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Structure of the working groups. SC, steering committee.
Source publication
Malnutrition in an obese world was the fitting title of the 13th Federation of European Nutrition Societies (FENS) conference held in October 2019. Many individuals do not eat a healthy, well balanced diet, and this is now understood to be a major driver of increased disease risk and illness. Moreover, both our current eating patterns and the food...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... working groups are proposed (Fig. 1). The first working group ("Concepts and methodologies") will focus on what concepts in nutrition science need revision and how this can be achieved, and what will be the consequences for methodologies in order to have credible and capable scientific research. Several questions have already been raised that most likely provide a basis ...
Context 2
... addition to the 3 FENS working groups, there will be a Steering Group and an Advisory Committee (Fig. 1). The steering group will comprise of the President of FENS, the Chairs of the 3 working-groups and a Secretary. The steering group will be advised by an Advisory Committee that will comprise interested scientists from outside of Europe, for example, representing the American Society of Nutrition and the Nutrition Society of Australia, ...
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Citations
... The incidence of these conditions is projected to increase by up to 50% by 2045 [1]. At the same time, eating patterns and the food system in general are considered environmentally unsustainable [4], with food insecurity on the rise [5]. ...
The effects of the consumption of an extract of the brown seaweed Ascophyllum nodosum (BSW) on postprandial glucose and insulin responses to white bread were investigated in an acute, randomized, double-blind, three-arm, crossover, controlled trial in healthy, normoglycemic subjects. Sixteen subjects were administered either control white bread (50 g total digestible carbohydrates) or white bread with 500 mg or 1000 mg of BSW extract. Biochemical parameters were measured in venous blood over 3 h. Significant inter-individual variation in the glycaemic response to white bread was observed. Analysis of the responses of all subjects to either 500 mg or 1000 mg of BSW extract versus control revealed no significant effects of treatments. The variation in response to the control was used to classify individuals into glycaemic responders and non-responders. In the sub-cohort of 10 subjects with peak glucose levels after white bread above 1 mmol/L, we observed a significant decrease in maximum levels of plasma glucose after the intervention meal with 1000 mg of extract compared with the control. No adverse effects were reported. Further work is warranted to define all factors that determine “responders” to the effects of brown seaweed extracts and identify the cohort that would benefit the most from their consumption.
... Incidence of these conditions are projected to increase by up to 50% by 2045 [1]. At the same time, the eating patterns and food system in general are considered environmentally unsustainable [4], with food insecurity on the rise [5]. ...
The effects of the consumption of an extract of the brown seaweed Ascophyllum nodosum (BSW) on postprandial glucose and insulin response to white bread were investigated in an acute, randomized, double-blind, three-arm, crossover, controlled trial in healthy, normoglyacemic subjects. Sixteen subjects were administrated either control white bread (50 g total digestible carbohydrates), or white bread with either 500 mg or 1000 mg of BSW extract. Biochemical parameters were measured in venous blood over 3h. Significant inter-individual variation in the glycaemic response to white bread was observed. Analysis of the response of all subjects to either 500 mg or 1000 mg of BSW extract versus control revealed no significant effects of treatments. The variation in response to the control was used to classify individuals into glyacemic responders and non-responders. In the sub-cohort of 10 subjects with peak glucose levels after white bread above 1mmol/L we observed a significant decrease in maximum levels of plasma glucose after the intervention meal with 1000 mg of extract, compared with control. No adverse effects were reported. Further work defining all factors that determine “responders” to the effects of brown seaweed extracts and identify the cohort that would benefit the most from their consumption, is warranted.
... Most of the studies included in the review were organised in Anglo-Saxon countries. In particular, those studies have been realised in Australia (5), 7,8,[14][15][16] United Kingdom (5), [17][18][19][20][21] United States (4), [22][23][24][25] Canada (3), [26][27][28] Ireland (3), [29][30][31] and South Africa (1). 32 Only four studies were carried out in non-Anglo-Saxon countries, such as Italy (1), 33 Netherlands (1), 9 Portugal (1), 34 and Germany (1). ...
... ,31 The specific topics addressed by the included studies regard various themes. The most frequent are related to physical, mental, and psychosocial well-being, healthy lifestyles, dietary health, physical therapy, health disparity, sexual and reproductive health, suicide and self-harm, and oral hygiene. ...
