Edited and reviewed by: Johannes Le Coutre, Nestle Research Center, Switzerland
This article was submitted to Nutrition and Food Science Technology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Nutrition.
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The twenty-first century is marked by multiple unprecedented environmental challenges that could threaten human survival. The combined impact of climate change, energy and water shortage, environment pollutants, shifting global population demographics, food safety, and growing disease pandemics, all place undue stress on the planet’s food system, already in a sensitive balance with its ecosystem. These threats, natural or man-made, obligate the scientific community to proactively seek new breakthrough food and nutrition solutions to insure global food sustainability and nutrition security in the future. To achieve this, innovative solutions need to be considered throughout the whole food chain inclusive of food choices and dietary patterns in order to make any significant improvements in the food supply, nutritional, and health status.
Any changes to the food supply will inevitably impact food, nutrition, and health policies, particularly pertaining to food production, agricultural practices, dietary patterns, nutrition, and health guidance and management. Climate change, droughts, and floods have exacerbated concerns related to land availability for agriculture usage, animal and crop production, as well as quality and yield. The resulting effect of energy shortage has directed attention to bio fuel as an alternate source of energy, particularly from crops such as corn and oil seeds. This sets the stage for an added competitive demand for crops being used as fuel in addition to food and feed. As a result, there is an urgent need to find alternative solutions to improve the efficiency and sustainability in the food supply chain by reducing food waste and enhancing nutritional qualities of foods through fortification technologies (i.e., biofortification and chemical fortification).
Another area receiving increasing research interest is food safety. The presence of chemical contaminants in the food chain, such as PCB and dieldrin, is particularly troubling. In addition, the emergence of new food pathogens, particularly viruses, as well as the re-emergence of known food pathogens, have captured considerable research attention. For example, alteration to diet pattern and nutrition affect microbial population, with consequential effect on the immune system, disease pathogenesis and health (
The United Nations projected that by 2050 the world population would reach 9.6 billion (
To address the emerging food and health issues, countries have issued national food, nutrition, and health guidelines and regulations. Unfortunately, in spite of this, many of these food and nutrition guideline goals remain unmet. An example is the United States Dietary Guidelines for Americans, issued first in 1980. Since then, seven Dietary Guidelines (DGs) have been issued; the latest released in 2010 (
A reduction in sodium intake remains particularly challenging due to the versatile role sodium chloride plays in food functionality, palatability, and health. The basic understanding of salt taste mechanisms and the physiology of sodium homeostasis in humans continues to be an active area of research and has impeded advances in the development of optimal and versatile salt reduction technology tools for food products. On the other hand, efforts to reduce fat and cholesterol intake have been more successful, with technologies having advanced sufficiently to develop products that meet both consumer taste and value expectations. However, this process took more than 20 years!
Important lessons learned from these findings: guideline recommendations that precede food technology capability will face considerable challenges of meeting set goals; even if a technology is available, time and research investments are needed to apply the technology to multiple food systems and categories; the need to understand basic mechanisms of food substance interactions is important to enable specific and widespread applications of relevant technologies; consumer acceptance of foods is critical to the success of any set of recommendation guidelines; sufficient time is needed to allow consumers to change their food and dietary behavior; multidisciplinary experts from all sectors, with research and application experience in food science and technology, nutrition, medicine, consumer behavior, economics, etc., should be part of the recommendation deliberation to ensure implementation and long term compliance and success.
In 2011, the Foresight Report (
The scope of the challenges is daunting and the path forward can be confusing in absence of a clear focus and set priorities. In 2010, the Institute of Food Technology (
Perhaps the most comprehensive path to building a future framework template is best summed up in the European Technology Platform report “Food for Life Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda” (
Based on these findings and considering the grand challenges related to food and health, future developments in nutrition, food science, and technology need to focus on the following points:
Food, nutrition, and health
role of food and nutrition throughout life cycle in support of optimal health and improvement of quality of life maternal-child and geriatric nutrition role of food and nutrition in disease etiology and management understanding individual variability in response to food and system biology variability and implications for setting guidelines advancing nutrigenomics and addressing personalized nutrition for optimal health. Food system and technology
food and water security and safety energy management of foods (fighting hunger as well as obesity) increasing sustainability within the food chain including food loss and food waste reduction addressing challenges of climate change providing food concepts for an aging population and for personalized nutrition (or at least for specific target groups) regaining consumer trust in the food supply improving existing and providing new functions/properties of foods via targeted processing (“tailor-made foods”) developing better tools for process control and development integration of the food chain involving food science and technology experts from all sectors at early discussion stages and deliberations on food, nutrition, and health guidelines These challenges for nutrition and food science technology can only be met through integrating disciplines, and through active interactions, collaborations, and partnerships.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.