The Director of the National Centre of Excellence in Functional Foods at the University of Wollongong, Professor Linda Tapsell, and a fellow researcher from the University of Minnesota, USA, have concluded that food, not specific nutrients, is the fundamental unit to health in human nutrition.

Their notion is contrary to popular practice in food industry and government, where marketers and regulators tend to focus on total fat, carbohydrate and protein and on specific vitamins and added supplements in food products --not the food items as a whole.

“We are confusing ourselves and the public by talking so much about nutrients when we should be talking about foods. Consumers get the idea that diet and health can be understood in terms of isolated nutrients. It’s not the best approach and it might be wrong,” said Professor David Jacobs, the principal investigator and a Mayo Professor of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.

Professor Jacobs and Professor Tapsell argue that we should shift the focus toward the benefits of entire food products and food patterns in order to better understand the nutrition-health interface with the human body. They focus on the concept of food synergy – the idea that more information can be obtained by looking at foods than a single food component (such as vitamin C, or calcium added to a container of orange juice). Professor Jacobs and Professor Tapsell say it is necessary to appreciate the systems biology of the food sources (plant and animal) in relation to human biology as well as the effects of food processing and the impact of cuisine.

“The constituents of foods act in concert for the health of the organism eaten -- all the members of this orchestra contribute to the whole when the organism is eaten as food. Therefore, it would be better and potentially yield more health benefits to analyse the entire composite of naturally occurring food components in each product”, Professor Jacobs said.

Both researchers can provide several examples in which the single nutrient approach to nutrition has not proved to be of benefit to health. For example, long term randomised clinical trials, considered the gold standard for making judgments about nutritional treatment and health, have failed to show benefit or have suggested harm for cardiovascular events for isolated supplements of beta-carotene and B-vitamins. A similar large experiment in total fat reduction did not show benefit. In contrast, myriad observations have been made of improved long-term health for foods and food patterns that incorporate these same nutrients, naturally occurring in food.

“An understanding of the interactions between food components in both single foods and whole diets opens up new areas of thinking that appear to have greater application to contemporary population health issues, particularly those related to chronic lifestyle disease”, Professor Jacobs said.

“It is this new understanding that reminds us emphatically of the central position of food in the nutrition-health interface, which begs for much more whole food-based research, and which encourages us in both research and dietary advice to ‘think food first’”, Professor Tapsell said.

The academics’ research is published in the Journal of Nutrition Reviews.