Patient experiences and ideas are key components for improving health promotion and prevention. Engaging patients and other stakeholders in sharing their practices and ideas is nowadays crucial to increase the legitimacy, credibility, and acceptability of the decisions in these fields, by fostering community wisdom. The World Café is a participatory method suitable to involve a large number of actors to propose creative solutions based on their different knowledge and experiences. However, the diffusion of this approach is not uniform in the various countries and health topics. This review summarises the specific topic, the study design, the number and the characteristics of participants, as well as the main findings and the purpose of the studies regarding the application of this method to health promotion and prevention. Among other results, it was found that the World Café is an appreciated, inspiring, and flexible participatory process often used in association with one or more other methods, to explore emergent themes or topics, to collect best practices or suggestions, to generate improvements or recommendations, and to define priorities for the implementation of projects or research agendas. The results highlight the potentiality of the World Café whenever an issue is not well defined and needs to be explored through deep and several insights. The method allows the exploitation of creativity and collective wisdom when qualitative and in-dept results—more than quantitative and statistically rigorous ones—are appropriate.
Highlights
The World Café is successfully applicable to health promotion and prevention.
It is a creative, inclusive and flexible participatory method in these fields.
It succeeds to engage stakeholders in improving health promotion and prevention.
Findings from this review can help to design future purposeful events.
... Currently, there are no international research infrastructures (RIs) to connect diverse data and 59 science-related services in the field of food and health (nutrition) that would aid science in 60 this domain (Brown et al, 2017;Snoek et al, 2018;Tufford et al, 2020). This commentary 61 reports on the approach to decision making undertaken by a consortium of international 62 scientists to develop the first international RI for food and health, which specifically focuses 63 on dietary determinants and intake. ...
Background
A better understanding of food-related behaviour and its determinants can be achieved through harmonisation and linking of the various data-sources and knowledge platforms.
Scope
We describe the key decision-making in the development of a prototype of the Determinants and Intake Platform (DI Platform), a data platform that aims to harmonise and link data on consumer food behaviour. It will be part of the Food Nutrition Health Research Infrastructure (FNH-RI) that will facilitate health, social and food sciences.
Approach
The decision-making was based on the evidence of user needs and data characteristics that guided the specification of the key building blocks of the DI Platform. Eight studies were carried out, including consumer online survey; interview studies of key DI Platform stakeholders; desk research and workshops.
Key findings
Consumers were most willing to share data with universities, then industry and government. Trust, risk perception and altruism predicted willingness to share. For most other stakeholders non-proprietary data was most likely to be shared. Lack of data standards, and incentives for sharing were the main barriers for sharing data among the key stakeholders. The value of various data types would hugely increase if linked with other sources. Finding the right balance between optimizing data sharing and minimizing ethical and legal risks was considered a key challenge.
Conclusions
The development of DI Platform is based on careful balancing of the user, technical, business, legal and ethical requirements, following the FAIR principles and the need for financial sustainability, technical flexibility, transparency and multi-layered organisational governance.
... One of the health-transitions humans have passed during the 20th Century related to nutrition is, with no hesitation, from malnourished to obesity [1], which is continuous in the ongoing years of the 21st Century [2]. During the 1980s of the last century, this transition started and increased steadily, first in some countries such as the EEUU and later in Europe and in developing countries [3]. ...
The health-transitions humans have delivered during the 20th Century associated with the nutrition is that from undernutrition to obesity, which perseveres in the current years of the 21st Century. Energy intake (EI) is a contributing factor and therefore a fascination in nutritional sciences. However, energy expenditure (EE) has not been usually considered as a conjoint factor. Thus, this study aimed to review if studies on adults consider data on dietary intake, specifically EI, and included data on EE and physical activity (PA). A search of MEDLINE from 1975 to December 2015 was managed. Our scoping review consisted of keywords related to EI, dietary allowances, and nutritional requirements. From 2229 acknowledged articles, 698 articles were finally taken fulfilling inclusion and quality criteria. A total of 2,081,824 adults (53.7% females) were involved, and most studies had been conducted in EEUU (241), Canada (42), Australia (30), Japan (32), and Brazil (14). In Europe, apart from UK (64), the Netherlands (31) and France (26) led the classification, followed by Sweden (18), Denmark (17), and France (26). Mediterranean countries are represented with 27 studies. A total of 76.4% did not include EE and 93.1% did not include PA. Only 23.6% of the studies contained both EI and EE. A large methodological diversity was perceived, with more than 14 different methods regarding EI, and more than 10 for EE. PA was only analyzed in scarce articles, and scarcely considered for interpretation of data and conclusions. Moreover, PA was often measured by subjective questionnaires. Dietary surveys show a large diversity regarding methodology, which makes comparability of studies difficult. EE and PA are missing in around 80% of studies or are not included in the interpretation of results. Conclusions regarding EI or diet adequacy in adults should not be taken without analyzing EE and PA.
... Even results of successful RCTs performed on single components or on single foods often lead to conflicting views on what constitutes a healthy daily diet [150]. For these reasons, the principles of nutritional study designs beyond and in addition to RCTs are being evaluated and discussed in different forums. ...
