Focus on dietary patterns, not nutrients
Should dietary advice be dispensed nutrient-by-nutrient or in terms of foods being part of dietary patterns? Though many government and advocacy dietary recommendations are expressed in terms of nutrients, the Salt Institute argues for "dietary patterns" in its Spring 2007 Salt and Health newsletter, published today. The Institute explains:
Decades of research in nutritional epidemiology as well as dietary intervention clinical studies have focused on assessing or manipulating the intake of a specific dietary component to determine its role in the development or treatment of a given disease or disorder. Despite the exhaustive effort that has invested in this field of research, it has remained mired in inconsistent and often conflicting results, confusion on the part of the general public, and lack of consensus among the experts.
The public is skeptical of seeming inconsistency between "scientific" studies, the article continues, but there is often a logical explanation.
Nutrients are not ingested in isolation, but as combined constituents of a total diet. Our diets consist of a variety of foods with complex assortments of nutrients and other ingredients, many of which may act on one another synergistically or antagonistically. When the intake of one nutrient is manipulated for study, increased or decreased, the intake and interactions of other components in the diet are likely to be altered.
Properly appreciated, dietary patterns should be the focus of dietary recommendations, the Institute argues, If that happens
We may well be approaching the time when nutrition scientists, policy makers, and the American public can set aside their differences and their skepticism, and sit down together over a meal they can all agree is healthy.
