Nutritional diet research content

The core content of nutrition and diet research has long gone beyond the traditional categories of "recitation of food nutrition ingredients" and "reproduction of universal dietary guidelines." The current mainstream research focuses on the three core directions of individual differentiated nutritional adaptation, full life cycle nutritional support, and two-way intervention between diet and disease. It also extends to the two major implementation areas of public nutrition policy formulation and food industry nutritional transformation. It is an interdisciplinary research system spanning basic medicine, food science, and sociology.

In the five years I have been doing nutritional consulting, the most common misunderstanding I have encountered is "copying other people's recipes". Last week, I picked up a 28-year-old girl who works as an Internet operator. She followed the "Universal Mediterranean Diet Formula" posted online for three months. Not only did she lose half her hair, but her uric acid level also increased during her physical examination. Much higher than the normal value - her own uric acid metabolism is weak, and the high-purine seafood and quinoa in the diet every day just stepped on her metabolic minefield. This is precisely the issue that is most concerned about in current individual nutritional adaptation research: no dietary pattern is suitable for everyone. The academic community has been arguing about the criteria for judging individual nutrition for almost ten years: a group of researchers advocate doing metabolic gene testing first. For example, people with MTHFR gene mutations cannot metabolize ordinary folic acid and must directly supplement active folic acid. People with slow caffeine metabolism will suffer from panic and insomnia even if they drink half a cup of coffee a day. All dietary plans must follow genes. ； Another group of scholars doing epigenetic research disagrees, believing that genes account for up to 30% of the impact. What’s more important is your current life status: you have been staying up late every day to catch up on projects, and your insulin sensitivity is already lower than usual. Even if you eat blueberries, which are recognized as having low GI, your blood sugar will still spike if you eat too much. Each of the two factions has its own large-sample clinical data support, and there is no conclusion yet. When we make plans now, we generally refer to both sides and will not be stuck in the standards of one faction.

If you feel that the research on individual adaptation is too detailed and scattered, the research on nutrition throughout the life cycle has actually quietly penetrated into everyone's daily life. The community where my mother lives cooperated with the community hospital to open a nutrition class for the elderly last year. In the past, the aunts and grandmothers were always afraid of eating fat and having high blood lipids. They drank white porridge with vegetables every day, and many of them had weak legs and fell. Now they follow the class and need to eat 1.2g of protein per kilogram of body weight every day, and drink it in the morning. Add a spoonful of whey protein to the soy milk, two ounces of lean pork or fish and shrimp at noon, and two boiled eggs as snacks in the afternoon. The last time the community organized a mountain climb in the suburbs, 72-year-old Aunt Zhang used to use crutches to walk on flat roads. This time, she didn't feel tired even after half the climb, and her physical examination showed that her muscle mass increased by 12% compared to last year. Today's whole life cycle nutrition research is no longer a rough conclusion that "pregnant women need calcium supplements and children need zinc supplements", but covers the entire stage from pregnancy preparation (even nutritional supplementation for men during pregnancy preparation has now become a research hotspot) to elderly hospice care. Even the snack addition standards for children of different ages are updated with new research conclusions every year.

Speaking of what is most relevant to ordinary people, it is actually research on the two-way intervention of diet on diseases. I am currently following more than a dozen type 2 diabetes follow-up clients, and almost everyone will ask at the beginning: "Which is better, low-carbohydrate or Mediterranean diet?" ”This issue has been debated in the academic community for many years. Last year, the New England Journal of Medicine even published two studies with completely opposite stances: One followed 1,200 people with diabetes for 2 years and found that the low-carbohydrate group had a 0.4% higher drop in glycosylated hemoglobin than the Mediterranean group. ； Another study with the same large sample showed that long-term low-carb diet will increase low-density lipoprotein and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease by 18%. In the end, the clinic reached a very practical consensus: regardless of the school, the one you can stick to for a long time is the best. I previously adjusted the diet of a 62-year-old diabetic who had been eating white rice all his life. I didn’t even dare to ask him to cut off carbohydrates. I just replaced the white rice with half of brown rice at each meal. The amount was controlled to the size of a fist, paired with 2 ounces of lean meat and half a pound of green leafy vegetables. He didn’t feel any pain. In three months, his glycemic index dropped from 7.8 to 6.5. The effect was much better than those who tried hard to quit carbs and ended up eating too much.

Don’t think that nutrition research is all done on a single person. Many details that we usually don’t pay attention to are the result of research. For example, the current nutritious lunches in primary schools require dark green vegetables every day, the salt intake is controlled below 3 grams per day, and the addition of ingredients containing trans fatty acids is prohibited. These are all the impacts of public nutrition research on policies. ； There are also iron-fortified soy sauce, high-calcium milk, and low-GI biscuits that can be seen everywhere in supermarkets. They are essentially product modifications made by the food industry following the direction of nutritional research. Of course, this area is controversial. Many people think that "fortified food is an IQ tax." However, thinking about it conversely, for children in remote areas with a single diet, a bag of milk powder with vitamin A is much more cost-effective than nutritional supplements that often cost hundreds of dollars. In essence, it reduces the probability of malnutrition at the lowest cost.

After all, nutrition and diet research has never been about giving everyone a bunch of prohibitions on "this can't be eaten and that can't be touched". In essence, it is to help everyone find a way to eat that can not only meet the needs of the body, but also make them happy. After all, eating is a part of life. If you have to completely give up your favorite strawberries and hot pot for the so-called "health", then even if the indicators are normal, what's the point?