June 2, 2022 – Current statistics on nutrition and our health paint a bleak picture.
Deaths from poor nutrition have increased by 15% since 2010. Malnutrition now accounts for 1 / 4 of all adult deaths worldwide, including those that do not need enough to eat and those that are obese.
“We are facing a far more deadly global pandemic than COVID-19, but it is happening in slow motion and receiving too little attention and too little collective action,” says Scott Bowman, co-founder of The NOURISH movement“Our diet is killing us.”
But it's not the food itself that kills – the improper food does. There's a growing movement to treat food as medicine, by designing meals to treat specific diseases, providing prescriptions for fresh vegetables and fruit, and improving the dietary content of the foods we eat. In the approaching many years, discoveries and programs on food as medicine have the potential to avoid wasting thousands and thousands of lives.
Looking to the long run
Currently, dozens of programs world wide are exploring ways to prescribe food to individuals with diet-related conditions similar to obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The majority of the research is being done here within the United States, however the reach is global:
- In Canada, a brand new study examines the impact of prescription foods on individuals with food insecurity and high blood sugar.
- In Iran, researchers have developed a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to recommend certain snacks to diabetics.
- In Italy, the prototype of a menu suggestion system takes into consideration users' preferences, in addition to their diseases and recipes.
- A study is currently underway in Australia to develop a medically tailored dietary program to scale back heart disease.
Each of those efforts contributes somewhat to our understanding of how food could be used as medicine.
(For more on how doctors are already using food as medicine, see this companion story.)
“We have a lot more to learn about nutrition. We know a lot, enough to act, but we also need to advance the science,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.
No one expects our lives to turn out to be less hectic in the approaching many years, so solutions have to be found that keep in mind our current lifestyle – especially our dependence on convenience products.
“Most of us will continue to need prepared, convenient, packaged and processed foods in addition to fresh foods. So we need to advance the science to understand what is harmful about ultra-processed foods and what is beneficial about most natural foods,” says Mozaffarian. “I haven't seen that yet.”
Food for treatment or prevention? Yes
While some scientists are serious about easy methods to treat disease with food, others try to stop it altogether. Plant-based diets are taking center stage as researchers look for tactics to extend the nutrient density of plants.
“The first generation of agtech companies were farmer-focused, looking for higher yields and pest resistance,” says Todd Mockler, PhD, principal investigator on the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. The recent generation continues to be working on that, he says, “but also on innovations that are more consumer-focused, like improved nutrition.”
An example of that is HarvestPlusThe organization uses a plant breeding technique called biofortification to extend the iron, zinc and vitamin A content of staple crops in low- and middle-income countries world wide, where nearly 13 million small farms grow them.
Another is a personal company called Light seedsthat uses artificial intelligence to map the universe of phytonutrients, the compounds in plants that profit human health. The company has identified 1.5 million – greater than 10 times what was previously known – says Mozaffarian, a scientific adviser to the corporate.
“In the future, if I want to optimize a food for a particular health condition or make it interact with the body in a certain way, reduce inflammation or respond to the microbiome,” says Bowman, “I could turn to an organization like Brightseed to tell me exactly where to find these bioactive compounds in the plant kingdom.”
And then there's the concept of precision nutrition. Researchers have found that every person has each a singular genetic makeup and a singular microbiome, so eating the identical food will affect you in another way than others, even close relatives. Your genes affect the best way your body uses nutrients (this is named nutrigenetics); at the identical time, the foods you eat can change the best way your genes are expressed (that is nutrigenomics). Nutrigenomics signifies that in case your genes make you more vulnerable to diabetes, and also you eat food that prompts the genes, it may possibly pave the option to developing the disease. At the identical time, the gut bacteria that make up your microbiome also work to customize your body's response to food.
“This is going to be an important factor in optimizing health,” says Dr. James Marcum of Baylor University, who wrote a literature review on genetically determined diets. “Given your genetic makeup, you may want to follow this particular diet to optimize your health so you don't activate cancer genes, obesity genes or genes that lead to chronic disease.” The research continues to be in its early stages, he says, but he's optimistic.
The National Institutes of Health also sees personalized diets as a promising area. Holly Nicastro, PhD, coordinator of a serious NIH research project focused on precision nutrition, says this area is even greater than genetics and the microbiome.
“We need to look at how all of these things work with other systems in the body,” she says. “We want to consider psychosocial factors, demographic factors and other things that have not been captured in traditional nutrition studies.”
On the industrial side, Bowman sees many approaches combined within the products we'll find on shelves in the long run.
“I think there will be tremendous leaps and advances in the next few decades, especially when you combine things like the capabilities of artificial intelligence with the world of the microbiome,” he says.
By understanding how the body processes food and using the insights of an organization like Brightseed, we may have the opportunity to raised understand easy methods to get the fitting nutrients to the fitting people. That could change the best way we take into consideration food design, Bowman says.
How to get there
All of those advances sound exciting, but solving the world's nutrition-related health problems requires a concerted effort at a world level.
“If you look back, we'll see that most of the industries that have grown around the world have been heavily supported by government – the Industrial Revolution, the railroad, the Green Revolution that modernized agriculture. And now there's green energy,” says Mozaffarian. “The next big industry that government needs to focus on is the food industry, with a focus on nutrition. If that happens, we can get all of that done pretty quickly, in 10 to 20 years.”
To this end, the United Nations launched a Food Systems SummitTheir goal: to take daring recent measures to speed up progress in 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Much of the 2015 Agenda relies on healthier, more sustainable and fairer food systems. While these measures are still within the proposal phase, lots of them could have a direct impact on moving food beyond just calories:
- Invest in infrastructure to make nutrient-rich foods like fresh produce cheaper. Currently, diets in lots of poorer parts of the world consist mainly of shelf-stable, starchy staples that don't provide much profit to human health.
- In social programs that provide food to food-insecure households, focus more on nutrition than calories.
- Create a world centre for food innovation to speed up the event of convenient, easy-to-prepare and nutritious foods.
- Work together to centralize research on the microbiome and food as medicine, adopt policies and develop recent strategies.
- Set government-mandated targets for sodium, sugar and trans fats in packaged foods – many countries on the planet don't yet do that.
- Diversify staple crops beyond the “Big 5” – wheat, rice, maize, potatoes and soy – to supply a broader range of nutrients. Currently, wheat, rice and maize alone account for 42.5% of the world's calorie supply.
Putting the medical into food as medicine
Before food could be treated as medicine and prescribed, doctors must acquire the obligatory knowledge of nutrition. Yet, most medical students worldwide receive little to no training in the topic. In the United States, nutrition is roofed in just one% of medical school classes.
“We need to unleash the power of providers, otherwise they don't know enough and can't deliver these interventions,” says Mozaffarian. Late last yr, U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) introduced a resolution calling on American medical schools to implement robust nutrition education schemes.
There is a movement in several countries toward “cooking medicine,” during which doctors learn not only about nutrition but in addition useful, practical cooking skills. Physician and chef Robert Graham, MD, practices medicine in New York City and teaches health professionals plant-based cooking.
“They won't take the medicine if it doesn't taste good,” he says. “I'm in health care, not nursing, and that starts with food.”