Researchers propose new model for human nutrition

a research revealed in Annual Review of Nutrition, researchers recommend a rethinking of human nutrition science by way of a new framework referred to as “nutritional geometry,” which considers how mixtures of vitamins and different dietary elements affect health and illness, relatively than specializing in anybody nutrient in isolation.

Human nutrition science has traditionally targeted on a single-nutrient strategy, which is based on a scarcity of assets or micronutrient deficiency. For occasion, the absence of vitamin C in human diets is a recognized reason for scurvy. But the researchers consider this conventional strategy is not helpful within the face of recent nutrition-related illnesses, that are pushed by an overabundance of food and an advanced want for meals containing specific blends of vitamins.

The researchers recommend there’s a want for nutrition science to interact with the deep theories of biology developed inside the ecological and evolutionary sciences. The integration of those theories into nutrition has already begun within the subject of dietary ecology. Nutritional geometry offers a method of implementing these theories by modelling how vitamins work together with one another to supply the properties of meals and diets and the way behavioural and physiological mechanisms interact with these interactions to affect health.

Although extra complicated than the single-nutrient model, the researchers consider that in the long run this framework can simplify the research of human nutrition by serving to to determine these subsets of things and their interactions which are driving damaging health outcomes in our quickly altering environments. The software of dietary ecology to people may also profit that area via extending its comparative scope to a extremely distinctive species whose biology and surroundings are researched extra intensively than another.

“Our new approach provides a unique method to unify observations from many fields and better understand how nutrients, foods, and diets interact to affect health and disease in humans,” stated co-author David Raubenheimer, University of Sydney.

“The ‘nutritional geometry’ framework enables us to plot foods, meals, diets, and dietary patterns together based on their nutrient composition and this helps researchers to observe otherwise overlooked patterns in the links between certain diets, health, and disease.”