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The nature of nutrition
Nutrition has long been considered more the domain of medicine and agriculture than of the biological sciences, yet it touches and shapes all aspects of the natural world. The need for nutrients determines whether wild animals thrive, how populations evolve and decline, and how ecological communities are structured.The Nature of Nutritionis the first book to address nutrition's enormously complex role in biology, both at the level of individual organisms and in their broader ecological interactions.
Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer provide a comprehensive theoretical approach to the analysis of nutrition--the Geometric Framework. They show how it can help us to understand the links between nutrition and the biology of individual animals, including the physiological mechanisms that determine the nutritional interactions of the animal with its environment, and the consequences of these interactions in terms of health, immune responses, and lifespan. Simpson and Raubenheimer explain how these effects translate into the collective behavior of groups and societies, and in turn influence food webs and the structure of ecosystems. Then they demonstrate how the Geometric Framework can be used to tackle issues in applied nutrition, such as the problem of optimizing diets for livestock and endangered species, and how it can also help to address the epidemic of human obesity and metabolic disease
Drawing on a wealth of examples from slime molds to humans,The Nature of Nutritionhas important applications in ecology, evolution, and physiology, and offers promising solutions for human health, conservation, and agriculture.
eBook
Validation of biomarkers of food intake—critical assessment of candidate biomarkers
Biomarkers of food intake (BFIs) are a promising tool for limiting misclassification in nutrition research where more subjective dietary assessment instruments are used. They may also be used to assess compliance to dietary guidelines or to a dietary intervention. Biomarkers therefore hold promise for direct and objective measurement of food intake. However, the number of comprehensively validated biomarkers of food intake is limited to just a few. Many new candidate biomarkers emerge from metabolic profiling studies and from advances in food chemistry. Furthermore, candidate food intake biomarkers may also be identified based on extensive literature reviews such as described in the guidelines for Biomarker of Food Intake Reviews (BFIRev). To systematically and critically assess the validity of candidate biomarkers of food intake, it is necessary to outline and streamline an optimal and reproducible validation process. A consensus-based procedure was used to provide and evaluate a set of the most important criteria for systematic validation of BFIs. As a result, a validation procedure was developed including eight criteria, plausibility, dose-response, time-response, robustness, reliability, stability, analytical performance, and inter-laboratory reproducibility. The validation has a dual purpose: (1) to estimate the current level of validation of candidate biomarkers of food intake based on an objective and systematic approach and (2) to pinpoint which additional studies are needed to provide full validation of each candidate biomarker of food intake. This position paper on biomarker of food intake validation outlines the second step of the BFIRev procedure but may also be used as such for validation of new candidate biomarkers identified, e.g., in food metabolomic studies.
Journal Article
Unsavory truth : how food companies skew the science of what we eat
\"Is chocolate heart-healthy? Does yogurt prevent type 2 diabetes? Do pomegranates help cheat death? News accounts bombard us with such ... claims, report them as science, and influence what we eat ... Marion Nestle [believes that] these studies are more about marketing than science: they are often paid for by companies that sell those foods\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Combining traditional dietary assessment methods with novel metabolomics techniques: present efforts by the Food Biomarker Alliance
FFQ, food diaries and 24 h recall methods represent the most commonly used dietary assessment tools in human studies on nutrition and health, but food intake biomarkers are assumed to provide a more objective reflection of intake. Unfortunately, very few of these biomarkers are sufficiently validated. This review provides an overview of food intake biomarker research and highlights present research efforts of the Joint Programming Initiative ‘A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life’ (JPI-HDHL) Food Biomarkers Alliance (FoodBAll). In order to identify novel food intake biomarkers, the focus is on new food metabolomics techniques that allow the quantification of up to thousands of metabolites simultaneously, which may be applied in intervention and observational studies. As biomarkers are often influenced by various other factors than the food under investigation, FoodBAll developed a food intake biomarker quality and validity score aiming to assist the systematic evaluation of novel biomarkers. Moreover, to evaluate the applicability of nutritional biomarkers, studies are presently also focusing on associations between food intake biomarkers and diet-related disease risk. In order to be successful in these metabolomics studies, knowledge about available electronic metabolomics resources is necessary and further developments of these resources are essential. Ultimately, present efforts in this research area aim to advance quality control of traditional dietary assessment methods, advance compliance evaluation in nutritional intervention studies, and increase the significance of observational studies by investigating associations between nutrition and health.