Demonstrating in an unambiguous manner that a diet, let alone a single product, ‘optimizes’ health, presents an enormous challenge. The least complicated is when the starting situation is clearly suboptimal, like with nutritional deficiencies, malnutrition, unfavourable lifestyle, or due to disease or ageing. Here, desired improvements and intervention strategies may to some extent be clear. However, even then situations require approaches that take into account interactions between nutrients and other factors, complex dose-effect relationships etc. More challenging is to substantiate that a diet or a specific product optimizes health in the general population, which comes down to achieve perceived, ‘non-medical’ or future health benefits in predominantly healthy persons. Presumed underlying mechanisms involve effects of non-nutritional components with subtle and slowly occurring physiological effects that may be difficult to translate into measurable outcomes. Most promising strategies combine classical physiological concepts with those of ‘multi-omics’ and systems biology. Resilience-the ability to maintain or regain homeostasis in response to stressors-is often used as proxy for a particular health domain. Next to this, quantifying health requires personalized strategies, measurements preferably carried out remotely, real-time and in a normal living environment, and experimental designs other than randomized controlled trials (RCTs), for example N-of-1 trials.
... Much of the challenge involves the redefinition of concepts of nutrition science, such as the definition of health and how to determine health status (of the individual, societal groups, nations, the planet), what to consider to be a causal effect and the process of achieving consensus based on the totality of the evidence on causality. Recently, a more detailed concept of health for the nutrition sciences was championed during a satellite workshop to the FENS conference [7,17,59]. At the same workshop, it was acknowledged that the quality of nutrition science should be at the highest level, however, taking into account that one must accept the fluidity of knowledge and that the spectrum of certainty will never be binary, either "A" or "B". ...
Commonly, it is the end of life when our health is deteriorating, that many will make drastic lifestyle changes to improve their quality of life. However, it is increasingly recognized that bringing good health-promoting behaviors into practice as early in life as possible has the most significant impact across the maximal healthspan. The WHO has brought clarity to health promotion over the last fifteen years, always centering on language relating to a process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their physical, mental and social health. A good healthspan is not just freedom from morbidity and mortality, it is that joie de vivre (“joy of living”) that should accompany every day of our lifespan. Therefore, health promotion includes not only the health sector, but also needs individual commitment to achieve that target of a healthspan aligned with the lifespan. This paper explores health promotion and health literacy, and how to design appropriate nutritional studies to characterize contributors to a positive health outcome, the role the human microbiome plays in promoting health and addressing and alleviating morbidity and diseases, and finally how to characterize phenotypic flexibility and a physiologic resilience that we must maintain as our structural and functional systems are bombarded with the insults and perturbations of life.
... Comparable initiatives in the United States [2,3], Australia [4] and elsewhere are working on increasing insights on how nutrition science can increase its credibility and capability, with each initiative taking its own approach. Discussion to date has identified that nutrition science is meeting inherent boundaries, hampering conceptual and methodological progress and the translation of novel insights into societal benefit and trust [1,5]. Nutrition science is facing limitations to its capability and credibility, impeding its societal value. ...
... During its existence so far, the NiT discussion group has identified several main points of concern [1] that can be considered major areas for an open, honest and thorough debate and discussion, in order to catalyse a new global consensus on standards in the science of nutrition. Recently, the Federation of European Nutrition Societies (FENS) has chosen to further develop the NiT initiative and begin a more internationally oriented discussion on "Improving standards in the science of nutrition" [5]. It is now proposed to convene 3 working groups under the auspices of FENS, with each working group dealing with specific working areas: (1) the concepts and methodologies required to produce credible nutrition science in relation to public and personal health, (2) the organization, capabilities and funding structure required to produce credible nutrition science, (3) the way nutrition science is communicated to the general public and patients, to the medical community, and to industry. ...
Objectives
To describe and compare the references cited in popular books about diet and health between the US and Japan.
Design
Books were selected based on their best-seller rankings in the diet and health category of online bookstores. We identified references throughout all pages of the books and examined the number of references, reference format (identifiable or not), and presence of specific types of references, such as systematic reviews of human research. We compared the characteristics of references between the two countries and examined related factors to citation.
Setting
Cross-sectional study.
Subject
Books (n 100 in each country).
Results
Among 100 books from each country, 65 US and 66 Japanese books had references. Forty-five US books cited more than 100 references, against only five Japanese books. The number of books that cited systematic reviews of human research differed between the US (n 49) and Japan (n 9). Additionally, the number of books that provided identifiable information for all references was significantly higher in the US (n 63) than in Japan (n 42). Books whose first authors have licenses of medical doctors were more likely to cite references than those without in both countries.
Conclusions
Two-thirds of books about diet and health cited references in both the US and Japan, but Japanese books cited fewer references and were less likely to cite systematic reviews and provide identifiable references than US books. Further research into the scientific reliability of information in books about diet and health is warranted.
