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 should not have enough to eat and people who 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 mistaken food does. There's a growing movement to treat food as medicine, by designing meals to treat specific diseases, providing prescriptions for fresh fruit and veggies, and improving the dietary content of the foods we eat. In the approaching a long time, discoveries and programs on food as medicine have the potential to avoid wasting thousands and thousands of lives.
Looking to the longer term
Currently, dozens of programs all over the world are exploring ways to prescribe food to individuals with diet-related conditions corresponding 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 advice 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 cut back heart disease.
Each of those efforts contributes just a little to our understanding of how food might 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 develop into less hectic in the approaching a long time, so solutions have to be found that take note of 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 learn how to treat disease with food, others try to forestall it altogether. Plant-based diets are taking center stage as researchers look for methods 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 all over the world, where nearly 13 million small farms grow them.
Another is a non-public 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 a different way than others, even close relatives. Your genes affect the way in which your body uses nutrients (this known as nutrigenetics); at the identical time, the foods you eat can change the way in which your genes are expressed (that is nutrigenomics). Nutrigenomics implies that in case your genes make you more at risk of diabetes, and also you eat food that prompts the genes, it might pave the method 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 significant NIH research project focused on precision nutrition, says this area is even larger 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 are going to find on shelves in the longer term.
“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 higher understand learn how to get the correct nutrients to the correct people. That could change the way in which 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 is predicated 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 more cost-effective. 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 might be treated as medicine and prescribed, doctors must acquire the essential 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 teaching programs.
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.”