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The New Nutrition Science Project

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Public Health Nutrition: 8(6A), 673–694 DOI: 10.1079/PHN2005819 The new nutrition science project Geoffrey Cannon1,* and Claus Leitzmann2,* 1World Health Policy Forum, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil: 2Institute of Nutrition Science, Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, Germany Abstract Objective: To show that nutrition science, with its application to food and nutrition policy, now needs a new conceptual framework. This will incorporate nutrition in its current definition as principally a biological science, now including nutritional aspects of genomics. It will also create new governing and guiding principles; specify a new definition; and add social and environmental dimensions and domains. Method: A narrative review of nutrition science, its successes and achievements, and its dilemmas, paradoxes, shortcomings, dissonances and challenges. Reference is made to 16 associated papers. Equal use is made of continuous text and of boxed texts Keywords that extend the review and give salient examples. Conceptual framework of nutrition Principles of nutrition Results: Recent and current interrelated electronic and genomic discoveries and Ethical principles of nutrition linked sequential demographic, nutritional and epidemiological shifts, in the context Ecological principles of nutrition of associated and interlinked global social, cultural, environmental, economic, Evolution and nutrition political and other developments, altogether amount to a world in revolution, History and nutrition requiring all disciplines including that of nutrition science to make comparably radical Life-course approach to nutrition responses. Biotechnology and nutrition Conclusion: Nutrition in principle and practice should be a biological and also an Genomics and nutrition environmental and social science. This new broad integrated structure brings much Human rights and nutrition recent and current progressive work into the centre of nutrition science, and in some Definition of nutrition ways is a renewal of the period when nutrition science had its greatest impact. It Dimensions of nutrition Biological dimension of nutrition amounts to a map charting well-known and also new worlds. The new nutrition Environmental dimension science is concerned with personal and population health, and also with planetary of nutrition health – the welfare and future of the whole physical and living world of which Social dimension of nutrition humans are a part. In this way the discipline will make a greater contribution to the Causes of health and disease preservation, maintenance, development and sustenance of life on Earth, appropriate Scientific revolutions for the twenty-first century. Systems theory and nutrition The New Nutrition Science project, of which this and the greatest significance for those human activities with associated papers1–16 are an initial part, is work in the greatest impact on the living and natural world. The progress. The project, as developed so far, proposes new implications for all sciences and technologies are principles to govern and guide nutrition science and its profound. application to food and nutrition policy, and a new There is in any case imperative need for nutrition definition that takes into account extended dimensions science to gain a new definition, new governing and and domains. The purpose is to give the science maximum guiding principles, and extended dimensions and relevance and usefulness in addressing the challenges and domains. The science, with its application to food and opportunities of the twenty-first century. Taken together, nutrition policy, is already breaking out of its original this is groundwork for a new general theory of nutrition physiological, biochemical and medical frame, and is science. extending into other dimensions and domains; but it has not yet gained the overall conceptual framework needed Introduction by all sciences and indeed by all structured and sustained human activity. We have now entered a new era of human history. We are moving out of the period in which human activity has An integrated science been mainly concerned with exploitation, production and The new nutrition will remain a biological science, now consumption, into a new period in which our main exploring the new domain of genomics, with a broader concerns are and will remain ones of preservation, biological base, and will also be a social and environ- conservation and sustenance. This is inescapable, and has mental science, with all three dimensions integrated *Corresponding authors: E-mail [email protected], [email protected] q The Authors 2005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 29 Sep 2021 at 06:19:51, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 674 G Cannon and C Leitzmann The world now is transformed from that mapped by nineteenth and early twentieth century theories and principles. The discovery of new worlds begins by becoming open to new ideas. As from the last decades of the twentieth century, the linked political, financial and electronic revolutions known as ‘globalisation’, together with bioscientific and biotechnological discoveries, and demographic, nutritional and epidemiological trends, all together make a new world that needs new maps. Nutrition therefore now needs a new conceptual framework, as a biological and also an environmental and social science, able to analyse and assess all relevant determinants of well-being and disease, and to take effective action. The new nutrition science will follow ethical and ecological principles, respect history, tradition and culture, affirm human rights, and be committed to the creation and maintenance of policies and programmes designed to preserve and protect the human, living and physical world all together. The New Nutrition Science project is work in progress to these ends. together. These concepts, of broadening and integration, science, this will involve, with the adoption of ethical and should be inseparable: the whole is greater than the sum ecological principles, the incorporation of disciplines of its parts. conventionally seen to be outside its scope, attention to The prospect includes accelerated evolution of nutri- history, tradition and culture, acceptance that health is tion, enabling it to respond more effectively to recent and more than absence of physical disease, and commitment current aspects of this electronic age, to give it increased to policies and programmes designed to protect the whole depth and range as a biological science linked with other human, living and physical world. The meaning and sciences. purpose of nutrition will be renewed as a result of this The prospect also amounts to a revolution of the collaborative adventure. science. This is because taken together, the principles, dimensions and domains proposed here, including those Background of evolution itself and ecology, as well as those of economics, equity and ethics, change the science from The theory and practice of nutrition science is certainly to one centred on humans, to one centred on the ecosphere do with the health of humans and animals in the service of of which humans are a part4. humans. The well-being of populations in both rich and In these ways, the reformulated nutrition will regain poor countries has owed much to the practice of the the importance, influence and impact the science science in its modern form since its beginnings in the mid- enjoyed in its first period between the mid-nineteenth nineteenth century (albeit in different proportions) and and mid-twentieth century3, by addressing the most will continue to do so. important challenges and opportunities of the twenty- Fundamental public health measures including the first century. securing of supply of adequate, varied food and safe water at population level, whether or not these have been the Need for new maps result of evidence from nutrition science7, have greatly The proposals made in The New Nutrition Science project reduced infant and childhood mortality, increased amount to an outline of a map of both old and new resistance to infection, improved good health throughout territory. An analogy from recent human history is the life, and greatly increased the average human lifespan17,18. discovery of the New World of the Americas by European This vital work, a living legacy of the public health explorers, with all that meant and still means for our movement whose initial great achievements transformed understanding of our place in nature and in the cosmos. the health of the first industrialised countries, continues at Just as the discovery by Europeans of the Americas half a international, national and local levels throughout the millennium ago created the pressure that caused new world19,20. For these achievements alone, nutrition science maps to be drawn and a new cosmology to be accepted, has a proud place in the history of human health, welfare the task now for nutrition science is to make a new map and development. based on principles that fit the world now and for the future. The biochemical frame Discovery, exploration and settling of new worlds begin Nutrition is now conventionally seen as a biological (or by being open to extraordinary ideas. With nutrition ‘life’) science, principally working within a physiological, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 29 Sep 2021 at 06:19:51, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. The new nutrition science project 675 biochemical, medical and now genomic frame, applied Discussion clinically or on behalf of communities and populations.
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