host metabolic signatures. Integrated into a cardiovascular risk prediction model, diet, metabolites, microbial taxa, and immune markers each contributed to 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk. These findings show that inter-individual variation in cardiometabolic risk partly reflects differences in molecular responsiveness to habitual diet, informing precision nutrition and cardiovascular prevention.