What have we learned from the world’s largest nutrition study?
03 February, 2021
The NutriNet-Santé study can be an ongoing investigation in to the relationship between nutrition and health. In this Particular Feature, we appearance at a number of the project’s results and consult with Principal Investigator Dr. Mathilde Touvier, who possesses been involved in the review since its inception.
A range of elements influences health, including genetics, lifestyle, environmental elements, and diet. Unraveling the complex human relationships between these factors is a challenge.
For many reasons, it is incredibly difficult to research the part of nutrition in health insurance and disease. For example, no two people eat the specific same diet, and incredibly few persons eat the specific same food 2 times in a row.
As it is neither feasible nor ethical to ask thousands of men and women to check out a strict diet for a decade to see what goes on, researchers need to find different ways of unpicking the links between diet and disease.
The simplest way to tackle any hard health-related question is to create as much top quality data as possible, which may be the NutriNet-Santé study’s raison d’etre.
From 2009, the NutriNet-Santé review was the initial internet-based review of its kind. By the start of 2021, the staff was regularly collecting info from 171,000 persons aged 15 years and older, making it the major ongoing nutrition study in the world.
Now functioning in France and Belgium, the team can be seeding similar assignments in Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.
Specifically, the researchers lay out with the next aims:
Investigate the relationship between nutrition, health, standard of living factors, and mortality.
Examine the factors that influence dietary patterns, such as financial and cultural factors.
The researchers keep a biobank of serum, plasma, and urine from about 20,000 people. They also collect stool to screen and analyze gut bacteria.
Alongside questions about food intake, the NutriNet-Santé workforce collects details about food product packaging, cooking practices, mode of development, physical activity, tobacco, drugs, environmental elements, and domestic and specialist exposures.
Importantly, data from the NutriNet-Santé study are associated with medical and insurance records to boost accuracy regarding medications, diagnoses, and long-term sick leave. The study is financed totally by public institutions.
Ultra-processed foods
Recently, ultra-processed foods have become a dietary pariah, and the NutriNet-Santé study has played very little small part in this.
Over modern times, data from the NutriNet-Santé analysis have revealed associations between diets high in ultra-processed foods and an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, mortality, depressive symptoms, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and gastrointestinal disorders.
For example, one paper based on data from the NutriNet-Santé cohort, which appeared in the BMJ in 2018, concluded:
“In this large possible study, a 10% upsurge in the proportion of ultra-processed foods found in the diet was associated with a significant increase in excess of 10% found in risks of overall and breast cancer.”
Another study using their data, which also appeared on BMJ, concludes:
“[H]igher usage of ultra-processed food was associated with bigger risks of cardiovascular, coronary heart, and cerebrovascular diseases.”
Yet more exploration, which appeared in BMC Medicine in 2019, investigated ultra-processed foods and their links with depression. The authors create:
“Overall, [ultra-processed food] intake was positively linked to the threat of incident depressive symptoms, suggesting that accounting for this non-nutritional element of the dietary plan could be important for mental health promotion.”
Next, the NutriNet-Santé researchers intend to investigate the causative areas of this relationship. They'll drill down into the precise compounds that could possibly be responsible.
Relating to Dr. Touvier, because of the researchers’ wealth of nourishment data, they can now “estimate the additive publicity for a lot more than 330 additives authorized in Europe and in addition find the mixtures of additives that will be consumed by the populace.”
They have already discovered these cocktails of additives and are now looking for relationships between particular mixtures of compounds and specific disease states.
Source: