Eating to add years of life and life to these years: what should be in the menu?

Nutrition to Optimise Human Health-How to Obtain Physiological Substantiation?

Demonstrating in an unambiguous manner that a diet, let alone a single product, 'optimizes' health, presents an enormous challenge. The least complicated is when the starting situation is clearly suboptimal, like with nutritional deficiencies, malnutrition, unfavourable lifestyle, or due to disease or ageing. Here, desired improvements and intervention strategies may to some extent be clear. However, even then situations require approaches that take into account interactions between nutrients and other factors, complex dose-effect relationships etc. More challenging is to substantiate that a diet or a specific product optimizes health in the general population, which comes down to achieve perceived, 'non-medical' or future health benefits in predominantly healthy persons. Presumed underlying mechanisms involve effects of non-nutritional components with subtle and slowly occurring physiological effects that may be difficult to translate into measurable outcomes. Most promising strategies combine classical physiological concepts with those of 'multi-omics' and systems biology. Resilience-the ability to maintain or regain homeostasis in response to stressors-is often used as proxy for a particular health domain. Next to this, quantifying health requires personalized strategies, measurements preferably carried out remotely, real-time and in a normal living environment, and experimental designs other than randomized controlled trials (RCTs), for example N-of-1 trials.

Macronutrient Quality and All-Cause Mortality in the SUN Cohort

No previous study has assessed the relationship between overall macronutrient quality and all-cause mortality. We aimed to prospectively examine the association between a multidimensional macronutrient quality index (MQI) and all-cause mortality in the SUN (Seguimiento Universidad de Navarra) (University of Navarra Follow-Up) study, a Mediterranean cohort of middle-aged adults. Dietary intake information was obtained from a validated 136-item semi-quantitative food-frequency questionnaire. We calculated the MQI (categorized in quartiles) based on three quality indexes: the carbohydrate quality index (CQI), the fat quality index (FQI), and the healthy plate protein source quality index (HPPQI). Among 19,083 participants (mean age 38.4, 59.9% female), 440 deaths from all causes were observed during a median follow-up of 12.2 years (IQR, 8.3-14.9). No significant association was found between the MQI and mortality risk with multivariable-adjusted hazard ratio (HR) for the highest vs. the lowest quartile of 0.79 (95% CI, 0.59-1.06; Ptrend = 0.199). The CQI was the only component of the MQI associated with mortality showing a significant inverse relationship, with HR between extreme quartiles of 0.64 (95% CI, 0.45-0.90; Ptrend = 0.021). In this Mediterranean cohort, a new and multidimensional MQI defined a priori was not associated with all-cause mortality. Among its three sub-indexes, only the CQI showed a significant inverse relationship with the risk of all-cause mortality.