Opportunities for diet quality improvement: the potential role of staple grain foods

Exploring Diet and Nutrient Insufficiencies across Age Groups: Insights from a Population-Based Study of Brazilian Adults

Assessing dietary inadequacies can contribute to understanding the nutritional vulnerabilities of a country. This study aimed to investigate nutrient intakes and micronutrient inadequacies in the Brazilian adult population, with an interest in different age subgroups. We conducted a cross-sectional study with 1812 individuals aged 19 to 65 years from a population-based study with a representative sample of Brazilian adults. Dietary intake was assessed by two 24 h food recalls, and the probabilities of inadequate intake were estimated using the Dietary Reference Intake targets. Adequate macronutrient intake was over 99% for proteins, 84.7% for carbohydrates, and 80.7% for total fats. There was a high probability of inadequacy (above 90%) for vitamins D and E, but vitamin D inadequacy was very similar between the sexes. In contrast, vitamin E was more likely to be inadequately consumed among women. A high probability of inadequacies (above 85%) of calcium and magnesium were found in the population, regardless of age group. Except for iron, the probability of an inadequacy of other minerals increased with age. The results showed a relevant proportion of nutrient inadequacies, with those most at risk being women and older individuals, helping with the better targeting and monitoring of public-health policies that address nutritional problems in the population.

Identification of a New Giant Emrbryo Allele, and Integrated Transcriptomics and Metabolomics Analysis of Giant Embryo Development in Rice

Rice embryos are rich in high-quality protein, lipid, vitamins and minerals, representing the most important nutritional part of brown rice. However, the molecular mechanism of rice embryo development is poorly understood. In this study, two rice cultivars with contrasting embryo size (the giant embryo cultivar Dapeimi and the normal embryo cultivar 187R) were used to explore excellent genes controlling embryo size, and the developed near-isogenic lines (NILs) (NIL-D, which has the giant embryo phenotype, and its matching line, NIL-X) were used to explore transcript and metabolic properties in the earlier maturation stage of giant embryo development under natural conditions. The map-based cloning results demonstrated that Dapeimi is a novel allelic mutant of the rice GIANT EMBRYO (GE) gene, and the functional mutation site is a single cytosine deletion in the exon1. A total of 285 differentially accumulated metabolites (DAMs) and 677 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified between NIL-D and NIL-X. The analysis of DAMs indicated that plants lacking GE mainly promoted energy metabolism, amino acid metabolism, and lipid metabolism pathways in the rice embryo. Pearson correlation coefficient showed that 300 pairs of gene-metabolites were highly correlated. Among them, OsZS_02G0528500 and OsZS_12G0013700 were considered to be key genes regulating L-Aspartic acid and L-Tryptophan content during rice giant embryo development, which are promising to be good candidate genes to improve rice nutrition. By analyzing rice embryo development through a combination of strategies, this research contributes to a greater understanding of the molecular mechanism of rice embryo development, and provides a theoretical foundation for breeding high-nutrition varieties.