Food Structure for Nutrition - Food Colloids: Self-Assembly and Material Science - page 3

the history of science have been so successful. The concept of specific molecules
as essential amines was initiated by Casimir Funk, who effectively spawned
molecular nutrition with the isolation of vitamin B1 (thiamin) in 1912, as
reviewed by Jukes; 5 and within 40 years the concept of essential nutrients was
ostensibly complete.
This great legacy of discovery paved the way for the eradication of diseases
caused by nutrient deficiencies. However, some of the important strategies of
nutrient discovery are proving to be debilitating to the future growth of
nutrition as a field. This is particularly true as nutrition emerges with the goal
of guiding diets to improve overall health. For example, while disassembling
foods into molecules enabled the differentiation of essential from nonessential
nutrients, it left a prevailing assumption that food per se is immaterial to the
provision of essentiality, and to health in general. Similarly, by establishing
essential nutrients, the underlying assumption was that they were essential for
all humans; thus, varying nutritional requirements within individuals among
the population remained largely ignored. By defining bioavailability as the
integration of the pharmacokinetic curve of an ingested nutrient in blood
relative to the same nutrient when injected, the goal became a bioavailability of
unity; hence, the foods themselves - in particular those with a degree of
complexity of food matrices that may reduce bioavailability - were by defini-
tion deleterious. By defining an adequate diet as that producing adequate tissue
levels of nutrients in the fasted condition, the relationship of the structure of
foods and diet to the dynamics of the fed state has remained largely unstudied.
Needless to say, if the dynamics of food and nutrient delivery remain unknown,
they will continue to be unappreciated in terms of the value of food structure to
its nutritive value.
1.2.2 The Present
The emergence of diseases of metabolic dysregulation associated with varia-
tions in diet is forcing scientists to refine the traditional views of nutrition. Diet
affects health in more ways than simply through providing essential nutrients: it
includes various aspects of chronic metabolic regulation. The science of nutri-
tion has not yet built an understanding of this complexity. Furthermore,
whereas recommendations for essential nutrients can be quite broad for the
entire population, humans vary in their responses to diets as they affect
metabolism, and the same diets fed to different individuals may develop quite
distinctly different health consequences. Therefore, as the field of nutrition
faces this new challenge of (re-)discovering the importance of food, nutrition
scientists will also need to change their perspectives of health.
While food structure and nutrition have not been well studied, there are clear
indications of the importance of the dynamics of food digestion to health from
many aspects of ongoing scientific research. The most vivid is the variation in
rate of absorption of the simple nutrient glucose. Although food structure has
not been explicitly specified as an independent variable, for many years the rate
of glucose delivery to blood has been included as an indicator of food as the