Evaluating the effects of food on health in a world of evolving operational challenges

Sustainable plant-based ingredients as wheat flour substitutes in bread making

Bread as a staple food has been predominantly prepared from refined wheat flour. The world’s demand for food is rising with increased bread consumption in developing countries where climate conditions are unsuitable for wheat cultivation. This reliance on wheat increases the vulnerability to wheat supply shocks caused by force majeure or man-made events, in addition to negative environmental and health consequences. In this review, we discuss the contribution to the sustainability of food systems by partially replacing wheat flour with various types of plant ingredients in bread making, also known as composite bread. The sustainable sources of non-wheat flours, their example use in bread making and potential health and nutritional benefits are summarized. Non-wheat flours pose techno-functional challenges due to significantly different properties of their proteins compared to wheat gluten, and they often contain off-favor compounds that altogether limit the consumer acceptability of final bread products. Therefore, we detail recent advances in processing strategies to improve the sensory and nutritional profiles of composite bread. A special focus is laid on fermentation, for its accessibility and versatility to apply to different ingredients and scenarios. Finally, we outline research needs that require the synergism between sustainability science, human nutrition, microbiomics and food science.

The Impact of Time on Nutrition and Health Claims on the Irish Marketplace

Since the implementation of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims (NHCR) made on food, only 261 health claims have been authorised, suggesting that the regulation creates challenges for the food industry. This study looks at the prevalence of nutrition and health claims labelled on food on the Irish market. Specifically, we compared their prevalence in 2009 with those present on the marketplace in 2022. Food labels of defined food categories were examined in three nationwide supermarkets in Ireland, and data of claims made on these labels were collected. A series of statistical analyses was conducted to compare the results from 2021 with those of 2009. In 2021, around half of the examined products (52.8%) displayed at least one nutrition claim, showing no significant difference with the data collected in 2009 (53.5%). Individual categories, however, did exhibit changes between the two time points. The prevalence of health claims on food has decreased from 21.6% in 2009 to 10.5% in 2021. There will always be a time lag between when a regulation is enacted and what its true impact can be measured. This study provides these data for the impact of time on EU Regulation 1924/2006 on the Irish market.

Measuring the health effects of food by metabolomics

Metabolomics of human biological fluids or tissues is used to discover markers for diseases by comparing the metabolome of the patients against healthy individuals. Ultimately, these markers can be used in drug discovery to determine how medications normalize (at least in part) the human metabolome at specific disease stages to homeostatic. Likewise, the health effects of food can be studied. Even metabolomics of the food can be combined with metabolomics of the treated patients to correlate compounds from food with measurable health effects from clinical studies. Various chemometric analyses of these metabolomics data are used to identify markers for diseases and to obtain evidence for health effects. This review discusses recent researches (published from 2013 to 2021) on whether specific dietary intervention to humans suffering from metabolic disorders may improve their pathological status. The scope is limited to those associated with major lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases, for which food is thought may have detrimental as well as beneficial effects on human health. It includes metabolites characterization of different biological samples such as the human serum/plasma, urine, saliva, feces, or ileal fluid. Whether the study results supported the claimed health benefits and whether the research was conducted with appropriate study design, was criticized.

Mapping and Modeling of Discussions Related to Gastrointestinal Discomfort in French-Speaking Online Forums: Results of a 15-Year Retrospective Infodemiology Study

BACKGROUND

Gastrointestinal (GI) discomfort is prevalent and known to be associated with impaired quality of life. Real-world information on factors of GI discomfort and solutions used by people is, however, limited. Social media, including online forums, have been considered a new source of information to examine the health of populations in real-life settings.

OBJECTIVE

The aims of this retrospective infodemiology study are to identify discussion topics, characterize users, and identify perceived determinants of GI discomfort in web-based messages posted by users of French social media.

METHODS

Messages related to GI discomfort posted between January 2003 and August 2018 were extracted from 14 French-speaking general and specialized publicly available online forums. Extracted messages were cleaned and deidentified. Relevant medical concepts were determined on the basis of the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities and vernacular terms. The identification of discussion topics was carried out by using a correlated topic model on the basis of the latent Dirichlet allocation. A nonsupervised clustering algorithm was applied to cluster forum users according to the reported symptoms of GI discomfort, discussion topics, and activity on online forums. Users' age and gender were determined by linear regression and application of a support vector machine, respectively, to characterize the identified clusters according to demographic parameters. Perceived factors of GI discomfort were classified by a combined method on the basis of syntactic analysis to identify messages with causality terms and a second topic modeling in a relevant segment of phrases.

RESULTS

A total of 198,866 messages associated with GI discomfort were included in the analysis corpus after extraction and cleaning. These messages were posted by 36,989 separate web users, most of them being women younger than 40 years. Everyday life, diet, digestion, abdominal pain, impact on the quality of life, and tips to manage stress were among the most discussed topics. Segmentation of users identified 5 clusters corresponding to chronic and acute GI concerns. Diet topic was associated with each cluster, and stress was strongly associated with abdominal pain. Psychological factors, food, and allergens were perceived as the main causes of GI discomfort by web users.

CONCLUSIONS

GI discomfort is actively discussed by web users. This study reveals a complex relationship between food, stress, and GI discomfort. Our approach has shown that identifying web-based discussion topics associated with GI discomfort and its perceived factors is feasible and can serve as a complementary source of real-world evidence for caregivers.

Study about Food Choice Determinants According to Six Types of Conditioning Motivations in a Sample of 11,960 Participants

Many aspects linked to personal characteristics, society and culture constitute some of the motivators that drive food choice. The aim of this work was to determine in what extent the eating behaviors of individuals are shaped by six different types of determinants, namely: health, emotions, price and availability, society and culture, environment and politics, and marketing and commercials. This is a descriptive cross-sectional study, involving a non-probabilistic sample of 11,960 participants from 16 countries. The objective of this work was to validate the questionnaire, so as to make it suitable for application in different contexts and different countries. For that, six scales were considered for validation by confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modelling. The obtained results showed that the six individual scales evaluated presented good or very good fitting indices, with saturation in goodness-of-fit index in all cases. The values of chi-square ratio were 6.921 (for health), 0.987 (environment), 0.610 (emotions) and 0.000 in the remaining cases (convenience, society, marketing). Furthermore, the fit was perfect, with saturation for all indices, in three of the six models (convenience, society and marketing). The results of this wok allowed the validation of the six scales, and the assessing of different types of factors that can influence food choices and eating behaviors, namely in the categories: health, emotions, price and availability, society and culture, environment and politics, and marketing and commercials.

Rethinking the Use of Mobile Apps for Dietary Assessment in Medical Research

Food intake and usual dietary intake are among the key determinants of health to be assessed in medical research and important confounding factors to be accounted for in clinical studies. Although various methods are available for gathering dietary data, those based on innovative technologies are particularly promising. With combined cost-effectiveness and ease of use, it is safe to assume that mobile technologies can now optimize tracking of eating occasions and dietary behaviors. Yet, choosing a dietary assessment tool that meets research objectives and data quality standards remains challenging. In this paper, we describe the purposes of collecting dietary data in medical research and outline the main considerations for using mobile dietary assessment tools based on participant and researcher expectations.