Nutritional Ecology and Human Health

Abstract

In contrast to the spectacular advances in the first half of the twentieth century with micronutrient-related diseases, human nutrition science has failed to stem the more recent rise of obesity and associated cardiometabolic disease (OACD). This failure has triggered debate on the problems and limitations of the field and what change is needed to address these. We briefly review the two broad historical phases of human nutrition science and then provide an overview of the main problems that have been implicated in the poor progress of the field with solving OACD. We next introduce the field of nutritional ecology and show how its ecological-evolutionary foundations can enrich human nutrition science by providing the theory to help address its limitations. We end by introducing a modeling approach from nutritional ecology, termed nutritional geometry, and demonstrate how it can help to implement ecological and evolutionary theory in human nutrition to provide new direction and to better understand and manage OACD.

Making nutrition guidelines fit for purpose

“…Such integrative approaches may be useful for complex nutrition questions such as how evolutionary changes in animal diets affect health outcomes 36. GRADE is being modified for application to environmental health topics 37.…”

“…Nutrition science theory helps explain the nature and scope of the associations between nutrients, foods, diets, food systems, and health outcomes4041424344 and to model them 36. Health promotion science can help suggest causal mechanisms that link intervention types with health outcomes.…”

Insulin-Like Peptides Regulate Feeding Preference and Metabolism in Drosophila

“…However, this has not yet been studied under different dietary conditions, where diet might modulate the phenotype of DILPs deficiency. Macronutrient combinations, as well as the quality of macronutrients and interactions with micronutrients, can modulate disease outcomes, thus offering the opportunity for diet to serve as both prevention and cure (Simpson et al, 2015, 2017; Raubenheimer and Simpson, 2016). We have shown recently in flies that macronutrient balance defines physiological parameters such as fecundity and stress resistance (Lushchak et al, 2014) and may also alter the impact of plant medicinal preparations (Gospodaryov et al, 2013).…”

Integrative Physiology: At the Crossroads of Nutrition, Microbiota, Animal Physiology, and Human Health

“…Extending this multi-species approach beyond the standard model systems may offer yet further opportunities, by exploring phylogenetic and ecological patterns that can yield unexpected breakthroughs in the study of human health. This principle is well illustrated by the field of nutritional ecology, where comparative analysis of a wide range of species has illuminated processes in human regulatory physiology and appetite control that predispose the subjects to obesity and metabolic disease in the modern world (Raubenheimer and Simpson, 2016). A corollary is that species-specific solutions to ecological challenges, even though not directly relevant to humans, may provide new understanding for humans by illustrating how such problems have been solved by evolution (Bolker, 2012).…”