Food Structure for Nutrition - Food Colloids: Self-Assembly and Material Science - page 2

obtain all of the essential nutrients and still consume diets that are suboptimal
for overall health. In fact, poorly balanced diets are now recognized to be one
of the leading causes of metabolic diseases around the world. 1 Understanding
how diet can produce such diseases is leading to a much more comprehensive
understanding of the interactions between food components and health.
To understand food's broader role in nutrition, it will be necessary not only
to go beyond essential nutrients, and to redesign nutritional models and
experiments, but also to reconsider the meaning of 'health' itself. Health must
be understood in terms of the wide diversity of normal metabolic states of
humans. The recent epidemics in heart disease, obesity, diabetes, hypertension,
and osteoporosis indicate that health can deteriorate in response to imbalanced
diets almost as quickly as it can deteriorate in the absence of essential nutri-
ents. 2 In particular, there is an immediate need to understand the role of diet
and foods in managing food intake and in regulating whole body energy status.
Most nutritional measures of essential nutrients and their status have been
taken in the fasted condition to avoid confounding chronic status with acute
food intake. 3 It is now becoming apparent 4 that variations in the dynamic or
temporal responses to food components are also important to overall health.
Nutrition research must, therefore, embrace the entire continuum of the fed
state, leading to an understanding of how rapidly foods are digested, absorbed,
and metabolized, and how these temporal and special events relate to overall
health. With this perspective in mind, the influence of food structure on the
dynamics of varying post-prandial metabolic states should be studied in
mechanistic detail.
Food itself must also be understood comprehensively as multi-component,
multi-phasic ensembles of biomaterials. Clearly, optimal diets are more than
just the essential nutrients. Notably, several aspects of foods have emerged that
were virtually ignored by nutritional research in the scientific pursuit of
essential nutrients. Perhaps the most important omission was food structure
itself. The science of food biomaterials must now deliver food structure as a
fully controllable variable set to nutrition research. For nutrition researchers to
understand the role of physical, colloidal, and macromolecular structure, these
must be studied as independent variables in nutrition studies. Knowledge of
food structure must, therefore, become highly predictive - not just descriptive.
1.2 Food Structure and Nutrition - Then and Now
1.2.1 The Past
The science of nutrition is the knowledge repository for the understanding of
essential nutrients, their quantitative requirements, and the mechanisms behind
their essentiality. Few achievements in science have been as complete, or as
rapidly brought to public health practice, as the identification of nutrients
essential for humans. The decision taken early in the 20th century to disas-
semble food commodities into molecules and study essentiality as a molecular
phenomenon was the defining event in molecular nutrition, and few decisions in