Journal Article
New mobile methods for dietary assessment: review of image-assisted and image-based dietary assessment methods
For nutrition practitioners and researchers, assessing dietary intake of children and adults with a high level of accuracy continues to be a challenge. Developments in mobile technologies have created a role for images in the assessment of dietary intake. The objective of this review was to examine peer-reviewed published papers covering development, evaluation and/or validation of image-assisted or image-based dietary assessment methods from December 2013 to January 2016. Images taken with handheld devices or wearable cameras have been used to assist traditional dietary assessment methods for portion size estimations made by dietitians (image-assisted methods). Image-assisted approaches can supplement either dietary records or 24-h dietary recalls. In recent years, image-based approaches integrating application technology for mobile devices have been developed (image-based methods). Image-based approaches aim at capturing all eating occasions by images as the primary record of dietary intake, and therefore follow the methodology of food records. The present paper reviews several image-assisted and image-based methods, their benefits and challenges; followed by details on an image-based mobile food record. Mobile technology offers a wide range of feasible options for dietary assessment, which are easier to incorporate into daily routines. The presented studies illustrate that image-assisted methods can improve the accuracy of conventional dietary assessment methods by adding eating occasion detail via pictures captured by an individual (dynamic images). All of the studies reduced underreporting with the help of images compared with results with traditional assessment methods. Studies with larger sample sizes are needed to better delineate attributes with regards to age of user, degree of error and cost.
Journal Article
The challenges of control groups, placebos and blinding in clinical trials of dietary interventions
High-quality placebo-controlled evidence for food, nutrient or dietary advice interventions is vital for verifying the role of diet in optimising health or for the management of disease. This could be argued to be especially important where the benefits of dietary intervention are coupled with potential risks such as compromising nutrient intake, particularly in the case of exclusion diets. The objective of the present paper is to explore the challenges associated with clinical trials in dietary research, review the types of controls used and present the advantages and disadvantages of each, including issues regarding placebos and blinding. Placebo-controlled trials in nutrient interventions are relatively straightforward, as in general placebos can be easily produced. However, the challenges associated with conducting placebo-controlled food interventions and dietary advice interventions are protean, and this has led to a paucity of placebo-controlled food and dietary advice trials compared with drug trials. This review appraises the types of controls used in dietary intervention trials and provides recommendations and nine essential criteria for the design and development of sham diets for use in studies evaluating the effect of dietary advice, along with practical guidance regarding their evaluation. The rationale for these criteria predominantly relate to avoiding altering the outcome of interest in those delivered the sham intervention in these types of studies, while not compromising blinding.
Journal Article
The determinants of food choice
Health nudge interventions to steer people into healthier lifestyles are increasingly applied by governments worldwide, and it is natural to look to such approaches to improve health by altering what people choose to eat. However, to produce policy recommendations that are likely to be effective, we need to be able to make valid predictions about the consequences of proposed interventions, and for this, we need a better understanding of the determinants of food choice. These determinants include dietary components (e.g. highly palatable foods and alcohol), but also diverse cultural and social pressures, cognitive-affective factors (perceived stress, health attitude, anxiety and depression), and familial, genetic and epigenetic influences on personality characteristics. In addition, our choices are influenced by an array of physiological mechanisms, including signals to the brain from the gastrointestinal tract and adipose tissue, which affect not only our hunger and satiety but also our motivation to eat particular nutrients, and the reward we experience from eating. Thus, to develop the evidence base necessary for effective policies, we need to build bridges across different levels of knowledge and understanding. This requires experimental models that can fill in the gaps in our understanding that are needed to inform policy, translational models that connect mechanistic understanding from laboratory studies to the real life human condition, and formal models that encapsulate scientific knowledge from diverse disciplines, and which embed understanding in a way that enables policy-relevant predictions to be made. Here we review recent developments in these areas.
Journal Article
Measuring diet in the 21st century: use of new technologies
The advent of the internet and smartphone technology has allowed dietary assessment to reach the 21st century! The variety of foods available on the supermarket shelf is now greater than ever before. New approaches to measuring diet may help to reduce measurement error and advance our understanding of nutritional determinants of disease. This advance provides the potential to capture detailed dietary data on large numbers of individuals without the need for costly and time-consuming manual nutrition coding. This aim of the present paper is to review the need for new technologies to measure diet with an overview of tools available. The three main areas will be addressed: (1) development of web-based tools to measure diet; (2) use of smartphone apps to self-monitor diet; (3) improving the quality of dietary assessment through development of an online library of tools. A practical example of the development of a web-based tool to assess diet myfood24 (www.myfood24.org) will be given exploring its potential, limitations and challenges. The development of a new food composition database using back-of-pack information will be described. Smartphone apps used to measure diet with a focus on obesity will be reviewed. Many apps are unreliable in terms of tracking, and most are not evaluated. Accurate and consistent measurement of diet is needed for public health and epidemiology. The choice of the most appropriate dietary assessment method tends to rely on experience. The DIET@NET partnership has developed best practice guidelines for selection of dietary assessment tools, which aim to improve the quality, consistency and comparability of dietary data. These developments provide us with a step-change in our ability to reliably characterise food and nutrient intake in population studies. The need for high-quality, validated systems will be important to fully realise the benefits of new technologies.
Journal Article