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Foods, Not Specific Nutrients, May Be Key to Good Health |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: In a recent academic review, a University of Minnesota professor in the School of Public Health has concluded that food, as opposed to specific nutrients, may be key to having a healthy diet. The research is published in last month's Journal of Nutrition Reviews. "We are confusing ourselves and the public by talking so much about nutrients when we should be talking about foods," said David Jacobs, Ph.D., the principal investigator and Mayo Professor of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. Jacobs, with coauthor Professor Linda Tapsell of the University of Wollongong in Australia, argues that people should shift the focus toward the benefits of entire food products and food patterns in order to better understand nutrition in regard to a healthy human body. They focus on the concept of food synergy -- the idea that more information about the impact of human health can be obtained by looking at whole foods than a single food component (such as vitamin C, or calcium added to a container of orange juice). A similar large experiment in total fat reduction also did not show benefit. In contrast, myriad observations have been made of improved long-term health for foods and food patterns that incorporate these same nutrients naturally occurring in food. An understanding of the interactions between food components in both single foods and whole diets opens up new areas of thinking that appear to have greater application to contemporary population health issues, particularly those related to chronic lifestyle disease, Jacobs said.
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