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Nutrition to Optimise Human Health—How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation?

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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Witkamp, Renger F.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8308379/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34201670
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu13072155
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author Witkamp, Renger F.
author_facet Witkamp, Renger F.
author_sort Witkamp, Renger F.
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description 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.
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spelling pubmed-83083792021-07-25 Nutrition to Optimise Human Health—How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation? Witkamp, Renger F. Nutrients Review 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. MDPI 2021-06-23 /pmc/articles/PMC8308379/ /pubmed/34201670 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu13072155 Text en © 2021 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
Witkamp, Renger F.
Nutrition to Optimise Human Health—How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation?
title Nutrition to Optimise Human Health—How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation?
title_full Nutrition to Optimise Human Health—How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation?
title_fullStr Nutrition to Optimise Human Health—How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation?
title_full_unstemmed Nutrition to Optimise Human Health—How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation?
title_short Nutrition to Optimise Human Health—How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation?
title_sort nutrition to optimise human health—how to obtain physiological substantiation?
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8308379/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34201670
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu13072155
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