Future directions in nutrition research.

Although nutrition is generally regarded as important for human health, it is rarely utilized as a key solution for the chronic diseases that have become a global burden. Is nutrition an ineffective strategy for disease management, or is it that we have yet to demonstrate the practical use of nutrition? To date, the persuasiveness of nutrition research has been hindered by inconsistent findings, contradictory messages, and unproven effectiveness. As a result, nutrition is still not taken quite seriously by the public, and its applications have not been sufficiently implemented in clinical settings. In order to change the mainstream perception of nutrition, we must reconsider our research approach as we move forward in the field. Let us ask ourselves: what can nutrition do for today’s health epidemics? The main challenge of nutrition research lies in its complexity and confounding factors. Unlike pharmaceutical research and drug trials, many factors in our diet and lifestyle can affect the outcomes of nutritional studies, making it difficult to interpret the findings. Large, long-term studies in humans are usually viewed as the gold standard in medical research, and their results often attract media attention and have a greater influence on regulatory policies. However, these types of nutritional studies are especially prone to the confounding factors introduced by the difficulties of long-term compliance and the unavoidable changes in lifestyle over time, such as dietary and behavioral choices. In addition, current nutritional studies inherently suffer from variations in the standards for test materials (e.g., nutritional supplement ingredients), as well as in methodology, reporting, baseline evaluation, and outcome measures. Many studies have also failed to take genetic variation in study subjects into account, even though it is now well-known that this significantly affects individuals’ response to dietary factors. From a translational research standpoint, nutritional findings cannot be readily implemented in clinical settings due to the lack of established biomarkers for evaluating the efficacy of nutritional interventions. In this context, it is essential that we develop new research approaches to demonstrate the potential of nutrition in healthcare. It is my opinion that nutrition research should devote greater effort towards interventional nutrition, in addition to its traditional emphasis on epidemiological and population nutrition. In other words, we should develop nutritional interventions as solutions for the health problems we are facing worldwide. I propose the use of a pathway-based, biomarkerguided, and personalized approach to create integrated metabolic interventions. Published online: January 16, 2014