Laureate Professor Clare Collins
Hunter Medical Research Institute, College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing, The University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Challenges and Opportunities in Assessing Diet Across the Lifespan; Pot of gold or Pandora’s Box?
ABSTRACT
What people eat and drink is fundamental to health and well-being across the lifespan. Poor eating habits contribute to one in five deaths globally and are a major component in global burden of disease and development of risk factors for major chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and some specific cancers. Nutrition is integral to prevention and treatment with dietary assessment essential for surveillance of both under- and overnutrition, in nutritional epidemiology and as a component of interventions for primary and secondary prevention.
Rapid developments in the fields of genomics and metabolomics mean the ability to tailor individual dietary advice to personalised genetic risk lies tantalisingly on the horizon. Hence the importance of accurate quantification of dietary intake has once again been brought into the spotlight. Greater understanding of variations in digestion and metabolism relative to genetic variation is central to developments in this field of precision nutrition. Food choices, food composition and actual consumption patterns are complex and can change over time based on personal factors including age life stage and health status, as well as due to external factors that affect the food supply or choices including season, climate and geography as well as advertising and marketing.
How accurately dietary intake can be measured is well recognised as challenging. Most dietary assessment methods rely on retrospective self-report measures or prospective, active self-recording. The inherent error associated with dietary data has recently been debated globally and the need to better understand measurement error has contributed to advancing the field and recommendations for research. The use of use of recovery and concentration biomarkers, albeit few, can assist in quantifying the degree of error relative to the dietary metho used. Development of future biomarker studies, including using dietary metabolomics, will continue to refine recommendations for both dietary assessment methods and statistical approaches to adjust for inherent error.
Development and use of image based and automated online technologies to assess dietary intake has accelerated, including image-based methods, wearable sensors, and assessment devices both as stand-alone and alongside traditional dietary assessment methods. In addition, the range of dietary biomarkers has expanded with the field of nutritional metabolomics accelerating. Importantly, technology-based methods have potential to overcome some barriers related to time, cost and burden for both researchers and individuals.
Given what people eat is potentially modifiable, there is an urgent need to integrate assessment with timely reporting of findings at both the individual and population level. Therefore, progressing methods that improve accuracy of dietary assessment and that help identify dietary patterns
amenable to change is critical to enhancing both knowledge of diet-disease relationships and development of evidence-based dietary guidelines to optimise nutrition related health and wellbeing across the lifespan.
Hunter Medical Research Institute, College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing, The University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Challenges and Opportunities in Assessing Diet Across the Lifespan; Pot of gold or Pandora’s Box?
ABSTRACT
What people eat and drink is fundamental to health and well-being across the lifespan. Poor eating habits contribute to one in five deaths globally and are a major component in global burden of disease and development of risk factors for major chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and some specific cancers. Nutrition is integral to prevention and treatment with dietary assessment essential for surveillance of both under- and overnutrition, in nutritional epidemiology and as a component of interventions for primary and secondary prevention.
Rapid developments in the fields of genomics and metabolomics mean the ability to tailor individual dietary advice to personalised genetic risk lies tantalisingly on the horizon. Hence the importance of accurate quantification of dietary intake has once again been brought into the spotlight. Greater understanding of variations in digestion and metabolism relative to genetic variation is central to developments in this field of precision nutrition. Food choices, food composition and actual consumption patterns are complex and can change over time based on personal factors including age life stage and health status, as well as due to external factors that affect the food supply or choices including season, climate and geography as well as advertising and marketing.
How accurately dietary intake can be measured is well recognised as challenging. Most dietary assessment methods rely on retrospective self-report measures or prospective, active self-recording. The inherent error associated with dietary data has recently been debated globally and the need to better understand measurement error has contributed to advancing the field and recommendations for research. The use of use of recovery and concentration biomarkers, albeit few, can assist in quantifying the degree of error relative to the dietary metho used. Development of future biomarker studies, including using dietary metabolomics, will continue to refine recommendations for both dietary assessment methods and statistical approaches to adjust for inherent error.
Development and use of image based and automated online technologies to assess dietary intake has accelerated, including image-based methods, wearable sensors, and assessment devices both as stand-alone and alongside traditional dietary assessment methods. In addition, the range of dietary biomarkers has expanded with the field of nutritional metabolomics accelerating. Importantly, technology-based methods have potential to overcome some barriers related to time, cost and burden for both researchers and individuals.
Given what people eat is potentially modifiable, there is an urgent need to integrate assessment with timely reporting of findings at both the individual and population level. Therefore, progressing methods that improve accuracy of dietary assessment and that help identify dietary patterns
amenable to change is critical to enhancing both knowledge of diet-disease relationships and development of evidence-based dietary guidelines to optimise nutrition related health and wellbeing across the lifespan.
